DEATHCONSCIOUSNESS

Why did the scent of bitter almonds remind Dr. Urbino of the fate of thwarted love? Not until the very experience we awaited—the one we thought would bring understanding once lived—finally occurs, do we find ourselves still powerless to understand death: it presents no disquiet, brings no miraculous epiphany to our lives, and all that remains are hurried passersby and late-arriving spectators. In light of this, I have attempted to write this essay:
The title of this piece encompasses capitalism, modern Confucian radicalism, the dark enlightenment, Marx, Hegel, Hammurabi, Qin Shi Huang, and even every individual and deity. In short, it encompasses the entire universe.
If death is an answer, what then is the question?
Sitting at the threshold between tomorrow and yesterday, I ponder.
We do not grasp the meaning of Hegel, just as we do not grasp the meaning of the universe. Yet Hegel, with his semblance to us, to Caucasians, Asians, butterflies, and tyrannosaurs, bears a death akin to ours. And so, Hegel appears across time and space, his shadow overlapping with our own.
Because death trails us like a shadow, so does Hegel, just as do the shadows of Caucasians, Asians, butterflies, and tyrannosaurs. We tread upon their silhouettes as we move forward.
To search for an answer to the question of death, I take death as a slice, gliding at the intersection of time and space, stirring the tides of memory. The sea of memory crashes upon the shores of reality, and from the spray emerges emotion.
The tides of memory are dark and viscous, and death arrives silently when the waters turn blue.
Because death is infinite, this essay too can endlessly broaden and lengthen.
Thus, the death of this essay shall come just after the death of the world.
The Chinese writer Yu Hua often quotes the opening sentence of this essay but once muddled the order of its phrases, realizing his error only twenty-five years later. He lamented that narratology was not adequately reflected in the original sentence.
This misunderstanding is, perhaps, understandable. After all, any rational examination of the irrational is bound to be flawed.
Liszt’s inspiration derived from Lamartine’s verse: “Man’s life is a series of preludes to death.” Liszt and Lamartine explored death as an artistic theme, not as a facet of life itself. Yet true art, in an unguarded instant, like a stray bullet, strikes at reality. In the splintered instant of collision, as reality is dismembered, art emerges. At the moment art strikes reality, logic and consciousness form a closed loop.
What was the first death? What is the most exquisite death?
Unable to answer such questions, we come to recognize that death alone achieves true equality. In this sense, the symbolic and societal value of death is immeasurable, surpassing the sum total of all values bestowed by humanity’s greatest inventions, dynasties, or nations.
The first note of death is like the overtone struck by a god’s severed finger upon the world. When it resonated in my childhood, it entered the simplified score of my early life, transforming its disordered prelude into solemnity, then meaningless anguish and absurd reasoning, and finally into the cold, still aria of absolute silence.
Who first observed death? Upon which continent did the first corpse lie?
These questions propel narrative into an impossible infinity, into Wittgenstein’s domain of truth: the unspeakable.
The death of the world slumbers beyond the world itself, veiled in truth, dreamlike and illusory, luring us into endless imaginings.
The origin of death’s imagination is fabricated by memory, and its narrative is similarly thrust toward an unattainable infinity.
Now, as in the past, and in the future, the imagination of death accelerates, ascending and hurling itself toward the unknowable, only to shatter like the very content it envisions.
I recall the ghost stories of my childhood. Their clarity has dimmed with the passage of time, but their nostalgic essence, akin to the patina of old films, lingers, as if I were in a daze, amidst the gentle scent of decay in my hometown at dusk.
I sit at the border of yesterday and tomorrow, facing the funeral of today’s self. I gaze at my body lying in the coffin. Or rather, it is not a coffin, but the dried remains of yesterday’s me.
I gaze at him. Now, at last, I have the chance to scrutinize him, for soon I will collide with today’s self in the addictive agony of death’s imagination.
In the cacophony of endless clamor and derision, I begin to accelerate. Amidst this turmoil, I read loneliness inscribed within my terror.
I yearn to seize these inscriptions, but like trying to hold onto the fragments of a dream upon waking, I unwittingly hasten the process of death’s imagination.
Perhaps this is a long spiral. I think conventional sorrow can hardly describe what I feel at this moment. In moments of mental overload, the senses, like a drowning man, suck in every perceivable landscape, and every hell that logic can reach. But unfortunately, no matter how far logic extends, it remains within the realm of the knowable: this must be why the unknowable is so alluring, and death happens to be its most captivating jewel. It presents no disquiet, brings no miraculous epiphany to our lives; only stone paths with the texture of snowmelt and gravestones washed by white rain, the mournful green pines and the primal scent of pine and burning incense, the discussions and remembrances of the crowd, perhaps with cries, and the long, unending deep-green mountain ranges, an equally long scale of history and time, equally convoluted clouds and rhetoric and strata, embedding our ancestors into the silhouette of the world.