cut the fruit from the vine, and the whole world falls away

“What has become perfect, everything ripe – wants to die!
…But everything unripe wants to live: alas!”

–Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

I used to have a definite deathwish. During my twenties, I decided that I would kill myself when I turned 33. I wasn’t depressed, I simply didn’t want to grow old. “Decrepitude” has such a nasty ring to it—did then, still does—and an even nastier smell. And now, almost four years past that expiration date, I can report that I was being stupid. But then I go and write stuff like the following.

Aleister Crowley writes in his essay Sorrow:

Each Event is an Act of Love, and so generates Joy: all existence is composed solely of such Events. But how comes it then that there should be even an illusion of Sorrow?

Simply enough; by taking a partial and imperfect Vision. An example: in the human body each cell is perfect, and the man is in good health; but should we choose to regard almost any portion of the machine which sustains him, there will appear various decompositions and the like, which might well be taken to imply the most tragic Events. And this would inevitably be the case had we never at any time seen the man as a whole, and understood the necessity of the divers processes of nature which combine to make life.

The “various decompositions” Crowley speaks of are processes known to modern medicine as apoptosis (from Greek: “dropping off” of petals or leaves): a type of programmed cell-death without which the body as a whole would die quickly. Menstruation, for example, is an apoptotic process, one without which birth as we know it would be impossible. The Wikipedia entry on apoptosis states that:

… apoptosis, in general, confers advantages during an organism’s life cycle. For example, the differentiation of fingers and toes in a developing human embryo occurs because cells between the fingers apoptose; the result is that the digits are separate. Between 50 billion and 70 billion cells die each day due to apoptosis in the average human adult. For an average child between the ages of 8 and 14, approximately 20 billion to 30 billion cells die a day. In a year, this amounts to the proliferation and subsequent destruction of a mass of cells equal to an individual’s body weight.

Taken individually, these billions of discrete events certainly would take on the character of the tragic, wholesale slaughter on a scale unimaginable even to Joseph Stalin and the diluvian Jehovah; it’s only zoomed out that they are seen as part of the ongoing maintenance and health of the whole.

When James Dean died, it was tragic—but it was accidental. Same with when Elvis died (and he was well past his prime anyway). However, and more importantly, when Big Black decided to call it quits, it was on their terms. In the liner notes to their last (and best) release, Songs About Fucking, we read, “hey. breaking up is an idea that has occurred to far too few groups, sometimes to the wrong ones.”

An internalized expiration date, and the sense that perfection is equivalent to death, was also amply on display in life and work and seppuku of Japanese author, body-builder, and Imperial dandy, Yukio Mishima. In the autobiography of his thinking, Sun and Steel, we read:

Facile cynicism, invariably, is related to feeble muscles or obesity, while the cult of the hero and a mighty nihilism are always related to a mighty body and well-tempered muscles. For the cult of the hero is, ultimately, the basic principle of the body, and in the long run is intimately involved with the contrast between the robustness of the body and the destruction that is death.

And of course, Mishima followed through on the promise of this sentiment when he ritualistically, and very publicly, took himself out at what was the peak of his physical perfection and the height of his artistic powers (creating, financing, equipping and actually training one’s own private army, and having it swear unwavering fealty to an Emperor certainly qualifies as among the most elaborate performance art pieces on record).

Perhaps the most famous deliberate self-immolation of all time is that of the man known as Jesus, assuming he ever actually walked the earth. Not only would it be most improbable for the offspring of a god not to foresee that a certain course of events set into motion by himself would pave the way for his demise; but there is additionally a tradition enshrined in the recently-recovered Gospel of Judas putting forth a version of events which states that Judas, far from betraying his guru, was actually acting under orders from him: “But you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.” He had himself nailed to a piece of wood and left to die at the height of his popularity; and while the mob turned against him, that same mob would come to fervently embrace him some centuries later. He came, he saw, and, like the Cylons, he had a plan. He became a posthumous god (in the entertainment industry sense, at the very least)—for better or for worse.

An accidental death is typically messy. A deliberate death, a death approached and undertaken with the cool uber-lucidity of a chess-player in his zone (as opposed to depressed desperation), is seldom messy; and what’s more, such a death is the very archetype of all change. Life can’t go on without it; the YES to life Zarathustra promulgates as God’s gift to a world without God is imbalanced until paired with just as voluptuous a YES to death—which is God’s gift to those otherwise trapped by such a world.

Tags: aleister crowley, bands, big black, cylons, death, james dean, judas, nietzsche, sever the cucumber from the vine, songs about fucking, yukio mishima, zarathustra