The Composition(s) of The Dead

 

A Trick of The Light

"Maybe you're right," she admitted. "But what's this about a bald vulture? Regular vultures I know about--they eat corpses. But bald vultures?"
In the train on the way home, I explained the difference in great detail.The difference in where they are born, their call, their mating periods. "The bald vulture lives by devouring art. The regular vulture lives by devouring the corpses of unknown people. They're completely different." — Haruki Murakami (South of the Border, West of the Sun)


 I was working on a short story regarding death, dreams and memory as extensions of how we demarcate the nature of life in a series of file drawers based on strictly our senses, as if living on the surface of a pond tells us the context of life below the surface or in the clouds and perhaps it does.. All of this was predicated on the recombinant nature of referents we navigate by, in that we have varying degrees of attachment to them although they are only images as proverbial navigation markers for whatever experiential reality portends to be.

One man's dreams may be another man's ghost if we remove the sieves we utilize to separate wheat from chaff, spirit or energetic matter from it's embodiments in cellular materiality. In this story for adults we have a visitor who happens upon a stranger in the wee hours of the morning upon the mall in Washington DC, who appears to be wary, preferring to remain distant and yet is in search of companionship that is sound asleep in his bed, separated by a century in the same general location. Things look both familiar and yet strange to him. Our narrative protagonist presses him too hard as to why he is wandering in the wee hours of morning only to find he vanishes like a mist.


Startled he returns to the park the next evening putting aside his flight home in the testing of his own veracity to distinguish more intermediary phantoms from perhaps his from his own waking dream...the entanglement of dreamers one unable to distinguish the other in a strange relativity when the bonds of memory are loosened just a mere fraction of a centimeter.  The organic hallucinogen of a biologic orientation. The utility of our memory certainly is a boundary that can be improvised upon as it is permeable if you ask any detective of either a paranormal or more practical stripe.

 The transference of memory outside of it's utility has been a chief feature of ghost encounters as well as dreams. What connects them is the strange bandwidth of a call, like the hoot of an owl or a sigh or the modality of words that proceed communication...the bandwidth of emotional engagement in the dreams that are superimposed as realities and the realities akin to dreams where the twain meets being neither one or the other, unconstrained by descriptors and yet in the genetics of an art where one brush stoke is built upon another, remain visible as a pixel in a memory without constraints..the glue of emotional engagement to referents that span our demarcations..become a cellular superimposition in a waking dream on both sides of this  proverbial mirror more akin to art than science more reinvention than mimicry, the recreation of our inner realities, a play upon solids that are not solids, but brush strokes.

The Canvas As A Metaphor of Recombinant Realities

"Painting is not for me either decorative amusement, or the plastic invention of felt reality; it must be every time: invention, discovery, revelation." -Max Ernst

The transience of memory as a contingency of the whole is perhaps a shared incommensurable quality that has no location in specifics to space... that requires referents none the less to paint a imprint on the observer.  A memory called forth that is a living connective tissue as what has been is foundational and a part of what we absent misguidedly call a non existent "now" whatever That is...language as a constraint to perception in regard to a re-creative nature, the recombinant..as a driver of associations.

Whether it is intentionally sought or otherwise. this non verbal music of the spheres that even planets radiate is a energetic decidedly non human composition that is outside of the bounds of language and yet language is simply a carrier wave or so it seems of, something else akin to a complex music that can be understood and felt without a word being spoken. Between the spikes of materiality lies musical notations we cannot read directly. Undoubtedly.

If we look at a side profile of the oceans on our planet and view the mountain ranges within the depths they poke out of the medium of the seas and appear to be islands, as a metaphor for the connectivity of memory as a individuated illusion, a sleight of hand. If we take the profile of islands and superimpose them on the bandwidth of the linear measurement of sound, as sensory spikes within our range arising to meet the atmosphere of referent engagement, we attenuate these more global memories to our own orientation which is purely experiential and not containing ( at least on the surface) a more global memory or if you, will a foundation for ourselves as a form of pointilism on the surface of things, and yet when we pull back from this canvas, we see an organized composition, made from the interactions of uncountable millions of relationships of one point to another, again, like painting with a brush...

Perhaps if we ruminate deeply we could envision that this is a work more attenuated to art than science..which is why as I grow older I see the difficulty and the impossibility of viewing all of our conceptual models of various realities as machines or autonomic happenstance that works in a causal reversal of our own nature as being fluidized not set in a frozen landscape worthy of Antarctica, where evolution is a matter of environmental conditions alone.

" Please pardon my levity, I don't see how to take death seriously.
It seems absurd." - Robert Anton Wilson

Perhaps an old lyric contains a truism when it comes to our senses telling us that the verbosity of language is a litmus test of sentience, whereas at it's root the opposite is also true.

In one post I wrote, "The Avoidance Of Silence" the sticky webs of this one dimensional view of sentience creates chatter without a context, the more chatter there is the less context is present, as if a scroll that reaches to the moon contains an alphabetic rune to what we appear to be and yet our nature confounds this view.

Beyond and Betwixt The Descriptors of Memory 

We have fallen back so far as to wrest certainty from language that like the old pioneer who sings, "The sun was so hot, I froze to death." seems to be a rational description of holes in between the surfaces of our little pond, where ghost memories and dreams compose alternate scenarios of what lies on the other side of a shimmering mirror, wherein in all points converge to create in effect more brushstrokes on a three dimensional canvas, that we simply cannot take in as a whole so we bite off more than we can chew in both paranormal and prosaic terms.

 Perhaps the dead view us as dead as much as we view them to be artifacts of memory put in their place as we dream we are something termed alive. File cabinets, reams of paper, language, islands, the waves of sound washing on the material making patterns of undeniable artistry that has no objectivity we can wrest from it. Reality is silent to the words we utter, yet we partake of this orchestrated art, to make images in the mind, to imagine what is not and to visualize it as a stick one end pointing to the devil, the other to Angels in a relativity of an art critic.

The constructs of language produce enormous hives, right angles and vehicles that we become to navigate the streets of sentences..pronouns, locked descriptors and in the rigidity of outcomes, in our dreams the unconscious destruction of this artifice remains, we the frightened, the over-awed, cling to this vehicle at any cost, at any price, real or imagined, we thirst for the immortality of our constructs..while reality itself knows no such thing, it is fluidity, uncertain, creative..and can never be frozen onto the death of it's immaterial nature that informs the lego blocks of human architecture,.as a superimposition of energy constrained outside of the subjective. This much I know is true. Call it the Fall of the Euclidean Universe, the American Implosion of Words, the Aztec Paradigms subsiding once again into weeds, but the unseen and the Immortalists bear witness to  shells membranes, and civilizations themselves as simply eggs for the fertilization of an art we cannot constrain.