The Inescapable Part

Dying Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

~ Sylvia Plath, "Lady Lazarus"

There is, I think, a certain art to self-destruction: but only in retrospect. When one is in the midst of destroying oneself (as in the throes of alcoholic delirium tremens, for instance) there is not much in the way of art -- just a lot of painful sing-song voices and dancing about old times waiting for some non-existent savior to bring you another bottle.

However, in retrospect -- after the pain has become a distant, evolutionarily muted memory -- a certain odd beauty emerges, rather like one of those alien hybrid worlds of Lovecraft's work ... The intensity of the moment quiets and the sound of paramedics and sirens and the rush of nurses to get the IV in all become just a part of a tapestry ... that's it.

But the worst part of it all -- the inescapable part! -- is when the people we love no longer see this thing as a grand work of art, but as a simple refusal to live. And now here is where I'll get philosophical ...

Life on life's terms. -- I hate that phrase. It is spoken by the weak who pretend that Life is somehow an entity to be approached with reverence and awe like some sort of biblical manifestation of the deity. No! Life is nothing but a jumble of possibilities crammed into a very small personal space, with nowhere to go unless we drag them along with us on our unpredictable journey into the dark unknown, the boundless night, the pure chaos of non-being -- toward which we are all headed.

When Kurtz cried his famous line, "The horror! the horror!," he was not referring to anything inside or about him, but rather about the life-denying world that he tried to escape! Unsuccessfully, of course. The true artist wants to do two things at once: stay in the world and love it; and escape from it and laugh sardonically at its folly from a safe distance, or height. At worst, of course, the artist is like Byron's Manfred, pulled back from the precipice by the lowly chamois hunter. So what are we to do?

Remember to cry at Christmas (or whatever holiday you observe) for the family you've lost. But rejoice in the fact that you are INDOMITABLE.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware.

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

Sylvia, her last word on the matter