Still in the World

Another peculiarity is the notion that one ought to return to normal after, well, anything, but especially a death or a failure or a trauma or the like. There is inherent in it the presupposition that such a thing exists in the first place, a sort of enduring gestalt that boulders along unflinching, accruing experience & shaping it into its extant mold. Time becomes the instrument of assumed balance, & the stunning evenethood of all things then comes prefaced already. I know that at the epistemological level, this is getting into some of Gadamer’s business & before him Hegel, but I just mean that when you’re pushed off a ledge, why the fuck would you climb & clamor back up to the same precipice? Why the fuck would you want to? 

Everywhere is echoed the same sentiment that this will pass, that in time, things will normalize & life will go on as it was. Talk about his death is carefully & strategically avoided, & when it spills out it is swept away in fear. The thing of it is though that life, by definition, cannot go on as it was. That is simply not a mathematical possibility when it comes to natural subtractions. I suspect-- I know, already-- that life will carry along its living threads, braiding them together in familiar patterns, but I have no interest in the erasure of my father in the hope that I can get along with things already. I don’t shun him when he arises in my thoughts. His absence will always, always occupy some part of me & will inform from his death forward the minutiae delineating my days: how I read every book, watch every movie, talk to my own loved ones, look at the world & feel my own heart in it. That absence inhabits me, fractionally, & will until I die, & that, to me, seems like the most normal & expected course to take-- to live with it, feel it, take its measure, hear its song whenever it elects to sing. What sort of culture craves quick dismissal of its dead? Stigmatizes a sadness itself defined only by love & shared experience? Surmise like ED that the horses’ heads are pointed toward eternity. There is nothing normal but to live & to die & to feel every second in between. 

At the bottom of the cliff there is a valley, carved over millenia, serpentine & surging & more powerful than anything we’ve known, mineral & chthonic & writ in stone. It has nothing to do with the fictions of any god. You stand up, a glint in the shadow, look up, wipe the dust off & take a step. You are still in the world, & under its soil, the bones of your ancestors & theirs before & others besides, atop still more of all the fauna from hundreds of millions of years. Every instance of absence imprinted, every record kept, if not in the ground than in the memory, itself a kind of passerine in song, morning unto night. All of that time, all of that living, & still, it matters utterly & deeply when it stops. The world is not the same, but it never is & it never has been.