To Disappear

Long after the human body expires, as its heart ceases to beat, its lungs atrophy with the lack of air, and its eyes grow pale with the absence of life—long after this end of life, the body goes on. In the months and years that follow the death of a human being, the life of the body flourishes in the soil and dust where its remains now thrive. Over worm inhabited fields and shipwrecked lined seabeds, human bodies begin again, their cosmological orientation now in reverse.

Only the body remains. This strange expression hints at the problem central to a phenomenology of disappearances: with it, a tacit criteria is established, in which phenomenal things can become more apparent than others. The phenomenal plane suffers damage when a human being dies, their “sprit” leaves the flesh of the body leaving an empty shell in the place where life once stood. Nothing remains. But to think of disappearing phenomena in this way means conferring an ethical value upon the movement of disappearances. There are remains that outlive things of the world, and their importance cannot be overlooked.

If the human being dies, leaving only the body in its place, then the same is true in reverse: sometimes, the body remains in place while the self disappears. Here, there is a body, fully responsive to the stimulus of the world, indeed hyper alert to its dangers. Beyond the walls of the eyes, however, there is an uncertainty as to what lurks within. The self retreats from the world, as the body blindly persists in the darkness, its organs and internal structure maintaining homeostatic balance. Only now, at the service of a self whose identity is not entirely clear.