Posts tagged "death" — Page 2

Relinquishment

But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. Let’s not go too far in such analogies, however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that that “is not worth the trouble.” Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence, for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.

~Albert Camu, The Myth of Sisyphus

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There is a pain — so utter —

There is a pain — so utter —
It swallows substance up —
Then covers the Abyss with Trance —
So Memory can step
Around — across — opon it —
As One within a Swoon —
Goes safely — where an open eye —
Would drop Him — Bone by Bone —
~Emily Dickinson

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Untitled I

To all viewers but yourself, what matters is the product – the finished artwork. To you, and you alone, what matters is the process: the experience of shaping the work.1

A struggle with my daily drabble. Three discordant points occupy my mind, defying order; a disparate triangle.

Kendrick Castillo. Student (their child!) dies defending his Colorado classmates during (another!) school shooting. We the People christen him a hero.

Kurt Cobain, beautiful, (self-deceased) idealist. All apologies.

Brown Bird in my garden, perched atop a sunburned finial. Teacup size, befitting call of teakettle, teakettle, teakettle. Translation: In the sun I feel as one.2

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Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

~W. H. Auden

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