A shirtless man- overweight, hairy, and in this author's opinion either drugged or suicidal- ran in front of my car last night as I drove with a friend eastbound on Hollywood Boulevard, right where the street begins to change from glitzy to depressed. If I had not seen him out of the corner of my eye and been able to swerve out of his path, as I did, he would be dead and I would have his death on my hands. The emotions that swirled through me immediately proceeding that moment were multifold and instantaneous: I exhaled, then I expressed confusion, I shared a moment and then made a joke; I took a profound sigh of relief, then I grappled with his potential motive. And then I became preoccupied with death. I thought of the physical properties inherent in it, first of his specific death and then of it generally. How the physics of him bouncing off and perhaps over my car would work, how I'd have to stop and see him on the ground, how I'd need to, at the end of the night, clean blood off my car. Then I considered life leaving him, abandoning him, and leaving others and what would it be like to see life drain from someone, would it swirl like in the bathtub or seep out slowly like from the crack in a teacup? I wondered where it would go, the life.
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Both of my grandfathers have passed away, but not until they had reached old age and not without adequate warning. I have been blessed to experience very little of "tragic death", which I take to mean death that comes unexpectedly, that results from anything but health complications associated with advanced age. The few tragic deaths I have been made witness to were that of people I had lost touch with or scarcely knew in the first place. I do not live in a war zone. I am privileged and therefore, in a lot of ways, too removed from death. Whereas some live with a deep connection to dying, this would have been my first direct experience, so while they can gain a perhaps deeper appreciation of life from their experiences with death, death informs almost nothing I do or feel. I am unattached to the deeper nature of existence; the closest I get to tackling its issues are when I squash a bug, or, as happened only two days ago, a baby bird drops dead from the sky. It didn't drop from atop a tree trying to fly because there were no trees above it. I speculated aloud that it must have been dropped by a hawk or some other bird of prey soaring above us, the mere thought of which disgusted some of the other members of my group. The baby landed ten inches from a swarm of ants who had been devouring some greenery over the last twenty minutes. The ants must have smelt the carcass because they immediately descended upon it. After a moment, I decided to remove the body and throw it in the trash rather than subject me and the others to the spectacle. I intervened so that we wouldn't have to view firsthand how life nourishes itself on death. Too grisly, I thought.
The near-accident happened so quickly. I guess time only slows down when one comes close to achieving one's own death. I wonder if it slowed down for the shirtless man. I looked back at him in my rearview mirror seconds after I nearly took his breath, and he was in the center divider of the four lanes of traffic, swinging his body wildly back and forth, like an animal. I wonder if he tried again. Did he want to die? Why would he want to die? Why did this shirtless, fat man run out into oncoming traffic last night? Did he make a tactical error and decide to cross a major intersection at the exact wrong time? Or did he, in some small or major way, want to experience death? If he did, I understand his curiosity. Every time I am on a cliff or tall building I envision what it would be like to jump, but I don't imagine the fall, the terror, or the splat. I take a more omniscient approach and consider what those around me might feel. Would they try and grab me as I dove? Would my ex-girlfriends cry when they heard the news? Would a lot of people come to my funeral? I view it through the lens of an outsider. In other words, I detach my death from my death. I have never jumped because it's a doomed experiment: the scientist completes the test, learns the results, but can never share them with the world. I haven't jumped because I'm scared, and I don't have a death wish. But most of all, I have not leapt from a tall building because I cannot in any way consider my own death. I could not imagine not existing. Last night I imagined him not existing, and then I imagined myself not existing, and then all of my loved ones not existing. Last night I broke through.
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This blog is called "Dan's Search for Meaning", a play on Dr. Victor Frankl's seminal book, "Man's Search for Meaning", which I recently reread. In it, Frankl imparts stories of his time in the Nazi concentration camp and expounds on his philosophy of logotherapy, a discipline of psychotherapy that focuses on the "will to meaning", rather than the "will to power" or the "will to pleasure" expressed by Adler and Freud, respectively. Frankl explains that in these concentration camps, when power and pleasure no longer truly existed, all that remained was a search for meaning, a reason to get up each morning, and that when that meaning was lost or could not be located, death soon followed. I obviously have no delusions that the work I produce in this blog will reach even moderately close to the depths of meaning that Frankl reaches in his book. Certainly, there will be sly, quickly-produced nonsense that vastly outnumbers anything serious or truthful. However, lately I have felt devoid of something in my heart or my gut or whatever you call that part of you that is you. I have a strong desire to figure out what I've lost or even never had.
This first entry, a rumination on death, seems to be a fitting place to start. Victor Frankl had been tinkering with logotherapy as a concept prior to his experiences in the concentration camps, but with his time as prisoner, he was able to see first-hand his theory in action and, in his desire to preach that therapy to the world at large following his release, found his own example of meaning, his raison d'être. Through his reflections on death and why he and others wanted to live, he found why he and others wanted to live. In this blog I hope to explore other people's and my reasons for being, from Catholicism to Buddhism, from science to Scientology, from humanism to hedonism, and all that comes between, through which I hope to arrive at some sort of larger truth about myself, my world, and my role within that world. I'll probably fail, but it's worth it to try.
Since this is already too long for a post in a post-Twitter world, I'll leave you with an anecdote which I believe illustrates, in a small way, both why I want to write this blog and why that hairy, shirtless man might have wanted to run into oncoming traffic:
Last night, I began to write this piece around 2am after I had come home. The near-accident had occurred maybe fifteen minutes prior and was all I could think about, so I sat down and typed my brains out. Well into my composition, at maybe 3am, I was interrupted by a repetitive clicking sound that I couldn't place. I looked up from my computer screen to where I had heard the noise and there saw a large, exquisitely-painted moth beating its wings up against my window pane. I watched and listened as it continued, unabated, for thirty seconds or more, to push itself up against the glass, again and again. Infinite darkness stretched out behind it. The moth wanted to get in from the darkness to my bright room. It wanted to get in to meet the light.
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