on life

this piece was originally published on tilde town zine #8.

what is life, really? this is a question a lot of people have been asking for a long, long time.

for as long as humans have existed, there has been an urge to encapsulate, under a neat definition, what it means to be: to make up a hierarchy under which they are on top, and to differentiate and distance humanity from the rest of the world. this has led to a very skewed, though understandable, general consensus of what it means to be alive or to be sentient, entirely hinged on the human experience of life as the one to compare against.

as a result of human-centric approaches to the definition of life in history, there exists a language problem in trying to define what life is, in simple words, without causing confusion. “life” is both a biological term and a philosophical one, and while they are in essence very different, there simply are no other words to distinguish them further. it must be understood that any attempt to redefine the definition of life is inherently hindered by having to fit into existing paradigms of thought.

to a degree, this doesn’t matter. any definition of life will have edge-cases, especially in the false negatives. one cannot rigorously define life in a way that restricts what qualifies as it, because life is fantastic and whimsical, and does not much care for what humans do or do not want it to be. this is, therefore, not the definition of life, but a definition of life: one that wishes to explore the innate curiosity of sentient beings, our inherent sympathy for the world around us, and the beauty of culture and folklore.

life is a property bestowed by the mirror of perception. to be alive is to be considered alive, whether that is by yourself or by others. this makes it a social construct, but not necessarily between two sentient beings: the only requirement is for one participant to be capable of declaring the other alive.

a haunted house is believed to be home to ghosts, and those ghosts are kept alive so long as the story is kept alive; passively engaging in communication by way of wind gusts, creaks in floorboards, shutting doors, and the like. as such, reinforcement of the myth is equivalent to life support: a ghost cannot die, but it can stop living, when it is forgotten for the last time.

an understandable reaction to the above definition would be to shrug it off as childish or immature, not weathered enough by the mundanity of human life — but that is exactly the point. children do not know the customs of human society as well as adults do. they may not have been taught philosophy, but they are still curious, and that gives them the unique ability to think outside the box, outside the set of axioms that the rest of us have been conditioned to presuppose. a childlike view of the world is a more pure one.

gods are alive, and we are keeping them alive by thinking about them. whether they are truly omnipotent or not, gods are a figure that many believe in, pray to, think about, and discuss, and by doing all of those things, they keep these gods alive in the collective mind. under this assumption, gods are supremely powerful: they cannot die, as long as they’re thought about. that being said, as kingdoms rise and fall, and history marches on, even gods can be forgotten.

here it is important to note a detail about anthropomorphism. while the urge to assign a personality and thoughts to a pet rock is understandable, including it as a requirement for life would be too restrictive. living things do not have to resemble humanity, sentience, thought, emotion, or even biology; the only requirement is to be perceived as alive. understand that the need to anthropomorphize is a societal construct, and that its use is to make something more close to human, and, in classical thinking, more valid.

folklore, for example, is also alive. it was brought into life by people telling stories, and will die if people stop caring about it and sharing those stories. in a sense, folklore is the non-anthropomorphic version of ghosts: it does not communicate, nor does it resemble humanity, but it still depends on the cognizance of sentient beings to continue to exist. an astute reader will understand that the same applies to any kind of story, and to many other disciplines as well: languages, history, art — everything that can be forgotten but hasn’t been.

breathing life into inanimate objects isn’t merely a natural extension of our curiosity and creativity as sentient beings, but the defining act that gives something life and character. humans and plants and mascots and folklore and god and nature and art — and you, dear reader — are all equally as alive, and it is our responsibility to care for the lives of all of them.