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The body of my opinion is sometimes like a snake with too many tails, grown gargantuan as it wends through underground tunnels, long and squamous, with the slow tremor of shifts and repositionings echoing out through its other extremities; sometimes apparently contradictory, sometimes confused, but one strange organism which somehow touches on everything, swallows down that which is larger than itself, and sits to digest it. Even the things which turn my stomach become part of my understanding.
Death is one of those things.
Because I am a person who has gone through death; I have died and been remade. Those I knew and love have died. I am the adopted child of a trickster in the aspect of death. I work with those who have connections or subversions to some aspect of death, or those who come to me through death. And the more I experience, the more my grasp of death is confounded; the more truth I see, the more incomplete my collection of truths feels.
It's come to the point where a lot of treatments of death verge on squicking me, not because they're wrong, but because they're incomplete. John Donne's assertion "death thou shalt die", meant surely to be read in triumph and defiance, makes me sick – like skinning a dragon. Death bounds our world with depth, pulls the threshold of where our minds can brush far beyond the reach of where our lives can attain. To so casually write it out would be like aspiring to eradicate the ocean and sink it all to land.
But at the same time, I've found myself uncomfortable brushing against opposed assertions: that death is kind, nothing to be feared, to be accepted with open arms. Because I've seen its ravages, and they are as true a part. Because death comes in many forms, and not all are congruent to a person's will and self. Because it's too single a truth to nourish me – a single story.
I don't know that I could ever articulate Truth about death. It's vast and singular and multifaceted, a threshold and a boundary and a gaping, wide-open universe. It's welcome and an enemy and a respite and a loss. It's comfortable and horrible and final and initial and medial. And it's hidden, and confused, and strange, and yet grasping any one part to bring it to light discomfits me because it's taking the rope for the elephant. It's too close to me for me to give any part credence – even the limited part I can see.
Even having died, I can't grasp the whole of it. Even when my body dies, I doubt I will. And I wonder if this is exactly as it should be, or as it must be, and whether or not death, in the aspect of Death, the archetypal, would indeed die if I were to grasp it fully. It it always has to remain as an upset in the belly of my knowledge, a hunger, a pervasive, captivating, unease. Or if this is just a reassurance to an imperfect person aspiring to perfect knowledge.
Death is one of those things.
Because I am a person who has gone through death; I have died and been remade. Those I knew and love have died. I am the adopted child of a trickster in the aspect of death. I work with those who have connections or subversions to some aspect of death, or those who come to me through death. And the more I experience, the more my grasp of death is confounded; the more truth I see, the more incomplete my collection of truths feels.
It's come to the point where a lot of treatments of death verge on squicking me, not because they're wrong, but because they're incomplete. John Donne's assertion "death thou shalt die", meant surely to be read in triumph and defiance, makes me sick – like skinning a dragon. Death bounds our world with depth, pulls the threshold of where our minds can brush far beyond the reach of where our lives can attain. To so casually write it out would be like aspiring to eradicate the ocean and sink it all to land.
But at the same time, I've found myself uncomfortable brushing against opposed assertions: that death is kind, nothing to be feared, to be accepted with open arms. Because I've seen its ravages, and they are as true a part. Because death comes in many forms, and not all are congruent to a person's will and self. Because it's too single a truth to nourish me – a single story.
I don't know that I could ever articulate Truth about death. It's vast and singular and multifaceted, a threshold and a boundary and a gaping, wide-open universe. It's welcome and an enemy and a respite and a loss. It's comfortable and horrible and final and initial and medial. And it's hidden, and confused, and strange, and yet grasping any one part to bring it to light discomfits me because it's taking the rope for the elephant. It's too close to me for me to give any part credence – even the limited part I can see.
Even having died, I can't grasp the whole of it. Even when my body dies, I doubt I will. And I wonder if this is exactly as it should be, or as it must be, and whether or not death, in the aspect of Death, the archetypal, would indeed die if I were to grasp it fully. It it always has to remain as an upset in the belly of my knowledge, a hunger, a pervasive, captivating, unease. Or if this is just a reassurance to an imperfect person aspiring to perfect knowledge.
