Commentary on The Denial of Death
By Kirill Khrestinin | March 11, 2021
Death is unavoidable. Sooner or later people we know will drop out of existence, finding their so often premature demise. Everything around you will be gone. Look at the people, pets, and things nearby. One day everything will be gone and so will you. The sun will stop its shining in a billion years and nothing will give Life a chance for survival, if before that we do not turn the life on this planet into a living hell where we would dream of death more than of life.
It’s hard to think about your own, personal demise. Mostly, when we think about death, we think about how our death would affect other people, close relatives, family, friends, a country. We feel mostly sorrier for the living who will outlive us than about our own self. We’re dead, why bother?
Since death is our complete cessation let’s boldly assume that death doesn’t exist and it’s just a transformation, conclusion from something to something. Death as a door through which we shall walk in but never come out. Lights go out and you feel, dream, live no more. As a slumber with no dreams. You closed your eyes, opened them, the morning is here. That dreamless dream of yours seemed to last no more than a second and at the same time it lasted eight hours. Maybe Death is just an unconscious state of being with no chance of awakening?
Ernest Becker in his masterpiece The Denial of Death, that I drowned my mind so carelessly in, called humans “Gods with anuses.” From one angle we seem to be immortal, God-like creatures, who are able to understand so many things that go beyond the rest of life on this planet. Our curiosity seems endless in its exploration. Our mind seems limitless in its comprehension. We’re so far from the animal world that we had to invent Gods based on our own imagery. We worship them seeing our own reflection and immortality. Infinitudes of something that lives inside each of us tricked us into believing that the entire Universe has been created for us and for us only. While our body, so fragile, so killable, so unsophisticated, smelly and ageable, gets us back to earth, back to the animal world where we shall perish like all species of this planet. Such irony. Such a joke. Our anuses defecate while our brains create. Some tribes even used plugs to overpower their own bodies, to stop this ugly defecation, smell, this animal existence.
One of the old, French filmmakers, used a mad dog in each of his films. The mad dog was always there, unnoticeable in the background. The mad dog was a symbol of constantly lurking danger. One bite and life is gone. You can be the smartest, the most powerful person on this planet. Death doesn’t care because death is that mad dog in the background. It keeps distant. It waits to get you. When you let your guard down it surely will.
The Denial of Death is an incredibly frightful book to read and even more terrifying to completely understand it. Jordan Peterson called this work a great book that has serious flaws and written though brilliantly, but incredibly wrong. With all due respect to Mr. Peterson, I dare to disagree with him on this. Ernest Becker wrote incredibly powerful work. He went deep into human nature leaving nothing to the imagination and this book has nothing idealistic. Just raw and very often depressing because truth in many cases is an incredibly depressing thing. I read it slow. I chewed his thoughts thoroughly, digesting what I’m able to digest with my weak stomach of education I so far received. I know now that this book is one of my favorite books and shall be in my collection for reading and rereading over and over again.
In my humble opinion Ernest Becker made an incredibly powerful argument about death and our illusion of life. There’s nothing good, nothing positive, nothing dramatic or sophisticated in our wellbeing. You have an anus, your body is imperfect, you’re mortal and you’ll die and that’s about it. A lot in this book is dedicated to Sigmund Freud and his attempts at understanding death. I unexpectedly discovered why we’re so shy about sex, why sexual intercourse is so uncomfortable to watch with your parents or strangers: sex links us to animals and animals link us to death. That uncomfortable, guilty feeling that each of us have about sex is nothing else but denial of death. That’s why we make movies and shows so violent, so cruel – people getting killed in frightfully bloody ways, body parts exploding, guts and brains, rivers of blood. But no sex. Sex makes us feel more uncomfortable than violence. Violence makes us sick because violence could be hurtful to our so fragile bodies. But, there’s some illusionary heroism in violence. People who sacrifice their lives for a greater cause are seen as almost defeating mortality. Good old nobility; we’d like to die many times for love, for a family, for something that would defeat our actual demise but we don’t want to die once and for real. And sex, well, sex is nature’s tool of procreation. You spread your seed, you nursed a child and that’s about it. Evolution is done with you. Your role is over. Your death is the next step. Pretty depressing, huh?
We have such great minds, but our bodies live so little, caught up in constant consumption, defecation, and procreation. Most of us won’t see our 80th birthday. Some of us won’t make it to our fifties. And we have even those who die young by an accident, false illusions, and tragic circumstances.
When soldiers are in war, they feel sad for a soldier nearby who was unlucky and killed by a random bullet. They think of this soldier’s wife, kids, parents. They don’t think that they could’ve been killed instead. They called it blind luck. Yes, blind luck. What exactly constitutes our luck? When a bullet kills your neighbor and not you. When a car accident killed a bunch of people while your wife somehow survived. When a school shooter spared your kid while finishing many others. Luck is a cruel thing, and we are even crueler for celebrating this luck. Read The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker because each of us lives in denial, one way or another, until death comes and we deny it no more because there is no life in us to deny it. A name on a tomb stone. A fading memory in those who used to know us. One day each of us will know Death. The question is, will we be able to know that we know it?
Kirill Khrestinin is a Russian/American writer and filmmaker. Born in Russia, he has always been fascinated by Death, dark funerals of Russian orthodoxy, and old cemeteries. His first uncertain literarily steps have been made by writing a poem about death where he was philosophizing over his own mortality and inevitability of death. In his early thirties he permanently moved to the United States to continue his writing, this time in English. So far, he has published two books Psychopath’s Diary Vol. I and II, and directed and written several independent films. He’s currently working on his new fiction book, on the pages of which he tries to understand his main character’s demise. For more information about his books, films and articles, please visit http://www.kirillkhrestinin.com