today was strange.
I read Chocolat for an hour, while it snowed out the library window and ended on a passage about death, which added to ruminating thoughts. While I am rarely preoccupied with death, today the subject was unshakeable from my mind.
and so, I sat in a class about just war theory, forced to think about the over 1 million non-combatants that have died as results of was in the past century. (maybe more?) and thinking about death. death. death. and the way I can't actually grasp it. death. and so many faces... the graceful old, the robbed youth, the innocent slaughtered, in Cambodia on the killing fields the bodies were dumped then this swamp-like ground flooded, but they lay there, just below the surface... sometimes a bit of cloth is sticking out from the wetland grass, and you don't know-- it could be disguising a full corpse, a bag of bones... they built a memorial, glass walls full of skulls. death. and we become so desensitized. it is so personal, terrifying, sad, sacred to the individual, but at the scale of war, we lose the humanity-- the hearts behind deaths. the loss. the overwhelming grief of Cambodians, Sudanese, Haitian, American, Iraqi families-- the survivors of death, the humanness of mothers who will mourn, of orphans who will weep, of fathers, parents-- who will wrestle with the goodness of God. and it turns over and over- the sacrifice of them for us, the sorrow into hatred, life for life, death for death...
: The faces... to some it comes as a grace, to others a terror, a waste, an injustice (so young), a loss. And more than death it is the unnameable, deeper than black darkness of loss, the separation from a being we were intimate with. It is the soul ebbing away from us to an unknown, unreachable destination more than the withering body, the decaying decency, senility's creeping thievery of the mind's daylight, the unseeable disease feasting on the body beneath the flesh even as all around life continues. Death, the inauguration of the reign of memory. And is faith an unwavering acceptance, to bow gracefully or is it a life-lust battle, flung against it. We envy those who can grasp its hand with contentment, with calendar pages stacked days full behind them. To die with dignity... is it cowardly to blink back tears, to mourn an ending, we perceive unfinished-- but death is finality.
This mystery. galaxy black velvet deep... but there are no words past dark, black, to describe the darkness my heart conjures, an impression somehow beyond, incomprehensible, because it is unexperienced-- an inexhaustible yawning lack of answer. And how do we cower at this death, but feel so free to vanquish "the other" and their families into loss, grieving. How do we mourn, bereft-- our sons and daughters of war, and not feel our conscience straying, fingers spread to clasp the mourning other. How do we shut our eyes to stare into the back of our eyelids less we see and comprehend the reflection of us, of them, in the eyes of each "other." ... Emily's friend died over spring break and she said, "I'll never get to encounter her "otherness" again, we'll never mingle, interact." The experience of her is gone (for now.)
Death is never singular, it evolves inside of us- searing pain, an eruption in the form of absence, void, stark bleaching negation. Memory is a cold, stone object-- it can not touch, can not be warmth or movement or encounter-- merely form and specter. Death begins a process, begins an altered living, changing.
Spirits... do they linger? Don't they whisper in the tall grass, in the rain, don't they coo, and sing, and laugh.... and chastise, warn, yell, weep. Memory, lingering impression, last mental ligaments of life, beyond death.
death. end. finality. the absence of presence, the startling screeching silence. screaming, wide open, empty silence. scorching, shell-shock silence.
faith. is it leaping into living? is it blushing, grasping, clinging, and is it shuddering, weeping, loving ligaments of living memory, are the unforgotten able to die?
death. is like tall unsighted trees bleached white by rain, birch trees maybe, unbending, reaching in unheard noise, echoing out sound-waves from the hearth of darkness, the center of some colossal hidden forrest.
I do not possess the spirit within me, I own no life to argue, grasp, yet... I would not complacently let it go... I am troubled by the unfulfilled pages, the mid-sentence stops of beautiful, strange, magnificent, odd, brothers and sisters. people who were. people who were and are not. faith... is it to trust the heart of Goodness, of Love, when the face looks like painful, colorless, monstrous loss?
death. What is darker, deeper than blackness, darkness, my mind can not reach there, life can not reach there, to the experience, but it is the survivors who know death, not the dead, who live. Yet... sky, space stretching outward, past starlights end, into infinite, eternal, lightless depth... back turned from the sun, into shadow, into wet damp chill emptiness of a cavern piercing to the center of our madre terra. full absorbing quiet, these thoughts swallowing my usual preoccupation with living. death, lighting the embers, cozing up to my internal fires, casting tricks of transparent people, opacity only developed by being living, "deep awake"... spirits in the streets, temporal, eternal.
