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.
