autothanatography as practice i

long ago i realized i do not wish to think the way you think.  death is the only successful method i’ve found that provides a sufficient alternative, a kind of natural translation service into ways and structures of thought i admire.  the only method sufficiently radical, outside, playful, crafty – the one ruse life, regardless of its talents or powers, recoils from.  i crawl into death to destroy my thinking and allow death to think me.   i look at the way you think, live, write – only a few of you impress me.  all trying to follow each other.  each saying i’m in charge.  each building your life on a desperation to be recognized by a circus of the same.  you still operate according to life’s barbaric lawbook – its stultifying and petty rules which through fear and convention officially exclude death and in such ostensible exclusion diminish life.  only death is free.  only death is kind.  after years of apprenticeship – which have meant increasing self-exile from your congratulatory and cannibalistic systems – i maintain my flesh by giving everything else of me to death and so – in this sleight-of-hand that has learned from death and simulates it in that labyrinth of mirrors … that only environment death itself cannot enter other than in the briefest of moments (but this continuously):  animate flesh – survive by eavesdropping on the silences of death’s continuous and sometimes noisy transience.  i have changed citizenship.  i am of the republic of death, this world without visas or rules.  i wander among you.  i watch your antics and hear your proclamations.  you humans too scared to use the one distinctive gift of your species, your only and last gift, the one true fire, instead thinking you can depend on yourselves.  no wonder i avoid you though for the time being share your visible form – a disguise i’ve realized, a trite and amusing wardrobe.

if i am dead in the republic of the living, i can do anything but have no desire to – it is this gap – between infinity and nothing – a gap that is itself infinite, nothing, intimate, strange – that provides the most modest and efficient of energies.  recording my struggle with how to identify, harness, apply, and dispose of this energy becomes my citizenship in death, what i call an autothanatographical practice.

i seek the interstices where life and death sit down together at an unnamed table, where life’s laws and death’s disability are temporarily forgotten, and the two have become so indistinguishable that they hardly have to seek one another or define their separateness.  of course i can’t maintain such states.  i am yanked back into the prisons of life and forced into various humiliations called civilization or responsibility, the floor opens and i slip into oceans of death and have to fend off the cold, the gravity, the untaxomizable beasts, until i voluntarily accept humiliation again.  nevertheless, i seek.  and even now i find that the ocean is in the humiliations, the prison in the grave abyss, a different union of the two, a different temporary forgetting.

buddhism with its sunyata offers no more peace than daoism with its dao, christianity with its christ, judaism with its book and law, hinduism with its moksha, art with its play, business with its productivity, philosophy with its analytics, prophecy with its rage, silence with its eyes. 

i do not seek peace for peace is as illusory as justice, love, community.  they all exist, but as moments, moods, ideas, desires.  i seek death and seek it in all things, and find it – for it is always there.  most of all i seek death in myself, for, here, it is doubly at hand.  death, despite the claims of the living, offers no rest or peace to the living – for death’s oblivion obliterates all feeling.  death may be peaceful, but offers no peace; it may be kind, but offers no kindness.  it may be free, but offers no freedom.

more autothanatographical thoughts

some sunny day,

don't know where, don't know when ...