The Mirrors of Death

We are creatures driven to analyze things through meaning, through which we can come to term with our place within this world and understand the reality of nature- and human nature.

As we grow we learn new things through rewards and punishments, we understand that there's limits to our actions, and one day if we are "bad" enough or unlucky enough, we might be severely punished. Nothing reminds us more of our vulnerabilities, defects, and dark potential than criminals, or what happened to criminals: capital punishment.

When we gaze upon their disembodied head, one that gulped breakfast earlier in the same dying day and thought of its parents only hours ago, we are horrified that we can also become an impotent mass of degenerating flesh only to serve as a fetish of justice and food for carrion. All our precious personalities, plans, memories, and even our appearances could be forever spoiled by the constraints of society because we went too far beyond an agreed upon line.

I think the people who saw these heads, these proofs of justice feared them more than the Devil. Because the Devil will always be there, he won't be killed or banished by God until some climactic millennial day so far away that the watcher wouldn't be alive anyway. But these heads, these criminals, are like a mirror to us. We know them, we could be them, and we could end up like them. They rot in plain sight, worse yet, they are in plain sight because SOMEBODY wanted it to be here. 

I think Nietzsche  said it best:

"The resolve to find the world evil and ugly, has made the world evil and ugly." 

So we are presented with a grotesque, offensive sight, one positioned there by powerful individuals to make us think like how they wish us to think, so insanely powerful that we will probably never get out of our mind or the deepest recess of our souls. Even though it is terrible to behold we still have a choice on how we can confront it. We all do. Like a backache that will never go away, like a birth defect or a terminal disease, we cannot completely overthrow them, they will continue to be powerful and painful like a brand. But we can accept it, we can be content in the presence of it, and...learn from it.

If any of you are watchers of “Game of Thrones” in season 1 Sansa Stark had a powerful scene when Joffery made her confront the severed head of her beloved father, after much struggle and begging finally she looked up with despairing eyes. 

She regarded it with broken empty eyes, but there was something else that was lost along with her innocence: 

Fear. She will never be as afraid of severed heads anymore.

Having had a similar experience as a child and lived through nearly half of a decade of nightmares about beheadings, pain and punishment, I can say I resolved my fear of death in a similar manner, by looking at these shocking images of decapitation.

I've accepted it wholly, and found out surprisingly much about life and the preciousness of living~ I learned that not only is life sacred but everyone one only had one go at THIS EXACT EXPERIENCE, nothing can be truly replaced, no one is better not being part of it, nothing is more empowering than the present moment, and nothing is as beautiful as a life lived with respect to ourselves, lived fully second by second. I learned that however happy or tragic a life is it is firmly ours by individual's right and no one had the right to completely destroy another's potential to learn and change. (In total defiance to the people who put the head to the public view, who wished nothing but to quell our natural choices and shame the deceased beyond their public humiliation. I resolved it's best to live life my own way despite whatever fear.)

I learned these lifelong virtues by becoming unafraid of the entropy of all beauty, and the grace of a soul not broken upon the scaffold. I extrapolated that because all beauty decay that they are truly majestic and must be appreciated and protected, that human beings can still “express” even on the verge of death and public defeat could still go on in images and stories. I learned so much from the mirror of death.

I look with unsurprised eyes, I firmly believe that we all from time to time need to gaze at the images of death.