On Death, or Darkness in the Absence of Light
I ONCE WROTE THE FOLLOWING WORDS in reference to love and death in The Mystery of Stillness around what I'd say would be two or three years ago:
The mystery of Love is greater than the mystery of Death, for Death is simple and Death is pure. For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world. Death is everywhere and it lies within every person. It is inexorable, merely capable of being postponed or deferred, and with it, as well the thought of it, it has hurt well as it has healed. But it is not a fact.
Death borders upon our birth, and our cradle stands in the grave. Our birth is nothing but our death begun, and without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem alone.
Those who read her work would see that the last line is a quote of Marion Woodman, a mythopoetic woman's movement figure. Having not read her work I cannot say I know much of her philosophy, for I do not, but it was this idea I enjoyed of hers which only helped in the illustration of what I was trying to show, and all an idea must do is create another idea or vision.
I say that death is not really death in the sense of the word which has become popular in these times. It is nothing created--death is not a thing; it is intangible and not real. Neither is it the moving on from one place to another, the coming to of this world for the beginning of another beyond the human horizons where religion lives. The darkness of death is only darkness in the absence of light. Death is the dissipation of all energies, both physical and mental, for both of these energies are the same. It must be seen that we are all artificial intelligences, that hatred is only a biological greed and that love is the chemical reactions of the brain working for the ways of reproduction or physical pleasure. We are tricked by our human structure to believe these things as to make procreation and survival easier. Emotions are not emotions, they are the instincts of an animal and nothing more. There is strength in numbers, no doubt, so we gather.
But there is no death...things like this are words made for the unnecessary and redundant. But I find here that Love is no more complicated than death, although its effects can be exponentially more palpable. For every relationship I have in my years seen I call it "Like," no matter its length or power. Love is thrown around by the elderly just as carelessly as it is by the youth, and I submit that I have only seen one Love...True Love, as it were. And, ironically, this love is found in death. True love comes when either one person or another becomes stagnant and unchanging. With change, as it is seen everyday, love falters, and because we are in constant change, as human beings, there is no love. But in death--oh, in death there is the static and immovable image. If, when in that brief moment when the love touches the human soul, the other dies, then there is True Love, for the dead is eternal and unchanging for ever. In that sense and that sense alone there is eternity in death, but it is certainly not for the dead...they are gone.
In ending, True Love only comes when one sees another as perfect, and no one ever truly sees this after time enough to think and bypass the primal instinct--they may say otherwise, of course, for their partner's sake, but it is not true. If the dead ever rose, however, the eternal love would most certainly end. This is the way and power of death, or darkness in the absence of light....
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