Months before he embezzled our money and ran away to Las Vegas, my instructor with a penchant for ending lessons with preachy, value-rich and truism-filled speeches, ended this lesson instead with a story. My ears perked, and I adjusted my knees under me, pressing pointed knee caps into the dotted mat, which I felt through my white robe. I absent-mindedly touched the black-striped red fabric around my waist, which I probably hadn’t done enough to deserve.
“It’s a crowded train station. You don’t know why you’re here. You look around, first to the left, then to the right (he mimed the actions), and you start to recognize a few of the people around you. There’s your grandma… your uncle. You’re confused. These people are dead.”
Some of the kids around me voiced their skepticism. “My grandma’s still alive!” one of them shouted. “I don’t have an uncle!” said another.
“It’s a story, just imagine for a second.” I didn’t have to, because I actually had a dead grandmother and uncle.
He continued. “You ask your grandma what this place is, what she’s doing here, who all of these people are. She replies that this is where people go after they die, but that there’s a second kind of death, too. ‘The first death is a physical death,’ she tells you, ‘when your body dies. The second death is the last time someone says your name.’ She gestures to a raised podium at the center of all the benches, in front of the outdated train timetable. You look closer (he put his flat palm above his eyes) and suddenly recognize -- Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, rows and rows of people wearing glasses and crowns (I pictured them as tired and worn down for some reason). Death doesn’t have to be the end, your grandma tells you. Death doesn’t have to be the end,” the instructor told us, “because you can continue to make an impact after you die, on your family, or on the world.”
He gestured us to our parents waiting in the light-filled lobby. I was excited for the post-practice ritual of McDonalds and a movie.
But I now felt light, like I knew something no one else did, a guardian to a treasured kernel of knowledge.
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Immortality is such an attractive idea.
It’s the times I forget my fear of death that I feel least alive. I’m talking about either fucking or masturbating, or not planning my novel but imagining its high-profile release and the illuminated display case windows in bookstores.
It’s these times, the moments of pleasure in orgasm or in ego-stroking, that I feel infinite. It’s not a feeling of forgetting the limit to my years as it’s a feeling of remembering the limitlessness to the years after mine. While grunting and dripping sweat onto her, while seeing the headlines and billboards through closed eyes with notebook in hand, I can almost reach across the void and touch the time after death. I can almost see a promise of permanence. Then I cum, then I open my eyes and see the terrifyingly blank page in front of me, and it’s over, and I’m left with little more than a feeling of emptiness. But it’s the bitter aftertaste of feeling used that accompanies the perhaps-expected feeling of emptiness, given the inevitable realization that the time after my death is not (nor will ever be) mine, that makes me feel so un-alive during these moments.
Of course, I am being used, by entities capable of reaching immortality co-opting me in their pursuit of the infinite. I’m talking about two different kinds of self-replicating units; one biological, the other cultural. Each unit of self-replication exists with a singular purpose: to survive to the next generation and extend itself further in time, with the end goal of immortality. Both are afraid of death, and each co-opts people in a different way.
The gene is the biological unit, transmitted through sex. The meme is the cultural unit, transmitted through imitation; examples include chords, phrases, and ideas. The gene is transmitted vertically, from generation to generation, whereas the meme has a potentially wider reach because it can spread both vertically and horizontally, from generation to generation as well as within generations.
But what’s more interesting to me than how these units spread is how they control us and how that’s detrimental. Both the gene and the meme can get into our heads and trick us into propagating them through time by making us think that they’re extensions of us. That we, or at least some part of us, will survive as long as the self-replicating units that we help copy and spread survive.
An easy example is children; we sometimes get lulled into believing that our children are extensions of us. But they’re not us; we don’t in any literal sense, live on through them. They’re just another iteration of our genes -- the next generation.
The harder example is the product of our non-procreative creativity: memes. Memes scare me more than genes for two reasons. One, I can be subject to spreading other people’s memes, which is analogous to birthing and rearing another person’s child, albeit to a much, much lesser degree. Memes would worry me less if every meme I spread originated with me, with the caveat of not being controlled too horribly by my own memes.
This brings me to my second fear, which is that my own ideas and mental creations sometimes push me to try to create an immortal name or image for myself. That’s the ulterior motive for a lot of my ideas, I think -- to see my name in the headlines or bookshelves, to win the train station contest and delay my ‘second death’ for as long as possible. The underbelly of every meme is to make the name or image of the meme’s creator a meme in itself. But this is a false promise of immortality. Memes are not actually extensions of their creators; the creators will die even if their memes live on.
From the meme’s perspective, Beethoven lives on through his Fourth Symphony -- everybody can recognize the famous “da da da DUN” first notes. Likewise, from the gene’s perspective, every father lives on through his son, through familiar features -- the shape of a nose, the color of hair, the indentations of dimples. But, Beethoven is dead even though his name lives on, even though his meme lives on. Every father will die, even though his recognizable genes are passed on. Memento mori.
No matter what we create or how long our creations last, we will die.
I don’t want kids. Having kids would be counter-productive to my enjoyment of life, and any enjoyment my kids give me would essentially amount to brainwashing on the part of my genes. I’m distrustful of my memes, and try to focus on the product, not the timestamp; the project, not the expiration date. I will die, and having kids or creating and building won’t change that. I sneer inwardly at young couples with baby carriages and exorbitantly large signatures on art, like I know something no one else does. Having kids or creating for the purpose of not dying would amount to little more than projecting ghost-images of myself onto a screen I can’t see.
The key phrase being ‘onto a screen I can’t see,’ because serving these self-replicators means preserving something easily-mistakable for ourselves, and it means preserving them for a future of which we necessarily won’t be a part: the time after our deaths. Being used in this way, although temporarily making me feel unbounded makes me feel un-alive, more puppet than man. It makes it hard, if not impossible, to live in the moment.
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The time I’ve felt most alive was heavily bounded.
From meeting her to skinny-dipping in the ocean that same night to seeing her every day that too-short week before I left for college, we knew we only had a week. And that’s precisely why it worked.
Avery got a text from his camp friend during a sleepover. She was with a friend, and they wanted to go to the beach. Did we want to come?
While drying from our dip, I rested my head on her shoulder and felt warm. I looked out off the lifeguard station across to foamy-white crests hitting gray-white sand in the dark. My heartbeat quickened as I made the decision to put a hand to her cheek and kiss her.
We hung out the next day. And the day after that. There was no question of whether or not we would, the question was when. We went mini-golfing. We went on hikes. We went on picnics. We smoked, we talked, we laughed, we played, and the whole time, we were entirely present. Our phones stayed in our pockets. She drove the impulsive string of action and talk that defined our week-long relationship.
Had we not been so constrained, we would’ve seen each other less often and for less time than we did; we would’ve been less present-minded. An ever-present ticking clock pushed us in the direction of more intimate conversations over small talk (“I joined the debate team because…,” “I quit theater because…”) and creative dates over aimless driving.
It’s the very act of trying to preserve a moment that kills it.
When I got back over winter break, I expected to pick it up where we left off. But our situations had changed. With the pressure of the future looming over us, we were in a position we hadn’t been in over the summer, faced with questions we didn’t have to answer the first time: were we exclusive? Should we try something platonic? What is the trajectory of our relationship?
This time, it wasn’t just the moment -- we were trying to extend the moment into the future, and this threw us for a loop: if we could see each other over winter break, then why not next summer? The potential for a future ruined the “now” mindset.
Self-replicators are designed to preserve moments, to offer us a potential future, after our deaths. Genes attempt to preserve the body’s moment. Memes attempt to preserve the mind’s. Serving both detracts from the present moment.
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This severe present-minded attitude could be mistaken for laziness and unproductivity. Some could extrapolate my ‘live in the moment’ worldview to mean there’s no use in creating, building, or doing adventurous things because there’s a chance our creations or impacts last after our deaths.
There’s a way to create in the present, and that way is without attaching our names to our creations. As soon as we put our name on something, it’s easy to take it as a part of ourselves and turn it into a selfish act in the search of immortality.
I picture a different train station, filled not with people waiting for their fame to die, but with art, sculptures, poems, books, and ideas, waiting to be worn out. In this train station, it doesn’t matter who made the pieces, it only matters how long they’re enjoyed; the creations have taken on lives of their own, entirely separate from their creators.
Because once you take your name off of what you build, it becomes more about the simple elegance in the creation of beautiful things than about taking credit for building those things.
It shouldn’t matter who built them.
It should only matter that a beautiful thing was built.