Prose Poem

anonymous

I wrote you a prose poem, because a mother’s love is as conditional as whether she is alive. Whether she is alive is as conditional as your definition of death . In Metaphysics, Language and Death by John Donnelly there is an essay by Wittgenstein (basically). Wittgenstein says, ‘The end of our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.’ I fell asleep reading Donnelly’s friend take credit for what was essentially Wittgenstein’s work, but here is the thing: it is so much more than a not definition of death (implicitly, a definition of death) — it was a hug at a funeral. 

Wittgenstein and I date — we meet at the Caffé Nero where the light falls well and where the buses hustle past and where the Ludwig Wittgenstein and the I date (or however else one could put it). He lets me touch the §11 and the §78 of his seminal PI when no one is watching — I pull a face as if I understand. To imagine a form of life, that is to imagine a language, he tells me as I’m drunk on his presence and thinks I’ll forget, is not the same as taking anything outside of language as death. He made as little sense as any lover should. But I looked back on these dates in the shower this afternoon and the desire to write you this prose poem banged its clenched hands against the bathroom door. 

The funeral is ours by the way, that is my point: we are attending it now. But this is not to say a mother’s love is not present in this poem — let us take another definition of death rather than the one that is a not definition. LW would be happy for me to make this move (I caught a therapeutic dazzle of his last Tuesday at a Costa instead and I said ‘I knew you were no bloody Anglophone philosopher!’ — he laughed that laugh). Death is tending towards death, I think, where death is psychic: it is to have thoughts and feelings and dance moves and shopping sprees swathed over and over and over and over and over a little person situated in the centre of your skull. 

Death is a curve of life, a tucking your head into your armpit in the cave 11 miles out from the academy where Plato taught — a roll of death, to be caught in the jaws of history on the side of the Nile bed. I am tempted to say: I forgive you all for your original goodness and I give you permission to be scared and make mistakes: To do more than tick boxes on silly forms by drawing out those silly form boxes in a series of seminars. Take your pen off the page, I want to say: you will develop consciousness yet. I want to say, come what may: Yes.