Not a Morbid Preoccupation

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I’ve been fascinated by death since before I hit my teens.

That being said, I am not, in any way into senseless acts of murder and genocide. I’m not a sadist. What I mean to say, in defense of my expression for appreciating the dark beyond, is that it is the mystery and enigmatic ambiguity of death and it’s ‘assumed’ role in our own existence that fascinates me. While I may be a huge fan of fictionalized, fantasy violence in film, art and literature, it’s the deeper, more philosophical roots of eternal rest, or as I prefer - impermanence - that I find begging interpretation and thusly, expansion upon. I, not unlike pretty much everyone else on the planet, have had my own experiences with death. Some that shredded my insides like fistfuls of cheap balsa in a wood chipper, and others that left me looking longingly over the edge of 'can I go on without them'. I’ve watched friends lose parents. Parents lose children. There are no words that can accurately express what death produces second-hand. I confronted my own mortality at a very early age, and while it may have been one of the worst moments of my youth, it benefited me in hindsight in not only personal, but philosophical and creative ways. As opposed to stewing in an abysmal mire of negativity and hate and rage and self-destruction, I began to realize that I possessed the means to refine, and redirect that negativity into something positive, even if it was only a few pieces of art and literature that maybe, I assumed, nobody would ever care about. Death has become an integral threat, motivator and setting in all of my writing to varying degree, and I can't think of a better, more organic and primal struggle for a toiling protagonist to face. There are many, seemingly endless shades of death and many angles I try to approach it in a way that feels, ironically so, 'fresh', and keeps readers waltzing on the edge of possibility that death may not be the end.

“Why should I fear death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which cannot exist when I do?”

—Epicurus

“If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death”

—Samuel Butler “Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace.” —Oscar Wilde “Life asked death, ‘Why do people love me but hate you?’ Death responded, ‘Because you are a beautiful lie and I am a painful truth.” —Author unknown “It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but retire a little from sight and afterwards return again.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson The Emerson quote is quite possibly the easiest way to surmise my approach to the use of death in my writing. It’s not an event, or act; it’s a second chance, a rebirth. The end of one, and beginning of another. Cyclic. Not unlike a chorus. EndFragment

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#essay #death