Mouroir

The Double Dying of an Ordinary Criminal

It is an unapproachable, ungrateful country. Along the coast, in an undulating green strip between the indigo sea and the ribbed, foaming mountain chain, the climate is tropical. There are sharks in the ocean and other fish large and small, dark coloured or of silver or ivory. On the land flamboyant trees grow, trees with shiny green fleshy leaves and violent outbursts of flowers: banana, palm, mango, the blossomy downpour of the bougainvillaea, the star-wounds of the poinsettia, the hibiscus with hairy dark ants most likely looking with sticky legs for sweetness in the calyx, canna, Ceylon rose. Nights the humid darkness is scented with the secretive magnolia, the camellia, the gardenia. The fruit are often fibrous, glutinous and soft. The trees — such as the guava — are enclosed by their particular smell, the heavy perfume of a full-bodied woman who has perspired a lot. The heat and the high humidity cause the milk to turn sour instantly, grow mould on the clothes strung on wires or kept in wardrobes, rot the wood while steel and iron are devoured by oxidation. To the north and west stretch the swelling sugar-cane plantations, the cane is cultivated and chopped by people of a dark race, people with large sombre eyes and smooth black hair. These people are sometimes called “sea kaffirs”. Here and there among the rippling and sharply whispering sugar-cane they erected rudimentary single-roomed temples for their gods, the inner walls decorated with bright representations: often the swarthy mother god, Kali, she who also at times assumes the aspect of Parvati or Sarasvati on the winged throne of a swan, or that of Shakti — the bride, companion and alter ego of Shiva the destroyer. On these plantations as also in the cultivated forests further removed from the ocean, where lumberjacks cut and saw the yellow and red trees, and elsewhere too, there is the constant flashing of many kinds of birds, butterflies, large insects with shimmering black bodies. As well as snakes. The cities service the ships which come to trade here, and the holiday-makers and pleasure-seekers come to relax on the guava-coloured beaches and to bathe in the tepid waves within the protection of the shark nets. When the barriers are raised the stuck sharks are there like white torpedoes. In the streets one encounters the many fumes of decomposition and dismantling, of viscosity and dry rot and sweetness; occasionally also the harsher tang of spices and seasoning herbs. There are night clubs and taxis and rickshaws. People smoke or use in other ways a rank stupefier commonly called dagga; other names heard are bhang, “real rice”, gunja, jane, “Maryjay”, “rooney”, “DP”, “green stuff”, “weed”, “grass”, “dope”, “popeye”, “wheat”, “Tree of Knowledge”, insangu. It makes the eyes darker from within and red around the lids and it lies like a curly smokiness on the voice. It analyses the sense of time the way one would eat a fish morsel by morsel off the bone. It entices the appetite.

The Coast is separated from the Heartland by a chain of mountains which seem blue from afar, the mountains of the Dragon, hundreds of miles long, like the great wall of China with its watchtowers. The colours of the sun remain entangled mostly in the structure of the mountains. But some of this citadel’s summits are so high that they’ve lost all colour; they are dusted with a sparkle which could be snow or ice.

Beyond the mountains the Heartland commences, an inhospitable region, a semi-desert which further and deeper will silt up in a true desert of brown and grey dunes; unresting dunes. It is a high plateau with hardly any diversity and little vegetation apart from the grass which grows tall and becomes white like a bleached photo during the winter. Now and then there are crevices or denser ravines in the folds of the high country, something which can be held darkly in the hollow of the hand, or more elevated ledges, ridges and mesas. When summer comes gigantic cloud constructions wash over the land, are piled up, unchain in thunderstorms of a prehistoric force with coiling swords of electricity and smoking arrows of light, until the clouds crack and tear, the bottom gives way and flood waters are poured over the ochre earth. The people of this land are hard and obtuse and doughty — but cunning — as the earth and its climate require of them. Their eyes lie waiting deep and unflinching in the heads, robed in wrinkles under thick eyebrows, and when they lose their teeth quite early on, as happens often, the jaw muscles are tough and bitter. They cultivate the topsoil. They sow and reap maize with big red-painted tractors, ploughs and other farm implements. They keep numerous herds and flocks, Brahmans with awkward humps, or earth-red oxen with white horns spread very wide on either side of the head — Nguni or Afrikaners by name. These beasts constitute practically the only heritage left by an ancient yellowish race of humans with Asiatic features who wandered over these wastes in days of yore. The real wealth of the Heartland is hoarded under the earth’s crust where, when the earth still moved, layers and veins of gold were deposited, and copper, and further south also buried volcanoes, pipes and alluvial soil full of diamonds. Over these riches the people built their cities: glass, concrete, steel — rising from the desert to sometimes be split and obliterated again by fulminations from above. In the streets the long flat automobiles crawl, flashing the sun like heliographs; inside the vehicles are people who have absorbed too much food, with fantastic coiffures or moustaches pearling perspiration, and with knees spread wide. The other people without means of transport are of a darker hue and they trot along the sidewalks with long rhythmically flapping coat-tails, passing by the enormous shop windows. From these cities are ruled and administered the Coast, the South, the Mountain Fastnesses, the Old-Land, the Gap, the Middle State, the Frontier, the Reserves, the Desert, and other colonies and possessions.

He was born in the country of Coast and grew up there. Little has been documented concerning his juvenile years and not much touching on his adult life. His mother became very old and started wearing a black dress with thick woolen stockings. Her back was bent high between the shoulder blades. He was a tall and sturdy fellow with brown hair, slightly oily, falling straight over the forehead. His legs were hairy and when he deigned to smile only the left side of his mouth was tilted upwards with a minimal contraction of muscles. We don’t know whether he was interested in any sport. There is talk of a work he was supposed to have had, and of a wife; even children are mentioned. He was still young. Twenty-eight years old.

Hell doesn’t exist. It comes into being, each moment it is created relentlessly, and then it is strictly personal and individual, that is, proper to each individual — which doesn’t necessarily imply that others aren’t touched or concerned by it. As tubes of light the hells burst in the heavens and illuminate, alter, the area within their reach. The act, the misdemeanour then, a fraction in time, causes a chain reaction, a mutation eventually flowering in the fated echo or the obverse of it; a clandestine bleeding. Each crime contains the hell befitting it. The snake’s skin fits without any crease or pucker over the snake. When the felony is committed the hell opens up on the spot; when it at last — and often in public — bursts forth, it is redeemed. The one is an utterance of the other. The one eliminates the other.

He became a bum — nobody quite knows why or how. He met up with a woman, much older, a companion and an alter ego, a person like him dwelling in the dark mazes of the city. As much and as often as they could afford to they smoked and they drank. Nights they then slept in empty plots by smouldering rubbish heaps, or in condemned buildings due for demolition. Sometimes they lay in water furrows. They also danced.

The old woman tried to tempt drifters with her poor body — boozers, sailors, blokes ostensibly gentlemen with problems sneaking through the streets late at night (late in the blossoming of life, already in the dropping of death). She was the bait. He was the hook. Also the tackle, rod, gaff and cudgel. When she managed to seduce an unsuspecting customer with an obscene caricature of hip swaying and the slimy dark tongue as clotted bleeding between the more tropical red of the lips, the edges of the wound, leading him to a sheltered or deserted spot, then he jumped on the greedy or shaky one from behind. With a stick or a knife, sometimes with a length of piano wire twisted in a noose. Always the purpose was to break the subject open, to murder; three times at least it is known that he succeeded. Some victims were chopped up and chucked piecemeal in a sewer. Robbery, it would seem, was not the motive. Perhaps it was a perverse form of sexual satisfaction or the foreplay thereof. One night the prey was a blind jeweller, who could understand the facets of gems or the shivery internal working of watches with sensitive fingertips. It may also be that the jeweller’s blindness is an injury resulting from the assault.

Without too much trouble they are trapped by the police. During the subsequent trial they are both found guilty and sentenced: she with tearing mouth to an insane asylum, he to the death cell. The expression is: he got the rope. They would top him. His life was to be reeled in with a cord.

He is transferred to a cell in a building of red bricks in one of the ruling cities of the Heartland. His appeal against the death sentence is rejected. The request for mercy likewise. The long wake has started. Altogether a year and a half passed.

The Monday the hangman came to inform him that the next Tuesday would be it — hardly a week then. Together with him in the pot there were five more “condemns”, Unwhites, people with sallow hides and of diverse crimes. They would go up together but were not to swing simultaneously. Maybe the Unlife up there would make them equal. A folded sheet of paper with a black border, where his dying day is announced, is handed to him. The hangman weighs him, measures his height and the circumference of his neck. With these data the length of the rope et cetera are calculated in an approximately scientific approximation. It was a Monday during the summer and each day of that season the clouds were a thundering sea battle above the hard, cracked earth.

Some people are dead before they even come to die. When the Unwhites are informed (when the countdown starts), they directly open up in song, they break and let the words erupt. There is a pulsating urgency about the singing, as if one can hear how scorchingly alive their voices are. All the other prisoners — in any event only awaiting their turn — help them from that instant on: the basses, the tenors, the harmonizers, the choir. Every flight of the prospective voyagers’ voices is supported and sustained by those of the others. As if a stick is suddenly poked into an antheap. The sound of the voices is like that of cattle at the abattoir, the lowing of beasts smelling the blood and knowing that nothing can save them now. Perhaps the Jews too, had they been a singing people, would have hummed thus in the chambers where the gas was turned on. Maybe they did? This making of noises with the mouths continues day and night, erases night and day, till those who must depart go up in the morning, at seven o’clock. The best flying is done in the morning. For that last stretch those who leave will sing alone. Day in day out it continues and in the early hours it is a low mumbling, the murmuring sound of the sea which never sleeps but only turns on to the other hip. In this fashion, during the final week, that which is fear and pain and anguish and life is gradually pushed out of the mouth. A narcotic. And so they move with the ultimate daybreak through the corridor as if in a mirror, rhythmic but in a trance, not as a men alone but as a song in movement. They are no longer there; just the breaths flow unceasingly and warm and humid over the lips. (The opposite may be alleged too: that this delicious and fleeting life is purified and sharpened over the last week by song to a shriek of limpid knowing.)

For him there is no such grace because his like — the fellow condemns in his section, in his part of the prison, the pale ones, the Uncoloureds, people from the ruling class — don’t sing easily. Nor can he, like the others in the pot, be put in a communal cell — of course there are far more Unwhite candidates than Uncoloured ones. He must pray death (or life) all the way out of himself. The pastor is there to assist and to show him the words, for words are holes in which you must stick death. He will die in another way before he is dead. He becomes his own ghost. The eyes are deep and bright in the sockets. It gives his head the appearance of a skull. His quiff falls lank over the forehead. He sneers without any fear of the warders. Like the other seasoned prisoners — those who know the ropes — he wears his shoes without socks.

All hope is lost

Of my reception into grace; what worse?

For where no hope is left, is left no fear!

(blind Milton)

The minister. In fact a chaplain, and with a rank in the service. He is a small chap with an absolutely naked scalp, dressed in a modish tailored suit and shirted in flowers branching out over ribs, belly and the small of the back. He has red puffy bags under the eyes and, so one imagines, folds of white flesh around the midriff and in the groin. It is his task to prepare the soul, to make it robust, to extract the soul and wash and iron it, and then to let it be acquiescent. It requires a fine ingenuity because the soul is like smoke and so easily slips through the fingers. He spends much time on his knees and it is not good for the pants. He prays and emits suffocated sounds. Some vowels are stretched beyond measure, are pronounced in a placatory way as when a little child tries to make a big animal change its mind. When he prays he closes his eyes and holds the hand of the convicted. With eyes closed, when talking aloud, you move on another level. That which is there is not there. That which isn’t there is there perchance. Heaven grows behind closed eyelids. His order is a tall one. During the last week something crystallizes from the doomed, surreptitiously, and comes to cleave to the clergyman. It is the soul wishing to remain among the familiar living when the soma comes to nothing. Like a snail it is searching for a new shell. So the body becomes lighter. .

The executioner (bailiff, hangman, topper, rope expert, death artist) is a tall man in the sombre weeds of pious neutrality and with a melancholy countenance. His post or position is private and part-time. When, through resignation or death, a vacancy occurs, anyone — a pensioner for instance, or the father of numerous sickly children who needs a little extra income — can submit his application to the magistrate. He then tenders for so much or so much per head (at present, before devaluation, it is seven rands) for he is remunerated by the head. He must see to it, together with his assistant (if any), that the gallows remain in good well-oiled working order, for they are often made use of. When the pot is pointed out it is his duty to be the announcer and to make the necessary preparations. He is the tailor who will fit you out in a new life. On the fateful morning he is there bright and early. He reposes his head on interlaced fingers against the bars as if he were praying or dozing off. When the candidates are brought in under escort he makes them take up their indicated positions — warders are keeping them upright — and adjusts the nooses around the necks below the ears until they fit just right. Then he closes the eye-flaps of their hoods and presses with a pale finger the button activating the trapdoor. They then plunge twice their own height. The complete procedure seldom takes more than seven seconds. Up to seven persons can thus be served simultaneously, standing in line like bridegrooms before an altar. After the thrashing about the corpses remain hanging for ten minutes in the well. What has not snapped will be throttled. Thereafter the still warm and very heavy (because deadweight) corpses are pulleyed in, the handcuffs taken off, they are undressed, and lowered again. If the correct results were not obtained the whole process is repeated. When shudders and convulsions are no longer observed the limp cadavers are deposited in washing troughs and the doctor on duty makes an incision in the neck to establish which vertebra was broken — this information must be entered in duplicate. Bloodstains have penetrated the metal of the wash-basins. Bloodstains, crud, snot splotches also on the ropes and the hoods, and the cupboard where the coiled ropes are kept stinks of stale effluence. The burial takes place within a few hours. The clothes of the deceased are brought back into circulation in the gaol. After all, it’s state property. If for some or other reason a dead body must be preserved, there are modern shiny iceboxes for that purpose in the autopsy room. As all of this happens during the fresh and innocent hours, the vocation of hangman need not interfere with any other job; your executioner could be a teacher, a psychiatrist, a politician, a chicken farmer, publisher, or unemployed.

The gibbets. In other ages the pillory was erected prominently in a square or on a hilltop, and the complete ceremony was public and a joy for the birds, not so much for its deterrent effect but because it was such an intimate part of everyday life and death, and a rude form of amusement. We live in these days and no longer frequent or know one another. No longer are we animals with the snouts in the trough of death. Also, civilization has come over us. In our time the place of execution is a privileged one, where it is dark, behind walls, through passages, in the heart of the labyrinth. Few people know when the seeker has found it. It is there like some bashful god, like the blind and deaf and self-satisfied idol of a tiny group of initiates, for the satisfaction of an obscure tradition. And that which is intimate, like defecation, must be kept hidden from prying eyes. The artificial gloss of an insouciant existence must be safeguarded. Usually there is no trouble or unpleasantness during the execution. But it has happened that some of the damned refuse to fit the pattern and that they then, that last morning when the cell door was unlocked, threw a blanket over the officer’s head and tried to smash him against the wall, head first like a battering ram — so that he had to live for months afterwards with his neck in traction. And it has also happened that one flappie,¹ in that fraction of a second when the trapdoor falls open, timed the moment exactly, and jumped on to the back of the man in front of him so that his fall was broken and he had to be hoisted back up, kicking, to die all over again. The blind shaft is as inevitable as the sunrise; the ritual leaves no room for any deflection or improvising. The last route is secure and actually no longer part of the personal hell.

The pilgrim, the candidate, is accompanied to the preparation room by a spiritual comforter and the officers. This place is called “the last room”, the departure hall. The nauseating sweet smell of death is already all-pervasive. Here he is handcuffed and a white hood is placed over his head. The flap above the eyes remains open until he has taken up his position below the gallows. Exceptionally it may happen that the spine and the neck break completely at the instant when the earth falls away below his feet and that the head becomes separated from the body, that the head alone remains suspended there. But that just happens in the case of candidates who are rotten with syphilis, and then mostly with female Unwhites. For this negligible probability, seen statistically, one can hardly provide in advance, in a scientific way, a solution. What occurs more frequently is that the male reprobate at the critical crossover reaches a benevolent, jetting orgasm. To beget a child is thus always a form of dying. What’s more, this final poke in the dark is fulfillment, at last a total embrace of the mother god. An influx and an unfolding. It is said: to die by the neck is to sodomize the night. . Precautionary measures are however taken with female executees. They get watertight rubber bloomers and the dress is taken in around the knees and sewn up. Nor will she afterwards be undressed like the men to be hosed down, but she’ll be buried just the way she is in her clothes. The reason being that the female parts — uterus, ovaries — are spilled with the shock of falling down the shaft.

At times a doomed one may attempt during the last days and nights to take his own death. He will for instance try to crush his head against the cell wall or to dive head first from the bed to the floor and thus be rid of his thoughts on the cement, as of a hard rain. But it is not allowed; after all, it’s not a sacrifice which is demanded but an execution which concerns others too and in which each one must play his ascribed part. It is a matter of mutual responsibility. Steps are therefore taken to prevent the suicide of the weak-hearted. Those whose lives in reality ceased existing with the death sentence are kept alive in bright cells permanently lit, and day and night a warder keeps watch through the barred aperture in the door. There are days and there are nights. . Once the candidate has been chosen his person and his cell are frisked for any concealed weapon or means of release. But apart from that he lives his last days like a king. The meal of the convicted may be ordered to taste, even fried chicken.

He swore that they’ll never string him up alive, that he will do himself in. His cell is searched. In the ink vein of his ballpoint pen they find a hidden needle. A dark needle, blue at present, which was to be introduced into the upper arm from where, theoretically, it could accomplish the short trip to the heart where with a flashing snake of pain it would perforate that organ-organism the way the god Krishna (an incarnation of Vishnu) long ago pinned down the snake Kaliya with his lance: a short ultimate journey. He doesn’t know that his needle has been discovered so that he retains the illusion that he himself may freely decide when to abrogate his life during the fatal week. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. He will die in another way before the final sunrise.

It would however have been better and more effective had he smuggled in a razorblade at the beginning. He could have done so with the pretence that he wanted to cut out pictures to stick them on a sheet of paper. He could then spend such an inordinately long time doing so that the guardian will end up forgetting about the blade. This little silver-fish he should then break in two, washing the one half down the toilet bowl; the other part he hides on his body at all times. The last evening he wishes all the warders a good night and lies down in his bunk with an extra blanket over him and his back to the door. He has one hand under his head on the pillow and pulls the blanket up to his chin. Then he would have to work quickly, for the convicted is not allowed to sleep with his hands below the blankets during the last week. With the broken blade he slices through the large vein in the crook of the arm, in the valley of the shoulder, in the armpit; a clean cut several centimetres long. His hand stays under the ear; the arm thus remains flexed so that the wound, the bearded and sighing mouth, may peacefully continue bleeding under the blanket — like the mysterious, sweetish smell of a tropical flower in the night. He rests with his body to the wall so that the blood may gather on the floor between the bed and the wall. When they arrive then the next morning to wake him for the final exercise, the body is already all of marble. . Or — an alternative — he could have pulled with the fingers, his tongue as far as it would go, closed his teeth over it, and then have tapped lightly with one hand against the lower jaw. In this way the lower teeth break through the tongue close to its roots. Nothing can save you from that blooming. Or he might even have swallowed the tongue. Fool!

From the land of Coast his mother arrives with her grey hair and her black back. Together with the preacher she visits him daily — but she of course is behind a glass partition since contact visits are not permitted. Death is contagious. When she prays, her hands, the knuckles and the joints, are so tightly clasped that it must be a tiny god indeed who finds asylum in such hand-space, a god like an idea worn away over the years, rubbed small, like a seed.

He stands in his cell under the bulb-eye from the ceiling, talking to his warders. One warder expects him to make shit at the last because he caught him doing exercises that final night. The pointing day is a silver-fish in a big bowl of liquid as murky as blood, in a dark house where night yet resides.

Monday comes with a cold persistent drizzle, an unheard-of way of raining in the Heartland in the summer. But apparently, so it is speculated, strong winds were blowing over the ocean from the Coast and a penetrating rain fell there. This strange weather is brought to the Heartland by the wind from the east — from the Coast therefore.

His last wish is that his eyes should be donated to the blind jeweller. His eyes are of a shiny green colour, like the stones jewellers sometimes mount on silver for a bangle or a gorget. It is not known whether eyes too have memories — who can say for sure where sensory memories are situated? When one leaves one’s eyes to someone, doesn’t it in a way mean the grafting of one person on another? But an eye cannot be grafted — only the cornea under favourable circumstances. And, in any event, his last wish cannot be honoured since there is not sufficient time to comply with the required formalities in duplicate and triplicate.

When the day comes he is up early. He will not see the dawn because the forbidden place where fruit will be hung on the trees of knowledge of good and of evil is in the very same building. Neither the knife of day nor the cape of night are known there. Some detectives come to enquire whether he might not be amenable, for old times’ sake, to admitting his culpability for a series of unsolved murders. He pretends to be exclusive — as if each man were an exception. He will take many dead with him to the rot-hole. It is suspected that he may have polished off up to fifteen victims. . He is led down the tunnels by officers and a soul-stroker. The song has already taken the Unwhites up, through the same corridors, ahead of him. At last, after whiling away so many months in the waiting rooms and the outer sanctums, purified and prepared, he will now enter the secret and sacred circle. Another hell is to be wiped out; a new one may be opened. Cause and effect continue. But he is no longer the man he was eighteen months ago.

In the preparatory room he greets the warders one by one by hand. The lines in the hand-palms are laid over one another; there is a touching, a crossing, a knotting of fingers. Night-flies meeting, parting. He claims he will meet them all again “up there”. Here there is the aroma of sweetness although the night is icy-cold. He is given his blood and shackles. Now he is the minotaur.

The mother is already waiting on her knees in the undertaker’s hall where the box with the rests, the shell of the sacrifice of atonement, will be brought: at her request the family will take care of the burial. What the gods don’t wish to eat will be fed to the earth. There is no more room between her hands. From her body something like a bleeding bubbles up, the reminiscence of a foetus, and breaks in her throat like the dark cooing of a dove.

He stands underneath the tree. Upwards, higher than the ceiling and than the roof ridge, is heaven; peace blue; stars have been incinerated by the light. A fish mirrors. The hangman, who has been leaning his head on folded hands, comes to adjust the rope, the umbilical cord. Exactly behind the ear the knot must lie, where the marrow, consciousness, the wire of light, grows into the skull. He follows to the last the cool movements of the executioner. The eye-flap is turned down. It is dark.

It is dark.

The trapdoor opened with a shudder running through the entire building. A door closing. A flame of lightning through a cloud. A knife slipping into the fatty layer below the ribcage. One heartbeat through all the tentacles, nets of silence, equilibrium-sticks and vein-sides of the body when you are shaken awake from the dark.

Outside the day. The sky a deep blue, purple nearly, the way it looks when seen through the porthole of a high-altitude aircraft or above very high silver-clean mountain peaks. The sun is a blinding thing, so ardent that you daren’t look at it to establish its shape. In the air nothing, no substance which may deflect the sword strokes. A sharp and clear cold, crumbly and yet glass hard. Breaths hang in limp tufty cloudlets from the lips. Somewhere snow or hail must have fallen, surely in the mountains, and that in summer.

(ii)

Once upon a time

not so long ago. .

One is loath to write too soon about something like the foregoing. You let the days pass you by although you’re aware of the fact that you’ll have to open the thing sooner or later. You allow the days to go hard in your throat. For it is like a contusion around the neck: first too tender to the touch, swollen with blood compressed in the capillaries; later the swelling goes down and the injured region becomes bluish purple; still later a yellowish blue and then a lighter yellow when it starts itching. Afterwards it is for a while still a scratchy place in the memory. And yet the matter must be disembowelled because we are the mirrors and mirrors have their own lives. Mirrors have a life too and that which gets caught in them continues existing there. Reality is a version of the mirror image. It is a literary phenomenon I’d like to point out to my colleagues: the ritual must be completed in us also. Before death points? Does death depend on us?

you hang the life

tied to death

until it dies

you drop life

gibbeted to death:

until death is.

Even though something can be inserted easily enough into the mirror, none of us knows precisely how and when it can be taken out again. Do mirrors have looking-glasses too, deeper layers, echoes perhaps incessantly sounding the fathomless? This is the result: the eye and the hand (the description) embroider the version of an event, the anti-reality without which reality never could exist — description is experiencing — I am part of the ritual. The pen twists the rope. From the pen he is hanged. . He hangs in the mirror. But where in reality he is separated — conceivable in spirit or vision and growth of flesh draped over humid bone — hanged, taken down, ploughed under — each of these steps remains preserved in the mirror. The mirror mummifies each consecutive instant, apparently never runs over, but ignores as far as we know all decay and knows for sure no time. (A mutation, yes. . ) He thus keeps on hanging and kicking in the remembrance. You only need to close the eyelids to see each detail before the eyes. And the writer just as the reader (because the reader is a mirror to the writer) can seemingly make nothing undone. He cannot reopen the earth, cannot set the snapped neck, cannot stuff the spirit back into the flesh and the light of life in the lusterless eyes full of sand, cannot straighten the mother’s back, cannot raise the assassinated, cannot reduce the man to a seed in the woman’s loins while a hot wind streams over the Coast.

Or can he?

Is that the second death?

(Shiva, as Nutaraya — King of the Dancers — has in his one right hand a drum which indicates sound as the first element of the unfolding/budding universe; the uppermost left hand holds a fire-tongue, element of the world’s final destruction: the soil is fire devouring the body to ashes, and brings repose, till the next time. The other arms represent the eternal rhythmical balance between life and death. The one foot rests on the devil of “Forgetfulness”, the other treads in the void, as is usual when dancing, and depicts, according to Heinrich Zimmer, “the never-ending flow of consciousness in and out of the state of ignorance”. Shiva, god of destruction, god of creation, et cetera. The heart is a mirror/The mirror is a heart.)