death ii

processes and techniques of death –

• hardly protest, argument, objection.  rather – using death as a tool of one’s self to continually eradicate what one thinks the self is.

• a chief art of death is anonymity, one that may be critical for the human to craftily use for its collective survival.  for does not a refusal to use names as root – an essence of anonymity – entail abdicating the supremacy of anything human … and this subversion, this unnaturalness which may be a simulated naturalness more central than technology’s simulations, an unparalleled energy (and this rather than a power) that evokes fear initially, for its vastness, its perceived darkness … and this collective entwining, this seemingly dissipating choice of setting alongside the hyena and termite and hydrant and hookah, an experiencing language for what it is and not some pretty tyranny, some gift of dead or living gods?

• i have always learned far more by not being myself than being myself.  first by not knowing myself sufficiently to not know i was not being myself.  subsequently by not knowing what a self was to an extent that i didn’t know what it was to not be or be myself.  in all cases – the learning, the first not knowing, and the subsequent not knowing – death at the center:  as technique, as question, as energy, as self and selves.

• as it takes a great deal of desire to desire to not-desire, so it takes a great deal of life to live in death.

• that we read the textures of life based on the parameters of death may be obvious, but that we read the textures of death – present to us in life as black glyphs on infinite seas of white – and in this other reading are commonly illiterate is hardly seen.

• a new form of death – a redirecting of death’s energies from their present primary outlets of war and love – would be if the majority of human communication were in art rather than functional, animalistic, or even capricious social discourse.

the human world, curved into itself, itself gravitation and objects, cooperation and enmity more ubiquitous than air, the city now the inescapable environment, objectives raised by the slough of groups and science fumbling enchantment’s ancient sphere, mysticism – being endlessly solitary, silent, of many environments equally (interiorally and exteriorally) but of any single one not at all – may be unable to survive in the present and coming urban and mass technology, it may be the only thing with the subversive skills to survive, or it may – as it has been – amble along, carrying quietly the torch of death through life, so that those who inexplicably find themselves cast from their accustomed environment may have help knowing the selfsame thread that winds through all – whether time, environments, technologies, names, cultures – without distinction. 

writing is easy.  what’s difficult is placing and maintaining one’s self in the spaces of death that make writing possible.

as once could happen with god and nature and no longer, so now one can enter consciousness to leave it, can enter thought to leave it, can enter passion to leave it – this leaving before force forces the leaving (what is colloquially known as death and what is technically a manner of death, a transition of a physical singularity into new forms) is an entering into death to life in certain modes.  so, too, perhaps, this can happen with technology and art and time.

death is the distance that enables life, the distance that is here, on the tram, in your wallet, smiling through a closet of masks, the void of words and the rave of solitude, the clickity-clack of time on the punctual and shiny rails of your brain.  death, like life or jesus or the future, is no friend, not friendly, but an environment, an ecology of turning and returning form.  death is neither darkness nor light, peace nor war, but a way that navigates all without mentioning any.  indifferent to creating names, this energy that trumps and fashions life, that assumes disguises like the sky, it flies, vast across the earth, atonal, lacking purpose, acquainted, limpid, hardly counted, nested, the architecture of galaxies and the technology of insects, enough.