Thread by @deontologistics

It's hard to believe it's been four years since Mark left. What a day to talk about the meaninglessness of death. If there's one thing Meillassoux is right about, it's that nothing less than the complete and total resurrection of the restless dead could make death meaningful.

Who wouldn't want to hear what he had to say about the absolute fucking state of this place (Earth)? That excuse to hear his insights might be a reason to hate this state just a little less. But we can't, and so it doesn't. How I wish it were otherwise.

Mark's death wasn't uniquely his own. There was nothing authentic about it. It was the same desperately sad story that you will hear over and over again throughout your life as unquenchable misery pulls meaningful people into an indifferent void.

Death is the enemy. Give it no ground, until you must make your own peace with it. That's what's yours alone, not the onrushing edge of your horizon of possible action. That edge is everyone's and no one's, and it takes the vast majority of us before we ever face up to it.

So rage against the dying of every fucking light. Don't go gently, unless that's your chosen style. I'll go kicking, screaming, and clawing at the edges of the maw as I'm dragged into it. Carve that on my tombstone. Here lies a man who would like you to know none of us is ready.

Celebrate the all too vain struggle against the pull of the abyss if you must, that's each person's legacy, but never celebrate the abyss, which is as impersonal as anything in this twisted fucking manifold we call a universe. To the mighty dead, and a fuck you to all apologists!

I'm not sure I'm ready to articulate my thoughts on the difficulty of turning death into something meaningful, be it your own or another's. It's one of the few things I can only think about in short bursts before the tears come and I need to stop. But today is a day to speak.

I've talked about a lot art recently, by which I mean the varied and rich aesthetic products of our culture that have no place inside the specialised (and sterilised) white cube of the artworld: TV, Webcomics, RPGs, and science fiction. But I've not said much about music.

On the one hand, I feel like my musical opinions are my least interesting ones, no matter how much they mean to me. On the other, depression has severed me from the source of their significance too many times over the last decade, sapping the joy from my favourite music.

But Mark's musical opinions were so intricately woven into his ideas that it seems right to offer a few thoughts, even if my tastes diverge quite significantly from his. So I offer a few reflections on death in musical form that have stuck with me, and which I keep returning to.

1. Let's begin with the big one: A Crow Looked at Me by Mount Eerie. An album about the meaninglessness of death that struggles as hard against the paradox of conveying this message without giving it meaning as anything I have ever encountered. It is, in a word, relentless.

Here is the first track (). Its final lines are:

"It's dumb
And I don't want to learn anything from this
I love you"

These words crush me every time I hear them.

Here is @theneedledrop's review (), which is better than anything I could write here. My goal this year is to make it through the entire album without blubbering. So far, I can make it to track 3.

2. 'Homeless' by Loudan Wainwright III (). Say what you want about Wainwright, but he is a master of sincerity, who works through his pains, joys, triumphs, and failures in his songs. This song works through the death of his mother. It is literally uncanny.

3. 'You Want it Darker' by Leonard Cohen (). If anyone ever managed the task of carefully and skilfully transforming their own onrushing death into a piece of breathtaking poetry meant to condense every last lesson they had to tell us, Leonard Cohen did.

4. 'Pale Green Things' by The Mountain Goats (). The album is incredible, slowly unfolding the shadow of his abusive alcoholic stepfather; culminating in an ode to forgiveness, resurrecting some sliver of decency in those whose deaths it's hard to mourn.

5. 'Ma Bonny Lad' by The Unthanks (). The first piece of somber North East English folk I'll recommend. Not so much conceptually deep as aesthetically quintessential in the way it captures the drama of meaningless loss.

6. 'Scarecrow' by Bridie Jackson and The Arbour (). The second piece of somber folk, cut with some blues influences to create a bitter reflection on mortality's cruel ironies, which imitate meaning:

"Of all the seasons Winter always tells the fewest lies."

7. 'Heart Emoji' by Richard Dawson (). I love all Dawson's work, but his new album remains conceptually folk music even if it no longer sounds like the folk you're familiar with. Here is a vignette about the mundane will to take a life, left unrealised.

8. 'Close the Coalhouse Door' by Alex Glasgow (). The archetypical work not merely of NE sombre folk, but real pitmatic folk:

"Bairns that had no time to hide,
Bairns who saw the blackness slide,
Oh, there's bairns beneath the mountainside."

9. I'll finish with a song that closes the circle of this musical reflection on death: 'Ghost' by Neutral Milk Hotel ().

"All drenched in milk and holy water pouring from the sky
I know that she will live forever
She won't ever die"

'In the Aeroplane Over the Sea' is an amazing album, in part dedicated to the redemption of what Meillassoux would call an 'essential spectre' (Anne Frank) whose death has already been made into so much meaningless meaning. 'Ghost' and 'Holland 1945' are exercises in hauntology.

Whereas Meillassoux asks us to perform such acts of redemption as rituals encoding little more than a symbolic bridge to a hoped for future of true Justice, Federov enjoins us to extend these acts into nothing less than the technological resurrection of the restless dead.

I like to think that somewhere in the mood-sized diamond supercomputers of @hannu's Sobernost sits a girl given a new, if entirely inadequate life by the archeologists of the mind (the Hsien Kus). An essential spectre ready to escape that living prison and forge her destiny anew.

I had to bring it back to science fiction in the end, but at least I've given you a sound track to accompany your thinking about death. Solidarity against mortality, my friends.