respis poste homonym te ese memento, memento mori. Look behind you. Remember you’re a man. Remember you will die. To keep them humble, to keep them from revolting, as was one to happen when you become convinced of godhood. You know, in opposition to the story that I did yesterday, the other gods by HP Lovecraft, in which a man becomes so knowledgeable that he believes that he can be as a god, that he can contend with the gods, deal with the gods. We have the absolute alternative, which is the skull. Just the skull. The skull in itself is a philosophy, a symbol, an idea so profound, so terrible.

It is the absolute truth that lies behind all of the facade of flesh. You are convinced now of life. Of far more than just life as well, of fantasies, dreams, ideas, love, and hate, and food, and all of that, and all of that is literally nothing. It is ephemeral, it won’t last, but the skull will. The skull, your bones, your skeleton is the only thing that is going to last. If you are not committed to mimetic immortality, if you are not committed to reproducing images and ideas that are going to live you, then you are going to be reduced to nothing but a skeleton.

If you’re lucky, because now we like to burn up bodies, which I think is probably not best. I’m a believer in the maintenance of the body. The Egyptians would be horrified to know that everybody becomes a skeleton now. They would embalm even their beggars, mummify their beggars. So, the skull, the skull is the truth. I saw a post today on Twitter that I liked a lot. It was a guy looking at his neighbor’s yard and there are decoration gravestones. And he says, there’s eight gravestones outside of my neighbor’s house. They only have a family of five and none of them are missing.

Very strange. I’ll investigate further. It makes me think, what if we did take Halloween decorations literally? We have numbed ourselves to the legitimate horror of a lot of Halloween imagery. Skeletons are terrifying. What I was just saying, a skeleton is a reminder that you are going to be that. You are going to be less than nothing. You are going to be but bones reduced forever nothing in the flesh, in the lack of flesh. And yet we can decorate them all around our house. We can put them, you know, giant versions of them up in our yards.

And if you’re me, you can put a real human skull with silly expressions right next to you in a YouTube video. You have to make peace with death. This is the point of Memento Mori. It became more than just an experiment in humbling. It became an amor fatty. It became the love of fate. The love that we will eventually be nothing. We will eventually be skeletons. You have to have this. You have to develop an acceptance and an understanding of death. If you do not make a friend of death, then it is an enemy.

An enemy to be feared terribly. So think about that. Another important point that I’ll finish it up with is that pirates and the Jolly Roger are really cool. And that it was once a legitimate symbol of terror on the seas, which is also a whole nother point. I mean, the horror of being on the sea, the likelihood that you will not make it home. And then to see dudes raise a skull. It was scary. I think the Jolly Roger is a great symbol. I love the skull. I’m sorry that I don’t have Ramona with me for this one, but I thought I would talk today about skull symbolism.

Remember, screams matter. [tr:trw].