Thoughts of Awe: Critical Essays (Love, Loss & Symbolic Death)

Love, Loss & Symbolic Death: 

This episode in the Shots of Awe series opens with a quote from Ernest Becker:

 “If the love object is divine perfection, then one’s own self is elevated by joining one’s destiny to it. All our guilt, fear, and even our mortality itself can be purged in a perfect consummation with perfection itself.” 

Silva says he has only lost one family member to physical death, but has suffered symbolic deaths through ended relationships. He proceeds to speak of love as fulfillment and overflowing, consecration and consummation, and “aesthetic arrest”, which, per James Joyce, is a sensory state of captivity brought about by art which evokes neither loathing nor desire, only a beholding of the object. Regarding symbolic death through love lost, Silva asks “How could it exist that once we were us and now we are not? Where’d it go? Where’d it go?”

In The Denial of Death (1973) Ernest Becker presents the premise that all of our constructs (civilization, religion, technology, etc.) are merely defense mechanisms against the acceptance of our mortality, and that our individual characters are essentially formed around the process of denying that mortality. This denial is important to our daily functionality because the fact of our impending death can render us immobile. The end result of the coping mechanism or “terror management” is that we become two beings simultaneously; physical beings, aware and terrified of our impending death, and symbolic beings, seeking to imbue our brief lives with meaning and purpose in order to attain a vicarious immortality or “heroism”. Heroism in the “age of reason” requires science to give us better and more convincing illusions of immortality, but in the end, these are illusions and will fail, leading to psychoses and, perhaps more tragically, preventing genuine self-knowledge. Becker believed that much of the evil in the world was a consequence of this need to deny death, and it was his hope that the gradual realization of death (memento mori) could help bring about a better world. 

What is symbolic death? If heroism is symbolic immortality, then symbolic death is…mortality? If we are elevated in consummation, does it follow that we are we somehow degraded when the union dissolves? Anyone who has suffered from love lost might readily agree that it can sometimes be felt so intensely that only actual death is like to quell it. Sometimes people do actually die of broken hearts. But if we came here alone, and must face the end privately as well, what is it that was lost? Where did what go?

Is perfect consummation with divine perfection even possible? Not in this lifetime, which is probably why Becker says it can purge all guilt, fear and mortality. At the moment of death, when we at once realize mortality and cease to be mortal, maybe then we consummate with perfection. Many religious traditions agree with this view. But while earthbound, one of the best impulses love has to offer us is a desire to uplift the other and also ourselves, that we can be nearer our own ideal or nearer the sort of person our beloved thinks we are. A high-energy love particle enters an atom, raises its energy state and now its electron binds with a once-lonely wallflower atom in a covalent bond. (You can’t spell covalent without l-o-v-e.) It’s where the whole becomes greater than the sum of parts. Oftentimes the energy state goes back to ground, and a photon is emitted. Has something truly been lost, or has it only changed forms? Oh, wait- here we are, at death again.

For me, the paradox of perfection appears at the acceptance of imperfection in myself and my spouse. (OK, mostly myself.) If I can acknowledge and attempt to address my own shortcomings, I’ll be more likely to overlook my spouse’s, and since neither of us has any idea what constitutes perfection anyway, we can relax and enjoy life’s surprises instead of trying to mitigate them. That sounds perfect to me.