Death And The Writer
A creative writer must struggle with the eraser mark that is death or remain a fascimile of his writer's self.
“When an author enters into his own death, the writing begins.” Roland Barthes
My mother won’t read my poetry. She says it depresses her. She says that even when I write something cheery, it has the smell of death.
I take that as a compliment. I don’t even feel the need to explain myself but I will say a few things on the topic, to put it to bed.
A writer struggles not with the ordinary view of death - the stopping of the heart, the ending of electrical activity in the brain, our disappearance from the day in and day out of existence. No. A writer’s fight and battle is with the very embedded fact of death in the here and now. How death is necessary for life.
In a word, an artist struggles to find meaning, to center, to shine light on, to find peace with the fact of entropy. That all is born perfect but decays and drips into nothingness. A writer tries to communicate this invisible law that is evident in and the main actor inside all of us. We all are slowly fading into oblivion and we all are momentary blips of insignificance on time’s laughing face.
Our culture, our societies, need the writer to interpret the energy by which the 2nd law of thermodynamics takes all things by the hand, to their end. It is necessary to deal with this - so we don’t sleepwalk, so we become alive to life. This is the role of art, to awaken from the grip, however temporary, of entropy.
Old Hank says it well in his poem I produced. I hope you enjoy it. View the lyrics. Like him, like my beloved Hrabal, the sad King of Bohemia - we are sad men, even when we laugh and sing and drink and screw. Forgive me, - it’s part of being Naked and Alive, part of the job description.
Disposable Names
“All knowledge is calling things by their right names.” Kung-Fu Tze
I’m told the world is ending.
I see it in the eyes of the blind.
I hear it in the voice of celebrities.
You can smell it - this death.
We gather together like its
our last moment together
our anchors no longer holding
our paper boats in place.
Desperation is the norm and
we don’t even notice the fear porn
we dance and step to
as we chatter without listening.
It’s almost as if
our death cult has no
leader and we are waiting
for someone to tell us
to drink the kool-aid.
We no longer know what to call
this thing we live
and without a name
it has conquered us.
……………………………………………..
I found this in one of the few notebooks I have here in Korea with me. Something I wrote about death. Must have been at least 3 or 4 years back during my time swinging in the hammock, on top of my mountain in Nicaragua.
"The foundation, the fountain, the force and purpose of life is found in death. Death is life's taskmaker and soil.
Our body, our minds unceasingly seek out death despite our protests and imaginations. The body wastes away on the stem of a mind programmed by death. Our cells, every cell divides and produces death dust championing our own demise.
Each breath we take, we kill billions of microrganisms. Trillions of types of bacteria dance and dream us into being beyond our microscopes and machinations.
If you want to look for the answer of being -- look littler, look to the infinitesimal, look down not up. Down into death, that place deeper and deeper where death resides. Deep and deeper I say, not higher and higher to a clown god of everything and thus, nothing.
So, enfin, our life, our brief time here on this planet is to be a host of death. To cater to death's every whim and wish. We are death's dasein. We make death visible, beautifully visible and enlarged. Do not be afraid - death will use you in any and all cases.”
I don't know. I don't see death as an end to things, but a transition, a lifting of a veil, something to see through, not to rule or master us. This whole mortal world we seem to live in is "samsara," an illusion, a veil, a seeming, beautiful and brutal, and forever changing. A mystery. Not to solve, but to see beyond, or beneath, or into.