death i

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.

darkness

darkness and homelessness are siblings in time’s dysfunctional family.  in a present odd reunion – a poorly attended affair that’s rented my flesh for its drugged party – i find solace in darkness, i sleep in the cardboard box of my blood; familial lineages glide before me in runny colours and difficult flatulences.

the realms of visible politics – identity, sex, gender, ethnicity – are the shibuya of the human psyche … but the realms of invisible politics – sanity, eloquence, blood, beauty, virtue – are the pissed slums of neglected urbanscapes.  the latter are my home; daily i uncoil my diseased prick and whiz on the future.  melancholic jötunn suck me off with their gums and we collapse into night’s putrescent kingdoms.

i wake up daily in a bed of death

i say to the shadow called day –

i will crawl into you

i will make you my companion

we will play together as if we were friends.

but i long for the prayers of dreams

i lust though for the shadow of sleep

death is my lover, the grave my mentor

day – night’s useful mask, void’s awkward other

evening waits like a warm and dirty bath

how beautiful when darkness draws us into her

that dread of this ever-present waking

darkness is not an absence of light, but is polar to and interacting with light; light is the simplest most undivided, homogenous being we know … confronting it is darkness:  infinitely plural, divisive … and so infinitely creative.  colours – shadow and the children of shade – are light itself.  colour is born of and feeds on darkness.

darkness evolves environmentally:  as humans migrate into contexts of perpetual light, so darkness – our deepest need – is constructed and accessed in novel and fabricated ways by these emerging creatures of light.  the materials, maps, hazards, portals, labyrinths, signage, risk management practices and false exits of these fresh routes – the comparison of these to those of the worn ones – all this giving new life to darkness … or rather to humans in their cravings for infinite relations.

at light’s highest point on its ladder, the darkness of things presents itself to me as the simmering surfaces of light.  but at the apex of darkness on itself, how do i see light?  as the animation of darkness?  a misspelling?  as the remnant that questions, dark’s tongue?  a hope that subverts even hope?

any authentic notion of divinity – or at least that of the human unhinged from its overwhelming greeds and incarcerating self-reflections, and so the human not itself – must include that which is oriented to seeing in darkness, regardless of whether it can speak.  divinity is independent of language, and any future notion of the writer, of the book, might place vision – not word – at the center of its dark art.

do i wait for day or do i wait for night?  my orientation to this question determines my comfort with society.

knowledge, while it may be acquainted with day – most certainly an esteemed and professional colleague at times, on occasion a spouse – is night’s lover.

if we were to compare the conversations of night with the conversations of day, with humans being novel to us, would we not conclude we were dealing with two separate species?  so darkness is a language, and who would give themselves to its mastery? and how can it be taught but in unaccredited and disavowed classrooms?

are not the translation arts between the languages of light and the languages of darkness more of darkness, for they are rooted in obscure soils and hardly seed or flower?

to say we are born of darkness and return to darkness neglects that we never leave – we are simply given briefly eyes to see it.