The Ghats

Death becomes human in the dying one. Human? But there’s nothing of him left, he who is being separated from us, he who is being carried across the river. Nothing – but enough. He is nothing for himself, not anymore. But for you, who are with him? To what are you brought into relation?

The other is experienced from through the Other. Death comes by way of the Other. Receive the gift of the mortality of the Other. Receive it – but you will not keep it, this gift. You are not there to receive it, to keep it. It is kept in you, blazing torch. Death, like the blue flame of the Bavarian Gentian in Lawrence’s poem.

‘Where there is death, you are not; where you are, death is not’: very well, but when death is there before you? When death is there, in person, before you? Death becomes human. But the human now, is scarcely human. That is why the body must be burnt. Cremate it, return death to death; pity it – do not let death be caught above the surface of the world. Death has come. But it can only come by way of what the world is not. Presence joined to absence, and for you, who are with him. Death has doubled itself. Life, withdrawing through the body, has let death give itself.

Return death’s favour. Cremate the body and break the bones. Cremate it, and return it to the elements. The river, the sea: these are, for a moment, the body of death, the body death gives itself as it figures what slips from all bodies. The body burns at the ghats. The body burns by the river: all of the world is burning here. The flames of life and the flames of death. Dead one, you are the opposite of the salamander, who lives in death. Death in life: and aren’t we, too, these reversed salamanders who die in life?