Disruptions of Death
The idea of death is coupled euphemistically with qualities from the more exciting side of primitive perceptual dimensions.
O Unas, you have not gone dead, you have gone alive to sit on the throne of Osiris. Your scepter is in your hand that you may give orders to the living, the handle of your lotus-shaped scepter in your hand. Give orders to those of the Mysterious Sites (the dead)!
— Pyramid Texts of Unas (2002)
When Ishtar heard this,
the furious goddess flew to the skies
Weeping she went before Anu, her father,
shedding her tears before Antu, her mother.
"Father! Gilgamesh keeps insulting me.
He keeps spouting slander about me -
slander about me and insults against me!"
Anu worked his words, saying to Queen Ishtar:
"Ah, but did you not goad King Gilgamesh
into spouting slander about you -
slander about you and insults against you?"
Ishtar worked her words, saying to her father, Anu:
"Father! Give me the Bull of Heaven,
so I can kill Gilgamesh in his home.
"If you do not give me the Bull of Heaven,
I will raze all the houses of the underworld
and open the gates to the land below.
I will raise the dead to eat the living,
- the living will be outnumber by the dead?"
— The Epic of Gilgamesh (Helle 2021)
One of the most widespread examples of the dynamic~static effect in myth and fiction is the specific mixture living~nonliving, as in being alive and dead at the same time, coming back to life after death, alternating between the two or lingering near the point of transition from one into the other.
Andrew George (2017) calls the episode in Gilgamesh given above, written over 3,000 years ago, the "first occasion in human literature where zombies have been brought into play." It's an early instance of the aesthetic mixture living~dead, a specific example of the more general mixture dynamic~static. Anu is concerned enough by the prospect of a zombie apocalypse to lend Ishtar the Bull. Gilgamesh and his best friend Enkidu kill it and tear it apart (disorder~death), however, throwing its right thigh at the Queen, enough for the gods to curse Enkidu, whose death sets Gilgamesh on a quest for eternal life.
He goes on a journey to consult Utnapishtim, "the Faraway," who presents him with an immortality-like challenge to stay awake for six days and seven nights. Gilgamesh sleeps the entire time instead, failing the test, but Utnapishtim tells him of a special plant that will make him young again. After he's retrieved the plant from the bottom of the sea, it's stolen by a snake, who presumably receives its powers instead. The hero is repeatedly faced with the prospect of living forever only to have it taken away, creating an overall pattern of contradiction between life and death, a theme that's repeated in countless stories from the earliest times to the present day.
Cephalophory, in which a saint carries around their own severed head for some time before dying, is a prominent theme in religion with the structure dynamic~static. Wikipedia (2024) lists about 50 prominent cephalophores, and states that there are many more:
Thus, an original, and perhaps the most famous cephalophore is Denis, patron saint of Paris, who, according to the Golden Legend, miraculously preached with his head in his hands while journeying the seven miles from Montmartre to his burying place. Although St Denis is the best known of the saintly head-carriers, there were many others; the folklorist Émile Nourry counted no less than 134 examples of cephalophory in French hagiographic literature alone.
The following poem by Clare Harner, "Immortality" or "Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep," was first published in the 1934 issue of The Gypsy magazine. Since then it's become extremely famous, regularly being read at funerals and appearing in numerous films, songs, and memorials, including the Chukla Lare Everest Memorial in Nepal dedicated to lost sherpas and climbers (Wikipedia 2023).
Do not stand
By my grave, and weep
I am not there,
I do not sleep -
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
As you awake in the morning's hush,
I am the swift, up-flinging rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight,
I am the day transcending night.
Do not stand
By my grave, and cry -
I am not there
I did not die.
The poem's history was recently reviewed in the journal Notes and Queries (Norsworthy 2018):
Since its rediscovery by John Wayne in 1977, the bereavement poem that begins 'Do not stand at [by] my grave and weep' has been variously traced to Hopi and Navajo burial rites, a young British soldier killed in Northern Ireland, a Baltimore housewife, and Anonymous… No matter the author, the poem offers welcome consolation with a restorative glimpse of something deathless and triumphant in the human spirit, poetically figured in the rhythms and beauty of nature…. Nevertheless, these poignant lines (twelve, fourteen, or sixteen in different printed versions) of rhyming verse have emerged as among the most widely beloved in English, and the question of their authorship has correspondingly persisted for some forty years now.
In Harner's poem the static, solid, cold, downward and inarguably unexciting concept of death mixes with the heat and brightness of the sun, morning, day and glint, the fluidity of tears, rain and blowing winds, the dynamism and upwardness of swiftness, rushing up, flying and not sleeping, and even large numbers, with the winds being multiplied by 1,000. Thus, the poem mixes the following exciting qualities with death: heat, fluidity, motion, speed, brightness, upwardness and large numbers of things, a third of the aesthetic qualities in list 1. Five of the six pairs of rhyming words in the poem: weep~sleep, blow~snow, rush~hush, flight~night and cry~die represent list 5 mixtures, specifically fluid~static, fluid~cold, speed~silence, dynamic/upward~dark and fluid/high pitch~static. Rain~grain is the only potential exception, and arguably it matches fluid~solid. There are other mixtures as well: bright~order in "diamond glints," bright~cold in "glints on snow," dynamic~round in "circled flight," bright~quiet in "morning's hush" and bright~dark in "day transcending night."
While it's unusual for a poem the length of "Immortality" to contain this many mixtures, few poems have none, and mixture frequency appears to increase in proportion to a poem's degree of abstractness or surrealism, as it approaches the essence of a hallucination or dream. Harner's poem and others like it can be used to predict the existence of common, nonsensical phrases and cultural practices with the same structure. Death is mixed with excitement or positivity in the expressions "thrilled to death," "laugh myself to death," "death wish," "die happy," "cross my heart and hope to die" and with list 1 qualities generally:
Heat (2): a dead heat, like death warmed over (hot/up~static); fluidity (6): dead in the water, dead air, the kiss of death, a watery grave, the dead spit of, only dead fish go with the flow; dynamism (15): the quick and the dead, ride or die, dead man walking, the walking dead, wake the dead, spinning in the grave, dancing on someone's grave, death spiral, a matter of life and death, live free or die, playing dead, go in for the kill, I'm going to kill you, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting something, the king is dead long live the king, live by the sword die by the sword, wake up and die right; disorder (2): dead broke, die of a broken heart; brightness (3): Day of the Dead, better dead than red, kill the goose that lays the golden egg; high-pitch/sound (7): buzzkill, whistling past the graveyard, die laughing, croak, death rattle; upwardness (5): overkill, over my dead body, raise the dead, pushing up daisies, go belly up, died and gone to heaven; outwardness (7): dead and gone, passed away, beyond the grave, dearly departed, die away, better off dead, a suicide mission; multiplicity (3): death by a thousand cuts, die a thousand deaths, cowards die many times before their deaths.
The sun, daylight and brightness are on the opposite side of death regarding excitement, so it's predictable that such things will be used to counter it euphemistically, as in the name of the Mexican celebration "Day of the Dead" or the practice of adding bright objects to graves. Red pigments have been used to decorate bones or graves going back to the Neanderthals (see Wreschner et al. 1980), a practice that makes a dead body slightly more exciting. Gods and religious symbols, which to some extent can be thought of as antidotes to the unexcitingness of death, tend to be characterized by list 1 qualities such as brightness, upwardness and spikiness. We counter death with sound through the use of music, and with fluidity in the form of flowers, spirits, souls, water burials and names like "Christ," from the Greek "Khristos" meaning "anointed."
