by David Halperin

1.

Why, folklorist Thomas Bullard has asked, are UFOs in this country “at once so popular and so despised?”  It’s a good question; the hubbub over Annie Jacobsen’s best-selling Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base is the latest demonstration of how good it is.  “Oh, I’ve got to read that book,” a waitress said when she saw me with Area 51, and from our conversation it became clear that it was the Area 51 of UFO legend, not the real Area 51 of Cold-War dread (to which most of Jacobsen’s book is devoted) that had drawn her interest.  UFOs, a.k.a. “flying saucers,” have zoomed around our cultural skies for more than sixty years.  They’ve survived innumerable debunkings, their fascination undimmed.  Evidently they’re saying something, communicating something, that needs to be heard.  What?

This is the real “UFO mystery.”  It’s a cultural, a psychological, even a religious mystery, the sort of thing a religious studies professor like myself might well take an interest in.  I can’t claim personal immunity from the subject.  Back in the 1960s I myself was a teenage “UFOlogist.”  I believed fervently in UFOs, though not necessarily (at least at first) that they came from outer space.  I thought solving their mystery to be the greatest and most important challenge facing the human race.

Jonathan Franzen takes to the New York Times op-ed page to proclaim that — oh yes, indeedy — technology is killing love.  Blackberries aren’t birds, birds are part of the environment, the environment is love, and love means facing death directly, or something like that:

To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.

Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.

A new report at the International Journal of Social Economics has found that the decline in number of the faithful in developed countries can be attributed to longer lifespans; we don’t worry about death so much any more. (Thanks to CBS for the report summary.)

Tom Junod, in the latest issue of Esquire writes (link below):

We are not going to live forever. We are not going to have our life spans scientifically amplified to biblical lengths. We will not be able to take pills that will give us the musculature of superheroes or allow us to gorge ourselves while enjoying the health benefits of starvation. We will reach our limits, and, with some hard-won variation, those limits will be — they will feel like — the same limits we humans have always had. We will remain human where it counts, in our helpless and inspiring relation to our own mortality.

Does this sound obvious? It shouldn’t. Indeed, what I should have said from the start is that I believe that we are all going to die, in that science increasingly believes otherwise — and science increasingly has become a matter of belief. Its logic, once pointed at the eradication of disease and infection, is now inexorably pointed at aging and death, which is to say the ultimate questions that were once left to religion. Over the past six years, I’ve written several science stories for Esquire’s annual Best and Brightest issue, and most of them were about scientists who began contending with a particular disease but wound up contending with aging and death as disease — as something that can be cured.

(h/t Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic)

The New York Times reports that Lebanon’s Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a Shiite Islam holy figure with a world following, has died.  He’s been called Hezbollah’s mentor.  He was 75.

For more on the Grand Ayatollah read here, here and here or read his facebook page here.

“The Digital Death Day attendees were not all entrepreneurs working out their promising business plans. (And some of those business models make good sense. LegacyLocker, DataInherit, AssetLock, and Deathswitch are all new companies offering sensible and useful services, on the order of providing Web locations for safe password storage, or promising to notify interested parties at the time of your death.) There were funeral directors present – digital technology is playing more and more of a role in bereavement, with Facebook walls functioning as memorials and slide shows and other media-borne mementos important. The city of Hong Kong, thedigitalbeyond recently reported, has turned to online memorials to help deal with a shortage of burial plots.” — Robert Roper in “Life After Death, In Digital Form” at Obit Magazine

There wasn’t a dearth of death in Benares; as one walked or drove on its streets, small groups of men bearing the dead on biers kept passing by with little fanfare about the nature of their procession. I saw many more dead bodies in three days in Benares than I had seen in the preceding thirty years. Unlike other Indian cities, this one does not go out of its way to separate and shield the living and the dead from one another. The two categories of bodies form a continuum; life and death remain in conversation with one another. — from “City of Life, City of Death” by Ananya Vajpeyi at Killing the Buddha. Read the entire post here.

by Paul Creeden:
Dr. Jack Kevorkian is the subject of You Don’t Know Jack, an HBO film, which premiered on the cable network in April. Al Pacino plays “Dr. Death,” as Kevorkian was dubbed in 1956 after he performed, in his role as a pathologist, a photographic survey of the pupils of dying patients. Kevorkian has a documented fascination with death and with helping people accept their deaths as an opportunity for medical advancement and he was reportedly fired from a pathology job in 1958 for suggesting that prison inmates be encouraged to volunteer their organs for medical experimentation.

by S. Brent Plate:

“This is the end, my only friend the end . . . I’ll never look into your eyes again”

-Jim Morrison/ The Doors.

Along with 10-20 million others, I just left the island for good, saying goodbye to my friends who have occupied me for the past few years: the scientists and skeptics, the faithful and flaky, those motivated by riches, those by redemption, those by reincarnation. “I had not thought death had undone so many,” said T.S. Eliot in “The Wasteland.” But what does death undo and redo?

There’ll be plenty in the news about the fallout, the end, but here is one thing that won’t be much mentioned in the mainstream press: Everyone needs help. Everyone needs someone else. Everyone dies. Even the heroes are not told “you are one of a kind,” but rather, “Now you’re like me.” To be special means you take your place in line among others: adoptive mothers, friends, and comrades. You are one of many, which doesn’t diminish their responsibilities.

When my tender soul was saved dozens of years ago at Circle K camp in the rolling river hills of summertime Pennsylvania, it wasn’t from fear of death or need for unconditional love but for humble credit of another’s craft: the simple lines of a green and pliant pin oak leaf told me I best acknowledge the superior skills of God. The long, rambling, poetic essay Edward Hoagland writes for the May issue of Harper’s magazine isn’t so much nostalgic for an unspoiled natural world — Hoagland’s old; he’s written 20 books, contributed to Harper’s since the 70s and achieved that many years — as prophetic: God’s Green Earth is receding; that means something bad for not only human existence but for human spirit. Of course Hoagland’s thankfully too smart to assess spirits; he’s refreshingly more interested in accounting. In the midst of auditing natural beauty and wonder — from Route 66 to African wildlife reserves, from aphids to elephants — he gives us a rundown of what nature’s lost in the past handful of decades, his decades. And he webs those natural losses to a larger consideration, particularly on the minds of those wrinkled, accustomed to grief, and weak in the knee: What does this loss of nature mean?