Writing Toward Immortality

How the act of writing can expand our present

Photo by David Billings on Unsplash

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“Who wants to live forever? / Forever is our today.” Brian May of Queen wrote these lines for the iconic song of 1986’s’ Highlander film, a strange story featuring immortals who can only be killed if their heads are cut off (just a spin on vampires and zombies, I guess).

Most films and books featuring immortals reach the conclusion that it’s a terrible state of existence. Yet, searching for immortality and fighting our own ephemerality has long been a desire or even obsession of some humans. Despite the lessons we learn from Frankenstein or Interview with the Vampire, some people continue to want to live forever.

Recently, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted we are within a decade of some kind of immortality emerging at once with singularity, human-like intelligence in AI. Simultaneously, cloning and cryogenics are receiving funding from some of the richest people in the world. Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel are famously investing in immortality companies and Ted Williams lies frozen, awaiting an awakening.

Some might say that those seeking an immortal legacy are using a healthier or more natural way to remain on Earth “forever.” Those who make history, who create timeless art…who write books. The language from their minds can remain in libraries for centuries or even millennia. Shakespeare, Aristotle, Bashō…are they not immortal in some way?

But as people search for these answers to defy death, they are missing the experience that musician-turned astrophysicist May concluded: “Forever is our today. / Who waits forever anyway?” What if writing, instead of leaving a legacy, could help us expand time – or our perception of it – into a richer, fuller mortal life? Many now attempt to save precious time by using AI by writing for them, and sometimes that time-saving strategy is probably quite useful. But the act might sometimes circumvent one of the very things that opens our realities and gives life meaning.

Time is relative anyway. Sure, physical time exists, but if we understand our perception of time in the way Heidegger does, it is relative and reliant also on death. We all know that things can feel fast or slow, depending on a variety of factors. Just consider the days and years of the pandemic, and you’ll know what I mean. Today, I’d like to posit that the act of writing makes time expand in itself.

Structural survival

When writer-philosopher-professor Jacques Derrida knew he would die imminently of pancreatic cancer, he sprung forward an articulation of both fear and hope (at once) to describe the way we can move toward immortality. In Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, Derrida spoke with Le Monde journalist Jean Birnbaum about these ideas that one could say have been immortalized in a book.

Conjuring ideas from Walter Benjamin, Derrida talks about a concept of structural survival, decidedly not about leaving books or children behind, but one that focuses on “tracings” and “spectral” qualities of oneself that may remain after death:

This is not a striving for immortality; it's something structural. I leave a piece of paper behind, I go away, I die: it is impossible to escape this structure, it is the unchanging form of my life. Each time I let something go, each time some trace leaves me, "proceeds" from me, unable to be reappropriated, I live my death in writing.

The idea that writing is living (and therefore dying as well) is something one could decipher from his ideas about différance but is stated more concretely by someone aware that he is about to lose his own consciousness along with his body:

[D]econstruction is always on the side of the yes, on the side of the affirmation of life.…This surviving is life beyond life, life more than life, and my discourse is not a discourse of death, but, on the contrary, the affirmation of a living being who prefers living and thus surviving to death, because survival is not simply that which remains but the most intense life possible.

The “intensity” is living a life to its fullest. And what better way to do this than through writing?

Something to do

Why do we write? It’s a question every writer asks themselves and a common article topic. Conversations about why writers write are vast, probably because we continue to try to understand something that has become a fundamental part of ourselves. It is a fascinating question for writers and readers alike…why take up life’s precious time (usually without the promise of payment, fame, or even readership) in order to put one’s ideas on a page?

Zadie Smith tell us that it’s something to do, like cooking or motorbiking or watching television, in the essay “Something to Do” from the pandemic book of essays: Intimations. Well, it is, of course. But more than simply passing the time, writing can expand time. It doesn’t make you live longer or enter some warp zone or parallel universe where you reach a bizarre form of immortality. Instead, writing enriches your mortal experience.

Smith says writing is “no substitute for love” and that by contrast “love is something to be experienced.” She goes on to explain that writing is a “manic desire,” something we writers do to fill up time. Well, what if the act helps one to see? I don’t just mean the pretty flowers on your balcony or the way your son exposes all his teeth when he laughs with his head back or the sadness in your friend’s voice on the phone. If writing helps us to see these things, to live them and reflect on them, then isn’t it helping us to love?

The comparisons between books and babies in terms of commitment and legacy is a cliché that misses the idea of what actually happens in the act of writing or parenting, focusing instead on some nugget to be left behind after death. But when it comes to love, there is something gained in comparison. Loving people, including but not exclusive to our children, spreads one’s positive energy from one’s inner being. Similarly, loving an idea or having a passion to write spreads this same type of energy. And maybe if your goal is to connect to humanity, you can share love in this way: through your words. I think of it in a metaphysical sense. Call it Deleuzean Affect if you like. All the matter we are made of is held together by energy in such a fragile way. As we create or love or laugh, we give off this energy to the world. We share it with others.

Writing for connection

I was asked by my son’s preschool to share how my job was a part of the community. The first instinctual response of a writer might be, it’s not. It was mine, too, and for that reason, I felt compelled to find out how I am indeed a part of the community. Because this was during the pandemic, I made a video, so I can conveniently go back to reflect on what I actually said. Without script, I told these three-year-olds that as a writer, I was a part of the community of humans, of humanity. It just came to me at the time, but I think it’s true. I am part of this discourse that makes us human and not animals (though I love animals) and not a beautiful tree (though that sounds delightful in some ways as well). No, as a human, I can think and I can write.

What sometimes feels like an extremely isolating experience is perhaps one of the most connected: what we write comes from shared languages and daily experiences or responses to art, all part of a community without limits. Although my work may reach a particular audience and work within particular genres and language, I also like to think there is more that brings us together rather than separates us. If love and happiness are the meaning of life, then we can find these in the act of writing.

And so what do love and happiness have to do with immortality? Perhaps more than capturing ourselves as pieces of prose that can be shared when we are dead, the way we live (through seeking happiness and sharing love) spreads our mortal finitude outward toward immortality. As we write, we observe and reflect. We connect. We who write are writing even as we go about daily life. In considering how we may filter an experience, we bring mindfulness to it and paradoxically the filtering expands the experience.

Uselessness

Oscar Wilde’s famous quote from the preface of Dorian Gray reads: “All art is quite useless.” It tells us that the arts, including literature of course, are not practical or useful for everyday life. Instead of being trivial or selfish acts, they enhance our lives. They make us human. They reach beyond the limits of our bodies. Of course, this novel also teaches us that the narcissism of striving for “eternal youth” can rot our bodies and souls. Instead of seeking unnatural qualities, art’s impractical qualities can help us to live more fully. Even as we embrace sadness and difficulty or heartbreak and grief, we can investigate these feelings through writing to experience the full range of our natural, mortal worlds.

In another case of the rich fighting mortality, Bryan Johnson’s Project Blueprint is “trying to maximally slow the speed of [his] biological aging,” attempting to change his 45 year-old body into that of an 18 year old’s. I could easily be wrong, but in perusing his website, I can’t imagine he does much more with his time on earth than trying to stay young. Is this drive his life’s passion?

When you have a passion for something, or perhaps it’s a compulsion, you don’t always question why that is. In other cases, the answer may be obvious, whether or not the reason is healthy. I run to feel strong. I drink to escape. I knit to share something with my friends. You get the idea. But with writing (and other art forms), sometimes the writer struggles to explain why they do it. It’s something we have to do, we were born to do. We know in most cases it won’t make us much money.

Writing is an affirmation of life. It reminds me that I am human; I can view the world through a perspective that I have the power to change. I can document its beauty, creating new truths through language.

Each time we write: we think, we observe, we challenge.

It’s hard to make sense of the injustices and horrifying violence in the world. If each of us engages in tiny acts of love and kindness, this will help. It may not solve anything immediately, but the power of truth (in the Keatsian sense of the word, as observations of life’s beauty) can spread. A few months ago, I read an article on Medium by a Ukrainian abroad who felt helpless, that all they could do was ‘pray’. But at the same time, they were sharing a story of their cultural identity and their pain – this act of writing was doing something. It was political; it was love; it was moving toward immortality even though the article would likely soon be lost. It made humanity something that much deeper than what it felt when I read the news that morning.

As we write in the metaphorical darkness, that is – in isolation and with our own mortal limitations or perhaps literally in the black of night, we also exhume our deepest fears, desires, passions, anger, and anything else that’s deeply lodged within our souls. Often, we don’t even know it’s there until it’s staring back at us on the page. In these moments, as our bodies seem to dissipate into the darkness, we paradoxically feel more alive than ever.

Some call Derrida’s writing perplexing or even nonsensical. Instead, one could say that what he has left us in his oeuvre is something filled with puzzles, often without any answer. They are also filled at once with ideas about love and kindness and the joy of creation. Essentially, he tells us to lead a mindful life, to dance rather than trudge through our days. He plays with language (“tourner les mots”) to try to help us see this way of the world. But he also plays and creates these labyrinths to make his writing speak. It speaks across generations, both before and ahead of him. He does not think he will be aware of these conversations after his death, but he has left some kind of energy there, and, perhaps more to my point here, it was in the realm of the infinite in its act of creation, as if time had collapsed in on itself to understand him.

If some kind of AI-aided immortality is in fact imminently reached, what will that do to our perception of time? With an overwhelming sense of foreverness, will we instead seek experiences that bring awareness to death? Perhaps writing gives us infinite lives within the structure of mortality. Perhaps each time we sit to write, we experience the present at its fullest only because we also embrace the end.

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