“All plots tend to move Deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer Death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.” 
―Don DeLillo, White Noise 

Death, perhaps life’s greatest mystery. What is Death? Where does it come from? Why is it a thing? Neither the what, nor the where, nor the when, nor even the why is known to mortals. Why, why do we die? What's the purpose? Where does consciousness go? Are our souls recycled, inserted into new life upon Death? Do we end up in some sort of Mysterious Otherside? Heaven? Hell? Valhalla? The great recycling plant in the sky? Perhaps we are consumed by Earth herself, fated to be nothing more than nutrients for the soil? Worm food, is that it? No one knows the answer. There are all sorts of theories, some scientific, some mystical, but no one really knows, and those who claim otherwise are almost certainly deluding themselves.

The most I know about Death is from the beginning of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, when Alucard, in all his bishonen glory, equipped with his most powerful artifacts, comes sprinting into Dracula’s castle, super cool afterimages trailing in his wake, only to be met by the floating specter of Death himself in all his cloaked skeletal grimness. “I’ve come to put an end to this,” Alucard says, to which Death responds, “You shall regret those words,” before stripping Alucard of all his artifacts, laughing a chilling laugh, and vanishing with an ominous warning, “We shall meet again.” This leaves Alucard effectively newborn and defenseless at the very start of the game until he powers himself up by collecting his stolen artifacts strewn all over the castle, around which point he crosses paths with Death again and stomps him good. But Death is never truly defeated. He returns again and again with each subsequent game, all while some valiant new hero goes dashing Deathward, which I'm sure symbolizes some profound thing that I haven't quite figured out just yet, but maybe I will stumble across it by writing this journal entry? Don't count on it.

This journal entry is not actually about Castlevania, however, it’s mostly about Death, and also White Noise by Don DeLillo, which is a novel that has been marinating in my mind ever since I finished reading it about two weeks ago. The book was first published in 1985 and is considered one of DeLillo’s best works, although this is the first novel I've read by him, so I don't really have much to compare it to. I got interested in DeLillo after seeing his name come up time and time again in reference to authors similar to David Foster Wallace, and I figured the best place to start was with DeLillo’s most popular novel, White Noise. I quickly found that the only similarity between DeLillo and Wallace is the fact that they write about similar subject matter, that being the subtle perils of modern life, ruminations on mindless entertainment and vacuous celebrity worship and the numerous distractions we all willingly engage in, both authors trying to tease out why it all feels so empty and gross. DeLillo, however, is a much more mature writer than Wallace. Reading DeLillo, one gets the impression that he has nothing to prove to anyone, even himself. He uses short, simple sentences. He doesn’t mess around with complex runaway paragraphs. He doesn’t overuse semicolons or em dashes or footnotes or whatever to make some kind of literary point. He has things to say and thoughts to express, and he does these things in a very to-the-point manner. There’s no fluff, no pointless wordplay. Every sentence, every word, every punctuation mark feels like it has a purpose. You never get the impression that DeLillo is doing the whole literary “Look Dad, no hands” thing, and because of this, his writing is very easy to digest, and not in a vacuous, unmemorable way either, because despite all his stylistic simplicity, the writing is still somehow multi-layered, full of double meanings and triple meanings that, considering how simple some of the stuff he writes is, kind of makes your head spin in a sort of “How the fuck is he doing this?” sort of way. Basically, if you can’t tell, I really like Don DeLillo’s style. I think he’s a brilliant writer.

And White Noise is a brilliant book that I would recommend to anyone. It’s a fast read, like 300 pages, and I read it in a few days on account of how engrossing it is. The dialogue in particular is fascinating in this darkly humorous way, and it’s written in the first-person perspective, which is my favorite perspective, so make of that what you will. The story is told from the point of view of a university professor specializing in “Hitler Studies” who is so afraid of Death that he comes up with all sorts of absurd plots and intellectualizations to hand-wave it away, all while being constantly thrown into situations that exacerbate his fear of Death, which results in a constant stream of humorous situations, like in the second act when this toxic-chemical tanker crashes, resulting in a billowing cloud of poisonous gas ominously hanging over the main character’s town, which, if I were to analyze, is a potent metaphor for Death’s looming influence over our lives. The novel also covers themes like rampant consumerism, family dynamics, and academic pretentiousness, all filtered through a sort of dark-comedy lens, which has resulted in many critics hailing the book as a quote-unquote “postmodern masterpiece of our age,” and I use the tag “postmodern” here kind of flippantly because I don't actually know what the fuck that means, and I don’t think Don DeLillo knows what it means either because he basically said something like “Postmodern? I don’t know what the fuck that means” in an old interview from 2010, which he later clarified by saying, “I think of postmodernism in terms of literature as part of a self-referring kind of art, people attach a label to writers or filmmakers or painters to be able some years in the future to declare that the movement is dead,” which illustrates that maybe Don DeLillo himself also has a preoccupation with Death, so perhaps there’s something autobiographical going on here too.

So, basically, White Noise is about Death, among other things. I had originally planned to write about the novel immediately after finishing it, but I kept putting it off because, well, surprise surprise, I guess I don't really like thinking about Death too much. In fact, I rarely ever think about Death, but the same cannot be said for the two main characters of White Noise, Jack and Babette, who are deathly afraid of Death and literally think about it all the time, and they have pretty logically convincing fears, too, considering Death is literally all around us just waiting to swoop in and take us away to the Mysterious Otherside, like you could step on a pebble the wrong way causing you to fall and bonk your head and that’s it you’re dead, or you could be watching your favorite television program while eating grapes and then all of a sudden a grape goes down the wrong tube and cough cough you’re dead, or you could be sleeping and your heater starts malfunctioning thus putting out some sort of invisible odorless gas and you never wake up because you're fucking dead, or you could be on a walk on a nature trail or something and you somehow touch some innocuous-looking plant and you have some ultra-rare allergic reaction to it and suddenly you’re throwing up and then bye bye dead, or you could be walking downtown and some random thing just falls on your head and bam dead, or a plane could just crash into your home for example, or you could be crossing the road and some drunk dude just doesn’t stop at the light and all of a sudden your guts are all over the windshield and just like that you’re dead, or your body could just say NO and trigger a brain aneurysm and that's it see ya you’re dead, and so on. Neither the what, nor where, nor when, nor even the why is known to mortals. No one knows. It's almost so absurd that it's not even worth worrying about, at least that's how I view it, like if I could die at any time, in ways often outside of my own conscious control, why expend time and effort worrying about it? Why get worked up? Why ruin my day? And that’s why I don’t fear Death, because like what’s the point?

But after reading White Noise and upon reflection, it turns out I was wrong, I do fear Death. Maybe I don't consciously fear Death, but I certainly subconsciously fear Death, at least on some sort of deep biological level. After reading White Noise, I started analyzing my habits, my daily routines, things like that, and came to the realization that maybe everything I do is actually motivated by some latent fear of Death, like Death is this terrifying primordial silence just lingering there in the background of things, always influencing literally everything I do, and I hadn’t even realized it until just recently. I started thinking that maybe even the stuff I do that seems so far removed from fear-of-Death, like reading and writing and playing video games, is actually just a subconscious distraction from the ever-present biological fear of Death. Maybe all the bullshit I do to keep myself occupied actually functions as a sort of white noise to drown out the silence of Death. This idea was new to me, and it spooked me a little bit. I didn’t understand it, but I wanted to. So I went on a quest to understand it, which involved the writing of this journal entry, and this quest led me to the soft conclusion that it’s likely very possible that everything we do is actually some sort of Death Avoidance Behavior.

There's obvious Death Avoidance Behaviors, like eating so that we don't starve, drinking so that we don't dehydrate, finding shelter so that we don't die of exposure, avoiding vicious animals so that we don't get mauled, forming communities so that we can help each other survive, establishing rules so that we don't take advantage of or kill each other, and so on, which, in the modern world, manifests as things like working shitty jobs so that we can buy food and afford a place to live, buying cars so that we can travel to all the places that supply various life-sustaining things, wearing clothes or whatever, obeying laws so that we don't end up getting murdered in jail or whatever, brushing our teeth and taking showers and whatnot, getting married and having children so that we can form our own close-knit communities so that we can have life-sustaining support systems, and so on, which is all very obvious stuff. But then there’s the less obvious stuff, like watching television or reading a book or playing a video game or writing a journal entry or painting a sunset or performing in a play or dancing on Saturdays or playing tennis or whatever, all so that we don’t quite literally bore ourselves to Death because, I suspect, if we just sit on our asses all day doing literally nothing, we’ll start thinking a little too much about our own mortality and thus the fear of Death will start creeping in. Maybe boredom is actually a latent fear of Death, our bodies telling us that we better getting moving because one day we will just up and die. Death is always there, in the background. So we distract ourselves. We turn on the white noise. Otherwise, we become depressed, despondent, miserable, all those dark adjectives that only serve to bring us Deathward, be it through suicide or self-neglect or whatever. What I’m trying to say is, it seems like everything we do is some sort of Death Avoidance Behavior, even the stupid behavior that seems counterintuitive to staying alive, like overeating food packed with high-fructose corn syrup or binge drinking alcohol or vegging out in front of a screen for hours or injecting heroin into our veins, these things serve as sort of Misguided Death Avoidance Behaviors, because even though this behavior is harmful, potentially bringing us closer to Death, they make us feel good in the short term by doing a really good job of drowning out the silence of Death, even if only temporarily, which becomes extra complicated when addiction comes into play, creating a sort of paradoxical Death trap wherein by trying to avoid the fear of Death you are actually hastening your own Death, or something like that, which only serves to show how cruel biology can be sometimes, tricking us Deathward. And we do these good and bad things, obviously, because Death just keeps showing up in each subsequent Castlevania game, he just doesn't go away, he is an ever-present force. Death is a hard-coded fact of life, and coming face to face with this is just downright unpleasant.

At first, this all struck me as very grim and depressing, but after finishing White Noise and ruminating on it a little bit, my perspective changed.

In White Noise, there’s this drug that basically eliminates the fear of Death. The main character becomes obsessed with this drug and comes up with all sorts of plots and schemes to get their hands on it, eventually leading them to the creator of the no-fear-of-Death drug. The creator of the drug turns out to be a man living in a cheap motel room. And from the very first scene with this man, we can tell that he’s obviously addicted to the no-fear-of-Death drug. He has eliminated the fear, drowned out the silence, conquered Death. He’s sitting in an uncomfortable metal chair in the middle of the room, no lights on, surrounded by broken bottles and candy bar wrappers and flies and stuff, just staring up into this little television set mounted in the corner of the room, mumbling to himself. He has clearly not bathed or groomed himself in months. He’s just wasting away, dying pretty much. He is no longer living life. He is just there, existing, doing pretty much nothing. The text makes it clear that this man is a sad, pathetic excuse for a man, a hollow shell, a ghost almost, someone who is both alive and dead simultaneously.

But he doesn’t care, why would he? He has no fear of Death.