Sometimes your author can think of nothing worth living for, and concludes that suicide is the solution to the riddle of human existence.
More often than not, though, I can think of nothing worth dying for. At one time, I'd have said Bluefish - when our love was at its apex, before the decline, before the hospital that broke us. (Indeed, the mental store of romantic images demands that this is the case. What greater act of devotion is there than for my expiring soul to evaporate against the tongue of the beloved, having just stopped a knife?)
At other times, I pick out the white flashes of Danny's fur against the pitch dark, and I imagine that I'd sacrifice myself to save him. Then I think about it a bit harder. For an unappreciative cat? Really?
As with moments of serene happiness, these episodes must necessarily be rare. They are the times when I shed my own skin, like a dirty old snake, and appreciate the universe with the purity of a baby.
Inevitably, I express the small store of things worth dying for in the context of my own experience: this woman, this cat. It is possible to point at them with the finger, like a child - behold the things this individual holds are more important than his own continued existence.
It is different with groups of people, with communities. Whereas I place living, breathing beauty
ahead of everything else, groups of people are prepared to sacrifice themselves for ideas. How many people have died in the name of 'England,' without ever stopping to think that it doesn't actually exist? Like the ever-evasive constituents of the atom, the meaning and significance of the word slips away from us as soon as we begin to think about it hard enough.
If not a war, then a political struggle - fighting in the name of the blue flag, or the red one; the one that will liberate us from our present bastard state through the mechanism of change (which is itself never really defined, either.)
England; The Party; Jesus Christ Almighty; the secret of the Rosicrucians; a collective hypnosis propagates throughout when groups of people put the interests of an idea above their own selfish wishes. The momentary certainty that Danny is worth turning it in for is re-inforced by the madness and pressure of the crowd, but I'd never die for that. Oh, for the idea of Cat, of Beauty, of Numbers, of Poetry, though!
Only that which we cannot grasp is ever enough to obsess us enough to do the deed. Die for a cat, and you are a fool. Die for Bluefish, and you are a (flawed) hero. Submit yourself in the name of politics or truth or the Platonic Forms, though, and truly one becomes immortal.
