A Gargantua of photons

Making death your friend. I intellectually understand this concept. In nearly all ancient fables, rituals and precise instructions were elaborated to guide us as we approached the gates of the Unknown, navigating our passage into an often complexly charted afterlife.

Among the Egyptians, the dead were buried with the Book of the Dead, a collection of magical formulas to guide the soul. The ancient Greeks placed an obol under the tongue of the deceased to pay Charon, the ferryman of the Styx. Food and drink offerings often accompany the body in meeting its needs in the afterlife. Rites included libations and sometimes the holocaust of animals.

The Celts and Germans followed the same practice. Their ceremonies were accompanied by ritual libations and offerings of weapons or animals.

For the Navajo, death was seen as a rebirth. The deceased was honoured with a totem representing their life achievements. The community observed a fast to meditate and honour death as a moment of celebration.

Influenced by Buddhism, Tibetans offered the body to birds of prey, symbolizing the soul’s return to nature. Before the ritual, the body was prepared in a fetal position, and monks recited prayers to soothe the soul of the departed. Then, a multi-day ritual helped the soul navigate the labyrinth of reincarnation or, for the purest souls, avoid the entanglement of hellish and paradisiacal strata and instead step onto a cloud of infallible bliss.

These traditions echo the teachings of the famous Don Juan, as imagined by Carlos Castaneda, a book I read in my mid-twenties. Don Juan speaks of the bird on his shoulder — the friendly and serene presence of death — which guides our actions.

I believe that death has never stopped being there, cloaked in its familiar shadow, presumably guiding my actions, even as I, like most of us, chose to live by living, by enjoying, by hoping, and by forgetting.

Aging is now more present. I watched my father die last year. We gathered around him as medical personnel worked to grant him the medical aid necessary to swiftly end his suffering. After his death, the family stayed by his side, gently and naively celebrating his still-floating soul — or so we hoped — hovering above our emotions. In our own way, we enacted the same rituals of past civilizations. We comforted each other and offered our final emotions to the one we loved. The doctor, who remained close, officiated over our pagan ritual. He provided the necessary calm as if he possessed a wisdom that eluded us.

Aging is also present, certainly in my body, but more so in the presence of my mother, who almost died this year. She is now out of danger and with us. Her presence teaches us how to age, just as our persistent vitality teaches her to continue living.

“To live is to empty one glass to fill another,” says the traditions. I cannot know if they are right. They might be no more than an approximate and clumsy answer to the implacable mystery surrounding our end. Or they might just as well be genuine answers that only the intuition of so-called primitive souls could grasp.

While digitizing family photos, I can’t help but feel it is a pointless act, as it will inevitably sink into the void of our collective consciousness. It resembles those pieces of paper on which we write what is dear to us, only to tear them apart afterward.

The Idealists — those post-quantum philosophers — propose the existence of the One, though they cannot name it otherwise. The One: an eternal cosmic consciousness that, through the ephemeral manifestations of our lives, takes form and learns from itself what it seems to already know. It is a dizzyingly vertiginous circle. To live is to fill a glass that empties itself only to be filled again, differently.

When thoughts of death entered my mind during that chaotic stretch of my twenties, my first reflex was to contract, to plunge into a poetic, quiet, and narcissistic depression. I continued my existence without wanting or being able to ask myself questions.

Now, I try to untangle the spiritual, philosophical, and emotional knots that have shaped my personality. I relax and train my muscles through a different kind of strength. I am still trying to understand this death, still hoping to touch with my hands or see with my eyes the light of Truth.

This brings us back to the famous One, to which the Ancients had grand answers as numerous as the atoms in our brains. It is said that there are as many elementary particles in a brain as there are galaxies and that the map of neurons in that same brain closely resembles the network connecting all those stars. The universe would be alive, a Gargantua of photons.

To want, to live, to know that we are going to die, to lose interest in the superfluous while gorging on it nonetheless — this is a strange obstinacy, an insistence beyond fatalism. Suppose death is a bird, a kind and intelligent thieving crow. In that case, we desire to recover our wings for skies whose origin and destination we do not know.

To fill and empty, to nourish and intoxicate, to love and forget; I will always remember until no one remembers me anymore.