i am of the
sects of hamartia and planē, these gods of the order of death. i establish shrines for them in the houses of
my words. for to devote one’s life to
wandering, to the mastery of masks and the supremacy of void, is to err in the
institutions of life that enforce life as supreme, distinguishable, standard and
plaque, as artifact and station, but in the open air of the dying sea, for
those born of movement and theatre and night, it is to breathe.
in the world
each hierarchy – even though a hierarchy of an i – is incessantly being questioned by all other hierarchies, a
process of death pettily delayed in small measures of time by each hierarchy
bolstering itself – this bolstering the hierarchies agree in calling life, an
agreement more essential than the competitive bolstering.
a
dreamer once said a coward dies a thousand
deaths before its death but the valiant taste of death but once. but i say a coward only dies once and the
valiant die a thousand times. for the
valiant are not afraid of death and so die as a matter of routine, because they
like it. it seems to me most strange
that humans, seeing that death, a necessary change, comes when it comes, don’t
integrate such necessity into their daily lives, dying thousands of deaths and
so creating what we now call death as just another one.
the key, they said, is to become so
intimate with death that one can use death’s techniques against it.
but then isn’t life also
subverted by means of that same intimacy?
a double subversion, they said, an experiment in the laboratory of the soul.
a key, though, without a door.
the only worthy key.
becoming
posthumous – …
birth and
death, being our passages, present themselves singly as the aporia of life.
death is
everywhere but everywhere life is devoted to placing death in small boxes to
suit its small purposes. yet death is
large and hardly confined to cemeteries and movies, coffins and
dictionaries. it rides trams through
crowded urbanscapes, presides at policy task forces, seduces you in bars,
lectures you in ecobiology. death is
not some once and final act, a silencing, but endless flowing.
i write for
the people of the void and so use the methods of the void and the language
hardly a language of those people.
living as i
have in decades of eros – which only became explicitly named such as we moved
away, an inexorable migration into thanatos:
that distance, sensing initially … now
i will have lived in both spheres fully, beginning as seems appropriate in eros
and closing in thanatos – followed by a shaded dawning that this life of
death contains no less energy than that life of life and so, as all the poets
have known and written: eros is as in
thanatos as thanatos in eros: we live
dying as we dying live.
