Blunted Inscriptions Of Impermanence

Walter Christian Schell - Died October 6, 2007


Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
stains the white radiance of eternity,
until Death tramples it to fragments.
—from "Adonais" by Percy B. Shelley
I now take such trampling seriously. It is October 7th, 2008 as I write this, one year and a day since my dear friend, Walter Christian Schell, died of cancer. He was only 45 years old. Upon awaking this morning all too aware of his death, I recalled Allen Tate's amazing poem on death and memory, hearing the first lines, old friends from my youth, inwardly spoken in my head:

Row after row with strict impunity
The headstones yield their names to the element...

It seems fitting to rediscover this for Walter who fled as a teenager to New York City from communist Romania seeking asylum, freedom, and eventual citizenship. Now in Autumn, in an election year rife with civic fragmentation, where each side of the see-saw considers itself the weightier and of greater value than the other, all the while denying the tilted Truth fulcrumed centrally upon a death's head, Death, the great equalizer of blue and grey, blue state and red, with memory conveys the once-were-living only too very late to art, to poetry, to stained cemetery angels, questioning sentinels leaning whitely into space, mere gestures in the dusk.
They conjure abstract eternity in our ears ahead
of our deaths as if we have already passed on.
Just what is it the meek shall inherit, after all?
Such is mythos, the inheritance, and the transcendence, of dirt—

First hurts hurt us into conscious selves, thereafter, the losses,
the embossing scars we call character-- glyphic scratches
on cave walls such are brain pans. Only the bones
remain which in their stiff muteness provoke the volumes
we call myth, religion, art, and history—

blunted inscriptions of impermanence,
precise and precipitous prescriptions for
living, we think, free while leaving that
"stained white radiance" stumbling, foolishly
surprised each time, into our grave or urn
greeted by "the conquering worm".
Tum tum ta-tum
tum ta-tum
ta-tum
ta-tum...

The Wheel of Life turns on.

Enjoy, fellow rememberers and perspirers, expirers all.

Carpe diem. Something like that...

This is for Walter Christian Schell.

Best to read this one outloud.



Ode to the Confederate Dead. By Allen Tate

Row after row with strict impunity The headstones yield their names to the element, The wind whirrs without recollection; In the riven troughs the splayed leaves Pile up, of nature the casual sacrament To the seasonal eternity of death; Then driven by the fierce scrutiny Of heaven to their election in the vast breath, They sough the rumour of mortality. Autumn is desolation in the plot Of a thousand acres where these memories grow From the inexhaustible bodies that are not Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row. Think of the autumns that have come and gone!-- Ambitious November with the humors of the year, With a particular zeal for every slab, Staining the uncomfortable angels that rot On the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there: The brute curiosity of an angel's stare Turns you, like them, to stone, Transforms the heaving air Till plunged to a heavier world below You shift your sea-space blindly Heaving, turning like the blind crab. Dazed by the wind, only the wind The leaves flying, plunge You know who have waited by the wall The twilight certainty of an animal, Those midnight restitutions of the blood You know--the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage, The cold pool left by the mounting flood, Of muted Zeno and Parmenides. You who have waited for the angry resolution Of those desires that should be yours tomorrow, You know the unimportant shrift of death And praise the vision And praise the arrogant circumstance Of those who fall Rank upon rank, hurried beyond decision-- Here by the sagging gate, stopped by the wall. Seeing, seeing only the leaves Flying, plunge and expire Turn your eyes to the immoderate past, Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising Demons out of the earth they will not last. Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp, Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run. Lost in that orient of the thick and fast You will curse the setting sun. Cursing only the leaves crying Like an old man in a storm You hear the shout, the crazy hemlocks point With troubled fingers to the silence which Smothers you, a mummy, in time. The hound bitch Toothless and dying, in a musty cellar Hears the wind only. Now that the salt of their blood Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea, Seals the malignant purity of the flood, What shall we who count our days and bow Our heads with a commemorial woe In the ribboned coats of grim felicity, What shall we say of the bones, unclean, Whose verdurous anonymity will grow? The ragged arms, the ragged heads and eyes Lost in these acres of the insane green? The gray lean spiders come, they come and go; In a tangle of willows without light The singular screech-owl's tight Invisible lyric seeds the mind With the furious murmur of their chivalry. We shall say only the leaves Flying, plunge and expire We shall say only the leaves whispering In the improbable mist of nightfall That flies on multiple wing: Night is the beginning and the end And in between the ends of distraction Waits mute speculation, the patient curse That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar leaps For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim. What shall we say who have knowledge Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave In the house? The ravenous grave? Leave now The shut gate and the decomposing wall: The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush, Riots with his tongue through the hush-- Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID?15303

From Selected Poems by Allen Tate, published by Charles Scribner's Sons, copyright 1937.

Death Surprises Death and Spectators In Apizaco, Mexico Corrida (Bull fight arena)
Video by Warren Falcon (shot in Apizaco, Mexico in January 2008)



Luis & Monica Day of the Dead Dance (Watch Who Comes To Dance At the End Just Beyond the Flores) Video by Warren Falcon (shot in San Pedro de Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico 2008)