This short happy piece was inspired by reading Sir Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia: Urn Burial. We’ll be discussing this unique piece of writing on 24.08.2023. You can access all reading materials and RSVP here.
Purgatory: unfriend the dead
I don’t know exactly when the thanatotic process began, but one day I realised that my Facebook timeline resembled a graveyard. Not a quiet graveyard, but a graveyard akin to that in Oliverio Girondo’s prose-poem “11”, from his Espantapájaros — a graveyard in which the dead talk:
“Scarcely has the bit of music that spoils our final moments begun to fade and we close our eyes to sleep for all eternity than the arguments and family scenes begin.”1
I know some people find solace in relatives or friends visiting them from the Beyond when the algorithm decides to feature them on their feed (after someone comments on an old post, for example); but I find it creepy — being unable to escape social media even in death isn’t something that makes me feel warm at heart. Because this is Social Media Purgatory: a place where you’ll be stuck while weirdos keep interacting with you, even if you are too dead to reply. An eternal loop from where there is no exit, like with the ghostly loop produced by Morel’s machine in the novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares2.
I might come across as coldhearted but when I learn someone has died on any social media platform I press the unfollow / unfriend button. It’s the healthy thing to do, to set them free, to set oneself free from their deaths, to keep Thanatos at an arm’s length for a bit longer. Don’t resent me in the Underworld if you go before me. And please don’t send me messages through any other medium. I promise the same.
The art of the “mebituary”
The dead don’t read obituaries. So it should surprise no one that when we write a message to the dead on social media we are actually writing a message about ourselves, to ourselves. And yet, it never ceases to amuse me when I read people’s online reactions to other people’s deaths, especially when it comes to the death of celebrities. Social media inspires the worst in us and unavoidably obituaries turn into a chance to display some life-affirming narcissism. Let’s call these “mebituaries”.
Authors Online are the best/worst at this genre. Their mebituaries sometimes verge on the ridiculous, and can sound something like this:
“RIP Celebrity X. Met them at a book event once and they mentioned they really liked my first novel. [sad emoji]“
Or
“RIP Celebrity X. The character of the street sweeper in my third autofictional memoir in verse, The Human Condition, was inspired by you. You meant so much to so many people. By which I mean me.
Desperate to shift books, no opportunity is eschewed by this attention-thirsty animal. Regrettably, the dead are terrible at selling books too. At the time of writing, The Human Condition, by Author (Very) Online has still sold only seven copies according to Book Scan3. That said, there are no figures for books sold on the Other Side.
The right to be forgotten
In Los cuerpos del verano4, Martín Felipe Castagnet, fantasises about a not too distant future in which eternal life has been achieved. But this isn’t your average eternal life. In this eternal life those who die end up floating in the Cloud, waiting to be burned into a new body. This is an eternal life of data, in which those in the meatspace interact with those other souls waiting to make their return — much like we interact with the dead on Facebook, only that the ones in Castagnet’s novella actually answer back.
There’s a lot more to Castagnet’s book5. But right now I just want to think specifically about the character of Teo. Teo is part of a very small minority in Los cuerpos del verano: those who refuse eternal life by refusing being sent to float in the Cloud, choosing in that way a human death. I find a parallel between Teo and those who died before the internet — the only ones who will truly disappear, the only ones who are truly dead. I have a few of these relatives; I also have a few friends who died young and left no digital traces behind them. When I think of them my mind is at rest — with no digital monuments it’s easier to let them go. Missing them when they are truly dead, thanking the opportunity of having met them, somehow feels more real, less mediated.
The Ancient Greeks dreaded the idea of being forgotten, erecting tumuli in a futile attempt to preserve the memory of the dead. Meanwhile, we are at the antipodes now: we live at times in which everything is captured for posterity (for what appears eternity) and we no longer have a right to be forgotten if we chose to live lives not worth remembering. The algorithm refutes the notion of death. The algorithm transcends everything and everyone. The algorithm is total.
Final words
I routinely contemplate how banal most people’s final words online are. It’s tragic that someone’s final words might be a comment on Love Island or a tweet to Ocado to complain about a delayed delivery.
When it comes to writers — since we live for words, since we trade in them — this is a double tragedy. Argentine writer Carlos Busqued died suddenly of a heart attack, on March 29, 2021, at the age of fifty. His final online words express the hope that the Ever Given sinks in the Suez Canal; his previous tweets regret there were no covid deaths in London that same day. This toxicity was part of his online persona, and if you didn’t know Busqued was one of the most promising writers of his generation you’d think he was a moron like many social media-powered morons.
That Busqued left us only two books and two-hundred-fifty-thousand tweets — the vast majority of them thoughtless — is also tragic in itself. I can’t avoid seeing the former as a consequence of the latter.
Translated by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert, as part of Scarecrow and Other Anomalies.
Spoiler ahead: In Adolfo Bioy Casares’ La invención de Morel (1940), Morel invents a machine that captures the images of people as they go through their life, and can reproduce them forever as if they were ghostly holograms. The price to pay is death due to exposition to radiation. This doesn’t stop Morel (nor the main character) from capturing himself and his beloved one. La invención… might have been conceived as a warning against the madness of both love and science but these days it is better read as a warning against the stupidity of unhinged narcissism and social media. For is there a better metaphor for the common-phenomenon of “death by selfie”?
I wish I was making this figure up.
Available in English as Summer Bodies, in a translation by Frances Riddle.
I love the idea of some fool's last words being a stupid comment about Love Island. To be honest, anyone commenting o Love Island deserves no more than those being their last words anyway. I often think the RIPs are mostly about boasting that you were into the celebrity's music or whatever, to show off how cool you are. I've said it before, but I couldn't care less when someone I never knew dies. You might say they won't make any more music but that's usually a good thing. Better to check out while the going's good.
I got a friend who's like Death himself. Everyone he knows dies. Anyone hangs out with him a while, dies soon after. I'm the only one to survive. Immune. I'm fuckin invincible anyway. Funnily, everyone who spent time with me went mad. Between the two of us, we have a long list of victims. Mad and dead. Like a pair of terrible angels.
your example of the Argentine writer, actually says something else - that the writer was what Musil described as higher ignorance. Perhaps intelligent and with expertise in their field but incredibly stupid elsewhere. A writer who can produce sentences who is stupid about the pandemic, race, sex and gender.