Death is a wedge

[Pallas]

For a while I was thinking about how it seems "American culture" is based entirely around not thinking about death. All the short attention span activities people do are so they don't have to think very long about anything and it can never progress to thinking about death. It's why people are really fixated on youth, why skulls are so transgressive, why people always cycle through fashions and buy disposable objects (so they don't have to think of things as enduring for an amount of time at all, only as being used and used up, which doesn't apply to themselves). I thought this was an issue because not thinking about things in general in order to not think about death is basically leading people to become unconscious, like they're in a high-energy coma, and that won't lead to a very interesting future if it becomes evolved in.

I first thought about this when I was thinking about how I like to paint in oils and it's really the easiest painting medium and not more expensive than other painting media (watercolor is way worse imo, look up the price of paint tubes, then compare the sizes of watercolor tubes vs. oils ), and wondering why beginners are encouraged to struggle with acrylics starting out of all things. A while later I read something discussing "PR83" saying "Permanency over 80 years doesn't mean anything in oil painting. Oil paintings aren't even completely dry in 80 years!" Then it occurred to me that people are avoiding painting with oils because the paintings can't be "finished" within their lifetimes and they don't want to think about that. Even if being dry enough is good enough and you can paint as fast as you can draw if you want to, you still have to engage with time in general, and that defeats the whole purpose of all the things people do in the first paragraph.

On the other extreme away from America, pretty much every philosophical or artistic culture talks about death a lot. It's basically an approach where people are trying to overcome death, but it's interesting because people are trying to convert into Platonic symbols that don't die rather than unconscious bodies that aren't aware they'll die. I mostly just identified this with the complete obsession with death in German literature but focusing on it is a lot more widespread than that (this is why a lot of people think Shakespeare is depressing and whatever). After a while I ended up identifying this as basically extraversion and introversion (activities vs. thoughts), and thought that it was interesting that the groups seem to be wedged apart by a response to the awareness of death. One is to try not be aware of death, and the other is to not identify with what'll die. I think this might be causative rather than just some sort of litmus test to see who's who, although it would be the result of something else, like a tendency towards associative thinking or something else trivial.

[Grendel]