death
subverts life not by being opposed to life but by becoming life’s shameful
necessity.
i do not
write with words, but death. words are
just the result of such writing, like spray from the water when a body falls
into it.
to translate
the dislocation of existence, the chaos of light, our center without gravity,
the collapse of time into colour, the precision of imprecision, oneiric
exactness, a drawing into nothing through light, to provide memorable views of
nothing, evanescent, airy and tinted steam, to make atmosphere a style and
indistinctness a method, to transfer polydimensional sensuous form to
adimensional planes of words … all this requires continuous and continuously
inconclusive negotiations with death.
science is
the primarily reproducible textures we spread on death to allay our unsettling
relations with it. i remotely admire the
reliability of science’s textures, but use old words to detour around the
microscopic admiration, thereby unsettling myself into death.
i was
never enamoured of life, but of the devouring that made life tumescent. disillusioned of the devouring, tired of the
great expressions that beautifully show the devouring, i begin to comfortably
dwell in the ancient spaces of silence and solitude – these deaths within life
that hide in the heart of eating. does
life inevitably seep in? perhaps, but as
into a sieve, for if i am a dwelling for death i am one with many holes.
to live in
possibility is to live in death – initially ecstatic, as one blurs oneself on
borders between actuality and dream – this ecstasy of eros – and then what
seems to be a deep melancholy develops (seemingly replacing the ecstasy yet
becoming apparent as another form), as one blurs oneself on borders between
sensuousness and death – this ecstasy of thanatos. and so this living is religious – the
unchanging religious life, far from institutional ravages, scholarly autopsies,
and populist sentimentalities and launderings, rooted in a precognitive
swooning before nothing less than the universe itself, a place of union of art
and religion, of creation and awe, of desert and verdancy.
death’s face
is absence. in a culture of presence –
of having, seeing, touching, of having to have … – death too must be made
present. technology is the factory that
inputs the raw material of death’s absence and outputs (through converting,
branding, marketing, shipping, retailing) death as presence. to avoid this commercial output, a human
itself enters into absence, a challenging but not impossible journey, for which
there are indirect guides and maps in certain books of past travelers (although
the risks and pathways now, in technology, being so recent, are poorly
attested, and present sojourners, whether successful or not (and who would even
use in this context the word success?),
i encourage to write travelogues, such as i am doing, regardless of how partial
and flawed they might be, in the hope that the combined experiences might aid
in the continuing project of updating the guides and maps of absence in
ever-shifting landscapes and ever-altering modes of the production of death in
life’s grim, drugged, and regulated factories.
to seek the
desert in the city of oneself is to forge a shovel from the junk of one’s soul
and dig up death and in the digging see visions of a shroud of communication,
and so doubt all things.
to seek the
desert in the city is to kill. what does
one kill? illusions of finding lay slain
like soldiers in trench warfare, some though flayed still gasping.
to seek the
desert is not of those activities that merit grant applications, book or film
contracts, sex club clubbing, monastic vowing, vowing, the attention of the
doctored class, beliefs. at most it
grants eyes and fills them with sand.
to see death
in all things is not teleological, macabre, pessimistic, gross; it is just
poetic vision – as natural as rice or lightning, as strange as television. to see oneself comprised of death is not
suicidal, sick, hateful, misguided; it is just aesthetic mirroring – as clear
as avocados or oceans, as cloudy as highways.
