We all have our hopes, dreams, relishing futures
fancied on summer afternoons.
Some people think about careers,
others families.
Me, I’m interested in my death. I want
to die electrocuted to my tips, rolling, burned
to a sultry brown crisp.
The end all be all of lightening strikes, shrowded in
electricity tingles and burning nerves for the briefest
(and hence longest) second of my life.
This has always been my dream, though perhaps
it’s not something I chase after as hard as I should.
If you have a desire greater than all others,
oughtn’t that be the one you orient yourself towards?
Shouldn’t that become your life’s project?
Your life’s work?
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2 comments:
Our death, along with birth, is the most important thing which will happen to any of us. It is the little green door in the wall through which we’ve seen others disappear but never return. And we know we, too, will one day go through that little green door.
What lies on the other side? No-one knows, although many think they do. Death is the ultimate mystery, the ultimate unknown, the known unknown, the unknown known, the unknown unknown, the ultimate letting go. When we go through that little green door we will say goodbye to our bodies, ourselves, our friends, relatives, pets, everything we’ve ever known and makes us who we are.
Is it any wonder that the thought of death scares the hell out of us all, and we fight with all our strength to delay that moment of reckoning when we go through that little green door in the wall and say goodbye for ever to all we’ve known?
But, paradoxically, death may be pleasant after all, for how nice it might be to just let go, to fly free of the cage which is our body. At the moment of our final breath we may think: “Is this all it is?”
Your remark “Shouldn’t that (death, presumably) become your life’s project? Your life’s work?” put me in mind of the late Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima who killed himself though self-disembowelment. But he prepared his body for its death by moulding it into the finest physical specimen possible. He perfected his body in order to kill it.
I love Mishima, have read Confessions of a Mask, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, and The Sound of Waves. There is an excellent film out about him, but I don't remember the name.
It is the unknown unknown. Heidegger suggests we live out our life's projects always with that in mind. The Being unto Death, he calls it. It individuates us and leads one to appreciate our final freedom.
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