WHY WAIT FOR DEATH
Why does resurrection not exist before death? If death marks everything in life beforehand, down to the last quark, then so does resurrection. And that means a number of hard-to-think things.
First of all, the dominant view of resurrection seems wrong. Resurrection isn’t pure. But Purity will resurrect, if it wants to.
Resurrection doesn’t happen as an external force, in other words. Without purity, it is nothing.
On the other hand, the dominant Christo-logical view seems to imply that the only thing that is resurrected is resurrection itself. The word. (This does and doesn’t make sense.)
But why does the founding resurrectional power of the image for the loved one, as seen after death, not exist before death for the loved one in the same way? What do we refuse the living out of meanness of soul that often makes them die, that can kill?
What death initialises for the image of the loved one is in principle transferable to them now. In some ways this folds back the kindness of death to the image into an image-for-life. And what is extinction doing here, to the image, when I take it to replace the image of death? Do I owe the other’s life to extinction, a non-image? Should the image not therefore be see-through?
Somebody once said on a roof above New York City, ‘I’m glad he’s dead, I wish I were dead too’; I understood these immediately to be the most beautiful possible words.
The release triggered by death with regard to the image of the loved is amazing, and yet says something about life again and again still sparkling in the sense of tip of the tongue phenomena . . . why did we wait?
The fault seems to remain with Christ after all. The sequence of resurrectional events as if makes no sense . . . for instance I asked my family last night what they were and they couldn’t quite remember.
In some ways, I don’t recognise Christ as a sensical figure at all. In her Notebooks it seems to me Simone Weil was pulled more and more towards Milerepa and Tibet, and therefore the general sense of the sky burial. The sky is that element without which the rainbow cannot exist.1 Death is emptied of all pathos so that we can love and heal the other now.
As a Dzogchen affiliate, a part of me is almost disgusted that we wait for death to gather around someone to really love their image, as if still undeconstructed Christians. Indeed, Derrida once warned that Christianity is among the most undeconstructible of zones because the notion of ‘deconstruction’ is itself Christian, to be sourced in Calvin.
Why wait then? Why wait for death? Why does the image wait on death? Weil seems to know when she says that ‘we dislike to see affliction because it compels us to see what it is when we love ourselves’. Typical of her quantum logic: we lack not the empathy, but the self-love.
In other words, we wait for death to love the image of the beloved more absolutely simply because in life we do not wish to see that we love ourselves. With the live-image of the beloved gone, we feel more comfortable.
The way to love the other more in love and life than after would therefore be to see-through the immanent resurrectional power of all images, now. In self-love which is non-crucifying, the other would be born in us so many times that by the time they go, we would have said and done more than enough, and nothing would be lost at all.
A rainbow does not exist apart from the sky.
loved this !!