Slip the World a Mickey17
Week 28: Experimenting with Absurdism
Exploring how to live in the absurd requires pushing past our reticence towards thoughts of death, because the universal feature of life is that all that live will die. Things die all the time, and the longer we live, the more we’re exposed to rot. The important questions are
whether we can and should accept death
In what ways can we live better with this acceptance
how to do it
This time last year, I realized not only can we accept death, but we must, and more importantly we have to figure out how to make it somewhat palatable to do so. I also realized that death is not something most people are willing to discuss, so I’ve found ways to ease the topic into polite conversation. I even slipped myself a Mickey17 a few nights ago. Mickey17 a sci-fi flick about an “expendable” space explorer (Mickey/Robert Pattinson) who has to die 17 times to learn how to live. I related to his character in that I feel metaphorically I’ve lived multiple lives and experienced a few kinds of death, but for some reason, this experience killed me a little more - yet again - but in a fun way.
At first, the idea gave me indigestion. In the trailer, Pattinson’s voice was thin and watery as opposed to the sexy syrup that I expected to slide behind the once diamond-bright skin of a killer. The trailer felt medicinal, but Ken reminded me that Pattinson has not really ever done a bad movie - so it might be a decent tonic, and the mention of it on a TikTok LIVE reading generated interest from one of my favorite bartenders, so that was enough persuasion for me to imbibe.
What I drank down was in fact a familiar and helpful elixir. In the film, Mickey, like you dear reader, is part of an absurd experiment where he, like you, is asked to die a little with each endeavor. He, also like you, has the opportunity to be reborn with each task and shit is so bad for Mickey it doesn’t take much convincing. He seems to stumble into his own existential need for rebirth, but as Fredrick Perls puts it “to suffer one’s death and to be reborn is not easy” and this is because as Ernest Becker says “so much of one has to die”. It’s a daily occurence for Mickey and us, but…I hope you need (and allow) some persuasion.
So, let’s get an experiment going:
Watch Mickey17, and come back to comment if you agree that we could all learn from death, or little deaths, like watching the film (about death).
Bonus points: Read Michel de Montaigne’s essay To Philosophize is to Learn to Die
Extra extra bonus: Read Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death (as seen on my TikTok LIVE)
Super extra conquerer of life and death bonus: Join me for a 2-part MidYear Rabbitholes workshop. We’ll look at what we’ve done this month and the past 5. The standard Worksheet is free, but paid subscribers get the live workshop and the new half-year worksheet (Scroll to the bottom for links).
“For who would give ear to him that should propose affliction and misery for his end?”
- Michel de Montaigne, To Study Philosophy is To Learn To Die
What do I mean by “die a little”?
Cicero (and Michel de Montaigne) claimed that “to study philosophy is nothing but to prepare one's self to die”. Contemplation can “withdraw from us our soul, and employ it separately from the body, which is a kind of apprenticeship and a resemblance of death”. When I ask you to read/think/study/experiment with me, I’m asking you consume a little poison with me because the person you were when you started the task should be gone in a small way by the end.
Reading is a difficult ask these days which is why I read aloud for my paid subs
and also why I make videos. Our brains may well be rotting from ASMR but maybe there are some forms of “brain rot” that might be beneficial, like a 60-somethings TikTokOpera that tickles us a little and serves as a vessel for cultural analysis. Not many people stick around for my LIVE readings of the primary texts on TikTok (unless there’s TOTI), so we have to slip ‘em the mickey other ways. People are willing to slip into a little death as long as it isn’t death by Aporia - it seems few masochists are willing to breach that vacuum sealed place where shit feels too uncomfortable to breathe. So, I’m just saying that we should find ways to induce a little ap-or-oxia…
We have boundless opportunity to practice dying these days and even microdose by creating and consuming shortform content that challenges us. When we focus on a task, a relationship, an idea, a project, we practice being inside our own mind and thus beyond the earthly plane. These little deaths can be dangerous, and you can overdose and slide closer and closer to that final entropic state, but if you introduce them with the following dispositions, I think you’ll be better for it:
Act in alignment with your personal principles
Explore as many sides of a position as possible
Give grace even when you've received none
Willingly sacrifice what could serve others better
Shut the fuck up and think more
Be brave and bold (mostly)
Stop expecting to be spoon-fed and start satiating yourself
La petit mort
Maybe I sound a little harsh, but these little deaths aren’t all bad. Welcoming death, big or small, can be warranted - all the homies who suffer greatly know what I mean. Death is a final ceasing of problems, and the french idea of la petit mort is the temporary cessation of problems (and conciousness) that follows coitus. It’s a type of reprieve, a little treat, for when life is life-ing too hard. Sex is such an enjoyable little death it doesn’t need a chaser.
But sex isn’t all pleasure, nor is anything that is actually pleasant. This idea of mixing pleasure and pain is ancient and found in Mickey17 where our protagonist finds small bits of pleasure in the pain that comes with dying for his friends and performing dangerous duties so others don’t have to. Living, too, comes with ups and downs as when he gains notoriety on the ship which leads to small pleasures like increased rations, relationships, and sex all while still being a grunt contractually obligated to persist in his work of living/dying. Mickey’s deaths add a bit of seasoning to his otherwise bland life, like a tajin rim on a margarita.
“Chiron refused to be immortal, when he was acquainted with the conditions under which he was to enjoy it, by the god of time… his father Saturn. Do but seriously consider how much more insupportable and painful an immortal life would be.. If you had not death, you would eternally curse me for having deprived you of it. I have mixed a little bitterness with it… that seeing how convenient it is, you might not too greedily and indiscreetly seek and embrace it… I have tempered the one and the other betwixt pleasure and pain.” (Montaigne)
Pleasure and pain are much more mixed than we’ve been led to believe. Pain alerts us as to the border between life and death. Too much signals that we’re near the edge, but it seems we’re all living nearer the edge than we think. When Mickey17 falls into an ice cave (the opening, and most critical, scene of the film) he expects to die, but when he wakes up, he’s not dead, and this is where the problem begins. Unbeknownst to him, a new Mickey18 is printed, and to have two Mickeys violates human rights laws, so both of them must die, permanently. It’s only in realizing that he will be erased that he starts to see the true beauty of his situation. He and Mickey18 decide to split the pleasure and pain. Each will share their girlfriend and the work of dying and two copies of Mickey will persist in secret. Even in sex, Mickey experiences pleasure and pain when his girlfriend asks for a threesome with Mickey18. Again nothing new here; Dan Savage has been edging the limits of pain and pleasure for two decades with his HUMan Pornography (HUMP!) Film Festival. HUMP! always delivers a variety of home-grown short films exploring facets of BDSM, and serving as a litmus test for what is permissible - nay preferred - at the leading edge of sexuality, and each year, they hand out ballots at live viewings across the country asking viewers to rate the best in show, humor, kink, etc. Highly recommend... and ironically the tour is in Nashville tonight, btw.
The problem is we have to be leery of false deaths/consciousness where culture makes too impersonal an effort to jar us and lands us in repressive desublimation - a slow march toward the ultimate exploitation and demise of our species. nbd.
I think Mickey17 and HUMP! are just “grotesque” enough, to use the verbiage of one reviewer on RogerEbert.com (which btw is a piss poor reanimation of its namesake - Ebert might have enjoyed the film despite its grotesqueness). However, what reviewer Christy Lemire does not seem to grasp is the meaning of “grotesque” as Montaigne was one of the first to use the word in his essay on Friendship:
“…et le vuide tout au tour, il le remplit de crotesques : qui sont peintures fantasques, n'ayans grace qu'en la varieté et estrangeté. Que sont-ce icy aussi à la verité que crotesques et corps monstrueux, rappiecez de divers membres, sans certaine figure, n'ayants ordre, suite, ny proportion que fortuite ?”
and the void all around, he fills it with crotesques (grotesques): which are fantastic paintings, having grace only in variety and strangeness. And in truth, what are these things I scribble here but crotesque and monstrous bodies, brought together from various members, without a certain figure, having order, sequence, or fortiutous proportion?Montaigne didn’t take himself so seriously as to believe that his work wasn’t just as “grotesque” as Lemire’s or the movie itself. He just appreciated the ‘crotesques’ for what they were - a vehicle for learning - for little deaths. Lemire saw Mickey17 as “uneven” and a “disappointment”, hoping for a sharper one-dimensional Snowpiercer of a tale, no doubt. But this is exactly what Mickey17 meant to avoid.
A story about 17 lives is naturally going to be rife with pluralism and dialectic - a perfect little death for the viewer (and creator/analyst). Mickey dies in myriad ways not not from a Parasite, but a virus once or twice, while attempting to explore ways for humans to live in a new world, and if we hope to survive our ever-changing world, we’ll have to die too (i.e., continuously study the human condition), not just under the singular lens of cApiTaLiSm = bAd or Ruffalo’s (Hieronymous Marshall, the governer of the space colony) lens in Mickey17 where people = expendable for power and “success”. We need multiple perspectives, and those can only be gained from a million little deaths where we all learn our part in it.
Even then the goal isn’t to fully escape the fear of death, but ironically by embracing it we won’t need to escape it. In tempering ourselves to death (la petit mort et plus encore) in as many ways as possible and continuously conducting the post-mortem, we conquer it.
Why we should learn how to die
By slipping in a little death tincture here and there I hope to prepare you, dear reader, to swallow the bigger pill that death is inevitable and we’re still (absurdly) going to keep trying to escape it. Ernest Becker says that to cope with death we all aim to become heroes in our own lives. Even if it’s impossible to be the ultimate hero, we still strive to be the best we can, but we accept the absurdity of our task. Becker believes that it is impossible to live without the looming repression of death, but I think it’s not so serious. Marcuse believed that some forms of repression can be liberating, and I’ll take it a step further: being brave, honest, and curious in the face of the unknown is a great way to practice for (and possibly even prolong) our eventual human ends. Through reading, thinking, critique, and ideation (little deaths), we might figure something out.
“To live fully is to live with an awareness of the rumble of terror that underlies everything.” Ernest Becker
Like Mickey17, we can’t escape the unknown that comes after death, but our consolation prize for taking the mickey is the joy that comes with learning how to die good deaths, big and small, and the process of figuring out how to be a hero and then being that. We get to live, and in living, the “most one can achieve is a certain relaxedness, an openness to experience that makes him less of a driven burden on other”.
Links
My Full Reading List if you’re interested
A piece I wrote on Chappelle Roan (similar vibe)