Tomorrow Will Never Know (The Beauty of Mortality)

I was fortunate enough to get tickets to Mac Miller’s short film release for his posthumous album Balloonerism. The short film is centered around a group of kids, as they travel through an alternative world that is filled with constant reminders of death. The short film was made with that premise in mind .Mac Miller insisted that the album be released after his death. Tragically Mac Miller passed away in 2018 at only 26 years old. There is one song however that stuck out to me from Balloonerism, titled Tomorrow Will Never Know. The song has one particular line that sets this essay into motion. “Do they dream just like we do? Do they feel just like we do? Do they love just like we do? Although this paper is not about Mac Miller, these lyrics are what inspired the essay. Due to this, to what degree does death disconnect us from consciousness and if it does why does anything matter at all? Using Merleau- Ponty's ideas on embodiment and Camus' perspective on death through absurdity, these questions will be addressed, and ultimately I will defend the statement, that without death, life would lose its worth.

At first glance, this essay might seem nihilistic, since it answers Mac Miller’s questions with a somber truth: the dead are disconnected from life. To back up my assertions, I am going to use Merleau- Ponty's ideas of Embodiment as well as embodied consciousness. Merleau- Ponty believes that consciousness and the body are unified rather than divided unlike Descartes who believes in dualism. The body is involved in the very possibility of existence. Because of this when we pass away, we lose our body, which strips us of our ultimate experiences. We are no longer humans according to embodied consciousness, because we are no longer conscious. As well, being human is more than just bodily functions. Embodied consciousness does not argue that we are only alive to serve biological needs; instead he argues that we are alive to serve mental and spiritual needs on top of that. Merleau-Ponty is different from many philosophers as he was also very involved in the sciences which shaped his idea that the human experience is directly tied to bodily perception. To continue the argument, Merleau-Ponty points out that when a great guitarist plays a song, he does not need to look at his hands to know where to put them but instead his body/ consciousness remembers what to do. If we were to believe Descartes' idea of dualism (that the body and the mind are two separate entities), then the guitarist would have to be constantly looking at his fretboard to assure that he was playing the right song. Emotions as well, are tied to the body. For example, when you are happy your face flashes up and you smile, meanwhile when you're angry, you can feel your chest tighten, your throat get dry and your temper flares. These points reflect embodied consciousness showing your body and conscious work as a team, not as two different entities. So, that makes the argument clear, according to Merleau- Ponty and what this essay seeks to prove, your body being alive and functional is vital, for your consciousness to be as well. Now, if our conscious is part of our body, and our body is going to die, why do we continue?

Albert Camus is often misquoted as saying. “Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?” That quote is greatly, what this essay seeks to answer, to be alive is something that is such absurd we are rather created by some God who does not care enough to let us know clearly beyond a doubt know that he is looking after us or we are the result of millions of year of evolution and are now here. Regardless of which one of the two we are greatly mistaken without any meaning on this earth. The Myth Of Sisyphus the patron saint of rebelling against death. Sisyphus is condemned to roll a boulder up a hill, over and over and over again. If you were tired of reading ‘over’ three times there, imagine the muscle strain of pushing a boulder up a hill. So how is Sisyphus a hero? Because Sisyphus is the master of his fate! “Sisyphus returning towards his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, combined under his memory eyes and soon sealed by his death.” (1) Before I continue the quote, I want to point out the importance in Camus writing his rock and not the rock. I typed out “the rock” at first and when I read his it completely caught my attention. Although both are three letter words, they are night and day when it comes to Sisyphus’s fate. His means that Sisyphus is the master of his fate, his rock is his responsibility. Contrary to the rock just being a proper noun. It would be the rock that the Gods put on him as a punishment to push the rock up the hill forever.  Instead since it is Sisyphus’ rock, a meaningless task now has meaning as it is his duty to push his rock up his hill “I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the high fidelity that negates the Gods and raises rocks . He too concluded that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each Atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle toward height is enough to fill a man's heart, one must imagine Sisyphus happy. (2) Like Sisyphus we must continue to push our rock and experience everyday to the fullest. Even though we know our rock is going to fall, and through birth we are ultimately condemned to death, much like Sysphus is condemned to his rock, we must enjoy our rebellion against death.

Camus argues we should rebel against death. Although we should, it is undeniable that death has some negatives that humans can not escape. Simone de Beauvoir has written about the ugliness of death as it is the robber of life “I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. (2) I happen to disagree with her, I do not see death as the robber of life although it could be argued that this is because I am young in age and hopefully far from death as well. Hence I see death as the giver of life. I have many things I wish to achieve but that is why my death gives us life. If as humans we were immortal, we would achieve not half the things that humanity has achieved so far through our mortality, why? Because we would always have time, and without a death clock keepings us working, we would feel we would have no need to achieve anything. Death for me makes every experience that much more beautiful, every outing I have with a loved one, could be the last one, that may sound like a nihilistic thing to say, but it is not, instead it is an idealist thing to say. Because it makes it that much more beautiful and special.

So through this comes two options to destroy ourselves or as Camus would argue, to rebel against death. I am for the latter, to rebel against death is to be stubborn, to understand as long as you have embodied consciousness you have the ability to experience, a beautiful sunset, getting your heart broken, winning a huge prize, losing in the last minute of an important football game, deciding that you want to be better or deciding that maybe you need to rest a bit. All of these feeling are uniquely human, of course an animal can feel these emotions but only a human can decide to experience them, because of this I believe that death is one of the best things that humanity has been provided with, because without it we would be able to feel the world around us but we would never truly be able to experience it. Although the question to Mac Millers question might be no, this should be all the meaning we need from life to put every ounce of energy into every one of our days. We must rebel by loving harder, crying harder and ultimately living.

References and Footnotes

1.) Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York: Vintage International : Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2018)

2.)Simone de Beauvoir and Patrick O’Brian, All Said and Done (London: André Deutsch and Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974).