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 ...
