Addiction holds you as strongly as death; addiction is akin to death yet is only a shadow of it, like listening to a motif rather than facing that which it represents; addiction is both fear and pleasure, like a requiem.
The quote on page 108 about death being the furthest the fashion photographers could go, from sex and tattoos and piercings to mortality, made me wonder what to expect next. A return to the days of falsities? The afterlife? The fantasy world? What is both worse and more realistic than death? Perhaps small things like clipping your toenails into a plastic waste bin or filling out a cheque for the electric bill or reading the programme at a lecture on health care or scraping the burnt bottom of a pan used to make an omelette that you forgot when you went to blow-dry your hair before work…and you work on the sales team at a store that sells…blow driers.
Another fabulous quote was on page 52: “People don’t associate you with the therapeutic function of exposing the shadow; they associate you with that shadow.” I wonder which is worse: for people to associate you with the shadow you attempt to bring to light, or for you to begin associating yourself with the shadow? No, I know which is worse, the latter is worse by far, for in contemplating yourself and the within, you are that with which you associate yourself. The shadow you are trying to bring to light surfaces into the day, but drags you into its core until the day is like night. Death devours those who reveal it; death is sun-shy and fierce.
Death is fiercest when cheapened, when commercialized, when commoditized, when marketed as the new chic. For it catches its purchasers unawares, for those who buy death are themselves sold, those who consume death are consumed in turn. When we forget death is fierce, he is fiercest.
There, I’ve gone and made him a he. Now why have I done that? Because I forget the power it has over me, and therefore he is he. And I also forget that he has no power over me, and therefore he is he.
But maybe he isn’t him…the terror that is death is in his genderlessness, in his facelessness, in his voicelessness, in his ambiguity, in his mask, in his lessness. Like the beautiful line written by Franz Wright about what Franz Wright carries up the walk: “Hugging that heavy black manuscript of blank texts.”
Living death is wanting to be invisible and wearing orange.
Living death is limbs not too heavy but to fragile to move.
Living death is a cage of camouflage with a broken lock.
