Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Carolyn van Langenberg - #12# - tweed (v) - daisies are everlasting

Carolyn van Langenberg - #12# - tweed (v) - daisies are everlasting "But is there a link to older beliefs and practices? Are we a radical technology that simply renews and extends those swarming traditions of everlasting life?" (Don DeLillo) The daisies in the old tub at the back door lasted forever, until they grew rank, stems wooden, incapable of budding, flowering, attracting bees, wilted in the summer's heat. My spine will be like those daisies. Once lissome, it will become gnarled with protrusions, and among the photographs of proud settlers, the men in suits, the women in long fastidiously fitted dresses, there are antecedents with my problem. Are these stern uncles and aunts my death-haunted roots? Are they emblems of my extinction? Twisted throughout the long and complicated tendrils of faith, doctrine insists life's mysteries reside in an everlasting life, the life thereafter, that idealised belief in never dying, eternal life, like a desired punch, the reward for the good life, complemented by rejecting the observation that life begins, grows, matures and then declines. Illnesses and accidents, travails - trials and tribulations - wreak havoc on nerve ends, biochemistry and organs. Stamina is eroded, sometimes slowly. Medical intervention that saves life doesn't restore strength, but prolongs.... prolongs breathing ...., eating a healthy breakfast, drinking the latest quaffable wine, the mechanisms of autophagy, the process by which cells break down and recycle their biochemical components, ....as well as the sharing with lugubrious inattention the details about body bits dropping off. Like the daisies at the back door of a farmhouse lopsided on its stumps, those body parts fly with occasional grace and some daring .... houses, daisies, ancestors...... with no complicating becoming and beginning and life everlasting and eternity befuddling liveliness. Arrogance adds up to avoiding the inevitable, the last breath is .....if without a full-stop, the writing above concentrically, sinuously, dances, the habit of death signals nothing is nothing

6 comments:

  1. Oh, those daisies carry a whole life!

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    1. So many daisies, living, painted and embroidered, even twisted into lace.

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  2. Carolyn, that is marvelous writing. You know that. But your short essay here makes it onto my list of the best things I've read for a long time. Thank you.

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  3. So many wonderful lines and images. This is a great piece.

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