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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (101056)	4/12/2005 6:11:29 PM
From: ManyMoose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

On Being Dead. Review of a novel by Jim Crace. In the town where I once lived, vendors made a lot of money selling T-Shirts to tourists and locals alike. Locals had a favorite design, "Spawn Until You Die." trollart.com Ray Troll’s macabre painting is a celebration of life in Alaska, punctuated as it is by an annual bouquet of rotting fish in virtually every stream and river that reaches the sea. It is the smell of death. But it is the stuff of life. Salmon, drawn by nature years ago from their pristine beds to swim in the sea feasting on krill and herring, can’t resist the urge to return. It comes to them like clockwork. They return, one by one, in thousands upon thousands, to the crystal waters where they were born. There they make a brutal drive, which, if it were evoked in human history, would be laced with heroes and champions the like of which Alexander and Odysseus would bow down to. The champions, those who survive, swish out a nest of hard rocks in icy water, where they make love without touching. And then they die. In their deaths and in that putrid bouquet are the nutrients of life that will be needed in that self-same nest of hard-rocks-in-icy-water by the offspring of those champions, maturing like clockwork from eggs to fingerlings, finally to be drawn by nature to swim in the sea once again. And the champions in their number, in due time, to die after a single stab at passion. Celice and Joseph were scientists in love. They were prepared for death and violence by their academic discipline. ”You’re dying now,” Celice declared to her students, ”Get used to it.” This book, “Being Dead,” brims with death. ”Grief is death eroticized. And sex is only shuffling off this mortal coil before its time to plummet to the post-coital afterlife.”… … “They were too rotten now and far too rank to hold much allure for gulls or crabs. They’d been passed down, through classes, orders, species, to the last in line, the lumpen multitude, the grubs, the loopers and the millipedes, the button lice, the tubal worms and flets, the bon viveur or nectart bugs which had either too many legs or none." The merest glimmer peers through this novel like a pin-hole in a tomb, but not like the salmon Odysseus portrayed on Ray Troll’s T-Shirts. Mondazy’s Fish, the metaphor of death, speaks. : ”Our Books of Life don’t have an end. Fresh chapters are produced though we are dead. Our pages never terminate. But, given time, the paper yellow, then turns green. The vellum flesh becomes the leaf.” How bleak to be drawn by gifted prose past a universe with too many legs or none. I couldn’t resist turning the pages. I finished it in a day, depressed and dismayed by the author’s conclusion: These are the everending days of being dead. Everending—not neverending. What is the message in that? I felt better after reading “Sounding,” by Hank Searls. amazon.com It too confronted death, and the knowledge of death from the sentient viewpoint of a whale at sea. Unlike “Being Dead,” “Sounding” brimmed with life, the life of champions the like of which Alexander and Odysseus would bow down to.