To be dead. A contradiction in terms. Dead means not living anymore; to stop existing i.e. cease to be — ‘be’ — yet one ‘is’ dead. ‘Is’ dead.
It’s a counterintuitive statement, yet perfectly logical. Everything we see and do is a function of Being, including death, the dead, or any condition that refers to the end of life. The only way to describe a state of non-existence, in fact the only way to conjure it into awareness and communicate it and understand and make anything out of it, is to bring it into existence.
A paradox, and a very delicious one, especially when considering the notion of presence. All one sees and experiences, everything that makes up this world, exists, including its negatives.
There are many theories covering this issue. I’m not going to pretend I know them all, nor do I care for them. I have my own term for this condition: the Hamlet Avalanche. It matters not whether one is or isn’t, at least in terms of existence. Beyond a certain level, it’s all part of the same body. Like wings on a bird, they flap on either side. To be or not to be. All part of the same game, elements of intelligent awareness, of which negatives are major constituents, inhibitory as their properties and effects are.
Negative concepts are doozies, downright bummers. They can ruin everything, just like that, especially when they take over. They send life in a tailspin, resulting in free falls and crashes.
And yet, despite their negative impact, they can never escape the horizon of life, intangible as some of them may be. They affirm it rather than cancel it out. They’re part of everything, just another extremity of this world’s body, playing their role in the grand scheme of things.
Like the shadow to a body, they’re proof indelible of the matter out of whose form they have arisen.
Negatives are usually created by taking a positive and bringing into existence the notion of its opposite, or the absence of the positive itself. We are bad when good is absent. We are enslaved when the freedom to do as we choose is not available to us.
We are dead when we are not alive, when life has ceased.
Yet we always ‘are’ dead, a paradoxical statement that introduces the notion of non-existence in terms of, that’s right, existence.
Consider it life’s ongoing triumph. Time’s greatest achievement.
Intrigued? Watch this space for more.
From the collection of writings EON: THE ANGRY COMING OF AGE