1.
Is there any wonder luminous the world arises? We ourselves arising luminous with the world? Any doubt that dressed with the dead, not death but the dead, our very own dead, that any contact, in which is included that physical, reveals the fiction of self or any other? The sham of history is that divide, whether space or time. We are not on the verge, but still and quiet within the very midst of the dead, their ever-present rustling within and around us, the incessant struggle we call life which is, perhaps, nothing more than the glittering of the dead. And once again, if for but a moment, still and quiet can we conceive that the dead conjecture life free of death? Death having been effaced with that of the divide which proclaimed but falsely the opposition known as being and for which we have answered in scars and pain.
2.
All of our contact, physical, with the world is not directly through the living but mediated by a thin layer of the dead, not death but the dead – skin, hair, mucous etc.. We are not singular, not individuals, but colonies, communities in which death is ever present. ‘Our lives’, without doubt, are renewal, but integral to such continual rebirth is that of perpetual and recurrent extinction, both that instigated by ingestion, as well as that common exhaustion which passes as time or duration. We appear founded upon a nothingness, a nothingness which engenders endless miracle and fascination, as well as awe and fear. Looking away from it, we marvel; approaching it, we tremble. But what if we simply recognize it as the essential it apparently seems to be?
3.
For life is diminished by death. One might say dwarfed. Not in the sense of quality or the riveting of the fear and awe. But through simple duration. Death seems an eternity, whether or not, and hence closest to the divine. From this point of view life will always bear an element of betrayal. And is difficult to forgive.