Category: Nicholas Clemente

and that’s what he feels; first in his fingertips, and then in his whole palm when he presses it flat to the ground; the stirring of the dead; not in the sense that things are stirring around them; insects devouring the corpses, damp soil collapsing the caskets; nothing like that; and not in a supernatural sense either; a city of reanimated bodies milling around, a city of the dead beneath the crust of the earth; not like that either; more like the dead never really died, not all the way; like the force with which they lived their lives has continued after their death, the follow-through and resonance of the same motion; and that’s what he can feel humming in the earth beneath him; and he can feel it now in the air around him; and he wanders around touching a tree, a tombstone, and the hum is there too; and if he stands very still and concentrates very intently he can feel the hum of the dead within his own body; not just the dead nearby but the dead everywhere; the lives of millions of dead running through him and running through everything and running through everyone; the dead incorporated all into one body and forming a giant engine which powers the existence of the world; which means that death had to be in the world even before anything existed, before anyone had actually died; death a giant machine sitting at the heart of the universe, empty forever and waiting forever for its first tenants; not in any other universe, any other dimension, any other spiritual plane; but at the same time not exactly in this one either; not exactly; more like it’s something that exists more in the future than in the present; a place he will reach one day but not yet; and even the dead aren’t all the way there yet; and that’s where the heat of the sun comes from, that’s what fuels the action of gravity, the impossibly fast passage of the dead towards a place reserved only for them…

All I remember from childhood are the colors. Colors so vivid they appeared to be artificially induced, colors unimpeded by any intermediaries, pure color without form, pure sensation divorced from memory. A world saturated by colors, colors carried on the winds of autumn and spring, colors bleeding out of the trees and into the greenish summer air, colors blending all together on winter nights and shining forth in a single white radiance. No words, no shapes, no faces, only a blur of blind experience: grass smells, pencil smells, soap smells, sunset smells when the red orb of the sky sank into the horizon and set free the redolence buried deep within the dirt of our shrinking suburban woodlands. Life happened all at once, everything simultaneously beginning and ending, time both passing away forever and leaving an indelible residue upon the immaterial stuff of life. I wonder now, as I did not then, what this stuff of life might be. Back then it still seemed like a porous and living thing, a body pushing itself through the winds of time, one that bore, however faintly, the scent breathed upon it by the changing of the seasons from one to the next and the next.