LIFE. ORG

A virus has more organized life than a star, though a star has an order of appearance, star in the sky and star on stage, but I am speaking of organic life, though a star on the stage or a movie star has organic life, more, in fact, than the virus. This explanation is paradoxical, a seeming contradiction, but let it stand for something in the same way that anything can stand for something else, particularly among symbolists and surrealists. In the same sense that the paranormal is most normal, the surrealists are most real. But humans are coelenterates: my liver heaves, my bowels twist, squirm with excitement and lead their own lives inside me. I need a new part. It pulsates. It is not my friend, but perhaps we can get along, after a time. At first, other parts reject it, but eventually they are tamed. You are all working for me, I cry. We are our own liver, kidney, heart. I am not your heart. You have no heart. Your better half told you that. You have no other half. It is all a golden fiction, inspired by sex. Your sex organs aren't even your own--they do as they please. As the real estate agent told the homeowner who questioned him about an easement, You don't own property, you control it. You don't own yourself, and you barely control yourself for social reasons of benefit to you and to the group. Life is the opposite of what is burning out there in space, that celestial snow, those flickering fireflies, which, close up, are all titanic violence. Life is soft and squirms when you caress it, and it could rule the night of the stars, if given time.

DEATH. COM

I think of Earth as a great piņada, stuffed with death. Traditionally, at the end of the party, you take a whack at a piņada and it breaks, spilling its contents. If you did that with Earth, the countless dead would be released and scattered into space, and, though the geologists and the astrophysicists would disagree with me, I say that what would be left would be a tenth the size of the present globe, a wrinkled, raisin-like, bag that no longer had an orbit or an axis on which to fall toward the sun or to do its wobbly spin. The dead from Earth's beginnings to the present, or what was left of them, would float off into space, much as the stars, the galaxies are floating off, away from each other, red, and growing lonelier and lonelier. But perhaps there is something to meet somewhere out there. Perhaps the universe has a bright side. The darkness of the void wouldn't bother the remanents of the dead, they are use it: star light, star bright! They are as blind as they were when they lived, for we see with our minds not our eyes. So the whole thing is for the living. Death. Commercial. Bury the blistering bodies or burn them! Stand in the midst of life and look at them go, to dust, to smoke, to ashes. Then rejoin the matter of the universe yourself; the universe that, if it were capable of hope, could only hope to live.