Political and Symbolic Deaths, Struggles for Meaning and Survival - Assignment Example

10 April Political and Symbolic Deaths, Struggles for Meaning and Survival Does death drive people’s lives? Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality, directed by Patrick Shen and shown in 2003, presents a compelling universal theory on human behavior that answers this question. It argues that death anxiety, which pertains to people’s awareness of and fear of death, significantly, but subconsciously, influences human ideologies and behaviors. Heather McHugh’s poem “What He Thought” and Damon Krukowski’s poem “I” explore death anxiety’s manifestations too. They illustrate the reactions of people to death, which include a wide range of humane and inhumane behaviors. The film depicts situational irony, wherein because of death anxiety, people want to assert life-affirming ideologies, and yet the more that they do so, the more that they end up hurting others and themselves, when one of the best ways to handle it is to simply live and co-exist. Death anxiety shows that the one of the greatest ironies in life is that the more people want to preserve life, the more they hurt others to do so. Some people become inhumane because of death anxiety, and they exhibit this through prejudice and discrimination (Flight from Death). Associate Professor of Social Work at Illinois State University Daniel Liechty asserts that to fight death anxiety, “One of easiest ways to make [people] feel more than mortal is to stand as conqueror of someone else, so there’s this…tendency…to want to lift [themselves] up by elbowing people down” (Flight from Death). Prejudice and discrimination help people feel better and secure with their lives by believing that they are superior to others. McHugh shows the discrimination of the speaker of the poem against Germans: “where it must have been abandoned by/the German visitor (was there a bus of them?)…” (27-28). The speaker questions the busload of Germans, as if it is an affront to the existence of Americans. Krukowski gives another example of discrimination with his story of a makkoli seller (9). Krukowski asks B. if the man is selling “Sake,” while B. asks, “or milk?” (9). They assume what the vendor is selling through his race. They assess someone through his racial features. Flight from Death emphasizes that when people fear death, they tend to overgeneralize people. Jeff Greenberg, Psychology Professor of University of Arizona, notes that after 9/11, a number of people are so deeply disturbed of being reminded of their death that they killed a man wearing a turban, when he was an Indian Sikh (Flight from Death). He stresses that because of the heightened reminder of death, several people resort to scapegoating and generalization (Flight from Death). The makkoli vendor in Krukowski’s story detests the generalization. In the end, he does something symbolic: “[He] pours the white liquid into a paper cup, eyes locked with ours. Still smiling, he pours it on the ground” (Krukowski 9). The action signifies that he does not care what he is selling because his occupation does not define his existence. When a group of people see another as different, they fear death that come from clashing ideologies, so they denigrate the other as inferior. Another way of hurting others is through competing with them in a rat race culture. Sheldon Solomon, a Professor of Social Psychology at Skidmore College, says that the American culture perpetuates death anxiety, even more through its various social expectations. He notes that it is not enough to be a person with integrity because they must also be rich, beautiful, famous, or extremely thin (Flight from Death). Otherwise, they are more likely to feel wanting in the world and more anxious of their mortality (Flight from Death). Krukowski exemplifies competitiveness in the real world that drives people’s fortunes: “Clue to the power of silent movies: Clara Bow’s career was ruined when sound revealed her heavy Brooklyn accent. This accent undoubtedly helped her silent performance, however” (14). What is in and what is hot differ across time and generations. The irony is in her identity- it is her boon and bane at different stages of her life and career. Death anxiety shows that it does not matter what level of success one achieves in the past, when success is changing and competition intensifies. Many people constantly strive to be better than others, if not the best, because it helps them feel more alive and less anxious of their deaths. The same sentiment is present when poets in McHugh’s poem want to show off to others. They were eating when someone felt it was “…[their] last big chance to be Poetic, make/[their] mark, one of [them] asked/"What's poetry?/Is it the fruits and vegetables/and marketplace at Campo dei Fiori/or the statue there?...” (36-41). They want to compete with one another so that they can assert their superiority. By elbowing others down through competition, some people cope with death through the exaltation of their excellence as human beings. The discussed manifestations of death anxiety are relatively benign, but one of the most brutal ways of fearing death is to eliminate others who do not share the same death-denying beliefs. Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Central Michigan University Merlyn Mowrey argues that the most aggressive manifestations of death anxiety are violent behaviors, including the annihilation of others (Flight from Death). Solomon explains that the causes of violence and armed conflicts in the world are death anxiety: Ultimately most armed conflicts are ideological in nature. Sure there's political and economic issues. We don't want to want to be simple-minded about that and yet, when you look at most of the protracted conflicts that often go over the course of centuries or thousands of years what you find is that they invariably come down to a people who deny the right of other folks to even exist and our argument would be that that's because people are psychologically intolerant of other individuals that don't share their death-denying illusions. (Flight from Death). When two people from different ideologies, whether social, political, or religious, meet, and they have opposing beliefs, there is a tendency to want to kill the other because that person is undermining the other person’s life-affirming beliefs. McHugh explores the death of a silent poet. The oxymoron suggests the ultimate punishment for those who oppose the mainstream, specifically those in power. Whatever they do best that affirms their lives, it will be taken away from them. The host asserts that poetry “is what [the dead poet] thought, but did not say” (McHugh 74). People were so angry at him for challenging their religious beliefs about God that they punished him in the worst way imaginable, killing him through silencing him. He died even before he died in flames because they burnt his freedom of speech away. When people from different ideologies collide, and if one group is so fearful of their deaths, they will kill the weaker group. Annihilation is a brutally ironic life-affirming result of death anxiety. Aside from hurting others, people hurt themselves too because of fear of death. They fear death too much that they end up not living anymore. Author and philosopher Sam Keen stresses that people are “beings toward death” (Flight from Death). This idea can make them so fearful that they forget living altogether because they are filled with anxiety and hopelessness. The people who killed Giordano Bruno have lost something beautiful. Bruno believes that God is in the waves and everything that moves: “… ‘If God is not the soul itself/he is the soul OF THE SOUL of the world’” (McHugh 60-61). Bruno offers a beautiful interpretation of the nature of reality, but the people denied him his own beliefs. As a result, they cannot live as fully as with him around because they have failed to have a richer understanding of the world through social plurality. Moreover, people fear death that they measure themselves too much with what do not matter. Mowrey talks about the illusions that people use to evaluate their lives, but these illusions are not helpful in making them happy: “We need to examine the kinds of illusions that we’re pursuing, the things that our culture has defined to be meaningful” (Flight from Death). These are illusions that seem to give meaning to life, but they only make people less satisfied because they become more focused on the material and physical aspects of their lives. Furthermore, people hurt themselves through insecurities. Krukowski has his own fears as a writer: “Why any page at all. Why add. What wisdom it would be, not to write” (10). He feels that he cannot contribute to the world through his writing. He is anxious of his life, which he feels have not yet amounted to anything. He has reservations in giving his book of poems to his parents. When he “finally” gives his parents a copy of his book, he describes “[t]hese poems are the destructive bits of story in my life, swept together like crumbs” (Krukowski 8). He cannot even wait for feedback and leaves. He is afraid that his life’s work is meaningless and so his life is meaningless. Meaninglessness enhances fear for death because some people do not want to die without feeling that they have achieved something important. However hard it is to cope with death anxiety, it is possible to be happy in this life, if people will only learn to live and co-exist. To live is to not judge others. Krukowski does not want people to know who others are by their faces. Physical characteristics can be misleading. Instead, he calls them to look at what things are: “How to cut through the routine of received ideas, habits of thought- cut through like a train through the city. Look to the backs of the houses, disused lots, community gardens, concrete riverbeds” (Krukowski 12). He wants them to see people as they are, in their natural states, not what they want to project on others. Once people stop judging one another, they can accept the other as they truly are. They can co-exist as equal human beings. In addition, to have a good life without too much fear of death requires not judging the self too much. Keen asserts that people should stop calculating what makes their lives full or empty (Flight from Death). He argues that people should see themselves and see the good in them and the good in their lives (Flight from Death). Krukowski believes that people should see their nature and accept its beauty and monstrosity: “Go ahead and mention the book you are writing, like Ovid’s writings in exile- he describes the situation of the book…Both are the truth. The truth of the situation, and the artificiality of it. The wandering, and the route it traces” (13). The truth includes the bad and the good and human beings have both. They should not reject any part of them because they have to be happy for all that they are. Existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom explains that it is important to handle death, it is essential to live: “…there is a relationship between the amount of death anxiety and…the degree of unlived life inside of that” (Flight from Death). If people have a sense that they have not truly lived, there is a terror of dying before they would have ever lived (Flight from Death). Krukowski wants people to awaken from their slumber of living artificial lives by harboring death anxiety: “Glycerin is useful in lubricating your unused vocal chords. You have been under water a long time” (16). People cannot escape death. They can live with it by knowing it exists and yet living all the same. Flight from Death is not about death alone. It urges people to live because death is real and imminent. It asks people to co-exist because no one deserves to die because of differences. Flight from Death does not endorse a full evasion of death. It motivates people to go on with their journeys toward life, the fight for life that has meaning. A meaningful life, however, is not in the attainment of superiority or the domination of the powerful over the weak. A meaningful life respects all and lives with all, for death and life are something they equally share. Works Cited Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality. Dir. Patrick Shen. Transcendental Media, 2003. Documentary. Krukowski, Damon. “I.” Afterimage (2012): 7-16. Print. McHugh, Heather. “What He Thought.” Hinge and Sign: Poems 1968-1993. Hanover, NH: Wesleya U P, 1994. 3-4. Print. Read More