Life Anxiety, Part Two: First Page

Previously: Science of Man

Here's a taste of the chilling (or hilarious, depending on your palette) Introduction to Ernest Becker's Escape from Evil:

"Life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh."

Yep. That's from PAGE. ONE. A reduction of life to "a constant struggle to feed," to gnashing and excreting, to flesh and shit.

You just totally got Walking Dead. You're welcome.

Becker is very intentional in this perspective. He takes as a page one premise a vision of humanity that we've been fighting for eons. Though Freud and Darwin did a number on the collective psyche by knocking man down off his own pedestal, even today ardent creationists consider evolution disgusting.

We blaspheme to relate the grandeur that we are to mere animals. We do not descend from beasts, but from God.

We are sustained by this belief that we are God's children, made in His image, or that we are magic and have control over the forces of life and death. We must be blessed with the love of a beneficent divinity or guided by cosmic forces to some eternal bliss.

Sure. Maybe. But if we are like unto god, then it's "the god who shits."

What's on page one of a science of man? We have to deal with what the poet James Merrill named "God B": Biology.

Half of Merrill's poetry was dictation from his Ouija Board.

Confront the idea that you can only exist by consuming other life, until the gunk you are made of gets too clogged to continue.

Becker calls this our 'creatureliness.' Our self-serving stories are aimed at disconnecting us from it. At heart we dislike, even fear our creatureliness, even as we take pleasure in it. The body is our vehicle to satisfaction in the world, but it can suffer, become sick and broken, even perish.

Consider that you are wingless, flawed and fragile, and you will come up against one of the foundational motivations of human activity: death.

Next: Once.