Juliet Ivy’s song “We’re all eating each other”
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood
– T S Elliot
There exists a special category of songs which sound very jolly, full of life, giving the impression of the light hearted joy, calmness, relaxation everyone desires; on close inspection you end up realizing that the lyrics of that same song is so dark that one would question the mindset in which the song was written and composed. These songs are the songs to which people would dance happily due to its music but the moment lyrics of this songs is opened for discussion you will end up questioning your existence. It feels ironic.
There are many songs to name which fall in this category, I stumbled upon one such song by Juliet Ivy called “We’re all eating each other” from her album playpen.
The song is written by Lucas Sim and Juliet Ivy Ortiz.
The great thing about this song is the way its melodies try to befriend you. It’s so simple yet effective and the song’s rhythm is not continuously varying which creates an impression of safe and calm space of familiarity.
What's the point of living without dying for an ego?
So we validate our fantasies to feel like we are special inside
You know we love to lie
I was literally shocked when I started digging into the lyrics. How could one simply state a brutal fact of life as if someone is asked to simply pass salt and pepper on dining table?
For me it creates an impression of life being so simple at its core yet we always choosing the complicated version to justify “our” way of life and “our” ways of truth. Juliet beautifully and very clearly puts this observation in few words of wisdom.
The life we are living, the identity we carry is all we have when everything is taken away from us. This identity is created and molded into a specific shape and size from the life experiences we have. They are mostly subjective and are created from inside. That is exactly why we are completely attached to our identity. This identity has two facets – the identity we truly know ourselves and the identity we project on people around us to show them who we are. Trust me both could be totally different. We are always trying to preserve our identity. This is what Juliet is calling the ego here.
In order to preserve our identity – our ego, we let go of the objective truths and accept certain illusions, fantasies. This is done to create a sense of security otherwise our mind would keep running everywhere in panic. We create some lies, ignore some painful truths to calm our mind down; no wonder they say ignorance is bliss.
The biggest lie is the lie we tell ourselves in the distorted visions we have of ourselves, blocking out some sections, enhancing others. What remains are not the cold facts of life, but how we perceive them. That’s really who we are.
– Kirk Douglas
We like grabbing onto anything to feel like we're important
Not a moment that is shorter than a hiccup or a blink of an eye
You know we're scared of time
Here Juliet shows how the limited span of life brings in the urgency to justify our existence so that we will be satisfied with the feeling that we are special. But we chose to ignore the fact that the ideologies, things that we are clinging to justify our special-ness also have limited lifespan just like the lives we are living. Even though we want to live for hundreds of years, on the grand scale of creation we are not even a blink – not even blink of the blink!
This is more than enough to leave all those false things which we are trying to justify our life, our special-ness with. The moment we let go of the feeling that we are something superior than anything in the world is the moment we lose the fear of not existing. The loss of this fear of not existing would make one eternal. We don’t want to lose the identity we created when we became conscious of our existence. That is why dying without getting any recognition, remembrance is a painful idea for all of us. But that remembrance, those memories will fade away. This should humble everyone.
The worst lies are the lies we tell ourselves. We live in denial of what we do, even what we think. We do this because we’re afraid.
We fear we will not find love, and when we find it we fear we’ll lose it. We fear that if we don’t have love, we will be unhappy.
– Richard Bach
But we're all gonna die
Decompose into daffodils and dandelions
The bees will use our flowers for whatever they like
Make the honey that our grand-kids will put inside their morning tea
It's the thing of life
We're all eating each other
The thing of life
Nobody lives forever
The thing of life
The urge to ‘consciously’ exist forever is the only lie we need to let go to become truly eternal, free. We are so attached to our so called “self-created identity” that we consider everything going against is as a potential threat to our existence – the existence which eventually will fade away into nothingness. It is way better to accept the finite-ness of life and be useful to each other rather than carrying that false sense of superiority, higher ego to justify our lies of life.
Juliet puts higher perspective to sooth our confusion of “conscious existence”. We are justifying our egos because we don’t want to die, we don’t want our identity to die, we don’t want our memories to die, we want to be remembered by people even when we are not existing in the world. The urge to preserve our conscious identity thereby our personality becomes the ultimate goal of life.
I am using ‘conscious’ word here to show that we are scared of losing the “I”, “Me” from our life because that is how we experience the life. We create the sense of existence from inside that is why sense of “I” is very important for our existence but if you closely observe the way things exist in the nature it is really difficult to pinpoint what makes that “I” – the “I”. Is it my brain? Or is it my body? is it my property? is it my super-car? is it my villa? is it my designation/ salary? is it my family? What exactly defines us?
You will get the answer once you accept that this thing that you have assigned your identity to – your existence to will not remain forever. When we say it will not remain forever it means that the combinations which created that existence. The existence would crumble down into nothingness.
Now here is an interesting part. We call the crumbles of nothingness “nothing” because they do not immediately affect, improve or help the existence we were trying to hold on to – our identity. We forget that it was the same set of some “nothings” which came together in a specific way to create “something” – this something became our existence.
Juliet beautifully brings in this perspective by saying that we will end up into flowers then into the honey that our future generation will put in their morning tea.
While we are trying to hold onto our special identity which is short lived, which would disappear in a blink we are forgetting the fact that the nothingness from which we were created is more eternal than the identity we are trying to maintain. This nothingness is the truth, its that something which is getting recycled all the time. On the other hand, we are in this constant battle to justify our falsely created, mortal identity.
We should understand that we are actually eternal but this false sense of ‘being’, this false sense of ‘conscious’ steals the real eternal existence.
We don't know how to accept we're just a product of a chance
And less like gods but more like plants
Who can't stop making up reasons we're alive
(We're alive, we're alive, we're alive)
You know we love to deny
(To deny, to deny, to deny)
Juliet is again waging war with our falsely created sense of “special”. We intentionally highlight the facts that justify our superiority and ignore the facts which actually show that we might be the result of few overlapped coincidences. Even if we have not come out of chances and coincidences our existence is not that grand in the whole scheme of existence. On the level of creation, we are as close to plants than the powers which created all of us.
So we paint our face with intellect
Pretending we're not curious
Too busy, super serious
Don't have the time to do what we like
(What we like, what we like, what we like)
Baby look at the sky
In spite of knowing that we are insignificant, knowing that the creation is way bigger than what we are trying to justify ourselves, we are always in the race to prove our superiority. Why does that happen? Why are we always trying to justify our superiority with some lies while we call ourselves the smartest species? Why ‘we’ the smartest ones fail to recognize the objective truths of the world when we know that there is not meaning to chase everything all at once? Why we are always trying to win the race and justify our worth with something?
The reason is that we think our existence is limited, our time of remaining conscious of our being is limited.
We very well know that we will die someday, that is exactly why we try to justify every moment of our conscious existence to something, some idea, some object which we call our job, duty, faith, passion. We don’t want to die with the regret that we have nothing that will remain forever after we die. We are so wound up in justifying the life, memories after our death that we have invested our present into the pursuit of lies which are creating the illusion of our specialty.
Our heads are so engrossed down into the pursuit to create that false identity of worth-ness that we are unable to look up and appreciate the beauty around us, the reality around us.
The urge to lookout for the meaning of life and then assigning that meaning to something so superficial will eventually end into the pain and regret of not enjoying the time we had to its fullest, the moments we had to fullest. We are always trading the real awareness of “present” to gain the illusive comfort of safe “future”. That is how we justify meaning.
The real meaning of life should come with the understanding that whatever it may come next, one will never attach the sense of being to something which amplifies ego. Ego too will perish in the flow of time. The rejection of ego comes when one lets go of their sense of identity being special.
'Cause we're all gonna die
Decompose into daffodils and dandelions
The bees will use our flowers for whatever they like
Make the honey that our grand-kids will put inside their morning tea
It's the thing of life
We're all just eating each other
The thing of life
Nobody lives forever
The thing of life
We're all just eating each other
The thing of life
Nobody lives forever
The thing of life
The rejection of ego will make you free, will show you what your real worth is. Even though you are not special – in the end, you are something of value when you synergize with others. Even though your conscious being is not eternal, the things which made your conscious being are eternal and that awareness should free you from all the urges to justify your identity, your specialty.
You are given a chance to experience the universe in the most sophisticated manner possible which many of the other species might not even have. What more could sooth your existential confusion! Once you realize that you are already made up of eternity, you will let go this mortal identity which you are always trying to preserve with some subjective perspective and lies. This is the real freedom and it requires innocence. Innocence is one of the basic indicators that the person has no ulterior motive to achieve something, it brings in the sense of acting on things without expecting anything in return. Please understand that innocence does not mean that the person should become a fool. Remaining innocent in spite of knowing everything is really hard, that is how you will know that you are not fooling yourselves. This song shows us that innocence.
Conclusion
Juliet Ivy very beautifully brings the sense of life that is made up of eternal creations and destructions. We attach the meaning of our lives, the purpose of our lives to certain things while realizing that they too will perish in the flow of time – this is what would unsettle even the dumbest person. This feeling is also experienced by the highest specimen of humans. In order to come out of this unsettling fear of unjustified – worthless living, we take support from our surrounding. We selectively choose certain aspects that will create an illusion of safety and comfort. Being social animals, we compare our lives with the lives of the others, we create our baselines and set our targets based on what others have achieved and done in their lives.
You know what? Even after achieving such goals which we defined based on our surrounding we are not happy. Even after those material victories, we see that the happiness is short lived. So, we shift our goals to something which is immaterial, something which is spiritual. Something which we think is more eternal than the material things. We make certain ideologies the meaning of our lives. Religion is one of such examples.
René Girard – a French philosopher coined the concept of Mimetic theory where he tries to answer how we decide what to do and why to do. Mimesis roughly means imitation, trying to resemble. When we are stuck with no information or loads of information in either cases, we will be overwhelmed. The best way to come out of such conditions would be to see what others are doing around you. We set our standards based on the baselines of our surroundings. We create lies to justify these baselines and goals we want to achieve. Our ego is thus created to ensure that we maintain the sanity in the times of clueless-ness. It will prioritize survival of body in materialistic races and survival of its own sense of existence its identity in the spiritual races. In the end, both victories will fade away. (That also should not mean that one should not engage in the pursuit of certain victories. It should imply that the non-eternal nature of everything should humble the person.)
The most important point to understand is the ways in which everything great (also everything worse) will be broken down to their most fundamental building blocks. The idea is to not get attached with what you created which got destroyed.
In our current times when the life expectancy is better than ever, when we have a better cover of social safety than ever, the primitive instinct of survival from natural predators has been replaced by the recently created – modern instinct of philosophical – ideological survival which is the ‘preservation of our identity’ – the idea of our own image. (Social media is the booster for such way of life. It is also how the mimesis is happening strongly.) Philosophical death seems more painful than actual death. That is why in certain cases people gather courage to do self-harm. The best way to come out of such mentality is to question the very thing which brought this philosophical death; I know it is difficult to pick on the injury which already is painful to bear. The idea to work in such confusions is to notice one important behavior every one of us maintains when we define our life. We always strive to amplify things which bring happiness and ignore things which bring sadness. We define our life selectively on such choices in spite of knowing that both hold same potential to realize in actual life. This desire to selectively attach to certain aspect brings pain in life.
The moment we accept that there is no end to the cycles of creation and destruction (of both good and bad) we will see that we are nothing but a recycled versions of everything that is there in the existence.
The realization of the actual death of our body should come with the awareness that you are returning to materials which made you.
The realization of the philosophical death of our being should come with the awareness that your idea of self, your consciousness was just created by your desires and after this philosophical death you are returning to the fundamental forces of what made them and thereby what made you. The endless possibilities for your becoming are opened in this point. This is the true eternal existence – to get broken down into the fundamental blocks of being and be recreated again.
Juliet Ivy said all this in one simple sentence “We’re all eating each other.”
The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.
― Carl Sagan
Parts Per Billion 