#The Art of Dying

[soracities]

Sarah Tolmie, from The Art of Dying [ID'd]

[harrisonarchive]

George Harrison in the studio, 1967; by Leslie Bryce.

“My dad’s favorite number was 7, and a lot of things that he did were according to the number 7, whether he meant it or not. That was the highest honor I could have given a track on the album [Brainwashed], to put it track 7.” - Dhani Harrison, Brainwashed EPK

Track no. 7 series: “Art Of Dying” —

“Some of them I wrote about three years ago and I kept them hidden because I reckoned they were too far out. One was called ‘The Art of Dying’. But I’m going to record it.” - George Harrison, FLIP, February 1970

“The Art Of Dying. Everybody is worried about dying, but the cause of death (which most can’t figure out unless they are diseased) is birth, so if you don’t want to die you don’t get born! So, the ‘art of dying‘ is when somebody can consciously leave the body at death, as opposed to falling down dying without knowing what’s going on. […] You have to practice all your life as you are likely to be in great pain as you are leaving your body — which could be at any moment. I mean *I* don’t want to be lying there as I’m dying thinking, ‘Oh shit, I forgot to put the cat out,’ or, ‘I didn’t get a Rolls-Royce,’ because then you may have to come right back just to do those things, and then you have got more knots on your piece of string.” - George Harrison, I Me Mine (1980)

“He never flinched. He never felt sorry for himself. He never lost his sense of humor. He wasn’t afraid of death, his own mortality, although he was very aware of it. He wasn’t even attached to his body, if you know what I mean. We’d be in the kitchen and he’d say, ‘Dhan, you know we are not these bodies, don’t you?’ And that carried over to the final stage where you have to lose your loved ones. As everyone in the world has to. But the more prepared you are the better. It’s like training for the Olympics. That’s what he did mentally his whole life... and he pulled it off, happily and in the most exemplary way you ever could.” - Dhani Harrison, The Times, November 2002 (x)

[drsilverfish]

Dean’s Soul in the Bardo -   The Art of Dying 1x06 The Winchesters

Catching up British-time, so a bit late to the party as usual, and coming to it fresh, as I like to do, without jumping into the time-line first. 

Screeches a bit because I am overwhelmed.

This episode suggests that, on one level, we can read every character in The Winchesters as manifestations of Dean’s consciousness, as he hovers in the “bardo”, the liminal realm in Tibetan Buddhism, between death and reincarnation. 

Mary - the leader and hunter who wants to get out of hunting; John - filled with wounded rage, Daddy-issues and violence; Carlos - the fabulous bisexual who dares to get into therapy and to go after the men he wants; Lata - the abused child who manages to chose love over violence - ALL OF THESE ARE ASPECTS OF DEAN WINCHESTER’S being, his experience/ soul/ desires <sobs a little because it’s beautiful>. 

Now I’m back on my meta, I’ve previously mused on The Winchesters as a reparative narrative told by Holy Ghost Dean Winchester; a counter-point to the traumatic narrative of Supernatural.

1x06 The Art of Dying offers further illumination and elaboration on that concept, namely:

The episode title, “The Art of Dying” is a George Harrison song, the right time-period for The Winchesters (1970), from his album All Things Must Pass. 

The Beatles, in keeping with the hippie counterculturalism of the time, were interested in Eastern spirituality, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism, and this Harrison song was inspired by his reading of Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1964). 

Harrison’s lyrics are about the religious philosophy of perfecting the soul through cycles of reincarnation:

“There'll come a time when all of us must leave here There's nothing Sister Mary can do, will keep me here with you As nothing in this life that I've been trying Can equal or surpass the Art of Dying....

There'll come a time when most of us return here Brought back by our desire to be a perfect entity Living through a million years of crying Until you realize the Art of Dying “

A theme which fits well with the Ouroboros (serpent swallowing it’s own tail as it ascends) narrative of latter-day Supernatural, which drew on Jung and esoteric alchemy to manifest the Winchesters’ journey as the journey of the soul towards God.  

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the Bardo Thodol, which means “liberation through hearing in the intermediate state”. It is a 14thC esoteric text (or possibly older but that’s when the written text we have dates from).

John, Mary, Lata and Losy all struggle with pain, parent-induced and violence-induced and hunting-induced trauma, but they are able to communicate their feelings to one another in a way which is strikingly and remarkably different from the enormous struggles with emotional articulation which animated Supernatural, which we watched Dean suffer with throught his life. 

So we can read The Winchesters as Dean’s revelatory hallucinations in the liminal state between death and liberation (or rebirth) - his revelatory sexual and emotional healing soul-dreams (in which, and what could be more Freudian, he returns to the scene of his parents).

And look, Lata is teaching John, who surived being possessed by the vengeful spirit of abused-as-a-child and violently out-of-control Mac, how to meditate and achieve higher consciousness (with an image of a globe in the background):

And isn’t it interesting that the rare type of vampire which Mac’s vengeful spirit first possesses is called a “soucouyant”, which means (incongrously, one would think) “carefree” in French. But not so incongruous if The Winchesters is about the journey of Dean’s soul to liberation, to bliss, to being “carefree”...

[dk-thrive]

I am beset by obsessively remembered thudding guilts and scalding shames.

Twenty-some years ago, I got a Guggenheim grant to write a memoir. I ended up using most of the money to buy a garden tractor. I failed for a number of reasons. I don’t feel interesting. I don’t trust my memories (or anyone’s memories) as reliable records of anything—and I have a fear of lying. Nor do I have much documentary material. I’ve never kept a diary or a journal, because I get spooked by addressing no one. When I write, it’s to connect. I am beset, too, by obsessively remembered thudding guilts and scalding shames. Small potatoes, as traumas go, but intensified by my aversion to facing them.

— Peter Schjeldahl, The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019-2022 (Harry N. Abrams, May 14, 2024)

[thewigmaster]

Death

[jenngeek]

THIS SITE IS ENTIRETY TOO FOCUSED ON LOST 1970s CINEMA WHEN IT SHOULD BE DIRECTING ALL OF ITS ATTENTION TO UNPACKING THE MULTILAYERED CYPHER THAT IN THE WINCHESTERS EPISODE THE ART OF DYING.

THIS IS A LEVEL 5 DESTIEL EMERGENCY THIS IS WHAT WE HAVE BEEN TRAINING FOR FOR OVER A DECADE, PEOPLE, ROBBIE HAS CONTROL OF THE SHIP.

[darkshrimpemotions]

Oh god. Seeing a hunter's funeral, not just the wake but the funeral, in a community instead of just with Sam and Dean alone. It's so deeply sad. But it's beautiful in a way too. Seeing the care taken. God I'm tearing up.

This is what I meant when I said Sam and Dean's childhoods weren't just Mary's worst nightmare, but worse than anything she could imagine. Mary was raised a hunter, but she was also raised in a home, and with a community. She had aunts, uncles, cousins, parents, friends. She slept in a bed at night and had enough food. She had SOME semblance of security, even if she also had fear and more responsibility than any kid should have to bear.

Dean and Sam had none of that. They were so deprived and neglected and isolated. And it's heartbreaking all over again, to see all the things they didn't have that they could have, even as hunters.

[papyrusandpaints]

Those who have never tried might imagine meditation to produce all kinds of ecstasies, spiritual visions, illuminations and the kinds of things that books are full of. But the real peace is the relief from the terrifying banalities of everyday life, the petty likes and dislikes, the interminable conversations of the mind, the wished for, the lost the abandoned.

And behind all that...is there anything beyond? Yes: a simple life getting simpler - an ordinary man finding real peace and happiness where he never looked before: in the ordinary things of life. Actually, there are no ordinary things of life. Coming to your senses out of your dreams, you find the ordinary is quite miraculous and the miraculous quite ordinary. It is only then that you realise, as one poet put it, that you are alive in search of life.

The Art of Dying, S.N. Goenka and Others

[automatic-overdrive]

Gojira - The Art of Dying live at Vieilles Charrues Festival, France, 2010.

[bitterorbittersweet]

El arte de morir, es la manera de dejarlo todo ir.

[rastronomicals]

11:48 PM EDT May 30, 2023:

Gojira - "The Art Of Dying" From the album The Flesh Alive (June 6, 2012)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

[incarnateirony]

WHENNNNN THE MOON HITS YOUR EYE LIKE A BIG PIZZA PIE THATS-

[drsilverfish]

Here Comes the Sun(flower)

Lata wears a sunflower motif on her headscarf in 1x06 The Art of Dying.

And she personifies sunshine, choosing a path of love and non-violence, despite her abusive past at the hands of a war-torn father with PTSD.

Sunflowers are associated with mythology in a number of different cultures.

In Greek mythology, the water-nymph Clytie falls in love with the sun-god Helios (tragically, of course) and eventually becomes a sunflower, face endlessly seeking her love in the sky.

Ah! Sun-flower

BY WILLIAM BLAKE

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time, Who countest the steps of the Sun: Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the travellers journey is done. Where the Youth pined away with desire, And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow: Arise from their graves and aspire, Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.   

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43649/ah-sun-flower

If we are reading The Winchesters as Dean��s mindscape (which, of course, on one level, we are) we already know the significance of sun and sunshine metaphors for the way Dean and Castiel are drawn to one another, long for one another, and feel about each another:

Dean’s longing for Castiel, palpable in this scene 9x06 from Heaven Can’t Wait (with it’s Gas n’ Sip sunshine motif):

The way Dean calls Cas “sunshine” in 12x03 The Foundry:

The way we know Dean is also Castiel’s sunshine, thanks to the cursed deal with The Empty, because in 14x08 Byzantium, The Empty tells Cas:  “And then, when you finally give yourself permission to be happy and let the sun shine on your face, that’s when I’ll come. That’s when I’ll come to drag you to nothing.”

And it is when Cas tells Dean he loves him (15x08 Despair) that the sun metaphorically shines on his face, because it is then that The Empty comes to collect on her deal:

If The Winchesters is Dean’s mindscape, he is still searching for his sunshine. 

[phantomlordreshiram]

Here’s some other art, featuring my Soul Silver protagonist OC, Heath! He’s a typhlosion in my AU, and is the current Johto champion!

Featuring art inspired by the band Death Angel. Character design inspired by @isshusgotissues.

[rodpower78]

Hunting has a way of changing a person. After a while, right, wrong, good, evil, they all start to look the same. And then it makes you start to wonder, 'Who is the monster here - - them or me?'

Dean Winchester

[itsdabatt]

anyways here’s tim drake dying in a glue trap