Let’s talk about us for a second. And not us in the sense of our egos and personalities and opinions. Not us in the sense of ourselves and the mental constructions and narratives pertaining to those selves. But us in the physical. The biological. The us beneath our fleshy groomed exterior. The bones of us. The calcium dense structure and the skull at its head. The lifeless human-shaped reaper we all forget is there, propped up behind our eyes like some kind of inanimate stranger assigned to carry our lips through life. Let’s talk about the actual thing of us.

Take the human skull. Observe its resting pose; a smile. Peel away the muscles and the taught skin which pull down the cheeks and keep the eyebrows furrowed and you’re left with an ecstatic wide-eyed looking simper.

Baked into the bone, beneath us all, there exists this incredibly unchangeable ear to ear grin. Nothing metaphorical or conceptual, just a clear and tangible thing to glean. An unmistakable crescent shape bent Northward, umlauted by two stark sockets. An expression described not easily as, but only as, a smile.

There seems to be an important glow about the fact that once we're dead, buried deep in our little wooden sleeping bags, time works to slowly rip away everything except for our smile.

The skull is the last part of the human frame to entirely decompose, the face, if it ever fully does. In a Christian context, and of course, in many other cultural corners, the skull symbolises death. The black flag. The dreaded and inescapable path of nature. A physical symbol of universal impermanence that Monks would keep in their sleeping cells to act as a constant reminder of this bleak fact — sort of like the best alarm clock ever.

Across the ages, the skull has always been used as a warning, from pirates to poison. The symbol holds the power to repel humans instantly, intuitively. And yet, what is the skull but a smile in its rawest form?

For me, the smiling skull’s inherent juxtaposition is one of those weird life things in which you can’t help but think: I know there’s most-likely no meaning here, but this seems meaningful.

It’s like when you throw a piece of rubbish into a bin from a far distance without even aiming. There’s a moment of genuine wonder, Is God trying to tell me something? Is it me he hath bestowed with superhuman abilities?

But then you try again and miss and realise, No, no of course not.

Because although rational thinking is always abandoned in the pursuit of meaning, it can’t help but eventually return. And the smiling skull exemplifies this. I look at it, and I think, Here it is again, humour manifesting within every naked crevasse of reality. Only, this time, the crevasse just so happens to exist inside my own head.

Another dot connected, I guess. Something clicks. But what can I do about this realisation, other than say, “Huh, strange,” and continue on with my life?

The smile survives death. It is relatively eternal in this sense. And anything that claims to combat mortality is always flush with a certain level of meaning. The kind that people generally have a hard time shutting up about. Artwork, religion, sea-swimming. There’s a profound longing behind actions that embrace the random finality of death and yet still try to control it somewhat.

Smiling as something mortal fits into this category. Knowing you’re ultimately doomed and still saying “Morning, Bob” with a smile and wave. It’s beautiful and commendable. It’s wholly necessary. But it also beckons a mental double-take. Because with the skull, we see the morbid and the comical intertwined in a visible sense — A sense that takes the physical anatomy into account.

Consider the skull’s blatant smile and you confront the idea that humour does not derive from pain, but rather, humour is pain. There is no difference. No line can be drawn. There it is, look at it. We grow around our smile, protect it as best we can, and then finally, we rot away from it.

When we’re happy, we reveal the boney reality beneath. And in pain, we do the exact same. A smile. It’s all an offering of something true. An invitation to vulnerability. Even the feigned kinds hold vestiges of sincerity. Children learn to do it before they can talk. Sometimes, I swear I can even see my dog do it.

The smile on its own is inherently bestowed with meaning, and as a meta-conscious species, the need to decode it is hardwired into our grey matter for the sake of our survival.

It is the centre point of humanity’s social network.

When we’re young, we enjoy searching for subtle smiles around us; in our food, in the clouds, on cereal boxes, on our toys, in our company logos. We see teachers mark our exams with little smiles. We leave them at the end of texts to infer a meaning left unsaid. We yearn for what’s within us to be echoed in the outside world. This is life. The search for consciousness manifested in the external. Lovers, friends, careers, clothing. We need our surroundings to mirror back our souls so we can feel as though we belong, that our environment accepts us. We draw the sun with a smiley face. God. Life giver. Mystery. We instil things with a watchful reassurance when we supply them with smiles. Something that states, This thing is like me because it emotes like I do. The daylight is kind and loving for it smiles down upon me.

So why does this all change when the smile is paired with the skull? What is it about death being a kind of jest that freaks us all out? Well, of course, it’s mainly the inference of our own destruction. The skull is only visible after death and the smile is innately life-infused. It’s a contradiction. A juxtaposition. And from this contrast comes questions:

Is the smiling skull a mocking thing constructed by nature to remind us of human impermanence? Is it a lesson for us to look lightheartedly upon the reality of death? Is it a sign signifying that death is not the end? Is it basically just a block of fused calcite in some upturned bow-shape that we’ve come to call a smile?

There’s a right answer out there somewhere, and I’m afraid that, deep down, I know it.

But the question is: are we only imposing meaning onto something that ultimately has none? Is this always the question?

Well, we know the skull existed long before intellectualism. Our brains had to evolve to think abstractly about these kinds of topics. So maybe it’s a chicken or the egg situation. For instance, was there always meaning behind the skull’s smile, latent, waiting for our brains to catch up and realise it? Or, contrarily, was there never any meaning there at all. And is it only because we’re spiritual beings who have come to crave a higher reason for everything that we can’t help but see the skull’s mouth shape as symbolic?

We could oscillate in pretentious circles like this forever. It’s like trying to discern how much pasta to cook for yourself. It’s an ultimately unknowable concept. You’ll never get it exactly right, no matter how intensely you think about it.

There’s a battle for meaning here. Does the skull’s smile make sense in the evolutionary context? Absolutely. But why should that disallow a conscious design behind it too? A coffee mug is ever so rarely just a blank ceramic cylinder with a handle. It will have designs, colours, writings, images pasted onto it, and for no other reason than the manufacturer probably thought, You know what’d be cool, if this meant something too. So couldn’t it be the same for us? In a sense, couldn’t we all just be evolved coffee mugs finally noticing a connection between our boiling liquid and our birthmark reading 2 Hot 4 U!

So, what then? How do we extract something helpful from the paradoxical reality of the smiling skull?

Well, let’s consider it in relation to growing up. The irony. The less playful we become the more we search for extraordinary answers about the true nature of the universe. As a child, I always used my imagination to conjure fantastical worlds, provide answers, solve problems. I would bestow life to plastic human-shaped figurines in my hands, smiles printed across all of their faces. But so rarely did I ever turn this creativity inwards, on myself.

Of course, sometimes, I’d sit in the car window and imagine I was in a music video. I’d daydream about kissing that certain girl, constructing various solipsistic, X-rated narratives, always in the name of fun and wishful thinking, and never out of desperation, or because I felt existentially lost. But the maturing of oneself, the embarkment on a predominately serious life, it involves the seeking out of a more profound personal meaning. And i feel as though I have now become like the plastic toys I once played with. I experience my own life from the third person perspective more so than the first. I ask, Who is this character? What do they want? What will I have them do next? What would that mean? And much like the smiling skull, I admit, honestly, I’ve no fucking idea…

And perhaps this isn’t such a bad thing.

The spiritual thinker Alan Watts argues the Buddhist approach to the smiling skull, and states that if we accept there is no absolute meaning to uncover, then it’s entirely a matter of perception. After all, anxiety and laughter are the same phenomenon seen from two different points of view. We can have shudders of horror and shudders of delight, tears of grief and tears of joy. And yet it’s the exact same shudders and the same tears in either case, they just have a different meaning.

Life is a matter of oscillation and vibration the whole time and all the way through. And so the real question is, How are you going to interpret that? Will it be by trembling, or by laughing? Sometimes one is best, and sometimes it’s the other. It’s up to us to decide and respond.

In regards to these questions, Watts cites GK Chesterton’s poem:

Chattering finch and water-fly

Are not merrier than I;

Here among the flowers I lie

Laughing everlastingly.

No: I may not tell the best;

Surely, friends, I might have guessed

Death was but the good King's jest,

It was hid so carefully.

Suddenly, we see the skull shed its grim meaning and become something entirely comical. It seems like there exists a point at which pain becomes an experience without having a negative interpretation placed upon it. It transforms into ecstasy. It becomes simply enduring an extraordinary sensation which happens to bare no meaning. If you see death as a threat looming at the end of your life, the tearing apart and ultimate destruction of You, well then of course you see it as absolutely horrendous. But if it has no meaning at all, then it can become digestible, maybe even quite mysterious and interesting. And the smiling skull can mean everything and nothing at the same time.