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Title: Drowning Author: Wolfi Landstreicher Language: en Topics: atheist, Killing King Abacus, religion Source: Retrieved on April 6th, 2009 from http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/drown.html
Drowning...
A death in which one is completely overcome by a natural force too great
for one to fight...
But what deaths do not involve such a force?
I think drowning has its special significance because the force
surrounds the victim, encompasses her, ingests and plays with him.
Particularly in the sea, it is as if infinity has swallowed the one who
has drowned, has taken him in and turned her into a part of itself.
While there are similarities to death by fire, which also consumes its
victims, fire lacks the apparent infinity of the sea, and the victim has
freedom of motion limited only by her own fear, at least until
asphyxiation causes him to lose consciousness. But one who drowns finds
himself to be the plaything of the sea, forced to partake in its
fluidity of motion. Certainly the drowning one will struggle against the
power of the sea. But to what avail? Her motions are conformed to the
desires of the sea; his struggles merely lead to exhaustion and limpid
acceptance. The motions, the currents, the fluid tidal dance possess
one’s body and take it where they will. I imagine one’s mind is also
slowly possessed by the aqueous dream and slowly drifts along toward
inevitable oblivion. Who does not imagine the drowning victim
dreamy-eyed and languid? Do not forget that we are mostly water. Doesn’t
it make sense then that such a death would seem, in our imaginations, to
simply be a return to our source? Maybe this is why we attribute calm
and peace to the last moments of one who drowns. I have heard people
speak of this as if it were a known established truth, even a scientific
fact. But of course, no one knows. The drowned do not return to tell the
tale of their last moments. So such a “truth” must be understood
poetically, as a reflection of our view of the sea and of our own
unperceived fluidity.
We are strange creatures. We desire...we need...to separate ourselves
from the infinity, to find our own uniqueness and color all the infinite
worlds with it, in this way making them our own. But such a task is
daunting. And more so as social constructs developed by those in power
in their attempts to dominate this process channel our endeavors into
mere reproduction of this social system which drains the infinity of
color and of its infinitude, leaving us with lifeless matter and
lifeless lives.
Then the appeal of losing ourselves once more in the infinite, of
drowning ourselves, comes to the fore — the appeal of religion. Surely
by this time, the absurdity of religion has been exposed a million times
over, both practically and through intellectual argument. Yet in these
desolate and dreamless times, its appeal is on the rise. The anguish of
living as a unique individual without the possibility of creating the
universe in one’s own image, of coloring the infinite marvelous from
which one has extracted oneself, with a beauty that enhances the world
and one’s own life, makes oblivion attractive. And the oblivion offered
by religion, drowning in the waters of baptism, is far less frightening
to most people than the absolute and final oblivion of suicide. But
those who choose the oblivion of religion are not merely cowards, but
traitors to themselves and to all who strive for self-realization,
because religion — however soft and malleable its form (even in the
guise of spirituality, that insidious thief which steals the marvelous
from the physical world and encrusts it with belief, destroying its
fluid and convulsive beauty) — is part of the social system that stole
our creativity from us to construct the monstrous, gray nightmare that
surrounds, this mad civilization that replaces creativity with
production, free activity with work, vibrant living interactions with
technological and bureaucratic mediation. This explains how religion is
an opiate: it makes us oblivious to the anguish of our suppressed
uniqueness and creativity, allowing us to forget the damage without
curing it. It numbs us to the point where we accept the damage and its
cause, civilization in its totality. One can see how certain forms of
atheism — its stalinist and maoist forms as well as the 19^(th) century
rationalist forms touted by the American Atheist followers of Madelyn
Murray O’Hare — can be religions. Atheism only avoids religiosity by
having an existential as opposed to a dogmatic basis — that is as a
willful decision to refuse god rather than a belief in no god. And the
willful refusal of god has its basis precisely in the decision to
extract ourselves from the infinite — that is the mass — and to live to
the full the singularity of our being, drawing the universe into
ourselves as our own and, thus, creating the marvelous in all its poetic
beauty...the decision to pull ourselves from the sea so that we may come
to know and love it with the fullness of our own unique being as only
those who refuse to drown can.