Day of the alive

We dream of the dead. They come to us strangely, performing fitness exercises, or taking on different roles or improvising inappropriate relationships, as if they wished to find a new niche and make themselves useful. They arrive like Banquo in Macbeth's role, not finding a place at the table, not-Banquo having already occupied it. We dream the dead and the dream tells of our wish for whoever has passed to come back to us, or at least to return for a short visit. We build a cult on the site of the dream because we are perturbed by this sense of time passing, and of others passing and of ourselves passing. We are nervous about this hurtling of people into the past, and how that contradicts the other sense we have, of the permanence of the world and our being there in it. Our new church of adjustment and processing, involving as it does the critique of past works, and the rite of the found object, is still built on the superstitions of the old religion - how should we respond if the dead are desperate to break back through to us? We decide that our desire, and the equal pressure of the dead from the other side, must be regulated by ritual. To that end, we shall allow the others to return for one day of the year. We desire their temporary intervention, to renew acquaintance and catch up with recent events. It would be a chance for them to demonstrate to us how they are keeping an eye on things, the way ancestors should. We desire them to legitimise the decorating, and accept our 2nd husband, to bless the new baby, to see how the tomatoes are fairing against the blight this year. We desire that they take an interest and ask who has moved the tools on the workbench. And to tell the old stories.  I remember you telling me that story about the blind boy, now dead of natural causes, who rode a bike with no tyres downhill through the wood without hitting a tree, tell me that story again. Let's sip some tea together in the afternoon with nothing much to say, maybe we will engage in some arm wrestling, or playing cards. Oh, yes, I almost forgot to mention it and do you remember where you put the secateurs and John said you said he could have your fossil collection and that old telescope, is it true, did you tell him? Because I thought.... oh, never mind. Well, that is the kind of thing we dream about you, and the dream reveals our vulnerability which is a true wish, it is too silly to confide it otherwise. So why not build a cult on the site of the wish for what will never happen? Let us make a threshold upon the site of what we know for sure is an absolute border and yet which, at the same time, is also a gap in the fence for our memories to flow through, back and forth like contraband. Despite our comprehension of it being the way of things, we still find it so strange that such and such mute objects have remained and you have died. The non-thingness of you is always being set against the thingness of things - it is both confounding and banal. It was in places of our familiarity where we first missed you and it was there where we also first forgot you. We have spread out, and taken the space where you once were. We have forgotten your presence, or mostly forgotten it. We carry on, our thoughts not referring to what has gone but constrained perhaps by your not being there. You are recorded somewhere in what we do even if we do not often bring you to mind. Lately, it is only in recently discovered or rarely opened boxes of photographs that we are jolted aware again. The day of the dead is a day for the inspection of the living by those who are not here. The conditions for their return is, on the one side, the permanence found in things, and on the other side, our fleeting awareness of a lived forgetting which is the secret accompaniment of accumulated and materialised experiences. We don't desire that the dead and their works should order our thoughts every day; how could we go on if we thought of you every day? No, there is a small aperture in our lives, a strict itinerary, in which we are prepared to entertain you, or put up with you, and after that we may safely forget you again, until next year. There is a small opportunity in our lives for you to remind us how things were back then, to remark upon the changes that have occurred which we have not noticed, to judge whether we have done well or not, to sip a little tea in the afternoon. I like to imagine that it would be exciting to prepare for your coming, and it would be comforting somehow to see you fading in the evening, taking your leave...  perhaps I'd call out fondly, 'see you next year, God willing!!' But probably, it would be more terrible than that. You would protest at the strict conditions we have placed on your return, you might stand there mute and forbidding. Silently judging, or at least witnessing, with your wounds unhealed, eyes, like wounds, following us as our gestures become ever more futile before what you represent for us. Maybe you'd be gasping, bewildered, like a landed fish, arching back, seeking to pour yourself back into the depths of the grave where you are finally undifferentiated. Then, went this saying abroad among the brethren, that that disciple should not die: yet Jesus said not unto him, He shall not die; but, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?