Wordless Winter · Dazaiosamu
Obituary: I
When we speak of this, we use too much rhetoric, even faulty grammar, at any cost, merely to bewilder the person we are talking toAnd so a love of descriptive textual material, driven by a plot too thin, shifts the emphasis to “severing” rather than “connecting,” as when, while the linen rugs in a boarding residence are changed out for washing, the elderly cleaners light cigarettes and exchange opinions on recent share prices, three arms bearing cigarette burns rest on a cracked tea-brown tabletop, a red short skirt rich in pleats and a fallen, rust-mottled engagement ring, those women walking, stumbling and uneasy, conceal an innocent fear not yet effaced. Do not add a full stop, we do not even need a comma let us continue let us continue, continue speaking of things wholly beside the point as though we had never harbored any concern about anything, the man I took for my teacher has already become soil, in the soil immaculate matter like an earthworm or the white eggs of insects, he who spoke of too many things has not yet stopped making speeches in my mind, from damp caves embedded beside sea cliffs to dry warm fences, all bear his words and fingerprints, let me quote: “On the day of my funeral please play this song, let them know some of my tastes but not the whole of them, prepare fragrant teabags and meaningless codes—including some wholesome, cheerful movements of the body and well-staggered glances, once they have all fallen silent, have my friends come forward one by one to bid me farewell—if they are still alive... as for the feathers, the broken fingernails, the watch gone dead, please see that they are properly dealt with” I close the book and hold my breath to hear him speak, and he adds: “Like this, when they fall silent, please begin to announce my death” and so and so, in the time it takes to recite the names of all Michelangelo's works, everyone connected with him sinks deep into memory, as though the amniotic fluid that wrapped their bodies at birth had been replaced, when these moments arrive, I think it is truly difficult not to feel a kind of void akin to guilt.Posting an obituary is like posting a job advertisement, but no one comes, only because everywhere in the world people are straining with all their might to build bridges, the fish-reeking concrete and rebar too numerous for the eye to take in, although no one realizes, no one detects that the rivers of our hearts have long since run dry. Those trunks once touched by our hands no longer cast wet and mutely dense shadows; look closely and the marks carved into them reveal:“The world dies and the love affair ends”Begin adjusting your breath shaving haphazardly letting the whole body be veiled in close-packed bubbles of music then soak at the bottom of a pond dense with water lilies hiding the spirit and the dazed unease within it like the cicada nymph asleep inside the tree-of-heaven beneath the building in my hometownWhen his eyes close, that line is finally deciphered by archaeologists, psychologists, astronomers, translators, historians:“Bring a flashlight”“It's dark ahead”The well-read cannot make head or tail of it, milling about in agitation, and the entire hall falls into chaosOnly his young child remains seated on the ornately decorated benchsorrowfully composing poetry out of tears