This column is about death and its things. I know that everywhere you look there is light, positive energy and values extolled in death insurance advertisements—they keep arriving in my spam folder—but perhaps we should get used to the idea that we are leaving to die My grandmother Rufi said: “We are not going to stay here to grow radish seeds.” Just in case—ghouls—I have donated my body to science. I have a “Body Donor” card. Mine will go to a Madrid university, but if my death does not occur in this my beloved community, it is warned: “Notify the nearest medical school.”
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My decision is based on practicality, cognitive optimism, philanthropy and thrift. You get rid of the hassle of funeral ceremonies, you save a fortune—dying has become sky-high—and you also trust that what’s left of you will help future medical professionals understand what a tendon is without resorting to technology. AI; Corporeality and temperature are fundamental even though there are now business models focused on alleviating grief thanks to the imprint that our beloved dead have left on networks and clouds: a voice message, an emoticon, the possibility of algorithmically predicting and reproducing in a message the reaction of a deceased person. Then that message reaches the cell phone of a grieving mother who, instead of going crazy, calms down. The stories of Jeanette Winterson, the chapters of Black Mirror or Shatter Belt point in that direction. I am analog and I remember Berenice by Poe, The Monkey’s Paw by WW Jacobs and The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson in the film version by Robert Wise. The series Two meters under.
In the end, it’s about the body, which, as I think Katherine Anne Porter wrote, is not a good place to live. But it is the place where we live and where we die too. We need the body, which is why the AIs in the best science fiction novels not only animate anthropomorphic replicas, but also seek to generate a membrane. Membrana is an excellent novel by Jorge Carrión. We need a body and, for that reason, I am overwhelmed by Rest in Peace, a film by Thea Hvistendahl based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist: with what care the body of a living dead person – son, grandson – is washed with drops poured into his the eyes to restore the moisture lost in the earth. With what submission a woman submits to being devoured by the person she loved. The widower and the orphans do not recognize the lost mother. Grief, forgetfulness, guilt, with impeccable cinematographic handwriting and images that you can’t get out of your head when you go to sleep. Notice to sailors, embalmers, thanatopractors protagonists of Death Suits You So Good and mad scientists who give resuscitating injections as in Re-animator, a film by Stuart Gordon, based on a story by Lovecraft: it is not the absence of the body that causes horror , is his presence.
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I would wish you a happy Halloween because I like Tim Burton’s movies, but let me remind you that here we celebrate the day of the dead by going to the cemetery to clean tombstones, renew the polyester flowers and shed a tear or have a conversation like at the beginning of Volver de Pedro Almodóvar. In things like this I get the patriotic fang, even though, to avoid becoming radicalized, I have donated my body to the university. I hope I don’t suffer from catalepsy.
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