Healings FAQ No. 7: Philip Sherburne
A Q&A about death and god: "Music, patterns, math, physics, biology—there’s a perfection to the world that I have trouble chalking up to randomness."
Hello and welcome to another installment of the Healings FAQ, where I ask the same series of questions about death and faith to a collection of writers, artists, musicians and maybe eventually some other notable public figures (looking at you, Guy Fieri). Why am I asking these specific questions? Because these are the things people asked me after I was diagnosed with cancer, and I actually sort of enjoyed answering them, and thought it might be nice if it was a bit more commonplace to talk about this stuff (ya know, without the cancer excuse). And so here we are.
I am extremely excited for today’s contestant, Philip Sherburne. Philip is quite possibly the preeminent voice of electronic music criticism in the known universe, as well as one of the genre’s foremost curators and champions. I could list out his resume and accolades but that’d take too long, so just trust me, and then also go check out his newsletter, Futurism Restated, which I consider (with no small amount of bias), the best resource on the planet for discovering new electronic music, or just music generally.
On top of being all those things, Philip is simply one of the best writers I know, someone whose voice comes dancing off the page, whose unending delight in the craft is evident in every clause and careful word choice, who’s been teaching me things about writing for over twenty years now. He’s also a thoughtful father and caring partner, who enjoys gardening, as well as the various small pleasures of his homebase of Menorca, Spain (oh right…the guy lives in Menorca, Spain—yes!). All of which is to say I knew Philip would have a lot of great answers to the Healings FAQ, and sure enough, he didn’t disappoint.
What happens when we die?
If we’re lucky, a loved one takes care of our body according to our final wishes and either puts it in a box in the ground or delivers it to a cremation facility, where it’s pushed into a blazing hot fire and reduced to ash. (It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that such a choice is an enormous privilege, and one denied to, say, the families being bombarded in Gaza right now.) Somewhere in between, we’re trundled about on gurneys, I suppose, and then of course there’s the matter of cellular decomposition, the extent of which depends on the method chosen; it lasts longer if we’re put in the ground, gets nipped promptly in the bud if we go into the incinerator. If you’re like my father, you get scattered in various places—beloved coves in Hawaii and Spain, an Oregon river where you used to fish—though a little of you also sits ensconced in a quart-sized Ziploc tucked inside an old basket on an upper shelf of your son’s office, waiting for him to decide what to do with the rest of you, 19 years later and counting.
(Sorry, I know that’s not actually what you’re asking. But the logistics of dead bodies have been much on my mind of late. My mom has rapidly worsening dementia, and one of the topics we’ve been returning to on a regular basis is her insistence upon “direct cremation, no funeral.” The physical implications of shuffling off her mortal coil are weighing heavily upon her mind, which means that I hear about them weekly, sometimes daily.)
Beyond the physical, I don’t know. I suspect that, as far as the sentient, universal we of your question is concerned, there’s nothing more. A switch goes off; perhaps it takes a few milliseconds for the neurons to power down. The world keeps spinning and the body stays behind, pinned to the Earth by gravity, but our consciousness, which is to say our self, our being, simply evaporates. At best, we’ll be remembered by our loved ones for a generation, maybe two, fuzzily, if we’re lucky.
I have been thinking a lot about memory and consciousness lately, about the fact that self-awareness depends in part on the ability to position yourself in time, to look back, to chain discrete moments together into a meaningful narrative. The alternative, I imagine, is the unblinking goldfish stuck in the perpetual now, in a kind of tunnel vision. I’m not sure what this has to do with death, necessarily, but sometimes I try to consider the idea of what would happen if I died right now, instantly, with no warning—say, a meteor crashing into my house with such velocity that I never even felt it, or going down on a plane while in a deep sleep. With no awareness of my impending death, would “I” even experience it? I’m trying to come up with a metaphor for that kind of erasure; the closest I can come is the unsaved Word doc in progress that blinks into the ether when the power goes out. (A memory from college, in one of the computer clusters, finals week—this was in the years before everyone had their own laptop in their dorm room—where everyone was frantically typing away on their term papers: Something happened, a power surge or something, and the lights in the building briefly flashed off and then back on, taking all the computers down with them, and in the moment after that pause there arose a collective cry of anguish—all those words lost in an instant, like tears in the rain—that was truly amazing to behold.)
But this is spiraling into stoned dorm-room talk (and I haven’t actually smoked weed in nearly a decade), so perhaps we should move on to the next question.
On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being terrified and 1 being it’s never crossed your mind, how afraid are you of dying? Explain.
Probably a 6 or 7? It’s not that I’m afraid of dying, exactly; more that the idea saddens me profoundly. I don’t want to die (even if I have said under my breath, “I wish I was dead,” many, many times in my life, and maybe on occasion even believed that I meant it, even though, in retrospect, I most definitely did not). I don’t want the people around me to die. I’m mystified by the idea of the world just carrying on without you once you’re gone.
Obviously, the rationalist in me knows that death is just a fact of life. My dad was 85 when he died; he had cancer, it was relatively quick and not too painful, and he got to die at home, surrounded by loved ones, after a long and active life. All told, it wasn’t too bad. But the idea that this person that I loved, deeply—someone without whom I wouldn’t even exist—is just gone… I have a hard time wrapping my head around that. And then when I apply the thought experiment to myself—think, say, of my wife and daughter’s lives after I’m gone, assuming, God-that-I-don’t-believe-in willing, that I predecease them—I get dizzy and have to think about something else.
I think a lot about a piece that Donald Hall wrote in the New Yorker almost a decade ago now: “Between Solitude and Loneliness.” At 87, knowing that he is nearing the end of his life—indeed, he died less than two years later—he looks back on his life, a life well lived. Then, in the final paragraphs, he recounts the death of a loved one from decades before, and while I won’t detail the specifics here, because I don’t want to spoil the force of his remarkable piece of writing, the sense of lingering, life-long grief he conveys is just devastating. It’s not the dying that scares me, it’s the all-consuming sense of loss.
What’s the closest you’ve come to death? What did you learn, if anything?
My superstitious side is afraid that I’m courting bad luck if I say that I haven’t, really, but what are you going to do. If there were brushes, either I was unaware of them (putting something dodgy up my nose, maybe, when I was young and stupid), or they weren’t that bad. I think the most intensely I ever considered the possibility of death was when I got COVID in 2021. It wasn’t a particularly severe case, as COVID goes; I was in bed for a week with a fever, and it felt like a flu. The two times I had pneumonia were probably worse. But there was something different about COVID. Perhaps, as someone who has had cancer, you will know what I am talking about, but I felt a kind of presence inside me, and it felt evil. I was acutely aware that there was something in me that was trying to kill me, and I found that profoundly disturbing. (I’ve discussed that feeling with other people who felt the same thing when they had COVID, and they have told me they had similar feelings, which I found reassuring, in a way. Perhaps it’s a bit like people who take DMT—something I’ve never tried—who all recount meeting the same weird alien figures on their trips. Who knows, maybe there is something out there.) [Editor’s Note: Curiously, this is not how I conceived of my cancer. I had a very detached, clinical conception: Oops, some science happened and now my cells are multiplying in a way that could kill me. I wonder if that’s related to the fact that cancer is actually your own body going haywire, rather than an external virus you contract. Hmmm!]
Do you believe in God? Explain.
I would like to think that there’s something more; I don’t think there is, but I’d love to be proven wrong. The rationalist in me thinks it’s unlikely, that religion is a deeply ingrained form of myth that humans invented to make sense of an unknowable world. Sometimes I’ll float a theory in my mind, a sort of theological trial balloon. “Well, maybe if our atoms aren’t actually destroyed, then perhaps they recombine in other forms, and…” But then I decide that sounds like a reach, and I abandon the thought experiment.
But hey, far smarter people than me do believe in God, or in (*gestures helplessly*) something. So what do I know? I don’t believe in a sentient god, though I was cowed by Him as a child. (I was born into the Presbyterian church, albeit a pretty liberal incarnation of it, and baptized, but my family stopped going when I was five or so, and I never really looked back. Though I did discover, toward the end of my dad’s life, that he prayed every day, which I found both moving and disconcerting, if only because it made me wonder what other things I didn’t know about him, and never would.) But if you ask me about spirit—well, I don’t know. Music, patterns, math, physics, biology—there’s a perfection to the world, in its order and its beauty, that I have trouble chalking up to randomness. It’s not that I think some god created the universe, but might the universe be a manifestation of… something? Something we don’t understand? Something that maybe, just maybe, might be revealed to us after death? Probably not, but out of sheer, stupid hope, I’ll keep an open mind there. Again, I come back to the DMT-takers, or the psilocybin-takers. Enough people see something out there, beyond the veil, that I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Do you have a spiritual practice? If so, what is it? If not, why not?
I do not, and I guess the simple answer is that I was never introduced to one that clicked, and I’ve never really felt the need for one, although I won’t deny that the times I’ve seen a good one—a Black Baptist church in full communion, or Jewish friends observing a Shabbat dinner, or even an Amish-type community that I visited as part of a comparative religion class in college—I’ve felt a pang of envy. (I’ve also seen a Pentecostal father yell at his kid for not doing grace right; fuck that.)
I think for me, spiritual experience lies in things like music, in the transcendence that can be felt in the presence of a powerful work of art, at least on the occasions that your mind, or your being, is open to that transcendence. Otherwise, more prosaically, I think I’d just like to live a good life—be there for my family, help my daughter grow, be kind to others, get mad less, be less of an asshole. When I manage to do all that, life feels better, and I guess when I die, I’d like to be able to look back and feel like I generally did the right things, and that my mistakes, which have been many, are compensated by the good stuff.
Give me an example of a sacred text, for you personally—a work of some kind (book, album, song, painting) that’s essential to the formation of your spiritual worldview. Explain.
A song comes to mind, a campfire song from summer camp, ages eight through 12, maybe. “Today, while the blossoms still cling to the vine/I’ll eat your strawberries and drink your sweet wine/A million tomorrows shall all pass away/Ere I forget all the joys that were mine today.” Setting aside the absurdity of summer camp kids singing about wine, which I bet they don’t let them do anymore, something about this song stuck with me from a very early age. I still think of the song often. It’s not a hymn, but it has the feeling of one; it conveys to me something of the simple but profound communal joy of singing together. (Strangely, I’d never thought to look it up until today; apparently it’s a 1964 folk song by a group called the New Christy Minstrels, and a pre-Byrds Gene Clark appears on the recording.) But there’s also a hint of sorrow lurking beneath the surface, something I would never have been able to identify as a child, but I think it affected me nevertheless: a sense of loss waiting in the wings, an understanding that the brightest delights are merely transitory. It’s a song about death, and about the search for meaning and joy in spite of it all.
One other image comes to mind. Carnac, France, last spring. Stephen O’Malley, of the doom-metal band Sunn O))), programmed a drone festival that took place among 6,000-year-old neolithic ruins. For two mornings and two evenings, at dawn and dusk, an ensemble of alphorn players assumed positions across a vast field of moss-covered menhirs and blew mournful, patient tones while the most reverent audience I’ve ever seen sat in the grass, heads bowed, listening to the sounds reverberate off the stones, mixing with the sounds of wind and birds and insects. No one really knows what kind of culture the original inhabitants of the site might have had, but we can assume that ritual played an important part of their daily life. The rhythms of the sun and moon, of the tides and the seasons, of the hunt and the harvest. Sitting there at dawn, head bowed beneath a waxing moon, crouched in dew-slicked grass and surrounded by spindly asphodels—for ancient Greeks, the flowers of the dead—it was easy to feel myself a part of a much longer history than we’re accustomed to marking, and I felt a combined sense of wonder and peace: This moment would pass, and eventually all of us here would be gone and forgotten. But the world would keep spinning, and the moss on the rocks would continue to grow.
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Healings is written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Ayana H. Muwwakkil provides art direction.
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