things people do
NOTE: After a whole lot of busy, lately, I find myself having a profoundly rough week. It's likely going be another little while before I can bring myself to produce new stuff, or even finish what I've got in the works. So I've decided to bring in a handful of casserole posts (thanks, piny, I love the term) to cover up the shortfall so none of you think I've up and quit. This one is from November 2006, and I meant to import it over here then, but forgot in December's uproar since it was more preachy than topical. Thanks for your patience, everyone. --ll.
Life is an ungainly, terrible thing to behold.
It looks at you, without breaking eye contact, until you become nauseous, until you are desperate to break that gaze any way you can, drowning it in alcohol, burning it in exercise, whipping and sexing and pill-popping and televisioning it away in an elaborate exorcism gloriously peculiar to a people so very afraid of death.
Death is not a frightening thing. Death is stern, and death is dark, but looking Westward, it is difficult to conclude that death is anything but the fairest of all forces, the most evenhanded, the only truly reliable thing.
Death is not what we fear. We fear the moments of life before it, searing or cold, lonely, painful. We fear what our deaths will do to the lives of the living: make them suffer our loss, force them to weep at surviving us and missing us when we are gone from them. And we fear, ultimately, that death will be anything like life.
We can insulate ourselves with promises of golden mansions and green fields, but when it comes down to it, what's the fear of the Avici or Tartaros or plain old Hell but the terror that death is a continuation of life? That our lives keep mattering when we're supposed to be done with them; that we will still be ourselves; that those selves will suffer torments that we can only imagine as being like the torments a living creature may face, but worse, and for longer?
We fear change. We fear the unknown. Most of all, though, I think we fear the known. We fear life.
And rightly so. What is life, after all, but a shadowed valley that we briefly walk through between eternities doing whatever it is meat and bone and spirit do before birth and after death? What makes us think that the peculiar animation of our carbon and breath is the normal state of being?
Life is where we eat, and hunger; life is where we love, and lose; life is where it is cold, and hot, and bright, and bitter. Life is where we gamble at a vast table whose cards are our skin and whose dice are our teeth and eyeballs and hearts.
Life is where we know that we are naked, and know shame. Life is where the story starts, after all, so far as we're concerned. Life is where happening happens.
It is a terrible and awesome thing to behold, this endless cavalcade of life devouring life, of springing-up and grinding-down, of hope and harm. It's a mess. It's an explosion. It's too slow, and too short, and tenuous at best.
It's a special thing, life. It matters to taste the blood in your mouth. It matters. Life, as a concept, as a thing in us, wobbles as a newborn colt, and stumbles along; or it hammers us, as a merciless overhead sun; it never, ever makes sense. The most miserable of the dead are consumed with wishing they still had it, except the worse-off, who still think they do when it is gone. Death that looks like life is no good death at all, no more than life that looks like death.
Life refuses to make sense. No matter how much we want it to, no matter how many patterns we put to it, how many dewdrops and stars we connect up into constellations and highways and stories.
Life is not a narrative. It is not.
It is a terrible, ungainly, gorgeous thing, life.
We're lucky it ends eventually. And we're lucky to get to visit, for a while, even though birth, every time, is an excruciating thing.
We burst through blood and shouting, squirming, gasping, and we never really stop. And every moment we spend, organs and bone and blood wrapped in skin, we are attired for prayer and wonders and darkness, too.
We are here. We may as well act like the living. And that means the terror and the hiding from life, yes, because that is what the living do; but it also means looking it in the eye and meeting that gaze for as long as we can until our knuckles are white and our teeth gritting, and letting it know that we bleed, but we do not run. We know it is terrible. We know that so are we. And we go on, to eat, and to hunger; to love, and to lose; to hope, and to harm.
And we go on.
Life is an ungainly, terrible thing to behold.
It looks at you, without breaking eye contact, until you become nauseous, until you are desperate to break that gaze any way you can, drowning it in alcohol, burning it in exercise, whipping and sexing and pill-popping and televisioning it away in an elaborate exorcism gloriously peculiar to a people so very afraid of death.
Death is not a frightening thing. Death is stern, and death is dark, but looking Westward, it is difficult to conclude that death is anything but the fairest of all forces, the most evenhanded, the only truly reliable thing.
Death is not what we fear. We fear the moments of life before it, searing or cold, lonely, painful. We fear what our deaths will do to the lives of the living: make them suffer our loss, force them to weep at surviving us and missing us when we are gone from them. And we fear, ultimately, that death will be anything like life.
We can insulate ourselves with promises of golden mansions and green fields, but when it comes down to it, what's the fear of the Avici or Tartaros or plain old Hell but the terror that death is a continuation of life? That our lives keep mattering when we're supposed to be done with them; that we will still be ourselves; that those selves will suffer torments that we can only imagine as being like the torments a living creature may face, but worse, and for longer?
We fear change. We fear the unknown. Most of all, though, I think we fear the known. We fear life.
And rightly so. What is life, after all, but a shadowed valley that we briefly walk through between eternities doing whatever it is meat and bone and spirit do before birth and after death? What makes us think that the peculiar animation of our carbon and breath is the normal state of being?
Life is where we eat, and hunger; life is where we love, and lose; life is where it is cold, and hot, and bright, and bitter. Life is where we gamble at a vast table whose cards are our skin and whose dice are our teeth and eyeballs and hearts.
Life is where we know that we are naked, and know shame. Life is where the story starts, after all, so far as we're concerned. Life is where happening happens.
It is a terrible and awesome thing to behold, this endless cavalcade of life devouring life, of springing-up and grinding-down, of hope and harm. It's a mess. It's an explosion. It's too slow, and too short, and tenuous at best.
It's a special thing, life. It matters to taste the blood in your mouth. It matters. Life, as a concept, as a thing in us, wobbles as a newborn colt, and stumbles along; or it hammers us, as a merciless overhead sun; it never, ever makes sense. The most miserable of the dead are consumed with wishing they still had it, except the worse-off, who still think they do when it is gone. Death that looks like life is no good death at all, no more than life that looks like death.
Life refuses to make sense. No matter how much we want it to, no matter how many patterns we put to it, how many dewdrops and stars we connect up into constellations and highways and stories.
Life is not a narrative. It is not.
It is a terrible, ungainly, gorgeous thing, life.
We're lucky it ends eventually. And we're lucky to get to visit, for a while, even though birth, every time, is an excruciating thing.
We burst through blood and shouting, squirming, gasping, and we never really stop. And every moment we spend, organs and bone and blood wrapped in skin, we are attired for prayer and wonders and darkness, too.
We are here. We may as well act like the living. And that means the terror and the hiding from life, yes, because that is what the living do; but it also means looking it in the eye and meeting that gaze for as long as we can until our knuckles are white and our teeth gritting, and letting it know that we bleed, but we do not run. We know it is terrible. We know that so are we. And we go on, to eat, and to hunger; to love, and to lose; to hope, and to harm.
And we go on.
Labels: monstrous, religion, remembered
posted by little light | 10:30 PM
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