Lazarus

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my Soul to keep;
If I should die before I 'wake,
I pray the Lord my Soul to take.

― Classic children's bedtime prayer from the 18th century

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Dear Kate,

The prayer above, do you pray that before going to bed?

Who does?

What a child used to find within the fair expectation of human experience we now deem unacceptable.  

Yes, we do die, one day, we can accept that much, but not today.  Not before we get our due share of pie.  Not before our retirement.  Not before we make good use in the second half of our life stuffs we spend the first gathering.  We insure against the possible slipups and pitfalls that might hinder the proper turning of our next page.  We place ourselves in systems (economic, health, political, religious, etc.) to only one end: deny death for another day.

There must be some way outta here 

Said the joker to the thief 

There's too much confusion 

I can't get no relief

When what's reasonable becomes unacceptable, we cannot accept anything as being reasonable.  Everything breaks us.  We are wide open to self-imposed vulnerability.

Why is it so hard to imagine we might never wake from our sleep, any nodding off, an afternoon nap?  What arrests the development of such healthy acknowledgement of vicissitudes?  What causes our failure to cultivate a robust imagination to live a peaceful, peaceable life?  Does your mom promise you that you will always wake?  Can you find in any holy book words to vouchsafe your every next morning?  Do you actually believe an apple a day keeps the doctor away - and always for another day?

In the comic I put together above you see objects gathering at the gate of death, threshold to the dark unknown of the nether world.  The pinwheel spinners are probably the first things you notice, and wonder how they ended up being there.  They too are wondering themselves, young and bright and full of life, why such fate so hard and fast.  At the other corner debris and dirt wonder not their comeuppance: never good for anything, never will, nimbus cloud the Moirai they couldn't look up to know.

What you don't see though, in the first frame, I assume, is the little patch of square between the stoic and the hedonist, the humiliated and the humbled.  What do you see when you move in the last square to observe from a different angle?  A materiality all of one piece, neither a random disorder nor a manufactured artifice.  A leaf dead already: you can't kill him again.

"What has really happened during the last seven days and nights? Seven times we have been dissolved into darkness as we shall be dissolved into dust; our very selves, so far as we know, have been wiped out of the world of living things; and seven times we have been raised alive like Lazarus, and found all our limbs and senses unaltered, with the coming of the day." ― G.K. Chesterton

Yours, Alex