To Secure a Share of Equanimity, Hide Behind a Skull

Death empowers others. — Elias Canetti

The rain comes down both sides of a camel, but only one flank of the mountain is green. Spirit falls from the summit into a moment of thought. A mythical uneasiness.

Through each gate passes a road, lawless and desolate; along the road a breeze, scented with rotting fruit. A manufactured world maintained by force of mental habit. The carpenter’s level with its bubble of sand. Each grain a peak of wonder. Illumination everywhere. Jewels reflecting other jewels and the reflections of those jewels, where everything is inherent in everything else.

He sat down to write his will. He had none. Acceptance had brought him to its bosom and the fountain pen was dry. He loosened his tie, turned toward the mantelpiece, and winked at the pale space on the wall. The embers glowing in the fireplace reminded him of a passion spent in solitude, counting the rings of a splintered oak. The axe rusting in the woodshed, beneath a birdcage wrapped in oil cloth. There were no footprints in the dust. The weasel was dead.

The priests that serve the rich and powerful had left their humble vestments hanging with the cobwebs in a stranger’s misery. Adamantine smiles sharpened their homilies, a rosary of blood clots dangling from their fists. And when outside the place of worship the sun went down and the last light slipped through the stained glass, dying the blood-spattered cloth that covered his loins, the man on the cross, finally at peace, cried Mary.

To offset an inevitable process of decay, by which half-lives might corrupt the known world, in 1959, on an island in the South Pacific, people were eaten for the last time – to honor an atomic explosion.