that "stellar" essay of mine...
<< 10:04 p.m. - Monday, Dec. 16, 2002 >>
Evolution of Death

�So Janie began to think of death. Death, that strange being with the huge square toes who lived way in the West. The great one who lived in the straight house like a platform without sides to it, and without a roof. What need has Death for a cover, and what winds can blow against him? He stands in his high house that overlooks the world. Stands watchful and motionless all day with his sword drawn back, waiting for the messenger to bid him come. Been standing there before there was a where or a when or a then.� (80).

Here I am in the same position, sitting in darkness and trying to find an explanation for death. It weighs on my mind, puts it�s importance in front of all else. Where are the answers when I need them? Questions continue to pile up before my barricaded door; I will not let them in. Death has no end of interpretation � I can find no secure answer. I shut him out in fear. What will become of my rotting body once my heart falters and stops its steady beating? A light at the end of the tunnel? No, I choose to excerpt that from the possibilities. Philosophers gather to discuss the vast universe and I laugh, shrinking back when I realize I stand on unstable ground.

He is of the darkness, without a scythe or black shielding cloak; his presence the only binding truth. In his wake you shall fall � his touch freezing every moment that ever mattered. None may get close to such illusive illusion. We spend all our waking life avoiding his presence, avoiding the tolling of the bells, the lowered flag. Finally willing to accept an end we find peace only too close to our own flickering flames of time.

�There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought. Nanny entered this infinity of conscious pain again on her old knees. Towards morning she muttered, �Lawd, you know mah heart. Ah done de best Ah could do. De rest is left to you.� She scuffled up from her knees and fell heavily across her bed. A month later she was dead.� (23).

Early in life we learn of death. This faraway entity that means nothing more to us than the economy or the function of cells in an organism. It all remains to be learned, our hearts unprepared for emotional knives that are poised to stab. Janie, like all children lives in a whim. A daily creation of her imagination. At one point she watches the blossoms being pollinated, the seeds of dandelions lilting off like music across the unending earth, and sees love. She understands happiness and cares not to see more. Her heart feels full.

Time passes, and as if Pandora�s box has been opened all over again, a flood of conscious and truth hits her. She is seeing past what is said, what is seen. Because there is something deeper beneath all the acting. Lies and fa�ades line the street corners, clog the drain, and fall into dark puddles when the sun stops shining. Not all is as it seems. �The familiar people and things had failed her so she hung over the gate and looked up the road towards way off.� She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie�s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.� (24).

A figurative death followed suit, with all the elaboration of a funeral. She was wearing white, standing near Logan, convinced that marriage meant love. Dreams die. Hover fleetingly and pop suddenly out of view. What lay before her was unlike the road she saw behind the rattling carriage.

She wants to leave. Fantasy and facts can only travel together so far. She runs from problems. She runs from Logan, he is as good as dead to her. Life with another begins and ends slowly. She thought she loved Joe, he thought she should love him, but put forward little kindness in return. Manners and power are his lovers. Vivacity drains from her, while he himself fades away into less than skin and bone. Looking like a bedraggled crow. �The icy sword of the square-toed one had cut off his breath and left his hands in a pose of agonizing protest.� (82).

She did not love him. The coldest and most isolated part of her heart had never felt any warmth from Joe. She mourned for the idea of what he could have been. She mourned to stop gossip. But her heart detached itself quickly. �Janie starched and ironed her face and came set in the funeral behind her veil. It was like a wall of stone an steel. The funeral was going on outside. All things concerning death and burial were said and done. Finish. End. Nevermore. Darkness. Deep hole. Dissolution. Eternity. Weeping and wailing outside. Inside the expensive black folds were resurrection and life. She did not reach outside for anything, nor did the things of death reach inside to disturb her calm.� (84) It was over. She could unlock herself from his binding chains and find freedom.

Tea Cake came then. Scurried into corners of her being with a burning torch. A rejuvenation. A lightening of spirit. Looking back on her life, the time spent with him must seem like seconds. He was everything her childhood heart had craved and she bubbled over with happiness. Her dreams and reality were dashed once more. �And then again Him-with-the-square-toes had gone back to his house. He stood once more and again in his high flat house without sides to it and without a roof with his soulless sword standing upright in his hand. His pale white horse had galloped over waters, and thundered over land. The time of dying was over. It was time to bury the dead.� (160).

She was wrong. It was not over. The hurricane was only the beginning. A crescendo of pain that crashed with the fury of the renewed sea all around her. What had she done to deserve this? Beaten down over and over. And still managing to stand up and walk away, eyes leaking the salt water she had swallowed. Tea Cake was the only person who had shown her a window out. He left her true freedom, undid the chains from Joe and loved her more than she had ever known. He would leave her with a gun in his hand. Rabid and lost. �It was the meanest moment in eternity. A minute before she was just a scared human being fighting for its life. Now she was her sacrificing self with Tea Cake�s head in her lap. She had wanted him to live so much and he was dead. No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep. Janie held his head tightly to her breast and wept and thanked him wordlessly for giving her the chance for loving service. She had to tell him for the last time. Then the grief of outer darkness descended.� (175).

All was not lost. The sun continues to rise and with each day we pick up the pieces of the day before. Dropping china everyday to remind us what we have to live for, what we have to die for. In that monotony Janie found peace. Tea Cake would be there, waiting for her in heaven.

�The day of the gun, and the bloody body, and the courthouse came and commence to sing a sobbing sigh out of every corner of the room; out of each and every chair and thing. Commenced to sing, commenced to sob and sigh, singing an sobbing. Then Tea Cake came prancing around her where she was and the song of the sigh flew out the window and lit the top of the pine trees. Tea Cake, with the sun for a shawl. Of course he wasn�t dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking.� (184).

Images of the dead don�t simply fade out our minds. Their grip does not lessen. We can only dig ourselves so far. At some point one must turn around and scratch at the dirt walls trying to escape. A cave of negative thoughts. Every dust particle caught in the light of darkness like a dying dream. We live with the dead everyday and learn to accept our fate. Pallid ghosts that drift outside my window. Part of the scenery, the backdrop, they exist only in my unconscious, for I choose to forget them. I let the memory of those past slip past me and float to the ceaseless sky.