What is Death?

We should talk about whether there is anything wrong with using a pseudonym in a discussion about incoherent thought.

But that isn’t the issue. There are specific grievances to air about the behaviour of another person. That is the issue. The other person says, ‘Fine, go ahead, but who are these people who have a grievance with me?’ I think that’s fair enough. Deal with it openly. Anyone can throw brickbats from the darkness of the stalls.

It’s clear that you’re dodging my criticism (“brickbats”) by arguing that my pseudonymity is a worse crime than your pompous, presumptuous rhetoric. You want me to engage with you by your rules because you’re convinced you’re right and I’m wrong. That’s where it is and where it will remain until/if you realize how mistaken you are.

It doesn’t matter where the brickbats are coming from or who is throwing them. What matters is whether the one complaining about them has any interest in whether there’s a good reason for their launching. If you had any interest in the reason you’re dealing with brickbats, we could talk about it. But because you’re not reasonable, you take the position that I am wrong for not playing by your rules.

But that’s exactly what I am trying to find out. Whom am I hurting so much that they want to hurt me back? Inquiry? Pickone? But if you say, ‘No, I’m Kimo from Hawaii - it’s me you are hurting,’ then it’s finished.

No, it is the only thing I am supremely confident about. All the rest can go to blazes. Love is not a sensation. You are waiting for the sensation; and I am not. That’s the only difference. I say, ‘Don’t wait one second for love.’ But I cannot love an abstraction, a word, a hidden shadow. Love demands the whole of us. First the name, then the face, then the voice, then the body - the whole of you. But you don’t even give me the name. I have to guess at it.

See what I mean about you being presumptuous?

First the name, then the face, then the voice, then the body - the whole of you. But you don’t even give me the name. I have to guess at it.

Enjoy your guessing game, including what you’re guessing love is.

It is not my intention to hurt anyone. If what I say about what you write hurts, go into it, find out why I think what you’re doing is misleading and self-aggrandizing.

I could be wrong to comment on your pompous, presumptuous palaver because it speaks for itself and serves as an example to all of us of how self-deluded one can be. Perhaps I should quit stating the obvious.

Yes ,most of us are aware of that logical fact but somehow the past have a grasp on the mind.

You are again missing the whole point. How many times do I have to keep on at this? If there is a real grievance, prove it, make it wholly real. While you remain in the dark nothing you can say will ever touch me, nothing. Come out and touch me, meet me, hurt me, make me cry. We can meet here, on Zoom or in person - I don’t mind. Make it real. It is up to you. Until then - nothing.

Or we talk about what it means to be anonymous. That we can still do.

I’ve made it clear and the record supports it, but I don’t expect you to see it. I’ve pointed it out for others to consider.

Or we talk about what it means to be anonymous. That we can still do.

I find it a waste of time talking to you. You feed on attention. You are all about you and nothing else.

Then you must really enjoy wasting your time. You have been talking to me for donkey’s years, and always with the same asinine complaints.

Or we could actually and finally talk about what it means to be anonymous. That possibility always remains. Until then, au revoir.

Being anonymous might have a direct impact with death. How can one go into ‘being anonymous’? Is it about not leaving any trace of past movements? Does not being anonymous (here, in our KINFO context) mean operating from a clean slate each time?

Obviously it is not about having a nickname and no picture like a comic book super hero (Do not miss the humorous tone here)

1 Like

How so? Are you referring to death as freedom from identification? (with my name, with the face in the mirror, with my status?)

I have played with being anonymous in the past by using a number of pseudonyms and I always found that there was fear behind it in some form or another. In justifying my right to anonymity, it feels that I was really protecting myself from all sorts of imagined difficulties in my relationship to the rest of society. But this fact that one protects oneself in relationship is itself an anonymous fact - it doesn’t have a name to it, belonging to one person or another. So there seems to be a difference between the desire for anonymity and anonymity per se. There is the idea of anonymity as a cloak or a cover; and there is the fact of anonymity which is wide open to the world. Can we love one another anonymously? Does that work? Or it is only by coming out into the open that we discover together the anonymity of love.

In the same way, then, to discover together the anonymity of death and the anonymity of the clean slate. It is not my death or my clean slate. Is this the difference? When we artificially induce or make claim to a clean slate there is motive behind it, so it is no longer an anonymous clean slate. And when death is seen as my death or the death of one to whom I am deeply attached, then it becomes impossible to perceive the truth about it.

Are you saying that to die, or to be a real nobody, totally anonymous - this necessarily entails being naked and visible to all?

I have no idea. But I don’t think we’ll get at it that way. This is first of all a question of psychological anonymity, isn’t it? Is this any different from psychological death?

Obviously(?) not, as trying to obtain these things as goals, would be a kind of confusion.

No, what I mean is that we shall not learn anything about this by listening to the words of other people. The words, the explanations, the descriptions, the entreaties, the subtle arguments, the rational or the irrational statements, the stories, the manifestos and even the most carefully delineated yet passionate poetry - none of this is the way into death or love or anonymity. We can’t use that which is present in order to explain that which is absent.

1 Like

That would be the ‘maturation’ (blossoming) of the human being? If there isn’t this ‘freedom from the known ‘, the brain at death will cling to the past?

Do you see the difficulty when we say something like this? It assumes there are degrees of maturity or even degrees of being a human being. Death is about no longer being a human being. Right? Are we ready for that? What I mean is, are we ready to face the prospect of no longer being a human being?

1 Like