Death is useless as a concept. It needs to felt in the body.
Death is always living here in me, an initiate walking up stone stairs and snuffing out the candles one by one, a flickering ahead.
Or a slasher film. Massacres of mitochondria. My body devoured by bacteria daily.
It is other death, the death of others, that need special rooms, funeral processions. Death happens continually and abundantly and is only important when we love.
Grief is unstoppable, rolling through, a tsunami.
Grief is the body feeling of love without desire, though maybe there’s still a sensuousness in the breaking open. The raw and pulpy underside of my own flesh and sinew somehow palpable then.
Grief is hot and consuming. It’s not the grey and drizzle of sorrow.
Space to feel may be necessary, a church, a forest clearing, light that catches motes. Room for the mess and the roaring silence. The never returning of someone sounds like the earth caving in.
Even imagining this irrevocable absence feels like too much wasabi. Feeling your goneness has been, always, a fire drill for a cascading catastrophe.
My own death is mere anxiety. Alive, I am always in some way terribly alone.
Even as you live, an idea called your death has always been that reminder. Even made from you, between us are the echoing straits. Love is never fully knowing another. Love is the salt, the sand, and the drowning.
Yesterday’s media:
- Slavoj Žižek and Shahidha Bari on Hegel and the Singularity
- Duct Tape Parenting by Vicki Hoefle
- Living for Change by Grace Lee Boggs
- Project Runway All-Stars S7
- DAO Harvard 2023 Summit on Equitable Ownership
- Whisper is another Case Study in Colonisation
- Does Capitalism Beat Charity? (in which assumptions may need some investigation)