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Do I have immortal longings in me?

I don’t think I have ever craved immortality: I don’t really need dessert after an already big meal. I am old now, and although I don’t wish to cease and desist from this mortal coil, neither do I wish to persist as an even older and weaker form of what I still retain. I fear my original summer has already fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf; and as my seasons march onward, the cold is arriving before I can ever hope for more appropriate clothes. No, whatever I am dealt, I must accept; I don’t want to be immortal…

Of course, what does immortality really mean? What would it entail? And might I regret it if I accepted a second course so soon after the first? It strikes me there are probably several flavours of immortality, some more enticing than the others. One might involve simply being remembered after death; but I mean how would you ever know, and anyway, so what? You’re dead, eh?

Same thing with a statue: or in my case, maybe a sepia photograph of me taken when I didn’t know who me was and eternity just meant a faraway time when I could stay out till 10 o’clock on Saturday night. Nothing enticing about that: at my age I’d be happy to stay awake until then, or at least stay in bed all of the night. It’s interesting how one’s perspective changes over the years.

Another idea of immortality ties in with religion and whether you chose the correct one. I have yet to choose, so I hope that will not be held against me au moment critique when my empty dance card slips out of my limp hand.

Still, the thought of a simple statue rather than mausoleum or funeral pyre to deal with my mortal remains is an interesting option, though.

I happened upon an interesting historical thought about death and perseverance thereafter, as I was death-scrolling (just kidding, eh?) on my phone the other day.[i] It dealt with the idea of cultural reproduction. ‘In the millions of years in which our brains evolved, there were no culturally produced representations of people… The oldest clear representations of humans date back about 40,000 years, and scholars believe they represent archetypes of fertility rather than specific individuals.

‘So throughout our long evolutionary history and until very recently, every human we saw was a real one. We would have treated it accordingly. Given how basic this reaction would have been to our survival, we would not expect it to depend on conscious thought processes, but rather to be hard-wired – and indeed, many studies have shown that even newborn human babies are more responsive to human faces than to other objects.’

‘When people were confronted with images of humans, they must have reacted to them in the only way they knew – the way they react to real humans… And so what we see across all cultures is a systematic failure to distinguish between flesh-and-blood humans and representations of them. In almost all early civilisations we find images – statues, for example – worshipped as if they were living gods or kings. Similarly in magical practices such as voodoo, a model of a person is treated as a part of that person’s self.’

‘It seems, then, that what we perceive when we are reproduced in the cultural sphere is a kind of magical act of creation. Because I believe the representation to be in some way real, I feel that my fragile biological self is being transmitted into a new form: a process in which I become stone or become song. It is a process in which I transcend the body and so attain immortality.’

“Uhmm, so what?” I can hear you thinking as you read this. “You’re dead, not immortal -AI replications of your speech or imitations of your appearance and usual behaviour notwithstanding.” Okay, I hear you: death is death no matter, eh? I’m merely struck by some of the ways in which our ancestors coped with the idea of physical death; the ancient poet Homer framed these beliefs in more modern terms, I think: ‘Having described in great detail the bloodshed of the Trojan War, he has the hero Odysseus descend to Hades to visit the spirits of his dead comrades. There he meets Achilles, who he believes must be revelling in his renown as the most celebrated of heroes. But no: ‘do not you make light of death, illustrious Odysseus,’ Achilles replies, ‘I would rather work the soil as a serf to some landless peasant than be King of all these lifeless dead.’ 

Still, do you who are parents remember the crayon drawings by your child that you sticky-taped to the fridge door when they were small? Sometimes the drawings were just wobbly circles of random colours which, after praising them effusively, you asked the proud child what they had been drawing; done gently enough, they often simply shrugged at your adult incomprehension and then identified the subject matter. They weren’t embarrassed; they knew what they had drawn.

I kept many of those sheets of crumpled art paper in a little box that somehow managed to accompany me on my many moves throughout the years. I happened upon the box just the other day in the back of the crawl space that I seldom visit. On the off chance of finding a usable metal tub to hold some items for the recycling centre I found an almost disintegrated cardboard box buried way behind some aging suitcases. Curious, I reached for it but I suppose I wasn’t as gentle as its age required and its equally fragile contents scattered into the darkness beyond the flashlight’s beam.

Cursing my clumsiness, I retrieved some of more easily graspable papers it contained and was about to place them in the tub when I realized they were some of the drawings my daughter had made when she was very young. I carried a few out into the bright light of the adjacent laundry room and there it was: a barely recognizable drawing of a human head with ‘Daddy’ scribbled in a red crayon at the bottom. There I was, I should say: me as my daughter saw me almost eighty years ago. The me  that had hung proudly taped to a fridge door for what seemed like years; the me I knew I could never fail to recognize…

Is that a special type of immortality: a lovingly crayoned head only recognizable by a proud father aeons later? I think it is…

[i] https://aeon.co/essays/why-on-earth-would-we-sacrifice-our-lives-for-lasting-fame

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