I dreamt about my daddy, and I woke up with these lyrics in my head:
And with bees in her breath,
And the rest of her ringing
They'll sting through her chest
With a force hard and beating,
'Till wonderfully wet she will get
Until she's soaked inside her clothes.
Everything lately has been pointing to the theme of death (but what doesn't?). It's not a sadness that I am feeling, but rather a hyper awareness that the state I am currently in is alive. Bees keep appearing to me in various ways. I always imagine them as this anti-Ayn Randian creature who lives solely for altruism and purely as a martyr, sacrificing itself for the sustenance of its species. When a bee releases its stinger, it dies. What can it mean to breathe bees? This song by Neutral Milk Hotel certainly has motifs pointing towards motherhood and childbirth. Perhaps a mother starts breathing bees when she has a child, as now she is to produce sacrifices rather than living just on behalf of herself.
This dream about my dad was related to care taking. I was in pain, and he took me to the hospital. Dreams of this nature are not unfamiliar to me. Perhaps they occur due to one of my fondest memories of him. When I was a child, I dropped pruning shears on my foot, causing a very large amount of beet-red blood to be released. I calmly walked into my home, blood sputtering out of my foot like a water fountain, asked my sister, "where's mommy?", found mommy, and told her that my foot was bleeding. The moment my mom suggested that we go to the hospital was the moment I became aware of what was happening. That's when my dad picked me up and carried me in his arms. I submitted to his care. I needed his care.
Tom Robbins is a firm believer in immortality and is held even more strongly on the conviction that being alive is just one form of "living", so to speak. That death is just a nasty habit of the living who have thus far, morphed the unbroken cycle of right-hand ideas and left-hand ideas like a pendulum. Louie CK jokes about never knowing when we are dead, but that all humans have the same thought just before death which is, "this is probably it." Seeing the white light, having your life flashing before your eyes, and all of that other crap is just a coping mechanism. We want it all to be worth it by summarizing that final moment of life with remembering that it wasn't all bad and that this isn't all that there is.
Death is trivial, in the state of being alive, for those reasons. Yet, somehow, we manage to hate and excoriate those who have an opinion on death that is incongruent with our own. Because ultimately, an opinion on death, is an opinion on how to live. I am speaking on behalf of a generic personal level, all the way to a cultural, societal, global level. It's the reason for everything. Everyone has their own idea of what happens after the state of being alive, and spend most of this portion of their lives dedicated to that belief.
If immortality was attainable and death was a choice, would there come a point when everyone would choose it?