Death. Something. Confessions of a vulture

Dear Stewart,

Before and after I traveled to Northern Ireland I read CQ's write-ups on death. Plenty more to add.

Autopsies (CQ Spring 1984, p. 4) and New Orleans funerals (CQ, Fall 1984, p. 38) tell you a lot about death -- death and its attendants. So does war; I've had a look-see at two. I learned there is little difference between my writing about war and my ministering to the dying in a nursing home: I attend what's left over. Tolstoy looked at the misery around himself and asked, "What then must we do?" He should have known better, the old geezer. Whether the bodies had bullets of IVS in them, the reader-over-my-shoulder kept track of what it all meant. I wanted to know. I wanted to see.

Camaraderie, intense experiences, the passion to witness . . . these are dependable explanations for a curiosity about war, about death, but they're just chips and stubs. I was too young for Vietnam so I got my eyefucks another way. I mean scribbling in El Salvador and Ulster. Political subterfuge aroused me, as did a hankering to see X: you know, thingumabobs that are best interred and doused with salt.

War is trepanned with death. (A reporter I knew in El Salvador abandoned her morning jogs because of all the corpses in the street.) The nusing home I worked in was too. In both places death infused life with high adventure. Maybe this is tantamount to the Rich Kid who thinks the Poor have an exclusive modern link to Reality, but there you are.

Whenever I touched a corpse I thought it would come alive suddenly. In El Salvador assassinations and intrigue were dime-a-dozen; you pick up your room phone and some lowbrow on the other end clicks a gun just to let you know he's thinking of you. And in the Ivory Coast of Africa: "One drum was hung with jawbones, another hung with cervelles, the brains of enemies, wrapped up in skins." No way can you read that and not embark on a Heart-of-Darkness schtick.

I gave myself over to events in war and at the Home. Out of their havoc came a spooky kind of know-how. I emptied their catheter bags and watched Alzheimer's or rectal cancer evaporate them pound by pound. Death became the Great Leveler. What was left before death came was memory, and the stories that uncurled like ribbon out of memory. It's no one's fault, it's just biology.

I've been face to face with a beery Salvadoran official who was proud of his responsibility for a metric bonanza of death in his country. A barker for the Provos in Northern Ireland talked to me about murder in language so robotic as to reduce death to the emotional stuatus of box scores. One evening I went to a Salvadoran killing ground (Puerta del Diablo) to see something. Well, something did not materialize. And when I shut the eyes of a corpse -- they bugged out like two eggs, looking up at God -- I felt as I did in the other cases, that I'd almost peeked at X because I'd seen how death uses us while we try to use it.

I do these things for reasons not always sanitary. William Broyles noted that in war zones "Those who were misfits and failures may find themselves touched with fire." Bang right. Jobs and relationships spatter at home. A jazzy line from Dog Soldiers ought to be may logo: "I waited all my life to fuck up like this." Nuerons just seem to fire better under jeopardy. The way you get to thinking is, once you've found the Dark Equator you'll be able to wend your way back to normality. Love. An even keel.

"I am become death, the shatterer of worlds." A power like that has the gravity of awe. The old I knew stretched their luck as far and as tight as it would go. Nobody dies without love, they figured. They also reckoned they had a humongous collateral of good intentions that would get them the brass ring, love. No way. Death would burn them pure and hollow. Meanwhile they had to be content to wail for a body to clasp to.

Next it's Afghanistan for me. To crib from anothe writer, it's a region of "negative spaces," chocked with all kinds of singularities. I want to know my fears for what they are. Maybe something will be killing time there. Maybe I will find my way back to Standard Operating Procedure.

I am not tyring to put a spin on death a la Kubler-Ross. Death is no endorphin high. But I know there is a connection between what we do with all kinds of death and how we live. It's worth investigating. And in the process you may do some good and get home before dark. There's a lesson there, somewhere.

COPYRIGHT 1985 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group