Edge Lord

I used to believe in the void. I thought that is where I would go when I died. But now I feel uncertain. ... I had a conversation with a painter. I asked, "What is the color of death." I thought she would say black, but she said, "Brown." "I think it's gray," I said. "Gray is the color of death. Not black. Not white. Gray is the color at the end of the universe, when nothing happens: no tension left to spark anything." "Well," she said, "I've never seen the end of the universe. But if you look at something dead, you'll see that it decays and feeds new life." She is quite the empiricist , I thought. But what about me ? What about my death?  What will life be like after I turn into ten-thousand flies? Perhaps death has no color. It is a lens—a magnifying glass, a telescope, a prism. Thereby we may bring the infinite into focus.

There was I, in a luke-warm black sea. Above me was a sky or cavern-ceiling. Dim constellations of dubious form. I kept swimming. When I could not swim, I floated. I closed my eyes; Accepted despair. I awoke to a rhythmic beating of wings, carrying me up. ... The alchemist says, "The spirit must be rescued from the waters. "It cannot be sieved or filtered. It must rise of its own volition." ... The water floats, as a sphere, touching not the glass of the retort. The soul circumambulates until it gives up its spirit. The spirit is lifted to escape the retort, guided by the principle of the air, the angel, the wind of paradise. ... The angel is four wings, brown and white. ... The black water is found in the deep, gathered in abyssal wells, carried up, in dark earthen vessels. Placed in the alembic, the black water gathers, like an orb, reluctant to touch the ignoble, the lowly the earthly, the common, the things on the sur...