OH DARLING, I’VE INVITED MR. & MRS. DEATH FOR CHRISTMAS

There comes a point in every smoker’s career where the only reasonable approach is to say to one’s self “I am a smoker”, accept all that this entails, and get on with one’s life. These individuals either can not or will not quit, it does not matter which, just that they are smokers to the end. My life is at just such a defining moment. I do not floss. I have tried and failed to floss throughout my adult life with nothing more to show for it than the toothbrush-like flossing device that hit the market last year now sitting on my sink as a reminder of yet another failed stab at acquiring the habit. The face that stares back at me in the mirror above the sink is that of a non-flosser, and always will be.

Non-flossing is the new smoking. How this came to pass is the story of how death died in America. Except, of course, unlike God or the author you can’t kill death because it is already, need we say it, dead. Death has just decamped from our lungs and set up shop between our teeth. Which crevices provide an ideal milieu for death, as demonstrated by the inordinate number of dentist suicides.

But before illuminating the great American lost cause of killing death, and death’s subsequent journey up the esophagus, I need to clarify my non-flosser credentials. Just as smoker’s vary from the two-pack-a-dayer to the I-only-smoke-when-I’m drunk, non-flosser’s come in many stripes. As a non-flosser who religiously brushes three times a day on weekdays, and twice a day on weekends, I am the cousin of the most curious of all smokers, the health-conscious vegetarian or, these days, vegan smoker. We have all met them, and been preached to about the hot dog meat rotting in the folds of our colons, and they keep mentioning something about free radicals (a confusing term that should reference black-clad anarchists but is instead intended to scare me away from my delicious processed cheese; I enjoy all cheeses but my relationship to American cheese, like a healthy marriage, is only deepening as the years pass). Because they are more often than not puffing on cancer sticks while preaching, it is tempting to bite them. Instead, I settle for biting my cheek until it bleeds. This allows the smoking vegan to get on with the process of killing themselves while simultaneously trying to live to one hundred and ten.

The smoking vegan may at first seem to madden the onlooker with her hypocrisy. But the tension induced by witnessing the preaching smoking vegan’s irrational praxis is rooted much deeper than annoyance at hypocrisy. The vast bulk of us are hypocrites 90% of the time, but the fact that I speak highly of tolerance and equality while residing in a de facto racially and class-bound neighborhood does not annoy people anywhere near as much as the guy swilling wheat grass between puffs on his American Spirit hand-roll. Most of us wear the mask of hypocrisy to pass as decent, good-hearted folks as long as it does not interfere with getting on with the business of our perceived self-interest. Vegan smokers are unpopular, then, not for your garden variety hypocrisy, but because they bring to a conscious stage the single most important and almost always unconscious psychic conflict, a conflict upon which rests the fate of our very souls. Which explains the near biting.

The capstone to Freud’s towering career was his recognition of this psychic conflict, the conflict between the life instinct and the death instinct. Freud’s work on the Oedipus complex is generally regarded as the centerpiece of his understanding of the human psyche. But it is his later work on the death instinct, and its tension with the life instinct, that stands as his greatest contribution to the understanding of human psychology. Much more than a successful resolution of the Oedipus complex, the quality of an individual’s internal relationship between life and death instincts is the foundation upon which the individual’s benign or malignant psychic life rests. The vegan smoker is a living allegory of the malignant relationship between life and death instinct that dominates the American psychic landscape. This relationship is almost always tucked away in the unconscious, but the vegan smoker rubs your face in it with the breath of her noxious preaching mixed with dissonant carcinogenic fumes.

The vegan smoker provides a pictogram of life and death instinct in conflict, allowing us to witness firsthand the tension that Freud uncovered in this dynamic interplay. Freud’s probing of the psyche revealed a human instinct to "re-establish a state of things that was disturbed by the emergence of life" ("Ego and the Id" 709), which he termed the death instinct. What was disturbed by the emergence of life was the peaceful slumber of death, an eternal, unbroken quiet darkness. From the cacophony of the womb (which I learned during my wife’s pregnancy is louder than a vacuum cleaner, and is why turning on the vacuum cleaner was the only thing that would put my daughter to sleep for her first three months) to the instant, reassuring wails of the newborn in the shiny delivery room, life is from the first a barrage of noise and, soon thereafter, light. But amidst the swirl of noise and light, there is more to life than life. It is this surplus to life that Freud termed the death instinct. This instinct to return to nothingness, which Americans regard as the negation of life, is, in truth, the very stuff of life.

It is the belief in death as negation, bound up with the denial of death as surplus, which fuels America’s mass repression of the death instinct. Americans insist on life to the exclusion of death. Whether this insistence informs the extremist style of capitalism we practice, or if it flows out of that extremism, is a chicken-and-egg question we can not answer. But the connection is symbiotic and spiraling upwards. The marketplace of American capitalism is the noise of our overdeveloped life instinct. To make money in America is to make noise. We continue to make a great deal of money, and we have never been louder. Silence, reflection, solitude, these are the enemies of the marketplace, and the marketplace is gaining ground in banishing them with each passing day. Perhaps the marketplace’s fiercest weapon in this battle is the cell phone and its increasingly adept progeny . To carry a cell phone is to never be alone (my wife and I just gave each other matching cell phones for Christmas/Hanukah, and in order to make up for this I may have to spend a lot more time secluded in the basement).

As it attempts to banish solitude, the marketplace, of course, does not work alone. It supplies the noise of the life instinct, but science provides the light. Science, autistic in its inability to relate to matters that do not respond to the Scientific Method, aims its high beams in all directions at once in a single-minded pursuit of knowledge, leaving no space for shadows, let alone the darkness of night that is safe cover for the healthy expression of the death instinct. With the death instinct so well repressed, science has its sites set on biological death itself. The most optimistic of scientific futurists (i.e. Raymond Kurzweil; see Gone Today, Hair Tomorrow below for more on Kurzweil’s future for America) foresee the death of biological death within the next generation.

As the death instinct has been buried ever deeper in the American unconscious, the life instinct has been given free rein, resulting in a near unanimous effort by Americans, hand in glove with science and the marketplace, to live forever but to never be alone. Yet even if science negates the (supposed) negation of biological death, and even if no one ever spends a moment alone ever again, the death instinct will live on as life’s surplus. But the repression of life’s surplus, our potentially healthy death instinct, boomerangs back to take our heads off with the return of the repressed. When the death instinct returns it does so in distorted form, as must all material returning from repression. The violence now endemic to America is the mutant return of the repressed death instinct. From the jaw-dropping sum of homicides to the drug trade’s low-grade war in urban America, from the violence dripping from our pop songs, TV, movies, and video games to the war in Iraq, violence permeates the American landscape. Addressing each symptom is futile, like the carnival game played by Venus Williams in a recent TV ad where she hammers down one plastic groundhog after another, only to see another one pop up in its place. Only in America today the groundhogs pack sawed-off shotguns and nine-millimeters.

There are many forms of violence, including slow suicide. The vegan’s cigarette, a slo-mo AK-47, is the twisted death instinct returned from and pointed at the head it was buried in. The smoking vegan has one of the most severely repressed death instincts of all. Not only does the smoking vegan want to live forever, she wants all the animals to join her in earthly eternity. Unsatisfied by the negation of her own mortality, the smoking vegan wishes to strip her four-legged friends of their right to die as well. The smoking vegan is afraid that if she lives forever she might be all by herself, which actually might not be that bad if only she can bring her pet dog with her. The smoking vegan’s genuine feelings towards animals are revealed when she smacks a mosquito into the beyond, as she certainly does not want her and Fido’s eternal earthly bliss disturbed by those little bastards. Only it is hard to make it to eternity with a two-pack-a-day habit. In a world where you can never be too thin, at least the smoking vegan’s diet of field greens and bark plus the always thinning smoking gives her a good shot at a runway model’s physique until she croaks. But God help the fat smoking vegan.

Nevertheless, the smoking vegan has a leg up on my crowd, the non-flossers. There is a certain sexy neurotic flavor to the vegan smoker, at least until they start preaching. I am all for brooding vegan smoking. Anyone who would put that much effort into a holistic, sacred approach to eating while sucking on carbon monoxide is, at the very least, interesting. Vegan smokers are a holdover from a time when the death instinct was not quite so repressed. Death’s return from the repressed could still take an overt form. Say what you will about vegan smokers, but they are unabashedly out in the open. Today, the death instinct has been repressed so far, stuffed ever deeper by the ballooning expansion of science and market, that the arena for its distorted return from the repressed is limited to the negative space of passivity. In the future, and the future is already now, death will erupt and take root wherever we don’t do something. I may brush my teeth two to three times a day so that my teeth will last forever, but death is so far repressed in me that I can’t even actively smoke to yellow those brushed pearly whites. Instead, I passively non-floss my way to destroying the teeth my parents paid a small fortune to straighten.

The non-flosser is not alone, just better camouflaged than their passive self-destructing brethren. It is hard to miss the three hundred-plus pounders who don’t watch their calories as science and the market demand. I may have just taken a shot at fat vegan smokers, but as active gives way to passive, fat will become the new skinny. To all the brooding-skinny-smoking-vegans out there, prepare to give way to sulking-fat-non-flossers. Death is about to put the Rueben sandwich back into Rubenesque.

But there is a way out of this American mess. The way out resides in the central story of human existence that Freud uncovered with the death instinct. Boiled down, there is one script that all human lives follow. The script comes in two versions, each with unique plots and contrasting endings. Despite these differences, the two versions are telling the same story, that of the marriage of life and death instincts. The first version, the romance, has three acts: Life, Death, and Rebirth. The second version, the tragedy, also in three acts: Life, Repression of Death, Return of the Repressed. Central narratives from both western and eastern religions point to this basic structure of human existence. The Christian story of Christ’s birth, crucifixion, and resurrection is a template for the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that humans repeatedly cycle through between the moments of biological birth and death. The eastern tradition of reincarnation is another writ large version of the story of birth, death, and rebirth that humans live day-by-day. Both eastern and western religions have animated the everyday cycle of birth, death, and rebirth through stories and traditions that stretch beyond the barriers of biological birth and death. But the utility of these religious stories, and their truth, is found in their relationship to birth, death, and rebirth as it occurs within the boundaries of a human lifetime.

Religion’s raison d’etre, then, is to serve as the fulcrum point on which the delicate balance between life and death instincts rests. The death instinct is life’s surplus, because without the addition of death, human life can not obtain the liberating, spiritual form of rebirth. Science and market, which have outstretched their real but limited usefulness by replacing religion in America, are ignorant of the sacred role of death as life’s surplus. Science and market regard death as life’s negation, dooming death instinct to repression, and guaranteeing the return of the repressed death instinct in the form of violence and passive self destruction.

The imbalance of what is left of religion in America, and its perversion at the hands of science and market, is on full display every December. It is no coincidence that Christmas, the celebration of Christ’s birth, has taken on such outsized proportions in America. The ballooning of Christmas symbolizes the American obsession with birth and life. The hijacking of Christmas by consumerism, witnessed in the battle royale of shopping that ensues early in the AM on the day after Thanksgiving, reveals the link between the holiday that celebrates life with the consumer culture that recognizes only life. And as Christmas has waxed, Easter (remember Easter?), the celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection, has waned to the point where it ranks a notch or two below Ground Hog’s Day. Ironically, Christmas Day itself has become something of a symbol of death, as it is the only day of the year where capitalism, barring the odd Chinese food joint, rests.

Functional religion mediates its flock’s relationship to death through meaningful spiritual practices. The most important spiritual practices for developing openness to death involve silence, which clears an inner open space for the encounter between life and death. This open space slowly emerges in those who cultivate silence, lapping like gentle waves at the tumult until a sufficient calm settles. Only in this sturdy, quiet inner space can life and death merge and in their union beget a rebirth that pours outward to all those fortunate enough to encounter the shining yet weathered new-old soul. “Born again” is a term misapplied to religious initiates; the new life of a spiritual rebirth, the only genuine meaning of eternal life, is the result of a humble lifetime’s (or many lifetimes) devotion to silence.

I have not yet cleared much inner space for death. My mind and spirit clatter with the noise of life, and this is perhaps appropriate to my age and station in life. But I am not quite comfortable with this rationalization. Death happens all of the time, not just when we are old and wizened. I have certainly repressed death with life, and flossing is hardly the only thing I can not do as a result. My maternal grandmother died sometime within the past five to seven years. That is as specific as I can get. Her death literally did not register, as a few years ago I found myself unable to recall whether my grandmother had actually died or whether she was still slowly dying in Ithaca, New York. I could try to blame it on the fact that I did not attend the funeral, and thus was denied “closure”. But my failure to attend her funeral, and my prior failure to attend my grandfather’s funeral, are symptoms and not the cause of my alienation from dying and death. By repressing death, I have lost the ability to grieve. I must ask myself, if life can not be grieved, what value life?

I can tell you that my father died in the weeks after September 11, 2001. I was present for much of his rapid decline from a malignant brain tumor. I offered and received comfort from my family and friends throughout the four months from diagnosis to death. I attended the funeral. I wept. I supported my mother as best I could through her overwhelming grief. I prayed. Looking back, I can think of no way I could have been more present for the death of my father. And yet, my father never died. He got sick, but he never died. I see him periodically in my dreams, and he is invariably sick. I can conceive of illness, but I am not yet whole enough to contain death. Until I am able to grieve, until death becomes real, my father will never die for me. But I have not kept my father alive by failing to grieve. All I have done is made my image of him into a ghost.

I used to love the opening credits of the X-Files. The spooky music and the UFO-sighting clips were spot-on, but what I really loved was the closing sequence of the credits when the words “The truth is out there” briefly graced the bottom of the screen before fading to commercial. Nothing thrills me more than the belief that there is truth and that it is obtainable. The Bible has the exact same line just with different words: “ask and it shall be granted unto you, seek and you shall find.” Translate this into 2006 American (there is such a language) and you get “There must be more to life than this.” The truth is out there, and it is that we are individually and collectively out of touch with this more to life. Life’s more, life’s surplus is death. It will most assuredly be granted unto us. The question for the twenty-first century is whether we shall seek to find death, or whether death will continue to haunt us.