Or Puss In Boots: The Last death

Jairo Lopez is a man, men are mortal, Jairo is mortal. When I write that name I am referring to myself but it’s not me, it’s the version of me that slots into your mind when you hear that name. If you’ve never heard it before then an impression is already beginning to form. That impression can become complex and informed by real experiences but it will always be just an elaborately built network of associations you make of me. There are perhaps hundreds of Jairos living in the minds of all my friends and family each of them a little different, imperfect copies of me that come into conflict with each other as perspectives change. These shadow clones are not mortal, they are eternal in the way that ideas can exist forever. I carry in me the ideas of all the friends and family I’ve lost over the years, holding them arrested and transfixed in time as I knew them. They perform in scenes of my memories, ambiguous actors in dubious plays with the same start and the same finish but always different in between. I may pass on these productions to others who may not know the original versions, a hasty rendition of a badly transcribed opera. They may retell it to others still, each time it jumps from person to person the actors in the plays become less true to their creators until only ripples of emotions and colors are left. The imaginary people and memories are distilled to the very essence of sensory perception, crushed into the miasma from which our very thoughts spring and in which the selfhood sits.

In this way we are not mortal, we cannot truly die. As our physical bodies return to the Earth so do our spirits live on in the collective human conscious via those we have touched. If we all exist as a conjunction of mind, body and spirit then upon our death each of these realms are released, disentangled from being. The body persists through the soil, the spirit lives in the hearts of others, but what becomes then of the mind? It ceases to exist…it’s the true death and no one can experience it but me for my mind is uniquely and unequivocally mine. Or rather, my mind is me, it gives me the ability to be a self in opposition to the other and it is unknowable to you.

My body seems to want to keep reminding me of that impending death. This time it was a gall stone, one I was carrying unknowingly but which demanded its presence known to me via an incredible pain in my upper right abdomen. In a flashback to the events from my birthday three months previous, once again I was stuck in a public bathroom writhing in pain. This time there was an overwhelming sense of pain, which triggered the symptoms from before: nausea, lightheadedness, difficulty of breath. Public bathrooms are such wonderful things, truly you never know what you could be walking into at one. I don’t know why I felt more comfortable suffering in the silence of a stall while my friends waited outside, presumably starting to wonder if something had gone wrong as the minutes ticked by. Indeed they walked in at some point to ask if I was okay. But how do I explain the iceberg of feeling and symptoms I had experienced in the span of the last hour or so? The deluge emotions and thoughts passing by my brain as I bargained with primordial forces to absolve of me of the little demon pushing his way through my insides. How could I explain the reconfiguring of my limbs and stomach to ease pain if even slightly, standing up and sitting down again when I thought I would lose consciousness and fall to the floor? So I told them I had a stomach ache but was okay.

I couldn’t monologue at them all that I felt as I was still going through it. Even in the present I was projecting myself in the future talking about the very events I was going through. This is a technique (or coping mechanism?) I picked up from some of the long distance cycling I do. Disassociate from the present you and think about how future you will look back on the events you are going through. Perhaps this comes from a strong desire for the present to be the past, if only time could pass faster through a sheer act of will. Most notably when I projected my thoughts forward some version of me, now relaxed and past the event, was discussing perhaps with you dear reader about what happened that night in the bathroom stall, ipso facto I wasn’t dead. I didn’t believe I would die and yet are we all not one terrible accident away from death? But there’s a difference between being killed and dying.

Eventually the intensity of the pain passed through like a storm. As it faded I thought about how objectively I should have dashed to the emergency room because I knew this was not a normal pain regardless of the rationalizing thoughts I began to have. Again my mind tries to play tricks on me, after the pain is gone already it begins to erase the internal promises I had made to myself and to soften the freshly minted memories into a nostalgic film instead of a blueprint of my doom. I resolved to at the very least see my doctor the next day. Which in our current healthcare system is a bigger undertaking than I knew. I couldn’t see my doctor but I saw a doctor and phenomenologically speaking that’s the same so screw it. I felt fine but the next day I was told to go to the ER because I had signs of liver damage. My own liver betrayed me, so this is how it would be I thought, there is no mind over matter, only mind in spite of matter.

The hospital kept me for 4 days. I had to watch my tightly scheduled and varied days fall part into one haze of cable TV and liquid meals. Each time I had to cancel a meet up I felt a pang of loss for a moment I would never be able to live. It’s a small price to pay to make sure I could stay alive but that’s 4 days diverted like a railroad from good times city to bad times central. I’m not the first to make this comparison but it felt like a prison, sure I was free to leave at any point, but I didn’t want to keel over after my first slice of pizza back home. So I sat there as my world shrank down from the greater metropolitan area of Los Angeles into a single room in Harbor City. As my agency dwindled, my problems and obsessions also narrowed in scope. If you have not realized how used to living life in the abstract we are then stay at a hospital for a couple days. I read this example in Irrational Man by Barrett: when you think of 2+2 do you stop and take the time to prove the 2,913 subtheorems that allow us to come to the answer 4? No, someone else has done that for us so we are free to go trotting about telling people 2+2=4 like medieval math gods. Being in the hospital was like removing these abstractions from my everyday life. The best parts of the days where the meals, and I would make sure to keep the phone next to my bed so I could order exactly what I wanted from the cafeteria. And OH! that bloody phone, a cruel joke played upon me by Fortuna. Unbeknownst to me the phone I had did not ring, so for the first two days I was not able to make a choice, all they gave me was the most milquetoast meal available. Being robbed of these choices was of course where the feeling of imprisonment came from. My days involved meticulously planning when I would stand up from bed and use the restroom so I didn’t have to drag my IV and medical pole behind me. I would strategically read my book at regular intervals so I didn’t get bored of the TV or the book too quickly. At night when sleep would come I welcomed it as I knew it was the single fastest way to pass the time. Just weeks ago I was exploring the cradle of my family in El Salvador, poring over ancient Mayan ruins, and zip lining across volcanic jungles and now I was here warring with a telephone and planning when to stand up and pace my room. Outside this prison I never have to stop and think about these things, in fact each moment I can spend reading my book or catching a tv show is a breath of fresh air in a fast paced life. That is the power of abstraction.

My doctors informed I developed an infection in my blood probably caused by the passing of the gallstone. In an existential jape I was symptomless, apparently they caught it early enough that I suffered no ill effects. Are you still sick if you don’t feel sick? Even with the knowledge that I had the infection I didn’t feel any better about being in the hospital. Perhaps if I had just a tiny fever, enough to whet that drive for self pity I could have withstood the experience a lot more easily. I started a round of antibiotics which I ended up having to take home in the form of a long term intravenous line in my arm, with a snaking plastic thread laid deep in my veins. I had an access panel, like a Cronenbergian version of the tin man needing direct access to his inner fluids. You know what they say, you can take the man out of the hospital but you can’t take the hospital out of the man. It was all very inconveniencing but the sobering thought I kept having was that 100 years ago I’d be laid out on my back literally dying of a fever from an infection I could have never prevented caused by simple stone from a near obsolete organ blocking my bile ducts. Again the abstraction of modern life rears its ugly head, without antibiotics I would be withering away without a hope or a prayer in sight of getting better. It would be a violent, disgusting end no doubt as the bacteria in my blood slowly started to destroy all my organs one by one. Yet in our blessedly modern society, I was complaining that I never had a symptom at all. I thought about how many times I would be dead by 1800s society standards. That one time I had cellulitis in my leg, that second time it happened a year later, that one time after the car accident, this new gallstone incident.
Four times over I’d be dead, perhaps we should all keep an internal count lest we believe that thought terminating cliche: YOLO.

During my reading in the hospital I came across a passage from The Death Of Ivan Ilyich. The passage clearly resonated with me in the way that only a perfectly aligned moment in time can, so I ordered it and read it within the week. Ivan lives the perfect, complete life at least by the standards he has been taught. One day he bumps into the side of a table while decorating a room. An innocuous bump that somehow ends up gradually killing him. Needless to say my reading of this involved Ivan passing a particularly troublesome gallstone. He experiences physical pain at first but over time he starts to be tormented by his mental anguish until they become entangled and inseparable, the death of his body becomes the death of him. The pain in his side represents his inevitable death but it also serves as a beacon of illumination that cuts through the falsities of his life. He tries to go about business as usual, performing all the rituals that brought him joy and comfort before but the constant nagging pain does not let him slip back into complacency and he realizes that these things never actually brought him happiness at all they were only useful in allowing him to never confront his death and so to never confront his life.

As he begins to accept that he will die, the complete bullshit of every day existence angers him and he sees the masks all his friends and family wear. He feels as if he’s sitting next to this unknowable, eternal void that everyone around him refuses to see and which compared against the pettiness of their rituals do not matter. Playing Bridge with his friends was his favorite activity and as he realized he will die he stops caring for it. This is contrasted with the the fact that at his funeral his closest friend decides he wants to go catch a game of Bridge since the service ended early enough. Your friend’s death is not your own. What does it take to shake everyone out of the abstraction of ritualistic life? Coming close to your own death changes you, and although we know of it, when we meet it perhaps then is when we actually begin our lives. When you stare into that eternal, unthinkable void what will stare back? Ivan wondered if he had lived a good life, and he cannot admit that he did not because if he did it would require him to die a death of the spirit and reorient his entire existence.

Which at last brings me to Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (spoilers ahead I guess?). How could I know that when I dragged my little brothers to the theatre on Christmas morning I would be treated to such a deceptively Tolstoyan film about a cartoon cat. Puss In Boots is on his last life, a respectable 9 compared to my measly 5, when he meets death. He’s died in the same way that I have died, deaths that have been abstracted away not by modern medicine in his case but by fairy tale logic. At last he comes face to face with true death, literally in the form of a wolf. Unlike Ivan Ilyich he recedes into a false life where he is in a purgatory of rituals and adopts a mask in the form of a beard. This mundane existence is a death-in-life which compared to his previous lives is a shadow of his existence. Yet before he met death, he lived a life-in-death, never stopping to have real purpose or meaning because without knowing he would or could die he lived only in service to his legend, the idea of a Puss In Boots not his authentic self. He finally shakes himself out of his depression and latches on to the notion that he can regain his former existence by getting more “lives”. We know that he can’t ever do that though because after knowing death, he is irrevocably changed as becomes apparent in how he interacts with the characters going forward. He meets his former self at first metaphorically in the echos how he affected his former partner Kitty Softpaws and then later on more literally as all his previous incarnations are present to convince him to abandon his newfound morals. The change in him is clear as he does not recognize his present self in his former actions and he realizes he can never un-know this. The only thing he can do is stop fearing death and dedicate himself to a purposeful meaningful existence. Like Ivan Ilyich, he dies a spiritual last death so that he can begin life anew. Of course I see myself in the cat, trying to ease the burden of existence by continuing to perform in the theatre of Jairo’s life. While I don’t exactly feel like I have lived rudderlessly it’s a reminder that there’s nothing wrong with taking stock of life, taking a quick peek at the void to measure up against what you’ve been doing lately. The truth will always come out in that moment when you ask yourself, have I lived a good life?