My god, being a companion of death, like all gods, twisted into transience, whispers its fantasies to me in the wormy glory of night. (What language does my god speak? English? Sanskrit? Godic? Silence? Brik? Only my god knows. I only know I understand.) One such recent fantasy suggested a perfect aesthetic-physical union, joining eros (art in its purity) and thanatos (flesh in its purity) on the social-historical stage. (My god excels at such metaphysical copulations, being my god.) The fantasy spectacularly consummated Jerusalem and Athens, time and eternity, in an orgy of calm and seasoned histrionics, the archetypal Artaudian[1] Théâtre de la Cruauté, the dream of every civilized human if humans were civilized, which they aren’t, civilization simply being to be in love with one’s god and, yet, when we look around, so many aren’t in love and this is the only thing to mourn.
The fantasy was this.
When I’m ready to die[2] I hold a great feast—13 grand courses, which I prepare myself, outrageously aged and expensive wines researched and paired for each course, the entire enterprise being decades envisioning, years planning, months executing, and weeks in kitchen chaos … indeed, we could say that my entire life would be devoted solely to its meticulous enactment. I invite 100 people to it: the 100 people who have been most important in my life—not determined primarily by recent influence, by time, but by the deep algorithms of the soul.
Five minutes into the feast and every five minutes thereafter one of the guests leaves: beginning with the least important to me of the 100, and so on, until only my four children remain. While I objected that the selection (and, most particularly, the order) would cause friction (both in myself and the guests), my god just shrugged—What, I heard, is fiction,[3] other than a seal on the desk of the divine?
The meal goes on through all of this: hours and hours and quaff and quaff while the driff and hours and droff depart and the quaff lingers like an opaque and circuitous joke. Then, finally, bliss and gorge united, at the end of the twelfth course, I kill myself in an innovative and comic way (my god leaves no detailed prescriptions as to method), my children prepare my body in a suitable manner and eat me as the thirteenth course. A fulfillment and parody of Christ, of Athens, London, a live parody play of the play and parody and life … and, so, art and religion, art and death, art and everything, everything and everything, are consummated.
My god! What impossible perfection! What seductive fantasy! What smooth and edible ends!
Yet, should you respond less than positively to this plan, should you be enticed and bubbly by the happy victuals but less so, quite less so, by the hierarchies and blood (yet were there not hierarchies and blood in so many of the courses, in the genealogies of wine?), might you be tempted to interpret your responses as a sign of your virtue? But might your temptation (like so many temptations) be a comfortable invitation into a cushioned corner in a closet of the mind, away from the searing bonfires of flesh? Might this not be a sign of our cultural pathos about pathos? Might it be cowardice wearing an expensive coat of intelligence?
Our funerals are pathetic, kinspeople in death! Funerals should be orgies of doors, searing portals of imagination, the raw truth of the body stuck between our teeth, vaudeville and leaping … they should go on for years.
We are a people who do not celebrate death; is this not because we fear, in the absence of God and the overweening presence of pharmaceuticals, the lack of any semblance of solid hope … that is, we fear ourselves, whom we must know, if we know at all, are hardly any avatars of dependability or certainty, but, if anything, vague gusts in a mottled and eternal dusk or dawn (we don’t know which or what!)? Death is what we are, kin-coffins and sockets of vision. Homo homo thanatoi. What pansies are we not to paint pirouetting colors on our verdant mortality, on that substance of substances, on our fear?
Perhaps we have swallowed—yet not adequately digested and shat out—the Christian god’s teleology and think (most perversely!) that we now live on the golden bricks that pave the path to Heaven or Oz (or Redmond … what does it matter?). Can we play a ruse on time (this our trust and gamble), using technology (that god’s firstborn son), encoding ourselves in worms and algorithms and satellites (where does it matter? it matters! everywhere!) so that we shall play endlessly—mirrors of math, morphing amoebas of art, encapsulated cold divinities—to the gasping stars?
Ah, my cool and cooling rationalists, who shall celebrate the sparkling doubt of molecules on the banquet table of their body? Who shall climb the ladder of the stars?
I have listened to a fantasy my god whispered to me in the wormy glory of night and when I am ready to die I will prepare a feast and invite 100 guests and be eaten by my children.
[1] See Dr. Foof β. Spätlese’s article, “Correspondences of Artaud, With a Notable Absence of References to B*********” in Non-Baudelairean Correspondences (LXII:18), in which Dr. Spätlese examines the dialectic of art and toad in Artaud and its relationship to a proposed Tanzanian literature on suffering intimated in Schulz’ The Street of Crocodiles.
[2] A certain indicator of our lack of civilization is that we don’t know when we’re ready to die, but think that we must cling to life with whatever savings plans and vials we can muster. The elder monk in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring is the noble and stark antithesis of our decadence: he knows his god—his body-spirit unity—and thus knows equally when his god is ready to seek a new home. What arrogance! What humility! What union of eyes! What evolutionary bliss!
[3] It’s true—I heard fiction … but what’s an ar or an or between heaven and earth?
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