this mystery

.

As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them,
so the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together
and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.

–Marie Howe

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dis(appearances

.

I come here every day, say hello to the butterflies, and talk about things with them. When the time comes, though, they just quietly go off and disappear. I'm sure it means they've died, but I can never find their bodies. They don't leave any trace behind. It's as if they've been absorbed by the air. They're dainty little creatures that hardly exist at all: they come out of nowhere, search quietly for a few, limited things, and disappear into nothingness again, perhaps to some other world.

–Haruki Murakami
1Q84, p 81

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prison hospice. beautiful.

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tell me before you go

.

WRITER: But tell me before you go. What was the worst thing about being down there?

AGNES: Just existing. Knowing my sight was blurred by my eyes, my hearing dulled by my ears, and bright thought trapped in the grey maze of a brain. Have you seen a brain?

WRITER: And you're telling me that's what's wrong with us? How else can we be?


–August Strindberg
A Dream Play, Caryl Churchill adaptation

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after all

.

The physical world many believe to exist beyond consciousness is an abstract explanatory model.

Without a physical world outside consciousness, we are left with consciousness alone as ground of reality. In this case, we must completely revise our intuitions and assumptions regarding death. After all, if consciousness is that within which birth and death unfold as phenomenal processes, then neither birth nor death can bear any relevance to the existential status of consciousness itself.


—Bernardo Kastrup
The Idealist View of Consciousness After Death

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markings
.

pearl of the formless

.

I drive down into the depth of the ocean of
forms, hoping to gain the perfect pearl of the formless.

No more sailing from harbour to harbour with this my weather-beaten boat.
The days are long passed when my sport was to be tossed on waves.

And now I am eager to die into the deathless.

Into the audience hall by the fathomless abyss where swells up the music of toneless strings I shall take this harp of my life.

I shall tune it to the notes of forever,
and, when it has sobbed out its last utterance, lay down my silent harp at the feet of the silent.


–Tagore translation
from Gitanjali

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in(formation

.

If you want to have life, you have to die every moment for it.

Life and death are only different expressions of the same thing looked at from different standpoints; they are the falling and the rising of the same wave, and the two form one whole.

—Swami Vivekananda

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