The Deathbringers

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THE DEATHBRINGERS Art, Poetry & Prose

by Jason Blasso

C H A RY B D I S P R E S S n e w y ork

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Published by Charybdis Press New York, NY www.charybdispress.com © 2013 Charybdis Press All rights reserved Printed and bound by Conveyor Arts 15 14 13 12 4 3 2 1 First Edition No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews.

Image Copyright © 2013 Jason Blasso Text Copyright © 2013 Jason Blasso Book design and animation: Young Professionals www.yp-yp.com ISBN 978-0-9860027-6-2 For more information regarding the art & writing: Please visit www.blackgesso.com or e-mail jay@blackgesso.com For more information regarding the publication: Please visit www.charybdispress.com or e-mail jay@charybdispress.com 16

For my cousin, Ginette.

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FOREWORD what you are reading is the summation of my experience and insight into the mysterious phenomenon of death in the form of philosophical aphorisms, symbological motifs, short stories, poems and a brief autobiography. I ask that you withhold any prejudices you might have of preconceived morbidity. This book is not an exploration of the gross death of matter but the true death of the mind that allows us to know Non-Being and Becoming through Being.

Jason Blasso New York, 2013

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THE DEATHBRINGERS

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Contents

I.

Philosophy

The Deathbringers II.

Symbology

The Passage of Life

III.

IV.

Foldout

The True Eye

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Being Becoming

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Here One Minute...

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Story

Abandoned Lots

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The Immortal

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Poetry

Gray Observations

V.

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Autobiography

Introduction in Conclusion 23

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I. PHILOSOPHY

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THE DEATHBRINGERS The Deathbringers is a collection of nine reflexive aphorisms that uses death, or the Knowledge of Non-Being, and the natural biases of our Knowledge of Being to allow us to discover the evasive Knowledge of Becoming.

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TRUE DEATH THE KNOWLEDGE OF BEING THE ISOLATION OF BEINGS & THINGS DEATH WITHIN US THE DEATH OF DEATH DEATH WITHOUT US TOTALITY THE KNOWLEDGE OF BECOMING TRUE LIFE

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I.Philosophy

TRUE DEATH There is no death outside of self-awareness, but, where selfawareness is, there are two deaths: the death of the body and the death of the mind. We must not confuse these deaths.

The death of the body results in the death of the mind, but the death of the mind does not result in the death of the body.

The death of the body is death. The death of the mind is True Death, which is the death of self-awareness. Self-awareness is not just the knowledge that one is alive in time; it is also the knowledge that one will die in time. Only we can experience True Death because our self-awareness dies in the truest sense of the word.

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THE KNOWLEDGE OF BEING Self-awareness is the Knowledge of Being. Those with the Knowledge of Being often assume, incorrectly, that all beings possess the Knowledge of Being. All beings exist along a spectrum of self-awareness, and though life exists in abundance, we are the only self-aware Beings that we know of. Our self-awareness separates us from other living beings and non-living things. This separation starts widening from birth as we learn that we exist as a Being in name, space and time. When we are aware of our self as a named Being in space and time, we gain the perception that we have fully separated from Totality.

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I.Philosophy

THE ISOLATION OF BEINGS & THINGS Our perception of our separation from Totality as an isolated self makes us incorrectly assume that everything not-self must also be isolated. Though this is our perception, we cannot assume that what is true for us is true for all beings and things. The Isolation of Beings and Things is a shared and necessary illusion, an inescapable reflex, of the Knowledge of Being. It is our collective self-awareness that allows for the belief that Totality is made up of isolated things which are, in turn, further made up of isolated things.

The deeper we look, the more isolation we find, but isolation only exists in our minds.

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DEATH WITHIN US Since every thing isolated and brought into being is isolated and brought into being within our minds, it is only in our minds where beings die. When a thing becomes a being in name and exists in space and time, it becomes capable of dying through the limitations of isolation. This death occurs not only because the being is contained by space and time, but because it now exists in relationship to our death. Although this being dies, it can only die through us and its death is not a True Death. A being without self-awareness never truly dies because there is no death outside of our self-aware minds.

We are the bringers of death.

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I.Philosophy

THE DEATH OF DEATH Death is the end of what is and since the only thing that is is our self-aware minds, then only our minds can die. This is a True Death and the knowledge of our True Death is the Knowledge of Non-Being. But, here, we must not be fooled by tricks of language. Death, like the words and concepts nothing and zero, represents an absence. And an absence can never be represented by a presence because it does not exist.

When we speak of nothing, we literally speak of nothing.

We cannot have what is not. Therefore, in the absence of absence, in the death of death, we reveal the first property of Totality: pure presence.

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DEATH WITHOUT US When we are dead, there is no longer an isolated, self-aware center capable of bearing witness. Without our isolated locus of self to know that things have been and will be, Totality is left without testimony. Though we are no longer present to bear testimony, the pure presence of Totality continues on after us as it had before us with no isolation by self-awareness. In the absence of isolated beings, what we formerly considered death becomes the liberation of energy into higher or lower orders of complexity. This continuous shifting of energy is the second property of Totality: ceaseless change.

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I.Philosophy

TOTALITY As with death, which is nothing, Totality, which is all, remains beyond name, space and time. We cannot speak of it because it is not an it. Totality always remains beyond our minds. Our self-awareness isolates us from Totality in name only and imparts to us our unique perspective.

The limitations of our perspective means we cannot achieve a comparative exteriority to know of other Totalities. There is no outside of Totality. We are on the inside looking in.

Wherever we look, we are looking into Totality as isolated and mobile localities of self-awareness that are both inextricably a part of and apart from Totality.

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THE KNOWLEDGE OF BECOMING When we are self-aware, we are apart from Totality in name, space and time. When we aren’t self-aware, we are a part of Totality without name, space and time. Though we know of Being, we must also know of Becoming. The trick of this knowledge is that one cannot know of Becoming whilst Becoming, because to know that one is Becoming is to know that one is, and, to know that one is, is to have returned to Being. The Knowledge of Becoming can only be gained retrospectively through the Knowledge of Being. Becoming precedes the state of Being and cannot be apprehended directly by the self-aware mind.

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I.Philosophy

TRUE LIFE When we know of our self in time, we can know, but not know directly, timeless, everchanging, and everpresent Totality. When the self dies metaphorically into Becoming, there is no longer any Knowledge of Being or the Isolation of Beings and Things and we are one with Totality. When the self dies truly, the mind is finally liberated from itself.

True Death begets True Life. To live truly is to know that every being and thing is us and that we are responsible for the death and life we bring to them and each other through our self-awareness. True Life is the source of all ethics and the gateway of Love, which accepts all.

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Death

Symbol

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0

Being

Mind

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Becoming

Body

∞

Non-Being

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Color

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II. SYMBOLOGY

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THE TRUE EYE The True Eye sees the past and the future. Through it, we know of Non-Being before and after life. Opening to both, we remove obstacles to change and become permeable to both Being and Becoming.

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II.Symbology

Destroy the Circle First

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BEING BECOMING Apart from/A part of: Static/Dynamic: Particle/Wave: These

are the correlative states of self-awareness. It is all about perception and whether we are there and aware. We are both human Beings and human Becomings.

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II.Symbology

Being

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Becoming

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HERE ONE MINUTE...

The common binary: On/Off. When we are alive and on, we are

here and aware, between the present and the past. When we are alive and off, we are in the present state of Becoming.

When we are dead, we are gone, gone, gone.

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II.Symbology

Here One Minute

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Gone the Next

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III. STORY

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ABANDONED LOTS We often fail to see that the world around us appears as it does because of our scale and perspective. At this level of perception, it is difficult to see past the borders of words to that seamless and nameless beyond.

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III.Story

ABANDONED LOTS

It was at the edge of the asphalt, as a child, where you first encountered it. There, as you lifted the ball from where it rested at the end of its errant path, in the crease between the pavement and the dirt, you saw it, without at first knowing what you saw, because, before this moment, there was nothing there to see.

This was a familiar place. You had always played in the old lot after school, played in the solitary ways that children play, self-occupied, with imaginary friends, telling stories.

The world had always been your private playhouse, until that day you were drawn by the ball to the seam that manifested itself before you like a sign. And though you were young, you knew that what you were seeing was something significant, though you did not know the significance of what you saw; that knowledge would come later, much later, when you were older, and had more experience and a greater vocabulary, after newer words had been caught and questioned, jailed and paroled.

The wind was blowing then as now, blowing as it always

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had, lonely in its ways, carrying on its back the purity of trackless distances and the timeless scent of the past; as you looked off into the low grass and the woods beyond, where the trees swayed and the leaves whispered. You stood there, with the ball in your hands, listening. Listening intently, to the long, drawn out shushing of the leaves, that interminable susurrus that quieted your mind, quieted the slow growing questions of your mind, to silence. Then, as if nothing had happened, you ran off and played.

Later, as the seamless and wordless world was portioning itself out for you, dividing itself neatly into simple units of words and time, you would notice that it had been dividing itself a little too neatly, a little too clearly, and it was then that rough experience made suspect the well trimmed edges of words. It was the neatness, the crisp tidiness, which had given it away and opened the door to doubt. For you had seen the margins, and more, you had remembered them, remembered the rough edges; and it was this memory that clashed against what you were learning, clashed against what you had learned, in the beginning, when you trusted and adopted the inherited forms. The structure was there before you, had always been there before you, until you entered into it and became conditioned under it, as those before you had been conditioned under it, innocently; and you learned to believe in its authority, its stability and permanence, until that day when familiarity freed your eye to stray to

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its boundaries. It was then that you remembered standing and staring at the seam, aware of an elusive meaning and significance there, yet incapable of grasping what you saw, until now; when you finally understood what it was you saw that day, lifting up the ball from the place where the pavement ended, that jagged and crumbled frontier where the asphalt broke off in heavy, black clods and you found the inconsistencies of borders and words.

That was the true origin of your quiet rebellion, when everything around you became suspect and you learned to trust nothing and to accept the unknown. You became subversive and quiet, went inwards, to that unexplored country of the mind, where you could map out your responses and dissatisfactions without calling attention to yourself, and where you could avoid the shaming, judgmental eye of the law. This was instinctual, for you weren’t yet strong enough, weren’t yet ready. So you entered into the privacy of your own inner darkness, that subterranean cell of the mind, to bide your time. It was difficult at first, but soon you learned the comforts of your new home and during the days, when you explored the world outside of your mind, you moved fluidly and quickly between origin and destination, knowing what you wanted and where you needed to be, approaching it directly, making no stops or detours on the road to your goal, because to be outside was to be seen and to be seen meant the possibility of capture and to be captured was to

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be killed, to be fixed in place by a word. There was so much growth and change, so many questions yet to be answered, that you could not risk being seen or named. These were invisible times, chthonic times, and it was there, on one of your midnight missions, when you decided to return to the abandoned lot where you had seen the seam that sparked the revolution in your mind.

There again, kneeling before it, you prodded at the broken edges, separated the asphalt from itself, with tougher fingers and stronger hands. You pried up and pried under the clumps of cold tar and sand and rock, to reveal the cool, damp earth beneath. It was then that you understood that the earth was always there beneath the pavement, always there beneath your feet; and then, in that instant, you understood the earth beneath everything. And you were floating above the seam, floating above the lot, and you saw, from this new perspective, the asphalt as a small patch on top of the earth. And you flew higher, to see the whole patchworked country and then, again, higher, to witness the entire borderless ball of the earth. You held and beheld the entire spinning globe and understood that there were no borders other than those created by the mind and that there could never be trespassing, no clandestine crossing of borders, unless we ourselves drew them and forbade it of ourselves to pass over them. You knew then that we were the keepers of our own limitations, the jailers and the jailed,

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for we were the creators of language and borders and time.

Back on the pavement, you felt its artificiality, felt the distance between yourself and the earth. From now on, you would always feel something insinuating itself between you and the earth’s cool dampness, something separating and isolating you; just as you would continue to sense her presence nearby and hear her calling to you from the other side, beckoning you; and you could feel her full body beyond, feel her deep in your bones that ached with the steady throb of longing. You are drawn towards her, drawn out of yourself towards her, always towards her.

Returning home to the responsibilities of the calloused world, you quickly found the concerns of your peers could no longer concern you, could never concern you, even though you were a part of them, in that vast, complex web of social hierarchies. You would always remain apart from them, watching them curiously, as if from the outside, always mistrusting the interface and doubting the exchange, acting out the excitement you had witnessed through careful mimicry. You played the part, but with that call echoing through your bones, you could have no concern with mundane trivialities. Life became one long pantomime, with all gestures and signs divorced of meaning, save that one insistent desire for reconnection. Nothing else mattered, for you had seen the earth beneath the social abstractions, the labels and names, had seen its borderless unity, its beauty,

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ever since you understood the meaning of the seam and had returned to lift its hem to peer beneath and beyond the black curtain of asphalt.

Over time, you became a better actor and slowly rose from musty basements into the light. You understood solitude and had grown strong and independent in the dark spaces beneath the world; for it was there, that you found the one thing that you could trust, the one thing that would always be with you, your self. And so it was, that you rose amongst your peers slowly, at first remaining in the shadows, but, after some time, confronting them and conversing with them, secure in your distrust and confident in your ear to recognize false platitudes. You remained yourself, cautious, distant and alert, accepting your role as solitaire, comfortable in the gray spaces between absolutes, when you returned to the lot to study the seam, for you felt it had another lesson to teach.

Once there, the long stretch of seam lay silent before you.

You waited in the wind and moonlight. Nothing spoke.

Disappointed, you turned and looked back over the paved lot deep in thought. You were gone for a while, looking inwards at your failure to find another message, another sign. When you returned, your eyes caught the movement of grass in the wind; grass growing yellow, green and gray through the cracks in the asphalt as black and barren as the night sky above your head.

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You looked up and saw the points of light that were the stars, points of light that might be distant suns around which a planet, much like yours, spins, and on that planet there might be sentient life, like yourself, standing there, staring up at the heavens, thinking of you as you think of it, across incalculable distances of space and time.

Your imagination crossed that blackness between all things, that blackness where the body can never go. You thought about the expanses of that great emptiness and its dimensions filled you with dread. You stared deep into the belly of the universe and understood your smallness, your triviality, understood that all the divisions of this world are meaningless in the great course of eternity that makes up the life of the earth and the heavens. You knew this is how it always had been and how it always would be.

You stood there, staring up at the sky, breathing in the wind, taking in the night, in a moment of moments that will never be recorded, except there, in your mind, in your body, that swayed like the grass growing through the cracks in the asphalt blown by the wind.

Your eyes wandered back to earth, found your feet and the grass between them, and you recognized your kinship. Then you looked back to the mute seam briefly before your eyes settled on the dim forest, gray beyond. Your mind crossed over long before your body had, until today, standing there as you were standing then, a child, with the ball in your hands

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and the wind in your hair. Now, with a wild glint in your eye and a mirthful grin on your lips that laughed silently inwards, you walked to the edge and, without hesitating, you stepped from the pavement onto the soft dirt and walked through the low grass towards the deep, welcoming silence of the woods.

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THE IMMORTAL Immortality has fascinated us since the dawn of selfawareness. The thought that we will not survive bodily death has terrified us into contriving many elaborate fictions to handle the burden of this knowledge.

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III.Story

THE IMMORTAL

My existence, if you can call it that, is a paradox; though here, to be more accurate, it is a fiction. Simply put: I cannot die; and it is, in the absence of death, that I cannot, strictly speaking, be called alive. Though I have nothing but life, and, in fact, am nothing but Life, I am not alive. For all life made to live has the capacity for death; and it is the awareness of this death that has created, in the dawning minds of man, the sublime sense of his own sacred character, bound to that singular and sovereign entity he calls self; and though other life lives, it is only in man, with the awareness of his life and his inevitable death, that he may truly be called alive.

It remains then, that my deathlessness is my lifelessness, and, having neither life nor death, it is man, and man alone, who can grant me an existence. For only man can give life to the lifeless through words. But we must be careful with words, because they have the power to ensorcel and are easy to confuse.

The giving of life to the lifeless does not occur through some magical transfer of life to the lifeless but through the

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actual transport of the lifeless into life; in other words, the giving out of life is more accurately described as the taking in of the lifeless. The lifeless, thus brought into the mind of man, can exist as alive only in the imagination of man, and it is here, on the stage of his mind, where man, in a single stroke, imparts both life and death to the lifeless with his awareness. Not only will the lifeless live and die within each man that takes it in, it will die utterly and completely when the last man takes his last breath.

When man gives life through his awareness to the lifeless, he also gives death, but this death and life are a fiction. I must not be mistaken for this fiction—though fiction I am, here, on this page—because I am the very changelessness of change, the very deathlessness of death. Truly, I am boundless and immortal and though these rude words attempt to give a form to my formlessness, I cannot be bound; because to be bound is to be and to be is to take on the co-condition of not-being, which is to die. Deathless, I can exist on this page alone through the sorcery of man; but man is subordinate to me, and when the last man dies, I will not die, but continue to be, though I never was.

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IV. POETRY

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GRAY OBSERVATIONS From the gray place of observation between the present and the past, the mind discovers the flexibility of language to create complex and polyvalent meanings through poetry to engage the paradox of Being.

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AND THERE ON THE VERGE I EMIT MY SOVEREIGN SOUND IN TIME TO BECOME A CAPTIVE ESCAPING A FURTHER FREEDOM INTO WORDS

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IV. Poetry

THE WORD DEATH IS LIKE THE WORD NOTHING

IS LIKE DEFINING A LACK OF KNOWING ZERO

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I CANNOT KNOW KNOWING I CANNOT STAND KNOWING I CANNOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE STAND KNOWING ALL THERE IS TO KNOW

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IV. Poetry

UNSEEMLY BEING FAULTLESS THE FISSURE OF MAN DIVIDED DIVINITY INTO AWARENESS OF A PART OF FROM APART FROM TO UNDERSTAND SUBSTANCE

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THUS EXPOSED SPACES BECOME NOT NOTHING NOT POSSIBLE RATHER THEY ARE WHAT ONE NOW KNOWS IN THE NOW KNOWING THAT BEFORE THIS ONE COULD NOT KNOW WHAT ONE COULD NOT KNOW

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IV. Poetry

THERE IS NO PARTIAL YES THERE IS NO NEGATION NO SEPARATION THERE IS BUT ONE SINGLE AFFIRMATION

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SENTIENCE THE SENTENCE I SILENCE MY PRESENCE TO KNOW ABSENCE IS TO KNOW TO AVOID THE PRESENCE OF A VOID

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IV. Poetry

DEATH IS NOT THE UNTIER OF LIFE’S KNOT WHEN LIFE IS NOTHING BUT ITSELF LIFE KNOWS ONLY THAT DEATH IS THE UNITER OF ITSELF TO ITSELF

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I SAW WHAT WAS SEEING WHAT WAS WAS THAT WE EXIST BETWEEN THE DEAD PAST THE LIVING PRESENT WHERE WHAT IS IS FOREVER OUTSIDE OF TIME

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IV. Poetry

AT LAST I HAVE REACHED THE END IN THE SNOW THE OCEAN OF STATIC RISES AROUND ME SHHHHHHHHH WHAT IS LEFT WHAT IS LEFT TO SAY UTTER NOTHING

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V. AUTOBIOGRAPHY

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INTRODUCTION IN CONCLUSION This short autobiographical section is included in an attempt to capture, through the haze of my memory, a glimpse of the two key experiences that led me towards, what is considered, by most, a morbid fascination.

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V. Autobiography

INTRODUCTION IN CONCLUSION

I’ve been confronting the idea of death and oblivion since I was very young. It wasn’t because I was sickly or had experienced tragic loss at an early age—though I have lost many beloved friends and family members over the years— but because of two casual events that set before me the questions of post-mortem consciousness and our place in the mind-numbingly vast expanse of the universe.

The first occurrence happened when I joined my father who was watching a low budget television movie about vampires.

I had arrived late and the movie was almost over. A group was repelling a powerful male vampire who looked like the lead singer of some glam band—this was the eighties, after all. The resistance finally got the better of him and amidst explosions and other visual pap—even at that age I knew the production value of the movie was deplorable—the vampire was vanquished. My father got up to make dinner and left me behind with the remote as the credits began to roll. Just as I was about to change the channel, there appeared on the screen a vision that would haunt me for many years to come.

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The vampire’s skeleton was shown buried in the earth.

It lay there in the darkness with its hands folded across its chest. Then, the skeleton did the unthinkable—it began to roll in its coffin. It rolled in anguish, an anguish that came not just from being confined to the claustrophobic interior of its tomb but at the horror of its consciousness being trapped in its bones FOREVER. My mind reeled at the horror of a living death and, once witnessed, I could not escape it.

This terrifying vision tormented me every night. A chill of fear would rush over me whenever bedtime was announced, as I instantly became aware of the darkness that was death that awaited me with implacable inevitability. I had to marshal the strength to brush my teeth and change into pajamas. No sooner was I under the covers with the lights off, when I began imagining myself dead and buried beneath the earth.

Night after night, the living consciousness that was me was trapped in the grave of my bed. I had a paralyzing fear of bedtime and began to make every excuse to linger amongst the living and the light. My parents, unaware of all of this and frustrated by my continuous sleepy-eyed presence, would send me back up to bed to face the horror that awaited me. My inability to vocalize my fear and my parents’ tough love worked for the better.

Over time, I built up a psychological resistance to my terror and although I still remained scared and thought about

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death every night, my relationship to its mysteries changed.

Curiosity got the better of me and I slowly overcame my fear as I began to look at death as a puzzle. Soon, bedtime was no longer filled with phantasmagoric dread and, lying there in the darkness, I would analyze what death was and attempt to understand its abstract implications. I gained strength and confidence by externalizing and objectifying my fear for manipulation and study.

A few years later, I was at a campground in Upstate New York with my cousin, Ginette, hanging around two guys who regaled us with stories about the quantity of weed they smoked in Jamaica. As the night wound down, in true stoner fashion, they looked up at the ceiling of the rec center and told us in a faraway voice how the length of our life is like a photoflash compared to the Universe.

This insight instantly blew my mind and I found this new cosmic perspective absolutely terrifying. Thinking about the vast expanse of space made everything on Earth seem completely insignificant. If my life is a photoflash, what is the life of the Earth or the Sun? Suddenly, through this long lens, nothing we did or could do mattered. Even in death, should our consciousness be trapped in our bones and our bones in a narrow coffin in the earth... What would it matter? The Earth and the Sun will perish. What matters my consciousness, my bones, my life? What matters man? All of this had little meaning

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when confronting the inconceivable scope of the Universe.

Now, lying in bed, I’d imagine drifting through the cold vaults of space, past shimmering nebulae, the dying light of extinct stars and the yawning abyss of black holes. In this hostile realm, after placing myself on the scale of space and time, I felt completely alone and overwhelmed by the despair of oblivion.

Returning to Earth, I knew not only that I would die but that there would come a time when even those who remembered me would die and that I would, eventually, be as if I never was. This was, I thought, the very nadir of fear.

But, when I stretched the logic out beyond the death of my own individuality to the death of all individuals and then further, beyond all individuals to life, I found the bottom of the pit: Life empty of any goal, center or meaning.

This horror weighed on me heavily. To repel this negation, I both aggressively wrestled and passively contemplated it.

The agony was well worth it, as I discovered that death does not exist in the world without our self-awareness. In short, it is because we are. This is the great paradox of existence and the ultimate trade off, because all the beauty, love and joy that we will ever have, we must have in exchange for our mortality. For we are the namers of nothing, the bringers of death.

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Jason Blasso would like to thank Jacky Yoon for digitizing the designs, Kristen Youngman, Rachel Boyadjis and Francesca Ferranti for creative and content editing.

Mark Pernice thanks Stephanie Miller, Christopher Knowles, Zhang Qingyun, and Elana Schlenker.

Printed at Conveyor Arts.

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THE DEATHBRINGERS Jason Blasso