DEATH

anguage is the house of Being, Martin Heidegger tells us.

Yet, what we are cannot be said. We come forth from the Great Silence. Our bodies are whirlwinds of light spinning upon the palm of the earth’s unclenched fist - until that fist closes. We house ourselves in language. But we are not under house arrest, though many of us live as shut-ins.

In the house of Being, we stare out through windows of sense and subject - and what stares in sets the bell of the skull ringing.

What is moving around out there?

We focus the Hubble. We set up arrays of radio telescopes. We gaze out through the windows of our narrative present, and we gauge the distances to the galaxies and beyond with stories that redshift toward mystery.

We see that the expanding brane that is our universe accelerates into a darkness too proud for stars. The universe - as we know it - will die.

In the central room of the House, in the living room of I, it is quiet. The silence is ominous. We stare at ourselves in the mirror of reason, and all that we see is reversed.

I composed Wyvern, Kingdom of the Grail, Hunting the Ghost Dancer, and Silent with my nose squashed flat as a snail against the window pane of the House. What I saw, I wrote.

Our moment of earth’s moment is so brief most of us never leave the House. And those who do, what do they find?

Beyond the doorway of discursive thinking is the unspeakable - the arbitrary, the unpredictable, the undetermined reality against which the House shelters us. Out there, in the infinite, truth disappears, all the better to reveal beauty.

Promiscuous lilies on the front lawn sprout from the grave mounds of those who came before. Their fragrance wafts through the windows of the House, no matter how tightly we shut them.

This is a bouquet much admired by H. P. Lovecraft, last century’s master of weird fiction. Thinking of him, his ghost strolling around outside the House, I wrote this story about the neighborhood where we live - and die.