Death twitches at my ear
“Live” he says
"I am coming”
I’ve never been in combat. The closest I’ve been to death has been at 120 miles per hour on my liter bike. That isn’t even really that fast or impressive if you know anything of motorcycle riding. People go faster and people die at slower speeds. I didn’t crash. The road was winding but I judged it well. The bike stuck to the road through the curves and whilst the adrenalin thundered through my veins it was strangely calm in my head. A measured moment as the world rips past. There have been scarier moments, overtaking an RV on a busier mountain road was certainly not my finest decision but it too went fine. There was no big crash, no awakening in the ER and yet after these moments as the speed falls away and you return to earth there is this edge left with you.
You walked up to a line and danced on it.
There go I but for the grace of God.
We are enveloped in a safety culture. Our lives in the West are not risky ones. Cars are safer than ever. Airplanes too, even despite the surge in diversity hiring. We aren’t burning young men in fighter jets on a weekly basis to improve our military capability. If anything much of our fear of the destruction coming from our elites is in fact that they are robbing us of the safety we have become accustomed to. More dangerous roads thanks to infinity low IQ migrants driving trucks. Our women risk sexual assault not because of our own bad men but because of the hordes of theirs. Dropped in our societies. Knife attacks and casual violence from the third world are now reappearing in our safe communities. For all the vitalist right bravado from the masculine crowd much of what we bleat about comes down to concerns at less safety.
Danger has become what we choose to approach. My own experiences on my bike are like that. There have been some other scary moments in my life where Death was watching. A solo hiking trip that took me across a dangerous path where fatigue and gravity could have spelled the end. A young man I know fell and died a few years ago in similar circumstances. He was young, full of life, but mist, moisture and the mountains claimed him leaving behind a many mourners. He, like me, was engaged in a recreational pursuit. Not all of us see Death in such places of course and often he greets us when we least expect it. This friend died descending a normal path after the actual climbing we think of as risky. Where we have control we dance with Death and almost welcome it, that is the memento mori most seek today. It is the loss of control in the complexity of a destructive society we fear. We don’t want to go down because Captain Shaniqu’a got a passing grade to meet a diversity quota, can you imagine the shame in the afterlife?
If you’ve ever watched footage of the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy motorcycle race you’ve seen men at the edge. We can intellectualize it all we want but it is reckless risk. Nothing compares in the civilian world. Not even combat sports. The very spirit of Marinetti and his futurist manifesto is encapsulated in the spectacle of the modern day gladiators racing around the mountain course. It is action at the edge. Man and machine fused together into something new. Riding a horse is a joyous feeling but until the combustion engine man did not have such sensations we have today. This is really a secret hidden revolution that few know because they live their lives asleep. In fact most people move at speeds cocooned in safety whilst listening to banal podcasts and continue to abdicate their own will to the algo that is really driving them. Bugmen. Pathetic. The motorcyclist is exposed to the elements. Wind, rain, sun. Most of all though he experiences speed. Perhaps only a jet fighter pilot comes closer to that kind of symbiosis you witness on the Isle of Man.
Facing Death is not what we moderns do. Death is removed and hidden away from us. It’s presence does not touch us as it touched our ancestors. One need only go back a few generations to see how widespread child deaths or deaths in birth were and how present Death was. It is not now. We are in part a Godless society because we have banished death to the far reaches of our minds and because we have exerted such control over it. That was in large part the ‘rona hysteria as well. Death could NOT be controlled, it faced us and most people hid from it. People hate to acknowledge just how willing the masses were in all that, there was no memento mori moment in there. It was just pure fear and running away. The essence of memento mori as a concept rings hollow in the modern world, it has lost gravitas. The religious might do it still but they like everyone face death less often today than the past. In that both the godless and the faithful of the West are weirdly united. Of course we all do face death, our loved ones die all around us. Even in our safe societies they are claimed by the reaper, it is not that we are immune from death nor that people don’t face tragedy it is that such tragedies are usually fewer and further between.
It is our own mortality that haunts us most. That we are so removed from. That is why so few of us really, truly, practice memento mori. We are of the living and remain so but we also do not challenge or take ourselves to the edge. Many readers will have faced death up close and personal, others may not be able to say that. Those of us who love live should seek out that bit more danger. Go up to that line. Be humbled by your life and grateful to the glory of the world. Pray to your God but do not be afraid to laugh in Death’s face. Conquer it in real terms not abstract ones. Always live, steal the moments you have in this world away from Death. He is always coming.