Death Cannot Be Managed

Art as a different kind of technology

This Weekly Edition of Inkwell features Helen Roy

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WET HEAT SETTLED over the marsh, and the fertile stench of pluff mud and crustaceous putrefaction filled the air. Mom and I had escaped to the ocean side of the island, and the tide lapped at our feet as we watched my children play in the water against the backdrop of a quintessential Carolina sunset. It was June 2024, and she was days away from completing her first round of chemotherapy. We didn’t know it then, but she was only a few more from the end. The wind, a feeble reprieve, filled her hair, which she never had the chance to lose, as she and I chatted about my husband’s recent career change. I wondered what my own future might hold.

“I hope you do something creative again,” she said back then.

There were eight weeks in between my mother’s diagnosis and her death. Cancer’s greed and time’s indifference took us by surprise. Those weeks and the words we exchanged live suspended in amber in my mind, talismanic clues she simply must have left behind in lieu of goodbye.

MOM SIGNED ME UP for ballet when I was eight—a little late, relatively, but my obsessive nature soon made up for lost time. The term “creative outlet” always felt like an understatement. I never took nor wanted a break. In some ways, I was escaping a tumultuous home, but dance wasn’t just an escape from life. It was my life, my religion, my first love. I trained and performed as a professional ballet dancer until the age of 18, when, burned out and having lost my confidence, I quit.

Leaving behind the discipline felt like a death: the loss of an irreplicable something with no possibility of retrieval. I tried occasionally to get back into the studio, but the wounds were raw and radioactive—too sensitive to touch. I beheld my squandered vocation with grief and anger, and felt the same for my body, which I blamed and hated for betraying me. This inner fragmentation was difficult to articulate, and to confront it honestly with myself was something I was incapable of at the time.

So, I turned to the internet. I spent the better part of the following decade wandering through a creative desert, often hunched over a screen, indulging the insatiable habit of doomscrolling. I learned to live almost entirely in my mind, while the body that once moved through life with vigor and confidence had gone numb. Technology took the pain away, but always at a price.

TODAY, THE DISCOURSE around technology is divided by ideological camps: optimists and pessimists. The former see its endless potential for the flourishing of humanity and the latter identify an “anti-human” or “transhumanist” threat in it.

A shovel spares the hands from digging. Antibiotics have saved countless children from early death. Many such developments are genuine mercies whose tradeoff ratio weighs so heavily on the side of “good” that it seems uncouth to speculate about their downsides. But other innovations increasingly edge toward something stranger. They attempt not only to augment, but to transcend the foundational mysteries of the human experience. Our notions and practices around birth, death, friendship, creativity, and focus are all at least disrupted by artificial wombs, digital necromancy, AI “friends,” large language models, and the attention economy.

In The Question Concerning Technology, Martin Heidegger says “technology is a human activity.” He describes technology as a “complex of…contrivances” including the “manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve.” The tendency to innovate and instrumentalize, to mediate the space between the human person and suffering, is, ironically, a natural human desire.

Heidegger warned that the true danger of technology was not the machines per se but the way they reshape our perception of reality, encouraging us to see the world as what he called standing reserve—a stockpile of resources. A technological outlook perceives rivers as hydroelectric power sources, forests as lumber inventories, the female body as an incubator. When the world appears only as something to be managed, measured, and controlled, we lose our ability to encounter what Heidegger would call “primal truth”—as something mysterious, given, and alive:

“The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted man in his essence. The rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.”

How, then, does one retain the “primal truth” in a world inexorably defined by its technological landscape? How does one recover it?

MAGGIE O’FARRELL’s Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague was published, providentially, on March 31, 2020. The novel reimagines the love story of the Shakespeares, William and Agnes, from what little historians know of their marriage. Agnes was three months pregnant with their first-born, Susanna, at the time, after whom she gave birth to twins, Hamnet and Judith. Hamnet died in 1596, at eleven years old, almost certainly a casualty of the bubonic plague. A few years later, the boy’s father wrote the greatest play of all time, Hamlet, of which the titular character’s soliloquies on death are generally regarded as, again, one of the greatest reflections on mortality.

In Chloe Zhao’s Oscar-nominated film adaptation of the novel, the halcyon days of the Shakespeare family are book-ended by screaming convulsions: the mysteries of birth and death. Judith was thought to have been born still, so Agnes always fretted over her health in particular. But, it is Hamnet’s death that shocks them and cuts open a yawning abyss between the Shakespeares. Agnes, with all her undifferentiated rage, cannot make sense of William’s continuation of life as normal. She is angry at his absence and intolerant of his half-presence. William, unable to be directly present in the pain, must come at it obliquely, through writing. Both must descend into the void alone.

The boy Hamnet, after death, is portrayed behind a veil, which we come to see is actually the London Globe Theatre’s set of Hamlet. The film culminates with the play’s debut, in which Agnes finally sees her son in her husband’s work. Together this time, they can say goodbye. And it isn’t just Agnes reaching out for Hamnet as the film concludes: it is the crowd bearing witness to him, resurrected, if only for a moment. Cathartic solidarity frees the Shakespeares from their grief—or at least allows them to live inside it. Together, they remember him.

Both Agnes’ and William’s reactions to human suffering provide an answer to Heidegger’s question of primal truth. Agnes refuses mediation. Her grief is immediate, bodily, and unprocessed. She remains with Hamnet’s absence, unwilling to let it be transformed into anything but what it is. In this sense, she resists what Heidegger would call enframing. Her fidelity is to the irreducibility of loss. William, by contrast, takes the most unbearable fact of his life and, using the tools and techniques at his disposal, traces the contours of the mystery. He reflects upon and reveals it. He gives form to his suffering without distracting from it. Hamlet is not a solution to Hamnet’s death. It is something else.

“Could it be that the fine arts are called to poetic revealing? Could it be that revealing lays claim to the arts most primally, so that they for their part may expressly foster the growth of the saving power, may awaken and found anew our vision of, and trust in, that which grants? Essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art.”

— Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology

DEATH CANNOT BE MANAGED. No amount of analysis or technological augmentation can dissolve its finality. In my youth, I responded to the alienation of loss by submitting myself to technologies and philosophies that justified and emphasized it. When my mother died, the distance I had cultivated from the art that lived so thoroughly in my body suddenly felt intolerable.

So, per her parting wishes, I returned to the ballet studio. Engaging in a creative practice helps me move through the subjective challenges of grief. But also, the objective reality of creation introduces the possibility of catharsis, transfiguring grief—as author of Doctor Who, Jamie Anderson says, “love with nowhere to go”—into something that can be shared and, if not understood, then appreciated.

Art is, in a certain sense, a form of technology, often involving technological tools to augment its practice. The difference comes back to Heidegger’s enframing. Whereas pure technology enframes the world as an extractable resource, artistic creation enframes the world as it is: created, mysteriously, out of love.

I HEARD ONCE that raising children is like trying to catch diamonds as they rain from the sky. Some things are lost forever; there’s no way to retrieve them all, but we try. On the other side of life, burying my mother has felt in some ways like excavating my childhood home—for forgotten diamonds, swallowed by dust, buried in the grime of myth, misunderstanding, resentment, regret. Some things are lost forever; there’s no way to retrieve them all, but we try.

I believe our best trying is found in creation, which is always co-creation. God—the first Creator, the one in whom all things are made and held—is the source from which all revealing flows, and the end toward which every act of true creation turns back. God’s language is poetry and parable. It could only ever be.

To create, then, is to revisit the “primal truth.” To remember, with all its mystery, what the world is made for and to remember the One who made it.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d.

— Hamlet, Act 3

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📰 Read in print: Here’s the link to a quick tool for those who want to get their hands on this essay and read it analog style.

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Helen Roy
Writer

Helen Roy is a mother and writer, focusing on family policy, women’s issues, and culture. She shares her work on her Substack newsletter, Helen Roy Writes.

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📸 Photography by Elizabeth Sanders

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