immortality project

[Contributed by Diana Means, from Indianapolis, IN]

I feel like henry darger in a confessional, mark ryden on an acid trip in a hot air balloon, kate bush in a neoclassical dining hall filled with vikings eating canned apricots.

It’s time to implement somethings new. I enrolled in Herron yesterday and I’ve got that familiar brain rush that tells me I haven’t ruined everything. It’s my favorite mode of thought and I’m drawing a terephone man attached with a backside umbilical to the wall. This is the perfect age - but maybe every age is perfect, because it simply is. Regardless, I’ve been wondering about those times when we act a certain way then think, wow, that was so not me, and thinking maybe that is who we are. We are how we act and it changes, and you have to just roll with it. There’s a photo of Sharon behind glass and if I hold it back far enough our faces almost match up. Our noses are different but our minds are so eerily similar that I have to remind myself that I’ve formed this all on my own, and how I’m acting isn’t a result of my biology or circumstances but who I am. And whether I like it or not I have to keep loving myself like I’m my own girlfriend.

Can you see yourself without a photo or a mirror? Can I look outside myself like I’m looking at a stranger - or better yet, someone I love dearly? I saw a man driving a truck full of plucked turkeys. That’s how you know the landscape has changed. Mine did two years ago and I guess I’m just now reacting. I want to strive to be a better sister this year. I don’t really know how to be the older sister. And I think I have found the last piece to the beginning and it has been misplaced again. It does not come through another sibling, another lover, another friend, another item in my collection, but perhaps all these things and none of them - at once. Nothing in itself can be magnificent without considering it in relation to other things - not even life, because it is not more important than death. And death is important if only for the allowance of new life. It completes a phase, redistributes, revives. It’s like a Christmas funeral.

I love being this age. I feel like I am always on the verge of learning something new and I just learned how to love myself. I can be my own teacher and as a matter of fact, I must, because I must always continue to learn, or I will die. Not a physical death but a creative death. Physical death is nothing more than the earth recycling your life. The death of your spirit is something else.

Eternal life… the ancient Egyptians, the mighty Romans, the legends of the Mahabharata, have all searched for the secret to immortality. For four thousand years we have seeked to emulate Tithonus’s tragic life… eternal life without eternal youth…

This project is dedicated to bring immortality within our grasp. Not through our bodies, but through our imaginations, actions and lives.

How do death and distance differ? An idol or mentor who has passed away is remembered for the lessons we learnt from them. Those lessons are omnipotent, being with us wherever we go, and surviving the mortals who taught them.

The immortality project aims to collect stories that will survive us. Stories that we will be remembered by. Stories that will make us immortal. So take a few minutes, and share a story that you’d like to be remembered by. It can be something that happened to you, or just something you witnessed. It can even be a story about your father, your mother, your brother… your heroes.