The Denial of Death

If you refuse to abide by the conventional paradigms proffered by society, your only salvation lies in a courageously creative response to the mystery of existence; otherwise, a plunge into madness and despair is inevitable. Conclusions of this nature compel me to embrace Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death, a text I’ve recommended more than any other over the years. I first encountered the work during my late adolescence. A desperately needed find, Becker opened up a constellation of ideas to help me negotiate my troubled relationship to the world, the organism Man, and his symbolic house of cards called civilization, ambitious bulwark against the black tide of mud. After several years of LSD experiments my trust in consensus reality was at best tenuous and I highly valued articulate voices who might guide me through a relentless dark night of the soul. Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Book Of The Dead and Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising were crucial during the acid tripping stretch but in the aftermath of my psychotic episodes I turned to more sober sources for inspiration.
Becker talked alot about Freud and Kierkegaard and Otto Rank and Norman O. Brown. He wrote about immortality projects and causa sui and neuroses and perversion. He spoke of cosmic heroism, Narcissus, and the nightmare spectacular of creation. It was all very comforting. His book is scholarly and sophisticated but not in the least obscure. His style I find quite a pleasure to read, (as I also do Freud) as opposed to celebrated psychoanalytic writers such as Lacan and Zisek who I find to be nearly impossible to enjoy, despite my compulsion to repeat trying, you fuckers. (Of course, Otto Rank isn’t the easiest read either---it’s my own deficit that prevents me from availing myself of the great ideas in their original form, I know, I know! His Art and Artist is fascinating but at times seemingly impenetrable. But hey, Becker even tells us in his preface that “Rank is very diffuse, very hard to read, so rich that he is almost inaccessible to the general reader. He was painfully aware of this and for a time hoped that Anais Nin would rewrite his books for him…”) Becker was a cultural anthropologist PhD. And I believe he had an honest, good-natured desire to actually communicate with his fellow man, in a spirit of generosity, rather than vainly parade his intellect playing clever games for initiates only. Every time I peer into the pages of The Denial of Death I have an Aha! Experience. To prove my devotion and reveal its worthiness, I’m tempted to rewrite the text in its entirety, like Borges’ Pierre Menard.

"What do we mean by the lived truth of creation? We have to mean the world as it appears to men in a condition of relative unrepression; that is, as it would appear to creatures who assessed their true puniness in the face of the overwhelmingness and majesty of the universe, of the unspeakable miracle of even the single created object; as it probably appeared to the earliest men on the planet and to those extrasensitive types who have filled the roles of shaman, prophet, saint, poet, and artist. What is unique about their perception of reality is that it is alive to the panic inherent in creation: Sylvia Plath somewhere named God “King Panic.” And Panic is fittingly King of the Grotesque. What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types---biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one’s own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him. The mosquitoes bloating themselves on blood, the maggots, the killer bees attacking with a fury and a demonism, sharks continuing to tear and swallow while their own innards are being torn out---not to mention the daily dismemberment and slaughter in “natural” accidents of all types: an earthquake buries alive 70 thousand bodies in Peru, automobiles make a pyramid heap of over 50 thousand a year in the U.S. alone, a tidal wave washes over a quarter of a million in the Indian Ocean. Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism’s comfort and expansiveness. “Questo sol m’arde, e questo m’innamore,” as Michelangelo put it."

------Ernest Becker, The Denial Of Death

"The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something---an object or ourselves---and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force."

------ibid.