Transhumanists Banish Death!

[A detail of Kobayashi Eitaku’s “Body of a Courtesan in Nine Stages,” 1870’s]

Son of a fishmonger, Kobayashi Eitaku became the official painter and even samurai for Ii Naosoke, Lord of Hikone. Ii is most famous for granting the US a commercial foothold in Japan.

Though Kobayashi has never been deemed an important artist, he left behind some striking images, including giant toad, octopus, bat, macaque and rat having mutually satisfying sex with women. Kobayashi also painted corpses, freshly killed or in advanced states of decay. To the putridly refined, Kobayashi is an immortal. Sadly, he died at age 47 inside some fleabag in 1890.

Religion is founded on death. Saint Benedict, “Keep death before one’s eyes daily.” With its tortured corpse on a cross, Christianity drives pain and death into each consciousness. Memento mori and vanitas paintings puncture sensuality with symbols of death.

Buddhist monks meditate before a skeleton or even rotting corpse. Canadian Bhikkhu Sona describes one arrangement in Thailand:

The villagers obligingly laid the corpse in a shallow grave in a homemade coffin with an easily removable lid […]

The monks were to take turns in lonely vigils over the corpse. We could visit throughout the day and each of us had an opportunity to spend one or more nights alone with the body as it progressed through the stages of decomposition.

[…] Since April is the height of the hot season, with temperatures of over 100 deg F, the body had already begun to bloat […]

In fact once one is familiar with the characteristic odour one can catch it, on a still day, 50 meters from the gravesite.

[…] in the quiet of the night, gases under pressure occasionally hiss out of the pellet wounds. The sound is disturbingly close to a rasping exhalation of breath, and again, the already ghastly stink is given a temporary boost. The corpse has now begun to lose fluid through evaporation […]

The mouth is completely covered by maggots and one can only guess that it is still open. In the photos one does not get the disturbing effect of the intense motion of these insects. They are in continuous activity in their feeding. It was difficult to take my eyes off the fountain-like effect they produce in and around the mouth […] These maggots fed 24 hours a day.

Kobayashi’s corpse painting belongs to a Japanese tradition, Kusōzu, that depicts the nine stages of a corpse’s decay. Pornographic shunga, though, has always been much more popular. The most celebrated sequence is Hokusai’s Kinoe no Komatsu (1814), with its 69, rape, lesbians, close up, malformed penis and, most famously, The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, with two octopuses. Picasso’s Dona i Pop was inspired by this.

Vietnamese Thiện Phúc, “To overcome craving and attachment, we should contemplate the body’s impurities. Lusting after another, remember she’s just a sack filled with six types of filth.” Go to hell, monk, and leave us alone with our porn.

Now more than ever, sexual delirium beats death. With immortality near, Jesus, Buddha, saints, monks and nuns will all be buried. Let maggots bloom from their mouths. In 2008, Nick Bostrom already doubled our lifespan:

You have just celebrated your 170th birthday and you feel stronger than ever. Each day is a joy. You have invented entirely new art forms, which exploit the new kinds of cognitive capacities and sensibilities you have developed. You still listen to music—music that is to Mozart what Mozart is to bad Muzak. You are communicating with your contemporaries using a language that has grown out of English over the past century and that has a vocabulary and expressive power that enables you to share and discuss thoughts and feelings that unaugmented humans could not even think or experience.

We’ve come a long way. In November of 2022, Harvard scientist David Sinclair told NBC News that aging DNA is like a scratched compact disc. He’s close to removing these scratches.

Even if you’re diseased beyond repair, there’s still hope. Working with “some of the world’s leading neuroscientists, engineers, and supported by forward-thinking investors,” a company has just announced, “Introducing BainBridge, the world’s first revolutionary concept for a head transplant machine, which uses state-of-the-art robotics and artificial intelligence to conduct complete head and face transplantation procedures ensuring smooth outcomes and faster recoveries.” From a braindead donor, you can get a younger body and better looking face. Since the world as is has no shortage of braindeads, you’ll have a massive catalogue to choose from.

Jewjab genocide, collapsed economies, impending world war, poisoned soil, dying oceans, species die offs, resource depletion and social chaos are but minor snags to man’s conquest of death and the entire universe. Online, there are all these ecstatic predictions of the future.

Tim Enalls, “With advancements in medical science and technology, humans would be capable of living for millennia, experiencing life in countless different bodies through advanced cloning, cybernetic enhancements or digital consciousness transfer […] They would witness the rise and fall of stars, see galaxies collide and merge and observe the slow dance of cosmic evolution firsthand. With time rendered almost irrelevant, they could embark on projects of unimaginable scale and scope […]”

With countless bodies, we’ll live forever to witness the rise and fall of planets, including, of course, our sad, redundant earth. Soon enough, we won’t remember any of it. Already, most are indifferent to a civilized gesture, well tuned colors, inspired phrases or tactful humor.

As for sex and death, they should be thought of as categories. Anything that’s life affirming is sex. The endless lies and insults we’re subjected to are death.

[Matthias Grünewald, The Small Crucifixion, c. 1511/1520]

[Carravagio, Saint Jerome Writing, 1605-6]

[Kobayashi Eitaku]