Our tradition tells us that life is transient. Tradition means no change. Thus our life is a denial of the reality of change. We only speculate about death. Living people do not bother about death. The memory in you wants to know whether it will continue even after what it imagines as death occurs. Death is the finality. There is no solution without death.
When we notice the phenomenon of death, we form a desire to survive beyond death. So naturally we create something beyond it. We replace one illusion with another illusion, because ending illusions is death. Man is not happy unless he has illusions. Illusions vanish only at his death.
As I walk through the soft dirt, already muddy from the predawn Sunday drizzle, into the graveyard, a sense of peace seems to move over my thoughts. I always preferred the dead, what I can see of them. They have all the answers that so many people look for all their lives until they become caught in the infernal machine of humanity. Twisting away each human's useless existence on their own little self-important meaningless tasks. Lightning tears through the sky; the thunderstorm has started, no dramatic rumbling through the clouds yet, only a flash reflecting off of each glossy gravestone, and then darkness.
I walk out away from the houses that border this morbid soil and sit upon a stone, the names says David Bowser, 1934 -1998. He was a veteran, left behind a wife and kid when he died. I stare out at the massive span of graves, each one of these dead has left behind families, who will die and leave behind more families. Eventually the line will grow so long that David Bowser, war veteran, loving father and husband, will be forgotten. Just another name in the wash. I stand and run, not in any particular direction, just run, from what I don't know. I grow elated in my exhaustion, leaping over gravestones, laughing at the top of my lungs. The dark grass wet from the rain now pouring down over me like time hitting me on the head to assure me of the clock. Lightning flashes blue in the distant clouds and makes the silhouette of the bare winter trees like dark veins reaching into the sky.
I flash down the gravel path bisecting the stones, the wind gusts like an invisible hand pushing my way down the path. I run until my lungs ache and my head is dizzy with air, I run until muscles burn and my veins feel as if they will explode. The flowing rain streaks through my hair and soaks my clothing. I run amongst the graves, leaping and laughing, my foot catches on a headstone and I go over. Tearing my arm on the edge down to the muscle, landing with my face in the dark fertile soil. Standing slowly up, I slosh in the grass in front of the stone that caused my fall. I stare at its name, blankly at first. But as the fog of my head clears and my eyes focus through the mist and falling rain my eyes read the writing carved into the stone....'West'. I throw my head is thrown back and laugh at the sky.
I lie in the mud and grass for longer than I remember, staring into the dark gray sky. All I can hear is the sound of my heart, pumping blood through my body, making me live. I feeling each raindrop hit my face, knowing, feeling that beneath me lie the long dead relatives of people I will never know. Answers, rotting bloated decaying answers beneath the soil. As I am lying there I wish the ground would swallow me up. Take me down, give me the answers, and tell me if we really matter or if we are just wasting our time living.
Staggering to my feet, exhausted by lack of sleep and running, I slowly wander around the graveyard. An arrangement of false flowers has been placed at the foot of a stone, 'Dad' it says. I wonder if he was a good father; good enough, I guess, to have his children place plastic replicas of flowers above where he is buried, decaying, slowly turning into dust.
I begin to run again, not feeling the blood streaming down my arm, the flag from David Bowser's stone flapping wet in the wind, it's not like he needed it. I begin to feel like I am being pursued by some invisible entity, as if death could catch up to me and reach its icy fingers around my throat, wresting the life from me. I run faster, letting out a screaming, laughing crying noise, because I know I will die, but I want to believe that I won't and its all these stones and fresh graves and flags and dirt and people that tell me.... 'one day you will have all the answers you need, and just maybe, it will be more than you can handle'.
When we notice the phenomenon of death, we form a desire to survive beyond death. So naturally we create something beyond it. We replace one illusion with another illusion, because ending illusions is death. Man is not happy unless he has illusions. Illusions vanish only at his death.
As I walk through the soft dirt, already muddy from the predawn Sunday drizzle, into the graveyard, a sense of peace seems to move over my thoughts. I always preferred the dead, what I can see of them. They have all the answers that so many people look for all their lives until they become caught in the infernal machine of humanity. Twisting away each human's useless existence on their own little self-important meaningless tasks. Lightning tears through the sky; the thunderstorm has started, no dramatic rumbling through the clouds yet, only a flash reflecting off of each glossy gravestone, and then darkness.
I walk out away from the houses that border this morbid soil and sit upon a stone, the names says David Bowser, 1934 -1998. He was a veteran, left behind a wife and kid when he died. I stare out at the massive span of graves, each one of these dead has left behind families, who will die and leave behind more families. Eventually the line will grow so long that David Bowser, war veteran, loving father and husband, will be forgotten. Just another name in the wash. I stand and run, not in any particular direction, just run, from what I don't know. I grow elated in my exhaustion, leaping over gravestones, laughing at the top of my lungs. The dark grass wet from the rain now pouring down over me like time hitting me on the head to assure me of the clock. Lightning flashes blue in the distant clouds and makes the silhouette of the bare winter trees like dark veins reaching into the sky.
I flash down the gravel path bisecting the stones, the wind gusts like an invisible hand pushing my way down the path. I run until my lungs ache and my head is dizzy with air, I run until muscles burn and my veins feel as if they will explode. The flowing rain streaks through my hair and soaks my clothing. I run amongst the graves, leaping and laughing, my foot catches on a headstone and I go over. Tearing my arm on the edge down to the muscle, landing with my face in the dark fertile soil. Standing slowly up, I slosh in the grass in front of the stone that caused my fall. I stare at its name, blankly at first. But as the fog of my head clears and my eyes focus through the mist and falling rain my eyes read the writing carved into the stone....'West'. I throw my head is thrown back and laugh at the sky.
I lie in the mud and grass for longer than I remember, staring into the dark gray sky. All I can hear is the sound of my heart, pumping blood through my body, making me live. I feeling each raindrop hit my face, knowing, feeling that beneath me lie the long dead relatives of people I will never know. Answers, rotting bloated decaying answers beneath the soil. As I am lying there I wish the ground would swallow me up. Take me down, give me the answers, and tell me if we really matter or if we are just wasting our time living.
Staggering to my feet, exhausted by lack of sleep and running, I slowly wander around the graveyard. An arrangement of false flowers has been placed at the foot of a stone, 'Dad' it says. I wonder if he was a good father; good enough, I guess, to have his children place plastic replicas of flowers above where he is buried, decaying, slowly turning into dust.
I begin to run again, not feeling the blood streaming down my arm, the flag from David Bowser's stone flapping wet in the wind, it's not like he needed it. I begin to feel like I am being pursued by some invisible entity, as if death could catch up to me and reach its icy fingers around my throat, wresting the life from me. I run faster, letting out a screaming, laughing crying noise, because I know I will die, but I want to believe that I won't and its all these stones and fresh graves and flags and dirt and people that tell me.... 'one day you will have all the answers you need, and just maybe, it will be more than you can handle'.