death vii

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

death iv

living a life of death can include eremiticism, primary destruction (regardless of the direction of the destruction and degree of laundering), obsessive morbidities, unthinking citizenship, and many other forms of simulation.  these are the traditional and primitive forms and they interest us far less than the living death of the future, which includes moving from life to life within life to such an extent that the moving, never stopping, becomes death, and so one lives more in the moving, death, the between, than any supposed origin or destination – these false atlantises:  too solid dreams.  yet death, being always unknown, escapes us and so living in escape – from solidity of fact, idea, person, work, direction, dream – is to live lives of verdant death.

so cain was exiled to nod, the land of wandering, after the first death, and there built the first city, and all who live in death live in nod.

if one is given to being committed to no path – hardly one who is aimless and given to regret – and given sufficient opportunity to move among paths to discover that this noncommittal commitment is itself a path, this one has emigrated to the death that lives in life and the life that dies in death.  this no-path path distinguishes itself from other paths in that one has lived it and then discovers oneself on it, in death.

one does not die for one is dying all the time; as a corollary, one does not live, as far as life is normally defined, for one is too busy dying.

i write my death as i write my life, my death is written as my life.  autothanatography and autobiography, wholly embedded in one another, as they are written, create my flesh and eyes.

(elsewhere, a colleague in the industry of sadoo has been exploring new forms of autobiography and is soon to direct this energy and innovation toward new forms of autothanatography.  those interested in creatively and diversely writing their deaths – or simply engaged with the idea of this emerging practice – may wish to seek out that sadoo’s experiments in the ether.)

the void is my mother, death my father …

i write my death.  words open to the abyss.  how can i remember the first time death visited me and said i am life and you will write me, i will be your one and faithful lover?  

we make believe, but we also make disbelieve, and the free movement between the two is death.

violence – regardless of the degree to which it’s laundered through diffusion, institutions – frequently named love – and the naming enforced by the launderers, the priests of money and professions – calls forth violence – immediate, direct, dirty, unmediated by communication, education – and the former, the necessary moralists, call their clean violence good and the dirty violence bad, but from the perspective of death each is equal on the indifferent scale of time, and any hierarchy that might be applied collapses under the weight and the pressing of the calling forth.  so a human who might see these mutual violences as equal and wish to bypass them still cannot bypass violence, but must recreate it using the energies of death.  and is this not the function of art, and the love that is less frequently named, and a calling forth that speaks far from language’s endless abyss?

surely one of the great deaths is the embodied knowledge of how incompatible the good of one loved can be with the good of one’s self.

in the age of technology, we reflesh death.  aloof, clean, optional, with options, impossible, remotely omnipresent and omnipresently nowhere, sexy, urban, statistical, whatever, aesthetic, like cancer conquerable, easy, marketable, objectified, soft like soap, it has become unlike any death anyone has known.  so technology specializes in possibility, a kind of bastard poeticism.

the iliad and blood meridian, bookends to western culture, outline myriad ways to die.  but i, in the outline of my life, find myriad ways to die in life.  someone says, … multiple, shifting, self-contradictory identity in contrast to male ideologies.  but i am male and have died many times to know male as multiple and shifting and self-contradictory and i have died from these easy binaries and i die each day from the words you speak, that are spoken, from words …

to live without goals is to live in death and so destroy death as any kind of end.

de nerval died with his hat on.  hat is in death.

how many have been killed from hate.  hate is in death.

the billions burned and are burning and will burn.  heat is in death.

hunger, hunger, hunger