Every time I leave the cemetery, I feel I haven’t learned much of anything. But as I walk between the rows of graves like rows of desks in a classroom, the dead are so quiet, they might be learning something. The dead know all these things we don’t know. But they’re so withholding. That’s why I’m drawn to them. The dead know everything.
So I’ve been thinking of writing a death book of my own. This way, I could be done with it. Death, I mean. I could lay all these thoughts to rest.
I don’t know though; it’s a big undertaking. I’m not sure I’m up for it.
You could work on a book like that forever and never be satisfied, like one of those Gothic cathedrals that took centuries to build and destroyed generations of men in the process.
And if you ask me, I think this would be the wrong direction: instead of attempting to capture death’s . . . vastness, a death book should be relatively modest in dimension, discrete as a grave in its proportions, yet full of hidden things, just as a grave offers the concealed promise of significance.
It could be as simple as the infinite death book I envisioned as a kid. The pages of this book were divided into three columns, like an old-fashioned library card, in this instance listing the date the individual was issued, the name of the individual who had borrowed their own identity, and their due date—as soon as the individual was returned, even if it was beyond their due date, a line was drawn through their name.
Simple or grand, the writer would keep coming up against the problem of . . . perspective. His viewpoint would be no more enlightening than the murderer who presents his book report; every murderer thinks he’s undergone something awe-inspiring and shattering, he’s been elevated to a higher plane, when all the time he was stuck in the anthropological world of observation, doing his best to make sense of a bundle of organs and emotions; it’s the dead who experience everything, not intellectually, like the writer or the murderer, but viscerally, concretely. A death book written by the living, someone with no experience of decomposing? In a language that refuses to decompose?
Not only would writing this book be futile, given the idiomatic properties of death, it would also be dangerous. To describe the dead is to commit a violation, and the only thing worse is inscribing them, so their death becomes a permanent record. You would want the book to serve a protective, magical function, but it would more likely turn against you. Something as trivial as a comma placed incorrectly could send the Destroyer the wrong signal. And it wouldn’t be good for the writer’s health, getting so close to the dead.
I may not know much about death, but I know this: we know nothing about death, absolutely nothing. All those books that take on the subject are of no use to us. They’re just trying to cover up death, like the slab of stone known as a ledger that covers a grave in its entirety. You would learn more from listening to a story told by a corpse whose tongue has shriveled in his head, and dried up like a flower, let’s say a rose. Or from listening to the corpse’s music; someone recently told me that a corpse is a kind of music box: the body cavities stretch open, and the skin unwraps itself, revealing the gift of the skeleton, over a soundtrack of popping, ripping, tearing noises. We might as well dig a huge hole in the desert, and bury every book written about death in this hole. A hole so deep we can’t retrieve the books.
Even so, I’m tempted to try to write a book that moves, not the living, but the dead, who remain unmoved by our words, our music, our tears. I want to write it from a place where it’s too dark to read or write. But I’m doing my best to resist the temptation.