The human condition

"Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition." - Michel de Montaigne

Remember this book: The Family of Man?

We are all in it together. This thing. Starts with a bloody birth that's pretty rough on everyone involved but joyful. From there we all pretty much have the same thing going on - we want the same things whether we are a Muslim boy in a Talaban camp, a Fort Worth debutante, a Parisian model eating crepes and the verte, a Bedouin shepherd, an aboriginal grandmother, a Papua New Guniea set of twin girls, an Irish grandma, a Mexican cartel secretary, a tinker, tailor, soldier or spy. Here's what we want: love, acceptance, belonging, to get through the day, to get through life, connection, purpose, to wonder why and seek an answer. We all experience curiosity, hope, desire, maybe love and surely pain and loss, crushing loss. No one will escape this. Ok well maybe if you are struck simultaneously from the back by a huge and silent meteor from nowhere, together, with all of your loved ones - maybe you'll escape it.

"No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa." -Eugene Ionesco

But really the truth is waiting for you. It's just time that stands between you and the fact that either you, or your beloved someone, will, for sure, either suffer or die. Dead. Loss is coming. This is so monster scary, so ancient collective consciousness motherfucking horrible, so un-holy, so tyrannosaursly  terrifying that ancient scholars could barely wrap their heads around it. I swear I read somewhere but cannot now find the source...damn! Well...something along these lines: a famous brilliant mind of ancient time said that all human drama (meaning art - music, plays, myths, tales, songs, stories, legends, even religions, politics, in short, all of our "busy-ness") is nothing more than a frantic and frenetic and desperate attempt to distract ourselves from the knowledge of our own mortality. 

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

David Eagleman

Once we reach the age of reason (around 5?) we GET IT - death is coming. You'll see children this age constantly ask mommy will you die? Daddy when will I die? What if we die? When will my friends die? I don't want you to die! Parents...remember this? It seems out of place but it's not. What's happened is that our social structure immediately CLAMPS down on this actual truth and begins shoveling mountains of dirt and sand at it - trying to bury death. Thus the drama begins:

Oh no that's a VERY long time away!

Don't worry!

And continues as we act out and dramatize and literarize and step very far away from while wearing HAZMAT suits and metaphohorize and sanitize and bleachify and tame and drain and euphemize DELUXE this one human condition thing we share - we lie:

Uncle Fred passed on

She went to a better place

You will have a long wonderful life and it'll all be great 

He's no longer with us

Enjoy this !

Work hard for your goals 

Everything is ok

You're not alone 

It's all a plan you don't have to worry about

God is in control

You'll see everyone again later and it'll be so wonderful and there'll be pie and coffee and angels and soft clouds 

He's ok don't worry

Et cetera

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not against kindness and I'm not saying we should walk around thinking of our imminent death 24/7. What I'm saying is that we sometimes are so fearful of what's REAL, that we shy away from it - and from each other. We are scared.

I am scaring you.

My last few posts put some people off. For some crazy reason our culture has created this huge pink cloud bubble myth about breast cancer, and I think it's actually harming our ability to understand the experience. I am not sugarcoating it. Nor am I trying to be frightening. Chemotherapy is extremely painful and it's ugly and it's mean. Why not say so? I'm pretty smart and I was GOBSMACKED right off the side of a skyscraper into a pile of pig mud by the sheer shock of how truly dread-FULL it was. After reading and researching. Why? Because most people don't really say...they (shhh) cover it up with (shhh) "nice" things, "pink" things, euphemisms like words like "discomfort" or "fatigue" which are patently false. I'm not patently false.

So I truly apologize if I scared you. At the same time I invite you to wake up and just see what is. I will be ok. I think. For now. You will be ok. I think. For now.

"People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown."

Chuck Palahniuk

"I thought if I could create a convincing cat I could say and do anything I wanted on the human condition."

Jim Davis