death vii

a trick of those who combine intelligence, creativity, and an openness that resembles nothing is to – when presented with an orientation, concept, attitude, behaviour – accept the idea (orientation etc.) and simultaneously develop the idea’s opposite, its partially overlapping notions, and so on, with equanimity and equality, and through this process, when practiced regularly and so developed into a thorough discipline, such that it is embodied and has been applied to all significant aspects of thought and action, self and world re-present themselves as they are – though never directly, due to their vastness, and so their areness is nothing known in that way knowledge is now used – in their plurality, contradictoriness, offense, impossible unity.  this process, practice, this re- and representation, we could call death, for it refuses the privileges of articulate singularities, of sentient conglomerates, and lays the world-self naked and calm across the universe, almost adimensional, seemingly to the edges of the unknown margins of things

i record – how could i, who is so alive, not? – my deaths and how could i, so alive, not die endlessly?

emptiness is, precisely speaking, not emptiness – which is impossible, but a gradual and irrevocable commitment to relative withdrawal from human ascendancy.  i distance myself through relative anonymity, movement; i distance myself from religion and asceticism through art.  i distance myself from art through mysticism and eremeticism.  distance is death and by maintaining intimacy with distance, the far-near is embodied in a singularity and the experience of this embodiment – the way in which thoughts, emotions and behaviours are modified through non-committal to standard social forms and conventions – is the focus of meditation (not a particular practice but the marrow of a life) and the meditative process the subject and syntax of language

i watch myself dying and record the watching, focusing on recording with the engaged detachment i might feel in writing a commentary on a surrealistic or mystical movie – say andrei rublev, svankmajer’s alice or faust, woman in the dunes, sayat nova, persona, or satantango – i’m passionate about, knowing the passion arises in large measure due to the perfection with which the movie reveals the void-joy of existence.  i want, though with ambivalence, the writing to be drawn out, the dying to be as long as the living, combining with indistinction the love, hate, desire, and indifference i feel about any intimacy, action, idea, or feeling

i am going to be dead for a very long time and i’d like to devote my life to preparing for this

            my specialty – such as it is, for it ostensibly involves all specialties:  an impossible specialty – is the innovation and development of simulations of death, counterpoints to the otiose yet still overwhelmingly dominant and destructive dualisms of peace and war, brutality and sentimentality, life and death, master and worker, bourgeoisie and proletariat, success and failure, teacher and student

the finality of death, its singularity, is set against death’s overwhelming presence through absence – like god or consciousness, with whom death dines – as continuous and these two demarcations, fleshed by the infinite intervals between, are uncertain as to which is primarily of the imagination, which of the flesh, and so we live stretched between them; our body is the infinite intervals, our body the between

i am dead, i repeat over and over again, for months, and this saying is more living to me than saying anything like, i am alive.  it contains more freedom, more knowledge, more courage.  it permits me to wander along the infinite labyrinths of life, an unused and somewhat polished mirror

language, oh language, that which sustains and destroys me, betrays and befriends me, the far-near of technology and the bed’s abyss, thou on whom words wholly depend yet who never speaks, i hear that death is just another sound among your seemingly infinite seemings.  i do not ask you to confirm or deny this; i only utter in the manner of utterances to hear another hearing.  praise and curses.  glory and degradations.  silence and sounds.  amen