Dispatches from The Equilibrium
The taste of life
Joel Biroco | March 20, 2024 | Archive
The newly dead recognise the imminent rather than the immediate, no longer being alive less simple than what’s coming next. Eternity is no different, aloof to states. Even if we have to believe in history, no event whets the appetite for survival more than immediate death. One is concerned, when alive, to be sure to taste it. The horror of passing away in one’s sleep, barely conscious to register it, one supposes. No, let me see what this thing is. The idea of simply being cut off without resolution strikes us as a failure of some kind, yet the idea of being born without any idea of where one has come from excites less interest among most. We are more cosy with what will come afterwards, when all will be explained, the bitterness, if any, dissolved. It must be lucid, not a torpor, clear-cut, a relief, not calling out in vain for an explanation that is not forthcoming, yet. That death will be as absurd as life doesn’t strike us as a ringing endorsement of having lived. No, we want to see what effect we’ve had, what was the point of it all, for surely it was worth all that time spent at work, accumulating dosh, surely our self-supposed importance in that world is not now entirely blank, billionaires no greater than tramps. Still individuating, perhaps we should have enjoyed the sun more, gazed like a poet at the full moon. But if we spent much of our lives hunched up in the shadows of a depressive corner . . . perhaps we should have listened when a single crow’s caw attempted to instantly change it. How hard would it have been to drop it all, as all is now decisively dropped. This is assuming we recall anything of our life in the initial timeless moments, of course pointless to say initial, a time word. Will there even be words? Will there even be you or anyone else? Perhaps a brief taste of something quickly passed, cleansed of its faults, an original innocence come out to play, the ephemeral life passing like rapid centuries to a time traveller, millenniums without cease to arrive upon this shore, disturbing any belief in history because so ancient, where one has just come from, little more than dust. If I died, it was millennia ago.
Becoming is needed for desire, superfluous. Can you not sense it in life? The ceasing of illusions is always accompanied by the desire for it to cease, as if the very process is implicitly recognised as illusion but one cannot quite do away with it, almost disappointed one has no illusions left to lose, as if one expected it to go on for ever. Naturally who is this one who expected it, one can always revert to that rigmarole. Or succumb to thought about what is after death, whether the revelation that there is no death will be strong enough to field it when it comes. Everyone else is always so much wiser, for all they don’t exist. One needs a transfusion of a fresh innocence, that has no need of continually repeated tropes, merging with the gulls crying, that would do, but we imagine something more substantial is required than the simple loss of the mind as dead ashes to the wind. We have taken root too strongly in a world without meaning.
Wet moss slowly overflowing the gaps between the paving stones vivid emerald green after rain. That’s the world I want to remember, the world I can remember now by simply noticing it as I glance down.
No clever talk can make its stamp so effectively. The way we conduct ourselves may be fruitful or not, but the birds are the same to all. Why do we camouflage the simple in the complex? Disencumbered of our history, what are we? Exempt, it would seem, from any further consideration of it. An oarless rowing boat floating peacefully on a sunny afternoon in the middle of the lake, a cormorant alights on its prow. The vanity of so many things seems less. Even detachment is void, what is there to deceive one so again? The ancient curse has no bony knuckles to rap on the bright windowpane. Loathsome creation redeemed.
Once we realise that phantasms have no power, we have the wings to be awake. Open to the natural state, there is no complaint. The tiresome conflicts of petty men flourish only in the doubts about what unmasks them. If one has never been alive to such transformation, it is hard to be inspired to quit this sterile resignation. Indeed, this is the kind of ignorance delusion aims to produce, and we live only out of ignorance not even knowing what our hopes should produce, apart from infantile fantasies of happiness, clinging to thriving appearances becoming estranged to oneself, unable to move but not still.
We endorse the rift of the abyss while never advancing close enough to know what it is. We incline to multiplicity at the expense of the singularity, but that can wait for ever if necessary, since eternity is the ocean that the wreckage of time floats in, never any distance away, the timeless countering every graspless moment constructing a life of semblances, an entertainment plucked from the stalk before it withers.