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
