Well, recently it was brought to my notice thanks to a certain course i was taking at the university, how very preoccupied Western culture is by the idea and the fact of death. Indeed I turned a few pages of my favorite books, and checked the cover of my recent Coldplay album (Vida la Viva or Death and all His Friends) and there it was...you know, I never thought about death or dying, in any substantial way. It was there, you died and it was just something like you are alive. Indeed it seems to have been a great preoccupation with my young, little brother who was this fourteen year old and he constantly told me about his fears of dying, of falling into this dark, dark infinite pit and it was a constant fear to him. Until i took this course, i never considered death as anything but some distant far off thing that looms somewhere in the background and which has very little effect on my life. The truth is, I am not afraid of dying and it would matter really nothing if i did not wake up tomorrow. But it is also equally true that while I am alive, I kind of feel i am immortal, not made to dim out. I feel i can conquer the world, that whatever i want and desire i can will it into happening, most times i do will things into happening and some occasional times when my will is not enough and the Cosmic Will and my own clashes and i do not get what i want, i cry and i fight but i live. I do not feel dead inside. I want to live like a flame, while i am alive. I do not want to be constrained by any morbid ideas of death. Durer, Burton, Guercino, Puissant many, many, many they had very successful careers forwarded by death, but when i can dance instead with death's brother Sleep and waddle about in the Dreamworld with the Dream-maker, what should i care for Death. I like to live, i like to extended my metaphorical wings, much pretty and i like wearing Lolita like glasses and watch the world from a distance. Too much exposure to reality is absolutely disastrous for my soul. I'd like to wander in a world that vibrated with the strains of Scarborough Fair. Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme...remember me tomorrow....and dance in some kind of infinite expanse from where nothing can actually cause me any pain. I like to live without pain, sorrow, undisturbed, untouched. It's painful to be in love, to be in any sort of contact with something that would lead me to death. I realized this relation between love and death...what the Greeks would call Eros and Thanatos. Being in love is something like dying a little, Eros leads you to a kind of self immolation and the dying away of a former personality and blending into the One. When you love somebody, you really do die slowly, you try to change yourself, your personality undergoes some sort of a slow erosion and slowly you turn into something really different. Every time you love, you die. Immeasurable pain.
The western civilization cannot think beyond death, it cannot transcend death. It has no place for death in its philosophy really. For us death is only temporal, like life. We die and then we have hope of reincarnation, until the cycle consumes itself with the final liberation, the ultimate achievement of Nirvana. You do not die forever, you may simply be reborn as a crow. There is some kind of a solace there, albeit an avian type. For the West bred on Christianity, only the dark, troublesome arcade of darkness in the domain of Lucifer (ironically the bringer of light). That is what they have and some other really dismal, chilly philosophy developed by surly, disheartened medieval frustrated closet debauchs. I love Christ, i visit a church more often than i set foot in a temple, still, i cannot feel that those clerics writing in Latin, burning people at the spark of a flint were anything more than charlatans who tried to dehumanize a very humane philosophy and way of life. Well, anyway, so the west cannot overcome anything other than their really small way of seeing things, i cannot blame them. Poor fools.
