Feeding the Dead

One of the Buddha’s greatest insights was that our sense of self is the product of clinging to our experience.  Normally, we assume things are the other way around.  We assume that our senses of self are fixed, and this is why we are so particular in our likes and dislikes.  But if you think about it, this scenario makes no sense at all.  Let’s assume that, at the core of who you are, there is a need for love.  And let’s suppose you find a lover who meets that need, but let’s assume that after some time, he or she goes away, leaving you heartbroken.  Now, if you were just a fixed self who was born with a need for love, there’d be no reason to be upset: you’d just go ahead and find someone else to meet that need.  But the truth is that, in the process of getting used to your old lover, you built a new sense of self around that attachment, and so when he or she left, it felt as though a part of you died.  And yet, before you ever knew that lover, there was no self around that attachment to be in pain.

So it turns out that each of us possesses many selves, and that these selves are not fixed or eternal at all; in fact, they are born and exist primarily in order to fight for our attachments.  This means that whenever we lose a fight for one of our attachments, we also lose one of our selves.  As life goes on, we heap up countless identities and also witness the death of these constantly.  Every person’s lifetime is like the cemetery of a little village: things look simple and quiet from the outside, but when you start counting the gravestones, you can see how much loss one small space can contain.

Now, this might seem very depressing to some people, but death is a part of life, and the important question is not whether or not this fact is depressing, but rather, how we should relate to what is dead — what is dead around us, but also, what is dead inside of us.  For when we start to reflect on who we are, we will necessarily find that there are parts of us that serve no purpose whatsoever, and yet, we are afraid to let these go.  We are afraid of the dead, you might say.

All cultures exhibit this common fear of the dead — both inside and outside — and if we are to believe the work of anthropologists, all cultures have at some point had a tradition of actually feeding their dead.  In some ancient Greek and Roman villages, I’ve read, people built coffins with feeding tubes in order to convey food and drink to the corpses once they were buried in the earth.  This is a touching, but also frightening, gesture.  Touching, because it honors those who came before us and made our own lives possible.  But it’s also frightening, because that kind of caring for the dead takes scarce resources away from the living beings who need them.  If this process feeding the dead went on forever, the dead would eventually outnumber the living to the point that there wouldn’t be enough food left on earth.  Of course, at some point, people forget about the dead, and this is a good thing, for we aren’t dead, and understanding this duality between life and death is necessary in order to respect both sides of it.  This is what Nietzsche meant, I think, when he said that forgetting is a life-affirming act.

It is the same with what is dead inside us, for there are many identities and habits we possess that are, in fact, no longer living, growing, changing, or evolving.  Most of these “selves” have to do with past traumas: they exist in order to fight threats that are no longer there.  And though our ghosts do not actually exist, still they can cause us to feed one part of ourselves till another starves.  In medicine, there’s a condition called “infarction,” which is when a clot or some other obstruction causes healthy tissue to stop receiving blood.  It’s the same with the past.  A child grows up with absent or irresponsible parents and develops a sense of “boundaries” in order to compensate for this, yet the sense of self he develops around these boundaries has to continually keep feeding off of confrontation with other people’s lack of boundaries.  So as an adult, the boy-man finds he can only assert himself by fighting with others.  Actually, he isn’t asserting his “self” so much as the ghost of a former self, a ghost that can never grow.  And while one hopes the world will be kind to this boy-man, at some point, it is not other people’s kindness so much as his own willingness to stop feeding the dead that will allow him to be happy.

We all feel at times that we “aren’t enough.”  We enter a social situation or a work situation or a romantic situation and we find ourselves seized by the thought that we are lacking in some way.  Usually, though, when we feel we aren’t enough, the truth is that we are too much: we feel inadequate because we are trying to accommodate the dead voices in us that told us we were ugly or dumb or destined to be alone.  It’s important to see things this way, because normally we respond to the feeling of not being enough by trying to assert ourselves more: by trying extra hard to be pretty or witty or popular.  But this is like carrying more food to the graves of the dead in hopes that in this way we will come to terms with what has come before.  It doesn’t work.  At some point, we have to begin relying on the hypothesis that we will find love only through a negative process.  If we stop giving our love away to the dead, we will find there’s plenty of it here for the living.

 

Paul Weinfield is the singer, songwriter, and founder of Tam Lin, a New York City-based band whose sonically-adventurous brand of folk music has earned it comparisons with Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake, Radiohead, and Talk Talk.  Tam Lin’s newest album, Garden in Flames (October, 2011,) is available for free download at http://tamlin.bandcamp.com/

 

Advertisement