which is more frightening—an invisible death or a foreseen death? what i mean is, should we be afraid of vasari’s carnival 1511 where the black oxen drag the dead men through the streets singing “dead we are as you can see and dead we’ll see you one day be”? or should be frightened by plath’s blue-satin flemish lovers, foolish, deaf and blind to the carrion army surrounding them?
breugel’s dead are just; baudelaire’s glamorous. the difference between the two is that breugel’s bring the living into their ranks (for desertion is punishable by life) and baudelaire’s bride yearns for the admiration of the living. and therefore breugel’s dead enrapture and enchant while baudelaire’s merely mirror life. breugel’s dead…the living are guilty, the immortal unforgivable, for life is gluttony, lust, and greed, all to be surrendered in death. death is the truest democracy, the truest equality, as petrarch notes: where are their riches now, their honours? wretched is he who hopes in worldly things (but who does not do so?), and if, in the end, they are deceived, then this is just.
we all belong to death and to escape him is a sin, for in death we are equal, simple, true, still. he is a jealous master. yet shelley sees the dead not as tranquil but as feeble and roving, faded yet roaming. perhaps because death it is because death is extreme that we are drawn to it, as schiller notes, because though the transition is one from animation to immobility, it is a great transition nonetheless. any shocking change is a source of awe, because from vast dichotomies, differences, contrasts, we derive awe. perhaps it is because death is so much greater than ourselves, so full of power beyond our control, that we flock to it as we do to disaster or pain. or perhaps we are not meant to be tranquil beings, and, therefore, in bringing us into peace, death does us great violence. perhaps we are merely fascinated because of all these perhapses, because we cannot know or even theorize. death is not a thing, but the absence of a thing, of life, and we cannot imagine what fills that void.
when one life dies, it seems as if all life dies with it. middleton’s kaspar is gone, and with him goes the fairies, and the compasses, the pushcart wheels, the devil-shooer, lucid monograms in the stars: the imagination, direction and logic, energy, protection and good, wisdom. and yet the last line is one pitying not the world which has lost, but the man who has lost the world. for the divorce is painful for both, whomever left first.
in death, who has lost and who has gained? or does river flow on in circles, winding around and refilling its empty bed?
