I. Not a day passes when I do not think of death. That is, my own death, although what gets me to the thought is usually the sight of some other’s dying or some other’s death, the iguana shot in its scaled head and tossed onto a neighbor’s front yard to bake in the sun, the body of a weak or beaten fish washed up on the shore, already beginning to emit the stench, the smell of death so palpable that traces of it seem to cling to me like a menace as I walk along the shore, that inescapable odor, the lizard devoured right in front of me as I lean back in the chair to meditate or release some poetry, or just sit their empty-headed, by a falcon, who, as he should be, is only proud of his catch, of being able to see the tiny life, first of all, from such a daring height, and second of his unmatched capability of diving from that height, a living arrow, at a speed that cuts the air, then with a thud landing on the turf for his meal, aware of the secure privilege he has as a soaring predator, the fruit-rat caught in the trap I chance upon in the middle of the night, begging to be released, or if not released begging to be alive, or if not alive begging to die, I can’t tell which as we do not share a language and his squeaks almost turn into a song as I, bewildered for a moment, encircle around the suffering one human concerns and the world of human troubles, for a moment, that is, until my ears, my eyes, my very skin is wakened to the plight of the ambushed life, repeating to itself Suffering is suffering is suffering like a treasured mantra, the rat all along squirming in the throes of undeniable pain, little black beads tilted up towards inert indecisive me, pleading for mercy, or solitude, or the mercy of being left alone, the mercy of enforced solitude, the single insect crushed as well as the countless hordes or swarms or colonies of them suffocated in a manufactured smog, smothered so that we may eat or so that we may live, so that the aphids will stop eating at our lettuce, or so that the termites will stop eating at our domicile, the tree that would have lived had it not been for its roots being covered over and choked by rock and plastic, steel and cement, its leaves now falling not for a someday renewal or not because it’s fall, but only falling because they are falling, and it will be the last time leaves of its kind, that is, leaves from this tree in particular, the crowned mahogany on the side of the roadway, will fall, the last time they will get to scatter with the slightest breeze, the food we ingest–oh, how much our food relies upon, as precisely as an equation, the death of others! How much we can see it on our plates, how much we can taste it!–at one time a pent up chicken or a pent up swine, at one time a cow who gets a breath of time in the field to saunter in the sun, when he saunters, with his five thousand companions, en route toward the conveyor, which leads to the line where, in front of one another, the bovine shall be slaughtered at once, hundreds of them, thousands of them already dead by the time the fearful slick-haired heavy beast approaches the prong, or the blade swinging from the arm of a machine, which in turn is controlled by a man or a woman, who in turn works for a major apparatus stretching far and wide throughout the country, flesh and suffering and stench and fear transmogrified into a commodity, into something that needs lobbyists in Washington, into that delicious steak, as already mentioned the death of plants, for what do we really care of the life of the plant unless it provides shade or nourishment, unless it is found somehow useful to us and our survival and endeavors, their deaths all the time abundant all around us, composing much of the dirt on which we build and in which we plant with its decomposing, transitioning into ash, and then, with rain, into mud, upon which some grub or worm or other might then feed, no less than the bodies of the long-extinct as well as the newly departed, the dinosaurs and long-lost megafauna on the planet no less than grandpa beneath the pine tree in the front yard compose the soil, turn into future, turn into what has the most enduring future, even if growth means decay, perhaps more means decay than it means itself, as this rock of a planet will someday prove, or perform for no one, when all of it, all of its systems, the tectonic plates no less than the atmosphere and stratosphere, air no less than water and water no less than land, is devoured by the nearest exploding star drawing the new horizon for ages of its own, drawing a new center of gravity, maybe drawing life into its circle, some eons hence, or maybe not, being content, as a star is content, alone, alone with nothing but stars and rocks, meteors, dust, comets, planets, light-speed beams a small part of immense darkness thick upon darkness, orbiting or swirling or dancing or crashing or doing whatever it is they do, the lovers, the family members, the friends, some of those whose names I have to pause to recall, almost as if the last thread of them were coming loose from me and I had to pull it back willingly or deliberately from oblivion, stupidly from there, its final turn, those loved ones who will no longer get the company they enjoyed or detested, who will no longer get to meet the earth and curse at it or thank it in tearful song for its great-lasting message of dirt dry in the sun, or with rain becoming something more slick and oily, something conducive to life, or not because it’s dirt all the same, the one message the earth has to give, joined as it is to water and air and the fire beneath the earth’s crust, so that we find ourselves, however suspicious we are, back with the blunt simplicity of four elements, and the human is left out of the matter, save for its earthlong show, or its spacelong show, or its digital show which could endure, perhaps, traveling through a black hole and making important transmissions from the one side to the long-awaiting technicians on the other side, the technicians and programmers, but nonetheless it’s a show, the Gilgamesh endeavor, we go where everything goes, back to the elements or back to the emptiness of elements which joins them as their spouse, for, as has been said before with a certain exasperation, almost to the point of defeat, form is emptiness, emptiness is form….
We go where everything goes, or better, everything goes where I go, or best yet, I go where everything goes, I and everything return to compose a wheel locked into spinning, a wheel no more sinister than a spinning-wheel, than a child’s toy, no more sinister than samsara, that mighty wheel forming the horizon of all things, holding them like a great mother, can be sinister or malicious. Is it morbid to think of death, to ponder its coming, or its being there right in the cradle, right in the first aware slime, when it is everywhere? Better, when it is everything? Wouldn’t the denial of death be the denial of all things? Isn’t this more than a little rash? Isn’t this more than a little–itself–morbid?
Love the Dust 