Extraordinary Developments at the End
I chose hanging for its speed and relative bloodlessness – hence my purchase of the orange rope. But walking home along the canal in the snow and dark and worrying that the rope might be a bit rough on sensitive skin – I slipped, tottered, tripped and was suddenly in the stabbing black water. I tried to swim upwards though was held down by my thick and now heavy clothing.
'Stop thrashing'. A strange voice. 'Let the bubbles clear.' It seemed I was reasoning. I did as I was told and so floated up, at last gasping at the surface. I reached towards the side, but it was of rusted steel and smooth and l could neither gain hold of it nor reach its top. I shouted, watching myself tire, hands grasping in vain at the dark wall. Even as I swallowed water, I was, surprisingly, trying to live.
We believe ourselves extraordinary; if only we could find the way. We think our lives unique in history, different from all those who came before. Certainly, I have longed to be special, most parents demand it, all work pretends it and adverts proclaim each one of us to be free-thinking and gifted. Yet there would be nothing extraordinary about my death, other than its bold absurdity. 'Planning to hang himself, he fell in the canal and watched himself die.' The ancients held that the arc of character is only fully revealed when that life is over, when completed by a specific manner of death. Now that I am old enough to know the endings of my friends and family, I note that the dead, estimated at 100 billion since our species began, far outnumber the 8 billion currently living.
I hope my arc is one of generosity because if you liked something in Gustav's home, he would give it to you. When walking on a city street with his best friend, the two teenagers were stopped, questioned and Gustav was pushed into a van. His parents brought cash and jewellery to the police station in the hope that he might be released, but when this ran out, they were at last informed he had died weeks before, working in a gypsum mine. The other man – the one left behind at the roadside, my father – relived Gustav's disappearance daily and throughout his life. He was forever generous – perhaps too much so, as gifts were given with a solemnity that confused his children and quietened him for hours. It was explained to us that our father 'carried the past'. He was remembering. Of course, all these people are dead now; the shape of their characters complete.
Humans have always imagined their deaths to be extraordinary, in that theirs would occur at the end of the world. Millennialists, Chiliasts, and Messianic cultists have stood in their thousands in rain-soaked fields, waiting for redemption and death together, only to walk home deflated, rudely dumped back in their ordinary lives. Again, to feel oneself special is the downright nerve of the living – each of us a walking blood-sack of self-importance – but in our case, we turn out to genuinely be extraordinary! Is this end, this degeneration, merely the completion of our collective character? We are ungenerous, reckless; a filthy yet passing infestation.
Though no Cassandra, I have (had to live with) a valuable ability not to believe the normalcy that surrounds me. Being in this way permanently out of place, and a bad fit with modern institutions, I spoiled my life and selected, for my completion, this banal and gasping death. But what of our species? We face a self-induced madness of sound: booming, terrifying winds that do not stop, juddering floods and the buzzing heat of famine. Shortages of electricity and food, money, fuel and medicines await us (supermarkets, ATMs, petrol stations, pharmacies). We have already so damaged the planet that a fearful end to our privilege cannot be escaped. Incremental and unceasing: it will be small rude steps that take us from security to millions traumatised, walking in silence, or dead.
Hope is a strange voice. The mind knows we will die, but inexplicably, unaccountably, the heart rejects this, and instead, we are aglow with love of the world and a longing for human contact. A child laughs triumphant when it places one coloured block atop another. Though I have no reason to do so, I struggle in the cold water to live. Similarly, the climate activist is doggedly optimistic in the face of the facts and is surprised to find this insistence within herself. Our emotional investment in the world is simply there. Only later do we learn that some are 'more equal than others,' that we die, that all around us is dishonesty and that the more you look at the abuse of power, the worse it gets. I once drove over a wild moor with my son, who, at five years old, suddenly burst into tears. When asked why he said he was thinking about death. He was panicking, sobbing and I was lost. At last, in a glib repetition of Montaigne, I intoned that 'death is easy; it's living that's hard.' To my surprise, this entirely satisfied him, and we drove happily on.
How to live in the face of death? Gramsci, (according to Mussolini, 'the most dangerous mind alive'), recommended an unsteady and seemingly impossible combination of 'pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will'. Working them together may be a trick only humans can perform.
Pessimism of the intellect is, of course, realistic and determined by the shocking state of the world. Yet on its own, is useless, toothless and ultimately, obedient. We need optimism of the will to live, but when it dominates cognition, we become ignorant and compliant fools, unable to see what approaches. Hope, in this view, is an expression of the will to live despite an assured demise. Humans seem built for this contradiction and so bring a 'warm glow' to all their thinking; a kind of functional blindness. Hope is hard-wired, a hot insistence, powered by emotion and somehow immune to the endless complaints of the mind – which it overrides when it must.
Fear approaches, and with so much damage already done and so little challenge to the emerging fascism, there is no reason for optimism. We can, therefore, blankly stare at life and ask, 'what's the point?' (Answers include ferocious hedonism, mass suicide and an instant global religion). But the question is not 'why should we care?' because we do. Better would be, 'how will our hope express itself?' when we are afraid and grieving for our future.
'He loved his family; he was generous and enjoyed walking, especially along the canal near his home. But he was also careless, as he drowned while swimming naked in winter. The body was found floating and contorted, frozen solid in the ice.' A sordid and meaningless death, though one of that extraordinary generation that both caused, and then confronted their end. Unique in all of history, they were the ultimate sleepwalkers, rudely awakened to a scene of slow collective suicide, gathering heat and terror.
Yet we waste what little time is left, we remain unable to solve age-old political problems, and I fear we lack the generosity of spirit to find a common future. More likely are food riots, roaming gangs and emergency policies that protect elites and abandon citizens. Order is a thin veneer.
I lunge upwards through the water and cry out. I knew I could do it, and at last, my hand found the top of the rusting wall. Breathe. Try to steady. Up to my shoulders in the freezing water. I peel off my sodden clothes and at last slither out, stark naked, writhing red and victorious in the snow. From now on, I would attend to what was important, like generosity and outrage. I will die, but not today, and not this way: alone in the dark water. From now on, in an extraordinary development, we will die together.