death viii

doesn’t death provide perspectives farther than asteroids and stars, nearer than super-resolved fluorescence microscopy?  isn’t it the constant immaterial material counterbalance to the human drives to build visible projections, now too vast and complex to be seen and so analyzed in fragments?  and i wonder of the reputed cleverness of the human, for it seems too often foolish to me, and to innovate without first knowing death a great imbecility no animal or god would ever do.

death dissolves hierarchical power, but can only do so through time – its chief limitation.  to overcome this limitation and yet retain death’s dissolving merits, the abolition of hierarchy and the strange equality of all things, i enter death alongside time – in art and consciousness, these alternate dimensions – and though, naturally, another limitation presents itself, the experiment i feel is worthy, and i invite others to join me and various similar experimenters housed in human form to don new forms of death – these sartorial laboratories without corporate or government sponsorship and so a new science, a physics of dream – and thus play with what otherwise appear to be sacred modes of being, these reified and ossified existences most blindly prostrate before with their very lives, and by playing see and by seeing transform.  so death is a poorly used tool and its apprenticeships and crafts hardly documented or understood.

to live a life of the imagination – of art, of creation, of possibility – without much interest in the immense and growing apparati of structures in politics, culture, knowledge, commerce, and science that dominate society is to live a life of death:  partly from the methods one must learn to use (methods borrowed from death) to circumvent society’s force, designed (inadvertently or not) to crush those who live such ways; partly because to live in such singular proximity to creation is inevitably to live likewise in singular proximity to destruction.  this relation has long been well reflected in the religious mythoi of the world’s cultures and, now, with the religious carpet pulled away, we take this mythoi into ourselves, become it.  we are shiva and orpheus, aeneas and yahweh.  let society spout wellness while it slaughters ten thousand kilometers from home; let the privileged ones argue against privilege and the diversity mongers hawk their packaged diversities … those whose home is the imagination are themselves their own abattoir and wet nurse, womb and war.

that this life given me has become a life of death – is this becoming not a co-creation between society and me:  the death in each co-creator joining to birth a new life of death?  so do not say i am responsible for the death i live.  you, you equally, live this death with me and share the birthing of its life.

i have never been better – primarily because i have never been less sure of what better does not mean.  the gap in this statement – between the first never been and the only less sure, between the first and second betters, between the possibilities of a superlative – is death.

it is true. it has come to this. and this is not unwelcome.  after all these experiences, all these humans who almost seem as one in their endless greediness, the collapse of i into distributed horror with all remittance technicized, the only thing that sustains my interest is death.  not others’ particularly, not mine especially.  but death as a mode of existence.  loss, diminishment, withdrawal.

when going one way means life and another means death, a third will be comrades of life, a third comrades of death, and there are those who value life and as a result move into the realm of death and these also are a third.  why is this?  because they set too much store by life.

i have heard it said that one who excels in safeguarding its own life does not meet with plane or car crashes when travelling, nor is it touched by disease when moving through society.  there is nowhere for the plane to crash, there is nothing for the car to hit, there is no place for the disease to lodge.  why is this?  because for one who safeguards there is no realm of death.

so when a word is spoken, it dies, and so when death is lived, it goes into the grave.

at some point – the city teaches me this – i had to say:  everyone i respect … these mumbling ones … feels (so knows in their body : that knowledge) the human to be unsustainable and, so, knowing themselves to be ostensibly human, knowing the voids between this knowledge and this knowledge, stops.  this stopping is the madness and the sound, a step in a return, a protest hardly recognized in its avoiding voice, its decreation of form, its refusal of tears, its suspicion of love, its silent anger.

desolation over depression, for desolation experiences depression, as despair or death, as just another empty flower.  desolation is the soil in which sensations grow.  become desolate, and one’s garden will be vital and varied, with no care at all, but for the care of maintaining desolation … a great care.