I don’t remember my death. I don’t remember my birth either, so there’ some kind of symmetry there.
When thinking back, I sometimes try to find moments when I was alive, thinking that obviously, I must have died after that. But it’s not that simple.
What exactly does it mean to be alive? I have that image in my head of the newborn child, screaming and making everybody aware of it’s presence, but then again - it didn’t start living in that moment, it just changed it’s way of being alive. Quite visibly, like a butterfly crawling out of its cocoon. The butterfly was alive also before that happened, and the baby was so as well, before birth.
I’m thinking that dying may be similar: not clearly happening at one particular point in time, but rather through one or more changes to the way of being alive. Gradually shifting away from anything we normally call living.
Like leaves falling from the trees in the autumn. When exactly do they stop being alive? They began as buds, unfolded, breathed, and then less of that - some day, they fell off the tree. Now detached from their origin; are they then immediately dead? A baby also detaches from its origin, and that’s when we claim that it comes to life.
I’m not a leaf. I’m not a baby. I’m not a raindrop or anything else that is seemingly easy to explain and yet, endlessly difficult to determine the temporal extend of.
Temporal extend is always difficult to determine - you start somewhere and end somewhere, by your definition. Whatever you are dealing with did, however, exist in some form before that, and it continues to exist in some form after.
A blacksmith creating a sword will start by heating some iron, and from the start it isn’t a sword - but after a bit of heating and hammering, it is already partly a sword. The blacksmith decides when it is done - when the creative process has completed, and the iron has become a sword. One blacksmith may have one definition of done, another blacksmith another definition. A person watching the process may decide along the way, that now it’s a sword, even if the hammering continues.
An archeologist digs out the sword from the earth in which it has been hidden for thousands of years. It is still a sword, just not new. Rusty, maybe broken. Nonetheless, a sword.
I am also rusty and broken, though not yet in the ground. I was never a sword, never a raindrop, never a leaf. Whatever I was, I still am, just not new.
But something bothers me.
I wonder if a fallen leaf had a continuous life? The sword certainly didn’t, being used and forgotten several times, and the raindrop was shaping, falling, getting absorbed, but possibly with some amount of steadiness along the way.
My life, in contrast, consists of moments, most of them not connected, possibly not even part of the same life1. Like different glass splinters, no longer in a frame but in a pile - perhaps once part of the same window, perhaps not. It is difficult to tell, and nobody would ever bother trying to find out. They don’t care about the splinters - nobody does. If at all, only to get them away, seeing only negative value in them.
I feel that when moving around in reality. Talking to people, who don’t see a complete person. At a job interview, for instance, with some questions asked, but the answers not understood as part of a person – only as fragments. They don’t see the full window, only the splinters. And they don’t care.
Society treats me by individual splinters, when something I’m said to have done or not decides how a lot of things proceed. Again, not the full window, just a splinter.
At some point in time, I broke, if I ever was in one piece. The solution was then to replace me with a new window, and even though one or more splinters from the broken me could fit into a new context, they were treated as broken, never taken seriously, never valuable.
Again replaced, thrown out, not valued.
I remember – or maybe I just see one of the splinters of my memory telling me – how there was a time when broken things were thrown out but people were kept. Even the splintered ones. Now it all goes in the bin.
At times, someone, for a moment, sees something in one of the splinters they believe is valuable – but they see a reflection, typically, of themselves, and when they understand that it is not me, they throw me and the splinter out. It can happen in a moment. From end to end – the journey of being seen as valuable to being thrown out.
Often, I’m ghosted. That’s a plague of the present time, I know, but to me, it has been like that during half of my life. So, maybe I died at that time? When I quit a job to go with my own company, ignoring all the warnings from people who insisted that I was not capable of doing it, I was not in the same league as those who did such things. “It will go wrong” they said, after which they did all they could to make their prediction come true.
At least from that moment, I was a ghost to most people in business life. They still see me as one. But I remember many episodes, also earlier, where I was not really part of life. Others lived, and perhaps I was allowed to be there, but I was considered a stranger. I was probably often tolerated, for some obscure reason, and just as often not. Never liked.
Moving to Sweden accelerated everything, as I wrote about once. That looks like fiction, even a poetic kind, but it’s a true image, just abstracted a bit with a model photo:
Sweden is the ghosting country par excellence. People here are masters in ignoring others, pretending that they don’t exist. And also masters in keeping doing things in a certain way, no matter the circumstances. Like robots.
When even robots ignore me, it must mean that I’m not here? But they ignore each other as well, making this place a very weird place.
At times, the robots smell blood and start behaving truly nasty. A program in them tells them to be mean to people with problems, leading to homeless people being set on fire in their sleep, for instance, and super-fast and hard-handed processing of dept collection. As I have written about previosly, they also issue threats for throwing away garbage in a way they see as wrong on the surveillance cameras.2
They don’t see the human inside, treating people as if they were robots. Which, of course, they may be.
People without problems are ghosted, and those with problems are put on fire.
But the world is bigger than Sweden, and I feel how I and other ghosts are not noticed at all in an even bigger perspective – becoming increasingly invisible in a world of insane information collection. Spied upon, but neglected. I almost like it when yet another company or organization, like so many today, emails me to tell that they miss me – so, please, would I buy something from them? Hurray! Someone doesn’t see me as a ghost – but as a wallet.
Always, I’m being treated like just a fraction of a person. Always just a splinter of that full frame I may once have been. Always with disgust and complaints, and always with any lack of interest in the full me. Always as someone who doesn’t belong, and who can be ignored.
Being a humanist, I can say that this is not compliant with any scheme for humanism. But which level of compliance is there for a ghost? Maybe the overall scheme in this world, when treating each others as only fractions of people, is meant to bypass any human considerations – because, it is purely transactional. It is not about you – not all of you, that is. Don’t take it personal.
Humanism is for persons only, I suppose. And humans. Not ghosts. And not those piles of glass splinters that nobody sees the value of – the remains of broken people.
That’s what I keep hearing at job interviews – there’s no “red thread” in my life. I didn’t follow a defined path from start to end. Nobody finds it necessary to explain why I should have done that, or what I’m supposed to do about it now. They don’t make a case for that red threat to be relevant at all.
It happens to others too, in other cities as well. It’s a virus that has gotten into the city owned housing companies – originaly established to help everybody get a place to live, but turned into the ugly face of capitalism, now used as vehicles to drag out (way too much) money of ordinary people, and to host a morbid culture of maltreatment of the people renting apartments.
Jørgen, this is a remarkably intelligent piece of writing.
What struck me most when reading your text was that I don’t think it is really about death.
It begins with death, birth, leaves, raindrops and swords, but somewhere along the way another question emerges: “What exactly remains when all the familiar forms have fallen away?” And that is a very mature question.
The text appears to ask when life begins and ends, but beneath that I sense a deeper inquiry. Not whether you are alive or dead, but whether there is something in you that exists independently of the identities, roles and stories through which you have travelled. Something that most people will build their identity on.
The leaf, the raindrop and the sword all seem to circle around the same mystery: Continuity through transformation.
And then suddenly the text becomes personal, when you write about splinters, job interviews, about people seeing fragments rather than a person, about being replaced, about being tolerated rather than welcomed and about being ghosted.
The philosophical reflection gives way to something more intimate: The experience of not being recognised as a whole human being. That is a particular kind of loneliness. And it is also something I can personally relate to. It is not the loneliness of being alone, but the loneliness of being misperceived. People who naturally see depth in others often suffer greatly when others relate to them through categories, labels and surface observations.
Yet while reading, another possibility kept returning to me: Perhaps the story is not merely about rejection. Perhaps it is also about metamorphosis. The image of the butterfly appears near the beginning of your text, but then quietly disappears again. I think it deserves to stay. Because there is something curious about metamorphosis. If we could ask the caterpillar what is happening halfway through the process, it would probably describe its situation as catastrophe. Its old idenity is being dissolved in a kind of biological soup. Its former way of moving no longer works. The structures that once defined it are breaking down. From the caterpillar’s perspective, it might look very much like death. And it is a wrestle for the butterfly to get out of the shell. Only later does it become apparent that what looked like destruction was actually transformation.
I have often wondered whether many of the deepest human crises are misunderstood because we view them from the perspective of the caterpillar rather than the butterfly.
What if there are periods in life when the old self genuinely has to fall apart?
Not because it failed. Not because it was worthless. But because it has completed its purpose.
When reading your text, I could not help thinking about those traditions that describe a stage of profound disorientation before a deeper integration emerges. The Christian mystics called it the Dark Night of the Soul, and this happens to be the title of my coming book. I have thought about this subject for years, and I am living it. In alchemy it is called Nigredo, the blackening.
In Kabbalah we might speak of a descent into concealment before a higher revelation.
Different languages and systems, perhaps pointing toward the same territory, that from within such a process, life often appears fragmented.
The old narrative stops making sense. The pieces no longer fit together. The continuity that once felt obvious becomes difficult to perceive. The window shatters. The map becomes unreadable. And yet, from another perspective, something else may be happening.
The fragmentation itself may be exposing an identity that was previously hidden beneath the roles.
Reading your text, I found myself wondering whether you have spent much of your life identifying with the various forms you inhabited: Employee, Consultant, Entrepreneur, Outsider, Insider, Accepted, Rejected, Valued, Discarded.
But what if all of those were merely temporary expressions or transitional states?
What if the process is gradually stripping them away, not to leave you with less, but to reveal something more fundamental?
There is a subtle idea in Kabbalah that comes to mind.
The vessels shattered.
The Light did not.
The fragments scattered.
The Light remained.
When I read your reflections about splinters, I wondered whether you may be identifying yourself with the shattered vessel.
The broken glass. The discarded fragment. The rusty sword.
But what if those are not what you really are?
What if they are merely the forms through which something deeper has travelled?
The fascinating thing is that your own metaphors already point in that direction.
You grant continuity to almost everything.
The leaf existed before it unfolded. The raindrop existed before it fell. The sword existed before it was forged and continues after it rusts. You recognise that forms change while something persists. Yet when the subject becomes yourself, you become less generous.
The leaf receives continuity. The sword receives continuity. The raindrop receives continuity.
But Jørgen becomes a pile of disconnected splinters.
I am not convinced :-)
In fact, I suspect your own text quietly argues against that conclusion.
You describe yourself as a leaf. Yet a leaf is never merely a leaf. It is an expression of the tree. The tree is an expression of the forest. The forest is an expression of something larger still.
Likewise, a raindrop is not separate from the ocean. It is the ocean temporarily appearing as a drop.
Perhaps the deepest question is not whether the leaf survives.
Perhaps it is whether the leaf was ever separate from the tree in the first place.
And perhaps the same question applies to us.
From the perspective of ordinary consciousness, life often appears to be the story of a separate individual trying to hold itself together.
From the perspective of higher consciousness, life begins to look more like a process through which something larger expresses itself through a temporary form.
The form changes.
The essence remains.
The identities come and go.
The witness remains.
The masks change.
The awareness behind them remains.
If that is true, then perhaps the splinters are not evidence that you have been broken. And even a piece of holographic splinter contains the full image.
Perhaps they are also evidence that something in you has outgrown the frame that once held them together.
And perhaps what feels like disappearance is not disappearance at all.
Perhaps it is the uncomfortable, often painful process through which a person gradually discovers that he was never merely the leaf, the sword, the raindrop or the window.
He was always the life moving through them all.
You're not a ghost. I see you.