Some Thoughts on Immortality

The common flaw in most depictions of immortality is in the assumption that the would-be immortals share the same emotional drives as mere mortal man. They are personified by their penchant for greed, paranoia, jealousy, fear, romantic love, insecurity & courage. The assumption here is that all these irrational displays of human behavior are somehow truths inherent in all living things and not the products of man’s obsession with mortality and the web that we weave running from death in search of meaning.

By assuming our immortals, in despite of their infinite knowledge, can not ascend even a human’s glandular impulses, we present a universe where if all the knowledge procured by immortality is useless in overcoming even the simplest human impulse than human nature is an unconquerable field & man can no more change in his lifetime than an immortal can in ten thousand of his years.

So, in assuming that the eons of understanding, exclusive to our perceived omnipotent immortals, can not resolve even one’s personal conflicts, then it is not to be known by anything on this plane, it is a truth beyond the living.

Therefore, under this belief, no conscious action in this universe, done better by bird, fish, dog, man or immortal, alters by the will of any living force. All living things follow a path of which they cannot vary and so if failure has no diversion then these actions are as predestined.

Predestination takes the heart out of will. All stories are at their root a tale of transcendence, boy to man, man to hero, man falls from grace, man becomes a villain, a villain is redeemed, and at the center of this transcendence is an object of desire, which regardless of details, at its core an end to suffering.

If immortal & man are powerless to change, than they are impotent, there is no end to suffering, it cannot be averted, so transcendence is denied them. We can only rectify this with the assumption of an even higher power, one with knowledge that transcends the living plane, whose will is the will of all things. However, his actions then must be rooted in knowledge divine, withheld from living things & in it, an objective worth pursuit.

However, in most cases this scenario is devoid of its keystone secret divinity and topples accordingly. When the higher power is assumed, as in a great deal of ancient myth and modern literature, to suffer the same emotional flights, be it an anthropomorphic personification or gods attributed with actions in accordance with emotions, it must also be true that they suffer the same achilleios pterna. Their suffering then too can not be abated & the prize is once again removed from the occasion.

In this context, man, immortal & god have but one conflict; the war against fate. Their story is running against the winds, the logic of their universe is entirely dependant on fate, all tales than come to not. This is used to great effect in the likes of Oedipus, etc., but in the end only reinforces the theme of futility.

In fact you will see predestination in the most modern tales of the like, a destiny foretold, a chosen seeker, a sacred path, etc. These stories have tidy endings for the most part, what is foretold comes to be, and inevitably the audience is dullfully rewarded for seeing it till the end.

But I don’t imagine it would be very difficult to see the flaw in this. We can easily see in our mortal lifetimes the progressive states of our emotions, reclassifications & obsoletion. How does a boy speak of love compared to the language of young men, working adults, recent retirees & old men?

Surely emotions become more plentiful with age & certain juvenile ideas wash out to the wayside; with each passing day our shared sense of pride, regret, faith, & despair deepen in weight & meaning, while words like grumpy, excellent, & sad are little more than ironic references.

There is a constant redefining of our minds as more information becomes available which produces recordable phases so distinct that each of us, at any time, would barely be able to recognize ourselves in the proceeding period. So to assume this process, over an eternal lifespan, in anyway resembles at 40,000 years that of a 20 year old version of itself could only be made further absurd by doubling the numbers.

So I would assume then that a more informed & more modern interpretation of immortality would scarecely recall those ancient ideas of mischievious & lovelorn demi-gods and attempt to portray immortality with these principles in mind. But any attempt at this draws up a very different framework.

For example, if a tale is, as they usually are, to involve the intertwining of man & mortal, would these men of eternal knowledge & burden have any shared frame of reference to the seemingly perpetual state of alien adolescence in man?

Their words would be of crystaline refinement, their perception otherworldly to man. However, this isn’t impossible, you can imagine a hyper-magnified relationship wherein our immortals play the settler and mankind the native. Our immortals know the words for corn, they inventory the basic superstitions of the people, they understand what the color of certain beads means to the chiefs.

They can interact with man but their intentions would be wholly obscure to the hero & the audience. Our hero & our audience then would assume that all actions are disassociated with reason. Our hero would act fruitlessly to obtain that which he can not understand, he will pursue the eternal & be lost hopelessly in its depths, acting with all the conviction of man confronted with complete ignorance.

All this while our immortals must come to the author’s discretion on whether infinite knowledge results in seamless unity, islandic individuality, or organized segregation. On each, entirely different, approach there is untapped potential for the artistic cannon but I am concerned most with the latter of the three.

Conflict is, arguably, an inevitable outcome in the affairs of any two parties & to hypothesize on what manner of subject would be cause to conspire for the immortals is to attempt to first imagine the thought processes of one individual with an infinitely greater comprehension, repeat ad nauseum, then gleam from it an issue of controversial debate.

Our storyteller is better off assigning arcane actions to randomly selected figures and speaking their tale while grasping at straws. Man cannot conceive these things, its inherent in the logic if knowledge is obtained over time then man is incapable of gathering a fraction of the knowledge of the eternal and with every passing day it’s potential falls further into smaller divisions of zero.

I wont draw the unnecessary parallel here but for the artist to interpret the immortals, they must have knowledge beyond the ringing truth of their own death, they must see past the veil, forego self & meaning. These tales of the immortals are all tales of madness.