I haven’t been posting here a lot lately, but I have been writing.
I haven’t been posting here a lot, in part, because I have been writing. Writing for other projects and other purposes. Although many people who have known me, particularly when I was young, would be astonished to hear this, I really can run out of words. I can use up my daily allotment.
More and more so, actually, as I get older.
Which may have something to do with a slowly-growing caution about personal energy and how I expend it, but also has a great deal to do with an equally slow-growing weariness with, even a gentle contempt for, my very oldest teacher, ally, and tool: language.
This substack, as I seem to feel the need to keep pointing out, is subtitled: “Mostly about Death.” Which is a big subject, and a deep mystery, and one I have been compelled to dig at, in various ways with various degrees of effectiveness, since I was about 8.
For many, many years my excavation was cognitive, and rhetorical. I was deep into adulthood before Death became a visceral reality, for me. And when it did, I found that, for me, Death’s energetic signature is Silence. A vast, profound stilling, a stoppage of Shakespeare’s “sound and fury.” The places where death happens can be — often are — full of the cacophonous crescendo of life’s desire to assert itself, but then a line is drawn, a veil falls and, for me, the rest is silence.
I keep saying “for me” because I know people — people I completely and wholeheartedly believe — who tell me they can cross that veil, a bit. That they can listen to sounds, communication even, coming from the other side.
For me, though, the silence is impenetrable and, seemingly, purposeful. There is a weight, even a sort of muscle tone to the silence of death that reminds me of the deep presence felt in things that do not concern themselves much with human beings, with our eye-blink timespans and our impatience.
That silence feels, to me, like the implacability of boulders, like the disinterest of the clouds passing, like the alien otherness of the lightless ocean depths.
I have never been a religious person, but that silence is what I imagine when I hear the word Holy. Also maybe because I feel a little of that silence when I visit places dedicated to religion and its practice.
What the moment of death looks like, from my perspective, is first a mercy, and then a surrender, and finally a disappearance into great silence where I cannot follow.
In the face of that silence, I suppose it is natural to want to fill the air with words. Words are a way, after all, that we claim ownership and understanding of the intangible. Words are our knee-jerk response to mystery, the stones we throw into the abyss, hoping the echoes will let us know there is a bottom after all.
But words are my lifelong medium, and I know them of old. They are beautiful, powerful things. The most potent (some have said the only) magic our species uniquely possess. They are also unrepentant liars, at worst, or, at best, persuasive tellers of half-truths, the sizzle that sells the steak of illusion.
Words are the stories we tell ourselves about experience. They come after experience, and they edit it. Words are a penlight shone into a dark room. They show us what we want to see, what we dare to see, even what we fear to see. But they can’t turn the lights on. They can’t show us the room entire.
Every word I use is a direction (look here) and a misdirection (don’t look there) at the same time. I’ve made the decision about what part of the experience to direct your attention to, and what parts to ignore completely, before I even open my mouth.
And so, if I’m honest, I know that I am not entirely honest when I write or speak about Death. Like any Mystery, I am re-shaping it into a smaller, more palatable container when I talk about it. I am giving the Ineffable a face, and a name, and am I doing a disservice to that Ineffable? More honesty: I don’t think the Ineffable gives a hang. But I’m doing a disservice to you, if I’m leading you to believe my words are anything other than a reflexive attempt to control Fear, and tolerate Awe.
And you’re doing a disservice to me if you let me get away with it.