When I was a little girl growing up in northern California in the 70s, there was one book that was sure to be found in every home – not The Joy of Cooking, not Tom Sawyer, not even the Holy Bible, but rather, Be Here Now, by Dr. Richard Alpert/Baba Ram Dass. Its blue mandala’ed cover and fibrous brown almost mulberry-paper-like pages served as an essential interior decoration item for all those homes in the redwoods, Victorian houses, spraypainted Ford vans and even teepees in which the people I knew lived – and perhaps was a reinforcement of a kind of book fetishism I had been nourishing in myself since very early childhood. I remember thinking that the book was sort of sappy, but that I liked it as an object – as I liked so many of my mother’s books like Laurel’s Kitchen and a book that had line drawings of how to make yoga pants from bedsheets and a book about natural childbirth that described people’s experiences giving birth at home in slimy detail.
It occurs to me that, given the right marketing push, the latest book by Madeline Gins and Arakawa, Making Dying Illegal, could be the new Be Here Now for the post-modern, giddily cerebral set. Reading it today at lunch, it occurred to me that a passage I was reading seemed like a direct translation from the Hippie, and I very much liked what I saw:
To form a person and to form an identity are not the self-same process. All supposed identities are half-told stories, dogmatic and highly unreliable patchwork narratives. It is incredibly important that what each organism that persons claims as its identity be nothing more than this: organism that persons. To try to have an identity over and beyond this would too drastically limit one’s possibilities, inasmuch as it would promote separatism, isolating this ethnicity from that, this family from that. The thing of it is that streams of inter-subjective attachment generally do not flow wholeheartedly as the milk of human kindness between people who consider themselves to have strikingly different identities; thus, if there is going to be a community-wide effort to do away with dying, then, so that people won’t be insufficiently fructified, so that they will be sufficiently encouraged along and replenished by streams of bioscleavic emanations, separatism-causing identities must be let go of.
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Following Suttie, I will (a) have love be thought of as quickness of sympathetic response, readiness of understanding, alacrity to laugh in sympathy with – in sum, a many-streamed feeling-interest responsiveness; (b) know an infant’s longing for its mother to be the expression of innate-need-for-companionship and of what in free-living animals we call the self-preservation instinct. Frustrating this urgent need will switch about direction of flow. Say that love and hate form a continuum. Another way to think of a switching about of direction of flow that comes from the frustration of loving longing is as a peremptory shutting off of access to some scales of action. Love blossoms different scales of action. When access is cut off from different scales of action an organism that persons loses cognizance of its biotopological condition. All the many sides of things and events… Hate is the collapse of love.
Madeline Gins and Arakawa, Making Dying Illegal p. 123
Get this book! It will rearrange your world!
Otohime 