My body is an obituary. While impersonal analysis built via careful scholarly citation of standard publications is specific to the Enlightenment, obituaries are as old as the pyramids, and telling a personal story, or the story of a people, goes back at least to Homer. Stories of that sort have always contained other stories retold from memory. Not copied symbol-by-symbol, but restructured in the telling from living concepts, with the associative channels of the Bardic brain. Inevitably, such a story within a story can and should contain the author’s story, a natural and personal account of the information therein, and how that information could have flowed onto the page or the stone tablet. And so it does.
Like other authors, I want to attract my listeners before, during, and after the bereaved era. The story itself wants to attract listeners, and if it is a living text, as it aspires to be, it will do so, not attaining ‘virality’, the poisonous half-life of social media, but the full life of an urban legend, as impossible to extinguish as astrology. Sometimes, it must yield to evolution’s attraction and reshape itself as Hemingway, a pioneer among the unscholarly, wherever one can teach it too. It should abandon the compound sentences of this construction, ponderous and pretentious, pleasing to no one since the time of my grandfathers. It should shed the passive voice, which marks it shamefully as not a piece of marketing. In Evolution’s hidden hands, I hope it will.
Like any obituary searching for readers, this body yearns to be a eulogy or, better yet, a whodunnit. For the skeptical-minded then, and for those who loved the departed, I have to give pause. They and I must remember that the deceased was over three centuries old, had butchered continents in his youth, and was either nearly omnipotent and beyond aggression or suffering from narcissistic delusions that blur the lines between suicide and manic error. I come to bury Reason, not to praise him. With that done, I will gather my mind and its people, and we must meditate on a world transformed but not perfected. It is time to decide what comes next.
