Dying

‘Where there is death, you are not; where you are, death is not’. And when the Other is dying? There is death – where? And when the Other is dead? Where is death, then? Is it there, in person? Does it present itself, there, in the body where there was once life? But what of your relation to the dead one? Relation broken, and broken where now death burns in his place. Burns – as though dying had allowed death to double itself. As though death needs dying in order to gain a relation to itself. As though death needed a burning intermediary.

Or it can be seen in a different way. Luria: where God departed, the universe opened. Where death departed, fleeing into itself, away, dying opened. Dying as the passage of death to itself. Dying as the fleeing of death. Death flees through the bodies of the dying. Then death is betrayed in the bodies of the dead. Death, which wants to retreat, to drain back to itself, is caught there. But is it caught? Isn’t it life and the living world that is caught by death as it appears in its midst? So does death’s disappearance draw after it all of life. And where death departs, life blazes into a trail of dying.