A Ramble About Human Life. Or, The Question Within the Question Within the Question
This past month, I sat for a meal with a few doctoral researchers – from astronomy to religious studies and French, each a curious mix of interests and cultures. Think of us with our heads bent over paper plates stuffed with pasta salad and humus and cheese, talking about graduate student life, and food. But mostly, we talked about Exodus, not in the framing of this letter, of course! But in the actual epic of Moses and the Egypt caught in the throes of frogs and hail. And then came the troubling contender, the death of the first-borns. At this point the conversation had acquired a pause, then reshaped itself into two questions: who deserves to die, and what is the value of a human life? It is not the first time that a Biblical victory has been inverted, pulled up like a rug and shaken vigorously, leaving its dust to settle like a cloud of doubt. It has always been my opinion that a good Bible and a good God can surely take a good question. But that is fodder for another letter.
I have always been fascinated by the ways that questions act as mirrors, sometimes reflecting our own images back to us. The questions we ask tell us about the ways we see the world, and the things we prioritize. In my graduate classes, the questions that emerge from my colleagues highlight strange meeting points between mind and text, often creating shimmering spaces of possibility and encounter. Is this not the point of our doctoral studies? To re-imagine old questions. Or, to ask the questions that have not yet been asked? And so, I left the meeting with the doctoral researchers carrying the taste of salted crackers in my tongue, carrying also, the questions that seemed to sneak out with me. Too late now. I am stuck with the words ringing in my head, caked into my nails, snug in the folds of my skin. It asked then, as it is asking now: what is the value of a human life? Such a question can be rife with political implications, especially in a place like America where there are only two modes of being. Yet, I like questions because they trouble fixed categories, because they invoke a space beyond or between the canons of acceptable life.
Much of my childhood memory is blocked off, the past constantly teasing me with its inaccessibility. But while I only see my younger self through sporadic bursts of memory, these memories come with exacting detail: the smell of sweat in the room, the shape of anger on a parent’s nose, the bite of hunger on a night without food. Now, here’s a distinct memory I have - asking an Uncle visiting at the time: where does God come from? I don’t remember what spurred the question but I can see clearly the shape of this Uncle’s head turned away from me - a vision of his neck folds and shave bumps. I also remember his response to me—what kind of question is that? he’d said. I conjure this memory as I think about this question on human life, as though by tracing the source of God, I might trace the source of life. But also I ask, what kind of question is that? And where do such questions belong?
Recently, I’ve found myself thinking (a lot!) about cells. Cells as units of life, as intelligent systems. Cells in their divisive and self-proliferating genius. If my thumbing through Google is anything to go by, then we, as humans, have over a Trillion cells. Fifty billion of these cells die every day while 330 billion new cells emerge. By thinking about cells, what I mean to say is that I have not stopped thinking about the body. The body in relation to dis-ease. The body in its plurality of ruptures. I have been thinking specifically about the relationship between food and cells. Cells and behavior. Cells as lifeforms that can be fed and guided. Cells as a distributive network, but also Cells as a collective, as a body. When I stuff my mouth with Spinach, I conjure images of these Cells as agents enacting received instructions. Be healthy. Be whole, and while you are at it, shed a pound or two! #Sigh.
In December 2021, I’d assumed I would take a simple week off Instagram and Facebook, coupled with a loosely structured hiatus from Twitter. Now more than ten months after the fact, I find myself wanting to shrink further the circumference of my participation in the world. It’s not just about being off social media, but also about an absence of the desire for sociality. I admit, though, occasionally, I am gripped by hunger for human contact, that boundless energy that comes from sincere and meandering conversation. But generally speaking, these days my impulse is to retreat. Or hide. And so, in addition to my question on human life, I have also been thinking: what is the value of a social or public life? Specifically from the visible corridors of digital ‘performativity’ to the invisible multi-enactments of cell labor.
Maybe the idea of ‘value’ is a faulty premise, seeing as how it has been hi-jacked by capitalist frames of usefulness and utility. Maybe we shouldn’t measure ourselves in units and outcomes. So maybe not value per se. Maybe just meaning. What does it mean to be human? And then, what does it mean to exist in the eye of the other human. What does it mean to be seen? Especially in that public sense of visibility and virality? But also, what does it mean to be anonymous—rendered invisible by choice? Or by failure. Or by shame. What does it mean to be fully embodied in humanity, contained within its restrictions, destined towards its inescapable expiration. Then of course, in a natural progression: What does it mean to die? Where, even, does this death occur? In the cells? On the site of the decomposing body? Or, by separation from public life?
And now I return to the beginning. Except, per usual, I don’t have answers, either about Pharaoh, or about evil and pain, or about the hand of God so gracious and yet so terrible. I don’t have answers about death or dying, or about the body’s duality as a material reference for life and as a metaphor for something not yet seen. But I have the desire to celebrate my questions, and to give room to encounter the questions of others, even when those questions trouble me. In our world of terror and ineptitude and scarcity, surely there is room for more questions. So this is what I offer by way of this letter, that the point is not always in answers or in theory. But sometimes in revelation, even if what is revealed is our blindness. We ask, so that we can see. We ask to cast a vision of our own limits, where a limit is not always a closed door but a world not yet seen. A qood question does not betray ignorance, it reveals everything that is still possible, still knowable.
In the face of prejudice and racial violence, illness and estrangement, global ruptures and hyper-mediated wars, we, like the past, are all confined with the burden of mapping our tragedies with answers. What does our existence mean, why do we matter, how can we make our shared space better? You ask me, and I will ask you, and together we might be able to say of our pains and sufferings - “once we were blind, but now we can see.”