death iii

death subverts life not by being opposed to life but by becoming life’s shameful necessity.

i do not write with words, but death.  words are just the result of such writing, like spray from the water when a body falls into it.

to translate the dislocation of existence, the chaos of light, our center without gravity, the collapse of time into colour, the precision of imprecision, oneiric exactness, a drawing into nothing through light, to provide memorable views of nothing, evanescent, airy and tinted steam, to make atmosphere a style and indistinctness a method, to transfer polydimensional sensuous form to adimensional planes of words … all this requires continuous and continuously inconclusive negotiations with death.

science is the primarily reproducible textures we spread on death to allay our unsettling relations with it.  i remotely admire the reliability of science’s textures, but use old words to detour around the microscopic admiration, thereby unsettling myself into death.

i was never enamoured of life, but of the devouring that made life tumescent.  disillusioned of the devouring, tired of the great expressions that beautifully show the devouring, i begin to comfortably dwell in the ancient spaces of silence and solitude – these deaths within life that hide in the heart of eating.  does life inevitably seep in?  perhaps, but as into a sieve, for if i am a dwelling for death i am one with many holes.

to live in possibility is to live in death – initially ecstatic, as one blurs oneself on borders between actuality and dream – this ecstasy of eros – and then what seems to be a deep melancholy develops (seemingly replacing the ecstasy yet becoming apparent as another form), as one blurs oneself on borders between sensuousness and death – this ecstasy of thanatos.  and so this living is religious – the unchanging religious life, far from institutional ravages, scholarly autopsies, and populist sentimentalities and launderings, rooted in a precognitive swooning before nothing less than the universe itself, a place of union of art and religion, of creation and awe, of desert and verdancy.

death’s face is absence.  in a culture of presence – of having, seeing, touching, of having to have … – death too must be made present.  technology is the factory that inputs the raw material of death’s absence and outputs (through converting, branding, marketing, shipping, retailing) death as presence.  to avoid this commercial output, a human itself enters into absence, a challenging but not impossible journey, for which there are indirect guides and maps in certain books of past travelers (although the risks and pathways now, in technology, being so recent, are poorly attested, and present sojourners, whether successful or not (and who would even use in this context the word success?), i encourage to write travelogues, such as i am doing, regardless of how partial and flawed they might be, in the hope that the combined experiences might aid in the continuing project of updating the guides and maps of absence in ever-shifting landscapes and ever-altering modes of the production of death in life’s grim, drugged, and regulated factories.

to seek the desert in the city of oneself is to forge a shovel from the junk of one’s soul and dig up death and in the digging see visions of a shroud of communication, and so doubt all things.

to seek the desert in the city is to kill.  what does one kill?  illusions of finding lay slain like soldiers in trench warfare, some though flayed still gasping.

to seek the desert is not of those activities that merit grant applications, book or film contracts, sex club clubbing, monastic vowing, vowing, the attention of the doctored class, beliefs.  at most it grants eyes and fills them with sand.

to see death in all things is not teleological, macabre, pessimistic, gross; it is just poetic vision – as natural as rice or lightning, as strange as television.  to see oneself comprised of death is not suicidal, sick, hateful, misguided; it is just aesthetic mirroring – as clear as avocados or oceans, as cloudy as highways.