TOTW: Life After Death

Do you strive for immortality? Many people who’d like to be remembered after they pass, and this goes for anarchists as well. We act with the hope of inspiring someone in the future with communiques. We dissect projects and organizations that have left this world and actions that have had their moment, memorializing them with the hope of educating future rebels. We tell stories about those who have left us and break windows in their names in the hope they won’t be forgotten, and perhaps hope our friends, children, and strangers we inspire will do the same for us.

What does life after death look like for you? How do you honor the past (people, actions, projects), and how do you want to be remembered? How do we carry the past into the future in a way that liberates rather than dominates our sense of what's possible?

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ahahahahah, what about the poor unfortunate *still living* anarchists who've been canceled, excommunicated, or otherwise written out of their own history, like so many former Bolsheviks airbrushed out of historical photos by Stalinists? when the arbiters of some sort of anarchist legacy (through publications, but most recently through their administration of websites) remain wedded to the cliquish antics better suited to junior high school, then the documenting of history -- warts and all -- is, shall we say, compromised? from the refusal to name people involved in various projects, to disappearing people from websites, the possibility of actual remembrance is severely curtailed.

There's a lot of potential for people to develop careless, demeaning attitude toward others just because of it. So there's a way I think to care without becoming attached, so that loss will not be as tough every time...

From the dead's perspective, I guess there's no reason to worry about whatever happens when you die. As Epicurus said, the world of the dead is another world, another plane. And even if there's nothing, this outcome is only painful from the view of the living. "Nothing happens!" means no pain, no horror.

I don't care much about what I'd leave behind, as I won't be around, duh. It's more about what this experience has been for me... how did progress or what good did I achieve? That's the only thing I worry about. How would it be to die with the awareness of having done abuse to others, or with the memory of the good shit I did out of my life?

I would say I'm less concerned with being remembered. I'll leave behind writings I guess bit that's more focused on the here and now, hopefully people will already have moved beyond my ideas by the time I'm dead. I care more about the physicality of death, living in death. I hope I'll die somewhere no one will ever find me. I'll rot and decompose, maybe even be eaten, but animals and bugs. I hope my death will be just like i hope I hope to live my life, interconnected with nature, free from institutions, the coffin is the last prison I hope to escape.

As for how I remember others, I would say it's quite limited to just that, remembrance. I'm not one for ritual. I guess in a way I try not to think separately of the dead or of the living. But remember our time together for what it was. And share stories of the good times that were had, the lessons to be learned, etc.

Last night I was listening to old anarchybang episodes, and I'm thinking of what Aragorn! said about how anarchism will hopefully continue to be passed down until someone is able to use it more effectively than us... Not to be a futurist but I like the thought of carrying on a knowledge and practice which might be valuable to people I will never meet. I don't intend to live *for* that knowledge, but it'd be nice if what I learn in my own life is carried on so that somebody else doesn't have to figure everything out the hard way.

Then again, I think one of the best things about the position of anarchists now is that we have to more or less invent a new way of life. Not to say that we don't have any culture that's been handed down to us, but there is very little in the way of actual practices for living our lives. So I hope that to the extent we are able to pass anything on, that it doesn't prevent a continuous reevaluation and reinvention of what it means to be an anarchist.

"Do you strive for immortality?"

No!

"What does life after death look like for you? "

No!

"How do you honor the past (people, actions, projects), and how do you want to be remembered?"

No! But I only contest the "honor" part. I remember people and things, fondly or not, I mourn losses. People will remember me however they do, I'm not concerned with that.

"How do we carry the past into the future in a way that liberates rather than dominates our sense of what's possible?"

The notion of linear time, causality and determinism, and conventional physics would imply that the future is always dominated or predetermined by the origin, the past cannot be retroactively altered by the future.

Memory (at least the squishy type of memory that happens in brains) carries the past into the future in a way, but it's imperfect, it degrades, it can be modified, erased, "refreshed".

Precedents can inform, but also box-in imagination.
The uses of memory can vary depending on priorities and criteria.
If the person values novelty, they can look at precedents in order to make iterations that differ from the precedents, so the sense of what's possible could be anything that hasn't been tried yet.
If the person is looking at precedents to evaluate the effectiveness of certain means towards certain ends, they will keep what worked and still works (if it ain't broke, don't fix it) and try to change what didn't and doesn't. So their sense of what's possible is expanded by increased capacity to do this or that (even if it's more of the same, or faster, etc), rather than by novelty. By development along a certain path of evolution, instead of a branching out into a different path.

Ignorance of precedents or history, lack of memory, means you don't base your choices on knowledge of the past, but you might still unknowingly repeat it. If a person seeks novelty, and they only have their personal immediate experience, then a lot of things will be new, vs someone with a long memory who has studied many precedents and experienced many. But is the "naive" person "freer" from prejudice? Is the learned person's sense of what's possible more dominated by the past, than the person who is ignorant of precedents or has no memory?

Seeing breadth of things that exist and have existed can sometimes provide with a greater variety of things than what someone could imagine (could a person imagine all the variety of organisms and landscapes that exist if they were raised and kept in a bare room all their lives?). But at the same time, what are the things that limit imagination, and what are the things that stimulate it?
Exercising imagination makes it strong, if all questions are answered by looking at precedents, then imagination atrophies, even if may it could be disputed that a given backlog, library, or database is more expansive than a person's particular imagination. A computer can also make many more iterations in quicker time.

So it's no wonder that people who are fans of information technology and technology in general find transhumanism and singularity with an A.I. appealing like a way to achieve "secular" immortality and omnipotence. Its opponents would argue against it as a form of domination and would argue towards no external memory keeping artifacts, no writing, no libraries, no graveyards.

"We act with the hope of inspiring someone in the future with communiques. We dissect projects and organizations that have left this world and actions that have had their moment, memorializing them with the hope of educating future rebels. We tell stories about those who have left us and break windows in their names in the hope they won’t be forgotten, and perhaps hope our friends, children, and strangers we inspire will do the same for us."

This speaks of transference of information: cultural, programmatic, genetic. If the law of conservation is true, none of the material components are lost, but all of the stories are.

Remembrance in death starts with a life well lived. Talk about dead friends and comrades, honor their contributions. Also in how I cede power and allow transition to happen in my collectives. I leave a legacy by doing the work with historical insight and making it easy for younger generations to take over what we've set the foundation for. I don't hold out or hold on irrationally or try to control what I've helped build. Raise sweet kids with curiosity for my worldview but no didactic requirement to share it. We talk about all our elders who pass away and what legacy they leave us, what we have the honor of continuing.

My next recurrence will be my last! I wish to leave the wheel of karmic reincarnation and all the spooks its attracts by having my amputated head dissolved in a bucket of acid.

Good luck with your eternal acid bath. What goes around comes around brother.

Speaking of honor and memory, and the past being domineering of the present/future, grudges are a sort of negative memory and affect that, in the desire to avenge a person or a struggle which was defeated, when that revenge is not carried out to give closure, it can fester and take out the liveliness out of a person.

When the memory of a past struggle, or way of carrying out that struggle, haunts the person decades after the past and makes the bitter and jaded and they can’t move on. They become like a broken record of petty jabs and passive aggressive remarks, instead of moving on.

That person, stuck in their ways and in their memory of “the golden days”, would be in need of a symbolic death and rebirth so they can live anew with a refreshed imagination and ability to appreciate the new day for what it is and for what it could be, instead of endless mourning of what could have, should have, would have been.

So yes, remembering, but also letting go, and moving on.

I don't care too create a big mark as a great thinker or professional activist. I like to do things here and now and life is for me. I like to read about historical anarchists.

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