Sifting Through the Dark--Blog Entry #6

Monday, March 4, 2013

7:00pm

28˚F

"Or will the first night be the only night, / a darkness for which we have no other name?"

In the dark nonhuman death happens and we have no proof of it. The trees fall and sway, their husked bodies severing from their emerald birth body. The sky shatters, a window in the cold, all her blue spraying into the smallest shards of glass until only light can mend the pieces back into her. Light weeps into dark, running away and hiding in his holes, in the dark’s black creases. Yes we can hear them; we can hear the natural breaking and bowing—the cries of the trees, the sky, the light. The wind picks up their echoes for us. But we cannot see them; we cannot decipher the exact moment they are taken by the temporary death. We can see the light crawling away into the holes, but we can never catch her in her final act of tucking herself away from the world.

Death is the wrong word for this natural leaving, for this light to dark kind of severing and I am aware of that. Death implies endlessness, but there is no end when light leaves, but only the beginning of dark and then again the beginning of light. “This is where language…stop[s]," where humanity has no words for natural phenomena. Yes we have the scientific, but the natural world wants nothing of theory. The natural world craves for a voice outside of the human, for a voice that can travel beyond sound into actual oral articulation, for a natural voice that can claim its death, its leaving. I wonder if this is possible? Can nature sing? Can we allow it?

Just as we cannot catch the nonhuman entering their temporary dark, we cannot catch the human arriving at their permanent dying. We think we can know the exact moment death is coming. Doctors offer us our chances, give us months as we hope for years, but it has nothing to do with time. It has everything to do with the moment, the moment we cannot control, the dying moment. So many souls at this cemetery did not see that moment coming. My uncle didn’t. He was on the phone with his niece and then he wasn’t. His heart stopped, gave out, walked off and no one saw it coming.    

"How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death,

How impossible to write it down."

At dusk, I arrive at the cemetery to locked gates. The light is leaving me. The dark will not let me in and I respect that. I stand here and stare through his dim body, searching for an end, waiting for my eyes to hit into a kind of spine or bone, but nothing happens. My stare just travels deeper and deeper into him. It moves through the pines that are hardly visible. I can barely make out their stoutness or the way their bodies are marked with the scars that tell their life stories. I reach over the gate and touch the chest of one of the pines to make sure I am not seeing things, to make sure there is a real body standing firm in front of me. The bark is cold and rough and touching its riveted skin makes me that much more human, that much more alive and able to feel through the dark.

This cemetery rises with the sun and falls asleep to the dusk and its human visitors are told to follow the same cycle, but I am breaking it by being here. I wonder what I would do if I were to get caught, if a human would see me in front of this gate. How would I explain myself? Would I say, I am trying to capture death or the moment right before? No not human death, no not death at all really, but more the natural leaving of things.  

"This is where language will stop"

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Sifting Through the Dark--Blog Entry #6 Inspired By:

“The First Night”

By Billy Collins

The worst thing about death must be
   

the first night.
                   

            —Juan Ramón Jiménez

Before I opened you, Jiménez,

it never occurred to me that day and night

would continue to circle each other in the ring of death,

but now you have me wondering

if there will also be a sun and a moon

and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set

then repair, each soul alone,

to some ghastly equivalent of a bed.

Or will the first night be the only night,

a darkness for which we have no other name?

How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death,

How impossible to write it down.

This is where language will stop,

the horse we have ridden all our lives

rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff.

The word that was in the beginning

and the word that was made flesh—

those and all the other words will cease.

Even now, reading you on this trellised porch,

how can I describe a sun that will shine after death?

But it is enough to frighten me

into paying more attention to the world’s day-moon,

to sunlight bright on water

or fragmented in a grove of trees,

and to look more closely here at these small leaves,

these sentinel thorns,

whose employment it is to guard the rose.