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
