when i died
first i don’t remember …
once one
detects monism and begins dismantling it one experiences it everywhere (this
splintered monism, this new
secular religion: the yahweh-christ in
disguise – multipally: as cyborg,
victim, scholar, social media junkie, justice ngo guru, feminist, techno,
eco-spiritualist, healer …), and
cannot stop dismantling. this process is
death. and then a one does not appear
and this is not the one but one.
the root of
the human is the inhuman and the process of entering this root to become human
is what we call death.
to encounter
the human by matching nature with nature – this is a death of which we speak.
just as
there is no closure in love (regardless of its state and direction), so there
is no closure in death.
death is
only a simulation of emptiness.
death is the
gap between desire and no-desire, these infinite gradations in which we live.
one of death
is given to and rather than or, an and that includes many or’s,
even as one authentically given to yes
is one given to a yes of infinite no’s.
soft death, like art or bread, you do not
forgive our clumsy love, our confused aloofness, our fated cruelty, you do not
forgive. you do not forget, for memory
is hard and apportioned to life.
my life is established as a chair from which to
watch my death unfold. i do not waste it
on side ventures, on frivolous things, on the pursuit of accumulations or to be
watched. i watch.
death, my true name which cannot be named
for, like death, it hides, in my brain
what i call consciousness, game
of chance and light – inane
but pointed, the same
as love’s blood’s stain?
all the same
the pain
…
the historic
objects of mysticism – those perceptions that facilitated justification of
death: whatever linguistic-spiritual concatenation
of god, holiness or purification, charity might have been involved – having
now, along with objects (through their spectacular proliferation) died, place
mysticism with no possibilities of human or self improvement, no sainthood of
anything recognizable, no allegiances or alliances, no institutional
affiliations however strained. it
arrives, empty, at time’s dirty threshold, still housed in horny flesh, still
yearning, still hardly of this world, its not-knowing and suffering odd
antidotes or absurdities to the edifices of knowledge and wellness,
questioning, empty, objectless and aimless, subjectless, godless, dirty,
looking, still looking, but with perception shattered, bereft even of
bereftness, lacking any justification, perhaps in all this absence with
opportunities to become more itself.
methods of
exile and death in the technological age for those disinclined to participate
in the dominant and present forms of life (liberally pervasive now across all
sectors, from business to art to politics to humanitarianism to ecology to
spirituality and psychology to education to law and justice to science and
technology) include not only withdrawal from progress, monism, societal
devouring, but also humanism and anthropocentrism. the primary tenets of today’s religion,
craftily having rebranded itself secular,
are as monolithically and inquisitorially voracious, ruthless, intolerant,
dogmatic, and enforced as the primary tenets of past religions, and so one who
is non-conformist will likely experience death, but according to the forms of this religion, which finds blood
distasteful and death impossible and martyrdom repugnant, and so exile and
death and martyrdom are simulated, offset, emigrated from physicality to emotionality,
from visibility to virtuality, and the one so disinclined (who refuses to
climb) likewise uses simulated means to withdraw, to die.
geometrically,
simulations of death can be negotiated as moving forward by turning back,
mathematically as adding by subtracting, communicationally as speaking by using
no words, politically as acting by not-acting, emotionally as loving by
not-loving, existentially as living by dying.
