Between blotch and blok

Another fine article, war-inspired (or war-provoked) but more far-reaching--Why are we so scared these days to look death in the face?, Johann Hari in the Indy,--makes some important points.

It's true, as she states, we are societally squeamish. Those of us who habitually see danger, understand daily our fleshly vulnerabilities, see death in life, are classed as morbid (or weird or depressed or...). Well, maybe. At least we can admit to having seen a dead (human) body, in the flesh once. And to touching it, kissing it goodbye. We weren't brought up with the consolation of some cosy afterlife: evidently we're amongst the exceptional atheists who have no problem with the thought that "At death you break up: the bits that were you/ Start speeding away from each other for ever/ With no one to see."¹

The extracts of the Jim Crace novel, and we confess to only having read extracts [scurries off to add it to wish list], do remarkably succeed in making the process of decay fascinating and beautiful: sublime stuff.

The one flaw with the article maybe is that, even were we as a culture more "in tune" with mortality, more in touch with death, the piles of corpses, the sheer numbers of dead, the very factor that it is clamed ended the Victorian attitudes and rtuals, those horrific quantities--"millions of mouthless dead"²--ought still to shock. Yes, death is natural. Yes, fight it how we will or accept it as we might, it will come to us all. But the manner of its coming, its often prematurity, its sometime indignity, is not an inevitable consequence of the inevitable consequence. Part of living well is dying well: not before one's time, not through violence--the "cess of war"³,--preventable disease, starvation. not without care for not just the dying but those left afterwards.

Still the final message rings true. We all ought to be given the opportunity to embrace the spirit of: "Live loud. Live wide. Live tall." For as long as we can. And for those that try to stop this: "Bring on the spanners."

---

¹ Philip Larkin's "The Old Fools"

"At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It's only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here. Next time. you can't pretend
There'll be anything else."

Wherein lies our consolation. It's a favourite quotation.
² Charles Hamilton Sorley "When You See Millions Of The Mouthless Dead"
Nope, we can't let the WW1 poetry alone.
³ Wilfred Owen "Strange Meeting" Our very favourite poem. [Interesting fact: this poem's prolifically represented across the Web, but generally, we guess, from the same source, which has a line missing (and what other errors? we haven't bothered to check). Sure helps knowing verse by heart sometimes.]