Shaking the mortal coil

I've been prompted to write a trite entry today after watching an episode of season 5 of 'Six Feet Under' where Nate finally kicks the bucket. The one series made for television which is actually worth forking out any stupid amount of money to watch. If for nothing else than it does a decent job of showing how western society deals, or doesn't deal, with death.

I took this picture in a graveyard just above where I live. There's a forest round the corner from my flat which climbs up onto the hill where my school is, and I've gotten to know it pretty well from sundry hikes to school on weekends and holiday mornings, when I actually bother to take the time to walk there.

This graveyard is pretty impressive. Germanic as it may be - overplanned and organised literally down to the bone - it's as good a place as you can imagine to come and honour the dead. Most days when it's not raining - that's more than you'd think in this city - the sky is clear and the light hits the place really nicely through the trees. It's a good a place for photography as you can imagine.

I want to capture what this particular tombstone represents. It's dedicated to a kid who barely saw the face of the planet. Who barely made it past the womb, and then was buried by her parents. The decoration is colourful and bright, but it doesn't seem to me like the relatives are pretending that she's still alive or just compensating for the unbearable idea of losing your kid so early in their life. Again, cheesy as it may be, I think they're thanking their child for having made it into their lives.

It's pretty hard to keep the idea that we're all going to die, and it could happen to any of us at any time, in mind. How can we bear to live in complete knowledge of the contingency of our life? You can't keep reminding yourself of the inevitability and possibility of death at every moment. Going to a friend's birthday party, and saying to yourself 'well perhaps I should bring 100 euros to ensure a decent burial in case the peanut butter disagrees with me', would be ludicrous. Paranoid, even. But it remains a possibility.

Somehow death has to be a part of what we are, and we don't understand it. We understand it better than most animals do; although many animals have some system of graveyards, some even mourn. Worse still to me is the fact that life itself is nigh on impossible. What are the chances of the world evolving into the delicate balance of oxygen and carbon forms as it did, to be able to host the sorts of species we've got? What are the odds of being exactly the right distance from the sun to be able to support plants germinating, and that ecosystems can keep evolving through this fragile state of affairs to allow a species to grow millions of years out of plankton, to eventually be able to write epic poetry and develop atomic energy which can both destroy the planet umpteen times over, but can also give us more resources than we know what to do with?

Wars have been fought throughout the history of mankind, and many at a scale hard to fathom. Look at a map of the Middle East 2,000 years ago and wars were being fought by the world's strongest empires in almost exactly the same areas. The Tigris and the Euphrates washed away enough corpses and bloodshed to paint the Red Sea... red. But somehow we haven't yet completely done away with the planet or our own species. In fact, both are pretty healthy. Some disturbances in the planet due to our stupid use of its resources could be corrected with a few more generations of tsunamis, earthquakes and melting icecaps. The earth is doing a decent job of curbing our overgrown species, and looks like it will continue to do so.

The possibility of life is bigger than my puny head can fathom. Trying to explain how we can actually live is much harder than accounting for the fact we die. Although there is no biological need for death, and it's less easy to explain than it might think. Some single-cell life forms simply don't die.

A fantastic book on the philosophy of science, called the Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch explains the near-inevitable thesis that our universe is inhabited by an infinity of other universes, each accounting for the choices, probabilities and contingencies of each event that happens in ours. In another universe, I just misspelled the word 'universe', but everything else was the same, ad infinitum. How stupidly complex is that?

How frustratingly, mind-blowingly complex the statement: this universe exists. And yet it does. And so do I. And in another universe, this kid does too.