Transforming edges

Our culture leads us blinkered through a cornucopia of edges each holding rich potential. Edges of madness that hold terrifying chaos and fruitful realities: edges of ecstasy and grief; sadness and depression; beauty and pain. There is nowhere in this world without its edge. 

But what of the edge of the world itself as the Flammarion engraving above suggests? Not the planet but the cultural reality we humans inhabit. This is the world we have to a large extent constructed and that through modernity has increasingly separated itself from any external world. It’s embarrassing that this external lump of inert matter seems to have a life of its own that breaks into our safe ‘narrative’ world with storms, floods, fires and tsunamis. 

Different cultures position human life and death in radically different ways. Our recent European technological culture has sought to dominate nature and put death into the shadow. This privileged but lonely and isolated place situates external nature and death as edges of unknown terror. Technocratic modernity may have triumphed in seemingly controlling all, but the cost is a slow loss of soul – that sense of deep interconnection and belonging.

Moderns strange relationship with death is to both be aware of it and attempt to escape from it as if it were not part of life. Raising the possible death of an seriously ill relative or friend can be regarded as morbid or even of hastening the death. Naming what is split off seems to risk making it real. This disavowal is not unlike that of our chaotic climate.

A consequence of divorcing life from death is that the inevitable and natural cycle of decay and destruction become a threat to life. Moderns teeter on the edge of a dangerous precipice, wondering if it is already too late to change our ways and save our species from extinction. As Clive Hamilton puts it in Requiem for a Species,

Climate disruption has the smell of death about it. It threatens to bring to the surface that which we work so hard to suppress.

I take death as a paradigm example of an edge that brings with it both deep anxiety and potential transformation. On the edge of a collective crisis and facing possible extinction may be the very place that is needed in order to focus our attention. Perhaps, it is through retrieving death from its split off exclusion, as I discuss later in the Orpheus myth, we may find ways back to life.