Dates with Death

I’m always on the lookout for songs, or art, or TV and movies that will help illustrate or enhance one’s understanding of Norman O. Brown’s Love’s Body , the bible of this blog. Last night we watched one of the best...right up my alley…The Brand New Testament, a Belgium/French production…so, yes, subtitles. But for the effort of reading them, you’ll be richly rewarded by, among other things, a half eaten fish singing La Mer to a dying transgender boy, an assassin who falls in love with one of his targets, and the still gorgeous Catherine Deneuve having sex with a gorilla. More to the point of this blog post, you’ll have your imagination stirred when God’s rebellious daughter Ea breaks into His computer and releases the dates of death to everyone on earth.

That gets to one of the central tenets of Love’s Body: Nobby’s belief that we realize paradise in the here and now…not in some imagined hereafter. Brown writes that acceptance of our mortality is the first, critical step to our achieving genuine happiness in our lifetime…and overcoming our biggest sense of stress: death.

To eat and to be eaten. The grain must be ground, the wine pressed; the bread must be broken. The true body is a body broken. [QuotingYeats] “Nothing can be sole or whole/That has not been rent.” To be is to be vulnerable. The defense mechanisms, the character-armour, is to protect from life. Frailty alone is human; a broken, a ground up (contrite) heart.

The Brand New Testament is full of contrite hearts…the assassin, the sex maniac, the drone…all liberated by Ea when she informs them not just of their mortality, but the actual day and time of their deaths. Her 8 apostles ultimately embrace their frailty, and in so doing are able to change the course of human existence. As the old Jackie DeShannon song put it, “And the world will be a better place.” That’s this world…not some imaginary wish-for world in the sky. The Brand New Testament does a lot of clever and amusing things. The thing it does the best, though, is comically expose what a pernicious farce heaven is. Where we're taught to see it as a paradisiacal reunion place with departed loved ones, it's really the ultimate put-off-today-until-tomorrow excuse. Heaven is for procrastinators  

The Brand New Testament helps create a myth about making heaven on earth. It's a brand new myth about not putting that important but difficult task off until we’re dead, when it's too late. That's a poignant message at a time when our planet is howling in pain at the hurt we've done to it. No matter what the holy men who are invested in a heaven tell us (like land speculators invested in Florida real estate), heaven is a distraction from the Biblical injunction that we take care of the earth...of our here and now.