And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad/ The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.
—-Tears for Fears, “Mad World”
Tonight, to celebrate Halloween, my friend Jamie and I plan on carving pumpkins, cooking dinner, and watching that cult-classic Donnie Darko. For those of you unfamiliar with the film, Donnie Darko— in addition to being a brilliant period piece set in Northern Virginia of the late 80s (the sequence set to Tear for Fears’ “Head over Heels” can’t be praised enough)— tells the story of an adolescent boy coming to grips with his own untimely death.
I mention the movie because I have been thinking alot about the relation between death, dying and fitness. My sense is that most popular publications on health and fitness steer clear of any discussion about illness and dying, as if death and disease constituted fitness’ other. The cover model’s lean, fit body, advertised as disease-free, sanitized, antiseptic seems haunted by another body– one unseen because unacceptable– one that is diseased, dirty, and fecund. My unease with this dualism between the fit body and the ill one probably stems from the accidents of my own life. At fifteen, I watched my brother-in-law, a fit man of 20, lay dying on the living room couch after his back cancer returned and metastasized. When I reached twenty myself, I came out into a gay community both decimated and galvanized by AIDS. (An interesting exercise: read Donnie Darko as a queer commentary on youth and AIDS). And as I now approach middle age, I find myself all the more familiar with the strange vicissitudes of chronic and life-threatening ailments, both in myself and in my family and friends.
So, “I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad” that popular discussions around fitness in America, while choke-full of information on how to live healthy, has very little to say about how to die healthy. After all, dying is one of fittest things a body can do. To pit one’s fitness routine against mortality seems a mere exercise in madness, desperately projecting one’s anxieties around potency, illness and death onto other bodies deemed “unhealthy” and “unfit.” What I love about Donnie Darko, besides its willingness to take serious the rage, vulnerability, and lucidity of queer youths in particular, and young adults in general, is its implicit message that there are healthy ways to die. (Another text to read alongside Donnie Darko in this regard is Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.)
So, in the spirit of Día de los Muertos, I invite readers this week to share their thoughts on how to bring death, dying and illness into more interesting, non-dualistic relations with health and fitness. What books, articles, films, music, video and websites have you found particularly helpful to think with? What delicious treats have you collected in your bag of tricks?
Happy Halloween Everyone!
Allen Durgin is the editor of Blog Further.
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October 31st, 2008 at 2:38 pm
It’s no Donnie Darko, but HAMLET would be it for me:
“If it be now, tis not to come, if it be not to come, it will be now, if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Let be.”
Yeeps. And this from a guy who, a short two acts before, was railing against the utter meaninglessness of it all in “To be or not to be.” Now it all has meaning to him, even the fall of a sparrow.
And then off he goes, into a duel to the death disguised as a sporting event (!), fully aware of all the corruption and greed and lust around him, and the likelihood that he’s looking death in the face. And he does it with grace and humor and joy–and athleticism! Good god, what a way to go.
I’ve always felt like Shakespeare is teaching us not only how to die, but how to live in that scene: committed to joy, to living with abandon, yet with eyes wide open that evil is all around us, and death waits for us all.
January 15th, 2010 at 2:16 am
James Cushman
August 13th, 2010 at 5:22 am
Hypotheken? Heel veel hypotheek informatie: verschillende hypotheekvormen, hypotheekrentes, nationale hypotheek garantie, hoe een hypotheek te vergelijken.
August 14th, 2010 at 1:46 pm
Lenen zonder BKR toetsing gaat vandaag heel gemakkelijk. Binnen een paar uur geld lenen zonder BKR toetsing doet u hier, lees snel verder
September 6th, 2010 at 4:55 am
Migraine is een ernstige vorm van hoofdpijn. Het treedt in aanvallen op en gaat vaak gepaard met visuele stoornissen en misselijkheid.
September 6th, 2010 at 11:41 am
Migraine is hoofdpijn die in aanvallen komt. De hoofdpijn komt plotseling op, soms midden in de nacht zodat u er wakker van wordt. De pijn zit meestal aan