Death Before Death

Can you die before death?

A man who breathes without reason, who wakes without purpose, who walks without guidance; his flesh and blood remain warm, yet his essence that once pulsed with vitality is now calcified and turned to stone. Even in his most beloved, intimate moments he finds himself alienated and isolated from humanity, like two lovers separated by the thinnest opaque glass screen. No matter how much he yearns for connection, for warmth and community to restore his essence, he always finds himself just tangentially out of reach from life. He feels the radiation of warmth, yet it never meets him. His heart pumps, his eyes see, but is he alive or is he a thing? Which is to say; although alive, is he simply a walking corpse?

Simone Weil herself painted the horror of man reduced into things in her essay The Iliad, or the Poem of Force:

From the power to change a human being into a thing by making him die there comes another power, in its way more momentous, that of making a still living human being into a thing. He is living, he has a soul; he is nonetheless a thing.

Who can say how it [the human soul] must each moment conform itself, twist and contort itself? It was not created to inhabit a thing; when it compels itself to do so, it endures violence through and through.

If the soul suffers perpetual violence simply to remain inside the body, then what name do we give to this life?

Indeed this reduction of humans into things is all around us. A young man who survived extreme abuse, often crying at night and feeling existentially isolated from his own species, recently made friends from attending fighting game tournaments. After a large monthly tournament, he takes a picture with his group of 12 friends before they walk across the dirty Portland streets, stained with life, to a Red Robin.

Indeed, this is a joyous moment - laughter, connection, and solidarity. For once, he is a part of a collective, something greater than him. And yet, no matter his action, he still feels disconnected and alienated from his own species, unable to fully fall into community. Despite his contorted soul's greatest desire, he is there, but he is not there.

Perhaps the greatest horror is not from the reduction of a man into a thing, but the disfigurement of his relation to himself.