death i

i am of the sects of hamartia and planē, these gods of the order of death.  i establish shrines for them in the houses of my words.  for to devote one’s life to wandering, to the mastery of masks and the supremacy of void, is to err in the institutions of life that enforce life as supreme, distinguishable, standard and plaque, as artifact and station, but in the open air of the dying sea, for those born of movement and theatre and night, it is to breathe.

in the world each hierarchy – even though a hierarchy of an i – is incessantly being questioned by all other hierarchies, a process of death pettily delayed in small measures of time by each hierarchy bolstering itself – this bolstering the hierarchies agree in calling life, an agreement more essential than the competitive bolstering.

a dreamer once said a coward dies a thousand deaths before its death but the valiant taste of death but once.  but i say a coward only dies once and the valiant die a thousand times.  for the valiant are not afraid of death and so die as a matter of routine, because they like it.  it seems to me most strange that humans, seeing that death, a necessary change, comes when it comes, don’t integrate such necessity into their daily lives, dying thousands of deaths and so creating what we now call death as just another one.

the key, they said, is to become so intimate with death that one can use death’s techniques against it.

but then isn’t life also subverted by means of that same intimacy?

a double subversion, they said, an experiment in the laboratory of the soul.

a key, though, without a door.

the only worthy key.

becoming posthumous – …

birth and death, being our passages, present themselves singly as the aporia of life.

death is everywhere but everywhere life is devoted to placing death in small boxes to suit its small purposes.  yet death is large and hardly confined to cemeteries and movies, coffins and dictionaries.  it rides trams through crowded urbanscapes, presides at policy task forces, seduces you in bars, lectures you in ecobiology.   death is not some once and final act, a silencing, but endless flowing. 

i write for the people of the void and so use the methods of the void and the language hardly a language of those people.

living as i have in decades of eros – which only became explicitly named such as we moved away, an inexorable migration into thanatos:  that distance, sensing initially … now i will have lived in both spheres fully, beginning as seems appropriate in eros and closing in thanatos – followed by a shaded dawning that this life of death contains no less energy than that life of life and so, as all the poets have known and written:  eros is as in thanatos as thanatos in eros:  we live dying as we dying live.