The Repeatedly Dying Russian Girl Pt. II
I first wrote about television’s new trope of Repeatedly Dying Russian Girl and her mythical reminder to prepare for a societal reset in the Fall 2019, months before we knew that an unsentimental, entropic, and morally ambiguous life-form would force the world into an unprecedented chaos. Now, in light of hundreds of thousands of human deaths and a death-threat to the system as we know it, Vasilisa is an even more timely guide. She reminds us that the only way out of the death loop that is our present society is through the wilderness. We have to go inside and meet our Baba Yaga and confront the things we need to let die.
But how do we do it?
An answer: by repeatedly dying ourselves.
Some years ago I found a meditation that guided me through a visualization of my own death; or rather, it brought me to the moment of pre-death, to a wise and peaceful state of acceptance, a sense of wrapping up a life well-lived. After enjoying some moments in my perfectly curated old age deathbed, usually surrounded by flowers and adoring friends, I could then ask this Dying Self, as the present, younger me “what is really important?” The question was always the same, and incredibly, the Dying Self always had a perfectly sage response. Over months and years of me repeating this meditation, she told me how to love, how to forge an inner strength, how to observe rather than be attached to my feelings, how to find meaning in every experience and feel it fully. Her voice was simultaneously mystical and lucid, ordering me to “Cultivate your own inner hum” or “Not walk around the world half healed.” Sometimes she spoke quite sternly, like when I complained about being overwhelmed by a mounting pile of tasks, Dying Self snapped, “Natalia, you must learn to concentrate your energy” which sounded both like a maternal nag and the purest distillation of essential wisdom. A friend I shared the practice with said her Dying Self straight up told her to quit social media for a year.
I’ve now fantasized about my moment of death exponentially more times than I’d ever imagined myself getting married, or giving a TED talk, or any other kind of “important day” people might daydream about. But I wouldn’t say that I’ve been daydreaming about killing myself. Unlike people who entertain suicidal tendencies, I’m not trying to escape from my existence, but to deliberately learn something by gently detaching from its form.
When I first started doing the Dying Self meditation, I imagined myself dressed in an eco-burial mushroom spore net, ready to fertilize the ground and rebirth as a tree. But in my countless iterations of the practice, I’ve experimented with other manifestations of the moment of death. Sometimes my body is sent off down a river in a canoe, and I get to reflect for the last time on the beauty and vastness of the sky. Other times I allow the death to come as a violent shock — a car accident, a gun shot — and still practice feeling the peace and the wisdom of my dying transformation, along with the fear and sudden grief. After a few months of the practice, I visualized my imagined self actually dying and leaving my body. She then reincarnated in my next mediation as a different being — a rock, a caterpillar, a cloud. Each version had her own perfect wisdom to offer for the then-present me. She says things like “no form is more real than another” and “everything wants to be used and appreciated, even if it has to wait 100 years” and “practice self-mothering” and “obeying your own time is the ultimate queerness.”
It’s so edifying, to die.
I wonder why the Repeatedly Dying Girls on TV are all Russian. My theory is that it’s less a nod to Vasilisa’s origin and more a reflection of the creators’ correct intuition that Post-Soviet Russians are the archetypal orphans — motherless, stateless, godless. In the book What Does It Mean to be Post-Soviet?, Madina Tlotsanova writes that the collapse of the Soviet project left its people in a state of existential exhaustion, hopeless and futureless, with no illusion that there is another utopia to build in the ruins. “People deprived of any future, do not cherish their lives and therefore are easily manipulated and become potentially dangerous” (p.21). Post-soviets are prime subjects to become Deleuze & Guatarri’s “orphans, atheists, nomads” — rhizomatic beings dissociated from traditional norms and commitments— and perhaps stumble, in their aimless quest, onto a real path of liberation.
I pull at the threads between my own post-soviet experience and this internal tug towards repeating death, between my contrived TV trope of the “Repeatedly Dying Russian Girl” and Vasilisa’s journey. An ex-boyfriend says I over-interpret. I notice I’m doing it now, connecting these American shows, my childhood, my meditations, into a strained constellation. But then I think of Donna Haraway, her penchant for using theory to play Cat’s Cradle, making string figures and speculative fabulations out of unlikely associates. In Staying with the Trouble, she imagines future communities that call themselves “children of compost” — compost humans. I like that. I want this future. A future that lets me die. A future that faces death as resource for new life.
I’m afraid that in our present opening for a collective death and rebirth we will fail. The Soviet state fantasy did not die. It failed. Its future got cancelled. The OA, too, got cancelled, after two seasons, with so much unresolved — so many multidimensional parentheticals left open. The die-hard fans were outraged and even tried to organize a coordinated boycott of Netflix, but the executives did not budge. The meta-death is so much more of a mind-fuck than an actual one, just like in the shows. Here you’ve surrendered yourself to an experience that has promised to deliver a beautiful narrative illusion, a suspenseful engrossing drama, a conflict between right and wrong…. and you can’t even watch it spiral into something predictably disappointing. Instead, it gets meta-killed. Cancelled.
When something is cancelled it can’t be recycled. When something is cancelled, it keeps lurking there, like a weird ghost, trying to come back. “Don’t walk around the world half healed,” I hear my Dying Self’s voice. In that transmission, she told me: “A healed injury or trauma is a source of wisdom and strength. An unhealed one is an open wound, a living trigger.” Perhaps the Repeatedly Dying Russian Girl is a living trigger trying to heal itself, by letting die what must die. I die in my fantasy so that I can fully live in reality. Dying Self says, “There is such a powerful fire inside of you. You are a spirit of light, ageless, limitless, eternal. The body you wear is a human costume. Use it like the tool that it is to harness the energy within.” I listen, and meekly wrap my hand around the torch with the glowing skull.
