Me And Everyone Else
John Torrington, 1825 - 1 January 1846. Stoker, HMS Terror
A sailor who's job was to keep the furnaces going, Torrington died of pneumonia while on the Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage, one of the only 3 bodies recovered although some bones have been found.
Stack of heads, King William Island, 1945. No bodies. Whoever put these here died before the skulls could be cracked open for the brains inside. Heads do not group together of themselves. See what happens when a member of a herd in extremis falters?
Far better alone and forgotten than one of a herd. Infinitely preferable the most frozen wasteland then life on the ever changing ever static veldt, existence then death then non-existence, repeat. No prey animal dies of old age. Most animals cannot have been proven to have lived at all. My cats will live as long as I do, all of them. Temporary, but something. An animal that has known love and loved in return is as immortal as any of us. Eventually I will return to earth or the ocean, part of the eternal use and re-use of atoms. Some other time I will bring up the custom of enclosing our dead in airtight, waterproof boxes. The Ice Regions preserve for a very long time, but everything fades away. But - and this matters - you die a memorial to your own death, a marker that will be around for a very long time. Pointless, sure, but so is everything else, including the birth of stars.
Jeremy Bentham called such a monument an 'Auto Icon'.
Of all his friends and neighbors and acquaintances, who do we talk about now?
Apologies to dearest Oscar and all, but I would just as soon not be talked about. This is Tollund Man, today.
Friends and neighbors and acquaintances. This is Tollund Man delivering a message to the Gods. The message reads 'Thanks'.
Hubble image, Birth of a Star
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
(Anyone unfamiliar with the poem fragment above can look it up or not, please yourself. My site requires no study guides. The Cold Wastes I talk of here are a metaphor for solitude, I hate cold weather. It's been in the sixties today and I'm damn near dead).
That was beautiful, cosmic and bleak all at once. Prose poetry, man. Love it!!!
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