Death: life as we don’t yet know it. The world beyond the black veil. Hades. Charon. The Elysian Fields . . . Concepts that fascinate humanity, giving awe and fright at the same time.
Enter simple superstition. Enter wild imagination. The evil, the demonic, the undead and living dead, all the elements with which people have painted the face of death to give life meaning, are wrapping themselves around life, and around each other. One more circle of circles. One more set of loopholes sending everyone for another loop.
To escape the loop, one needs to simplify, deconstruct, move away from vapid thinking and strip everything down to the solid detail. Something wicked this way came, via chapters 39 and 40 of Something Wicked This Way Comes, the book that sparked this section, addressing the multiple natures of death, but the greatest insight, it lay in chapter 41 where something delightfully wicked this way came, something delightfully and wickedly exact, reminding everyone that death is more than one imagines, yet so much simpler.
Death isn’t the polar opposite to life, as was suggested so triumphantly in earlier entries. Not exclusively.
Neither is it just a face with terrible paint and fangs on it, as tradition would have people think.
Nor does it possess the nature of something inside which the unseen and unimaginable lurks, not unless one considers another, more encompassing alternative. A super-arching complement to all this.
Death, in plain and simple terms, may be, just may be, just is, when one thinks about it, the advance of life on other life. Death is life is death is life, by which Generation A culminates itself, by which Generation B culminates itself, followed by Generation C, and D, all the way to Z, one feeding off the other, or, to be more exact, on the other. It’s life everlasting, constantly flowing, feeding its way through its own mediums, never a rupture in the forcefield, not a permanent one by any means. Come a rift in the continuum, life goes away for good, kind of, on the surface, operating lower, deep below, unseen, in the very lowest of frequencies.
But it’s there. Life is still there, still throbbing, kicking and screaming inside the bowels of quietude, preparing itself for another surge, all through the power of restless animation, on the nourishing promise of death, by the hands of which it grows stronger, come the time, on the back of which it rides to bring forth development. Apocalypse now, and forevermore. Death perpetuates life until the universe brims with action and turmoil, or until all is still, and death is all there is, with life stirring in the shadows, rising to make its mark again, rousing its stormy eye, cyclops of vibration, to kick start another engine of living process, another gargantuan interaction, the depths of which are secured by life killing life so that life may advance.
Dear old sweet bitter death promotes this advance ever so nobly and scapegoatedly. In the face of cursing and hexing and religious superstition; the mortuary passage of the victorious living and their undead relatives signifies the progress of what fits the world better at any given moment in time, in the wake of what has passed and can no longer be.
Death, in other words, is the future. Breath everlasting.
Death is life itself, exhalation to inhalation, foundation and buttress to the body of existence.
Which is how the original argument went. Death was deemed life’s validation, its glorification, the counterpoint that proved the point, and proved the point has been, and here we go again, making the argument once more, stronger and more solid this time round because we’ve deemed all other possibilities tiresome, bothersome, trite or supercilious.
Death is life advancing, and life is everything there ever was, is, will ever be, seen through the macro lens of Time, revealing development everlasting, now and forevermore, development shaped by the rise and fall of various elements, by the birth and death of what constitutes the Cosmos, far out-spanning humanity and its be-all, end-all, conceit . . . its mortal vanity.
Intrigued? Watch this space for more.
From the collection of writings EON: THE ANGRY COMING OF AGE