With me, on the other hand, it was not merely belief that was instantaneous. I immediately gave way under its pressure. When I was told that her body had been found and the last vestige of hope disappeared I literally fell over, because my legs wouldn’t support me. It was another psychosomatic failure about which my internal machinery could do nothing, just like the seasickness that had saved me from the backflip of the Genesis.
I wept uncontrollably. None of the others did—not even Axel, who’d been closer to Grizel than anyone else, including Camilla. They were sympathetic at first, but it wasn’t long before a note of annoyance began to creep into their reassurances. I was disturbing them, putting a strain on their own coping strategies.
“Come on, Morty,” Eve said, voicing the thought the rest of them were too diplomatic to let out. “You know more about death than any of us. If it doesn’t help you to get a grip when you’re confronted with the reality, what good has all that research done you?”
She was right, after a fashion, but also very wrong. Jodocus and Minna had often tried to suggest, albeit delicately, that mine was an essentially unhealthy fascination, and now they felt vindicated. Unlike Camilla and Axel, who kept conspicuously quiet because they were having their own acute problems dealing with upwelling grief, they weighed in with Eve, presumably attempting to get over their own reflexive denial by criticizing my acceptance.
“If you’d actually bothered to read my commentary-in-progress, Evie,” I retorted, “you’d know that it has nothing complimentary to say about the philosophical acceptance of death. It sees a sharp awareness of mortality and the capacity to feel the horror of death so keenly as key forces driving early human evolution. If Homo erectus hadn’t felt and fought the knowledge of his own mortality with such desperation and courage, sapiens might never have emerged.”
“But you don’t have to act it out so flamboyantly,” Jodocus came back, ineptly using cruelty to conceal and assuage his own misery. “We’ve evolved beyond sapiens now, let alone erectus. We’ve gotten past the tyranny of primitive emotion. We’ve matured.” Jodocus was the oldest of us, and he had lately begun to seem much older than ten years my senior, although he was still some way short of his first century. Had he been a falsie he’d have been booking a date for his first rejuve, and the rhythms of social tradition seemed to be producing some kind of weird existential echo in his being.
“It’s what I feel,” I told him, retreating into uncompromising assertion. “I can’t help it. Grizel’s dead, and I couldn’t save her. She might have told a few lies in her time, but she didn’t deserve to die. I’m entitled to cry.”
“We all loved her,” Eve reminded me. “We’ll all miss her. Nobody deserves to die, but sometimes it happens, even to people like us. You’re not proving anything, Morty.”
What she meant was that I wasn’t proving anything except my own instability, but she spoke more accurately than she thought. I wasn’t proving anything at all. I was just reacting—atavistically, perhaps, but with crude honesty and authentically childlike innocence. But I had laid the theoretical groundwork for that reaction in the still-unpublished Prehistory of Death. I had argued that my reaction was the kind of reaction that had propelled the Old Human Race out of apehood and into wisdom, and I was damned if I was going to be told by a bunch of amateurs who were still in denial that I ought to put on a braver face.
“We have to pull together now,” Camilla put in, “for Grizel’s sake.”
If only it had been that easy. In fact, we all flew apart with remarkable rapidity. Our little knot in the fabric of neohuman society dissolved into the warp and weft, almost as if it had never been—or so it seemed at the time. Much later, I came to realize that it had made a much deeper and more indelible mark on me than I knew; I suspect that it was the same for the others in spite of all their stiff-jawed self-control.
It’s not obvious why a death in the family almost always leads to divorce in childless marriages, but that’s the way it works. Camilla wasn’t being foolish—such a loss does force the survivors to pull together—but the process of pulling together usually serves only to emphasize the fragility and incompleteness of the unit.
We all went our separate ways before the century ended, even the three Rainmakers. From then on, they worked on the management of separate storms.
TWENTY-ONE
The first edition of the introductory section of my History of Death, entitled The Prehistory of Death, was launched into the Labyrinth in 21 January 2614.
As with any modern work of scholarship, the greater part of The Prehistory of Death was designed as an aleph: a tiny point whose radiants shone in every direction and spread into the vast multidimensional edifice of the web to connect up billions of data into a new and hopefully interesting pattern. Many contemporary works did no more than that, and there was a zealous school of thought which insisted that a true historian ought not to attempt any more than that. A scientific historian, these zealots claimed, ought not to dabble in commentary at all; his task was merely to organize the data in such a way that they could best speak for themselves. In this view, any historian who supplied a commentary was superimposing on the data a narrative of his own, which was at best superfluous and at worst distortive.
My response to that argument was identical to Julius Ngomi’s: all history is fantasy.
I do not mean by this that history is devoid of brute facts or that historians ought not to aim for accuracy in the accumulation and cross-correlation of those facts. The facts of history are, however, documents and artifacts of human manufacture; they cannot be understood in any terms other than the motives of their makers. There is a tiny minority of documents whose purpose is to provide an impersonal, accurate, and objective record of events, but there is a wealth of complication even in the notion of a record whose purpose is accuracy, and anyone who doubts that the compilers of supposedly objective accounts might sometimes have deceptive motives need only ask themselves whether it really is possible for economic historians to obtain a full and true picture of the financial transactions of the past by examining account books prepared to meet the requirements of tax assessment.
In order for a historian to understand the motives that lie behind the documents and artifacts that the people of the past have handed down to us it is always necessary to perform an act of imaginative identification. The historian must place himself, as it were, in the shoes of the maker: to participate as best he can in the act of making.
Without this leap of the imagination, no understanding is possible, but every honest historian will admit that any such leap is a leap in the dark, and that the conclusions at which he arrives—no matter how confident he may feel of their certainty—are the products of his own fantasy. A good historian is a scrupulous fantasist, but he is a fantasist nevertheless.
The zealots among my peers argue that if this is the case, then history is impossible and that everything sheltering under that name is false. They point out that the historians of the present do not belong to the same species as the people of the past and that our existential situation is radically different from theirs. I have heard this said many times in connection with my History of Death. Its least sympathetic critics have always argued that insofar as my work attempted to go beyond the collation of statistics it was bound to fail, for the simple reason that I, a true emortal, could not possibly perform the mental gymnastics that would be required to allow me to see the world as a mortal would have done.
According to skeptics of this stripe, the people of today cannot possibly hope to understand their ancestors, whose mental processes are and will always remain utterly mysterious to us. All we can sensibly do, such skeptics proclaim, is collate the facts of their brief existence and lay them away in the bowels of metaphorical mountains, heavily armored against our interest and involvement.
Clearly, I have never agreed with this assessment. Nor could I side with those pusillanimous historians who took refuge in the commonplace observation
that people had begun talking about a New Human Race in the early part of the twenty-second century and that we could legitimately identify with those of our ancestors who merely believed—or at least hoped—that true emortality was within their grasp. It would be a poor sort of history that derived its authority from the fact that its objects were deluded—and an even poorer sort that attempted to extend its claims deeper into the past by suggesting that the people who lived in the midst of death for thousands of years did so in a state of perpetual denial, never able to accept the all-too-obvious fact that each and every one of them was bound to die, sooner rather than later.
My belief, simply stated, is that we who have drunk of the authentic fountain of youth do still have the ability—if we care to exercise it—to imagine what it was like to live with the inevitability of death. I believe that we need only to exercise our own powers of imagination cleverly enough to be able to put ourselves in the shoes of people faced with the prospect of a life span no more than a hundred years in duration, most of which would be spent in a state of decrepitude.
Not only do I believe that this is possible, but I believe that it is highly desirable. How can we understand the world that our ancestors made if we cannot understand the motives and processes of its making? It seems to me that if the pessimists were right about the impossibility of our being able to understand the existential predicament of our ancestors, then they would have to be just as dubious about our ability to understand one another. We have to learn to be human, and the first generation who laid legitimate claim to the title of the New Human Race still had to learn from their mortal predecessors. Today’s children are raised to adulthood by their own kind, but emortals of my antiquity were raised—almost without exception—by foster parents who knew that their own useful hopes had been dashed and that only individuals equipped with the best possible Zaman transformations could have any realistic hope of living for more than two hundred and fifty years, or of sustaining their continuity of self indefinitely.
Like every other individual in history, we pioneers of true New Humanity first learned to see ourselves as others saw us, and no matter what we have learned since then, we carry that legacy within us. While we still have that gift, we still have the ability to see those others as they saw themselves. However New we may be, we are still the Human Race, and if we are properly to understand ourselves we must set ourselves to understand those who came before us.
Like history, autobiography is a kind of fantasy, but each and every one of us is permanently involved in constructing the story of his or her own life, and even those of us who are perfectly content to act without recording remain creatures of fantasy. Those of us who record as well as acting are attempting to grasp the substance of our personal fantasies and to be as precise as possible in their construction as well as their interpretation.
For those reasons, therefore, The Prehistory of Death carried an elaborate commentary that did not even try hard to be dispassionate. So far as I was concerned, in fact, the commentary was—and is—the book. The elaborate hypertextual links forging Labyrinthine pathways through the vast mass of accumulated data were, in my estimation, mere footnotes.
To anyone who still labors under the delusion that such an assertion is heresy against the scientific method I can only say: “I cannot help it. That is what I feel. That is the foundation on which my life and work have been based.”
TWENTY-TWO
The commentary attached to The Prehistory of Death summarized everything that was known about early hominid lifestyles and developed an elaborate argument about the effects of natural selection on the patterns of mortality in humankind’s ancestor species. It gave special attention to the evolution of parental care as a genetic strategy.
Earlier species of man, I observed, had raised parental care to a level of efficiency that permitted the human infant to be born at a much earlier stage in its development than any other, maximizing its opportunity to be shaped by nurture and learning. From the very beginning, I proposed, protohuman species were actively at war with death. The evolutionary success of genus Homo was based in the collaborative activities of parents in protecting, cherishing, and preserving the lives of children: activities that extended beyond immediate family groups as reciprocal altruism made it advantageous for humans to form tribes rather than mere families.
In these circumstances, I argued, it was entirely natural that the remotest origins of consciousness and culture should be intimately bound up with a keen awareness of the war against death. I asserted that the first great task of the human imagination was to carry forward that war.
It was entirely understandable, I said, that early paleontologists, having discovered the mutilated bones of Neanderthal humans in apparent graves, with the remains of primitive garlands of flowers, should instantly have felt an intimate kinship with them; there could be no more persuasive evidence of full humanity than the attachment of ceremony to the idea and the fact of death. I went on to wax lyrical about the importance of ritual as a symbolization of opposition and enmity to death. I refuted the proposition that such rituals were of no practical value, a mere window dressing of culture. My claim was that there was no activity more practical than this expressive recognition of the value of life, this imposition of a moral order on the fact of human mortality.
Paleontologists and anthropologists had argued for centuries about the precise nexus of selective pressures that had created humanity. It was universally recognized that a positive feedback loop had been set up by the early use of tools: that the combination of a deft hand, a keen eye, and a clever brain had facilitated the development of axes, knives, and levers, whose rewards had then exerted even stronger pressure on the development of the hand, eye, and brain. Protohumans made tools, so the story went, and tools made true humans.
Some theorists emphasized technology as a means of making humans powerful, equipping them to hunt and fight; others emphasized its role in making them sociable, facilitating the development of language, and hence of abstract thought. Some saw the domestication of fire—the first great technological revolution—as the origin of metallurgy, others as the origin of the culinary art. None of them were wrong, but none of their accounts were complete. None of them had ever stood back far enough to see the whole picture or identified with their subjects with sufficient intimacy to grasp the aleph that bound the complex picture into a unity.
My contention was that the prehistory of humankind could best be understood with reference to the most elementary aspect of existential awareness: the consciousness of death. Protohumans began to be human not when they became aware of their own mortality but when they did not immediately retreat into denial. Protohumans began to be humans when they decided to use whatever means they had to keep that awareness and thrive in spite of it: to fight death instead of refusing to see it. Of course the domestication of fire was the beginning of cooking and of metallurgy, but its first and foremost purpose was to illuminate: to rage against the dying of the light. Even warmth was secondary to that. Fire was enlightenment, literally and symbolically, and the fundamental purpose of that light was to allow the first humans to see and face the fact of death and to take arms against it.
Humankind’s second great technological leap—the birth of agriculture—had previously been interpreted by many archaeologists as the key event in human prehistory. Human beings had lived for nearly a million years as hunter-gatherers before beginning to settle down, but once they were finally and firmly settled down, after tens of thousands of years of apparent prevarication, their condition had begun to change with remarkable rapidity. If the Crash could be regarded as its first terminus the process of civilization had been completed in a mere ten or fifteen thousand years.
Most commentators had seen agriculture as a triumphant discovery, but I took a greater interest in the minority who had seen it as a desperate move unhappily forced upon hunter-gatherers whose more subtle management of their environment had been far too success
ful, generating a population explosion. This minority argued that farming, and the backbreaking labor that went with it, had been a reluctant adaptation to evil circumstance, whose tragic dimension was clearly reflected in multitudinous myths of an Edenic or Arcadian Golden Age.
I had more sympathy with this minority than their traditional adversaries ever had, but I refused to take it for granted that it was solely the need to secure food supplies that had caused and controlled the development of settlements. I argued that although the sophistication of food production undoubtedly met a need, it ought not be reckoned the main motivating force for settlement.
I proposed that it was the practice of burying the dead with ceremony and the ritualization of mourning that had first given humans a motive to settle, and that the planting of crops and domestication of animals had been forced upon them as much by that desire as by the environmental pressures of “protofarming.” This was, inevitably, a highly contentious claim—but such discussion as it engendered was initially confined to the ranks of vocational historians.
The original version of the The Prehistory of Death attracted little immediate attention outside the ranks of dedicated academicians. The traffic through its aleph was by no means heavy during the first few years of its presence in the Labyrinth—but I was not unduly disappointed by that. It was, after all, merely an introduction. I had several more layers to build before my admittedly speculative “whole picture” of the origins of humanity was transformed into what I hoped would be an utterly compelling “whole picture” of the entire human project.
The Fountains of Youth Page 9