Douglas Mercer
October 12 2024
The most certain you can be is dead certain, to be dead pan is to keep a totally stone face, a dead ringer is a perfect replica, to have a dead eye means you are a perfect shot, to be dead on is to be right on, that is totally correct, to be caught dead to rights is to be caught completely, dead silence is total silence, the most right you can be is read right, a dead giveaway is a total clue, and a dead ringer is an exact lookalike. Thus this cluster of the uses of death cover a single concept of totality or perfection or completion.
The most clear you can be is crystal clear
The genius of language
***
Unbeknownst to the groundlings in the cheap seats and the high and palmy men of ruffles in the balcony outside the Globe Fortinbras is making his waltz like stately march at the head of a team of men and horses, he is set to swoop in to clean up the dead strewn field, his fell hand high handed. His heraldic flag is (as always) gules on a field of sable; inside the method has fallen on the inventor’s head and the stage is littered with blood and bodies as the dying men shout their last. When his friend goes down (poisoned rapier) Horatio, that most Noble Roman of them all and that Antique Dane (Hamlet is the antic Dane) utters an exclamation.
O Proud Death!
Perhaps he picked up one of the copies that went on sale from the Stationer’s Registry at stall in front of St Paul’s, perhaps it was passed around among the coterie, but know it he did; mostly likely on one palmy day in England he sat, not with the groundlings of course, but in the upper reaches of the terrace with the high, palmy, and ruffled men; peering down he would have seen the drama of plays within plays and infinite intrigue, and purposes mistook, and always word, words, words the proud verse in its sails, the foul corruption of an erupting state in a mirror like world of illusion; a world and a language much like his own. As the melodrama reached its fated conclusion with the spectacle below perhaps he wrote the words down or just committed them to memory; seven years later they would bear fruit; but as he mulled it over in his mind’s eye he took issue with the exclamation and so the future divine set the world in joint, and devouring time is devoured itself:
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
For several weeks at the Dakota in 1977 John Lennon claimed to his Tarot reader that he was dead. I’ve been dead Charles. I still am as a matter of fact. I suppose I will be until I am reborn. You may consider this a communication from the spirit world. In his search for omnipotence he gave serious though to traveling to Spain and environs in the hope of being able to locate the spear of Christ, the one that lanced him in the side. Demons and evil spirits haunted their abode, or so they said, according to those who knew him and his wife. In the song which he tried to claim the mantle of the avant gardist from Paul he says: Dead Man, turn me on; tune in turn off, it is like dying, though sometimes tomorrow knows.
One such clue was the entire cover of the Abby Road album. Fans deduced that a simple picture of the band crossing the road was actually meant to depict a funeral procession. John, in white, was the clergyman. Ringo’s black attire showed that he was the mourner, while George’s casual jeans meant he was the gravedigger. Paul’s bare feet was what sealed it. He didn’t need shoes, because he was the dearly departed. The scarab beetle may also hold the key to the Paul is Dead mystery. This small insect is associated with an ancient Egyptian god by its curious habit of rolling dung, from east to west, into a ball, into which it lays its eggs. When hatched, the dung provides its young with food. This process of transforming the dead matter of dung into renewed life represents initiation in the Egyptian mysteries. Paul’s death, rather than being literal, should be interpreted as symbolic of initiation or rebirth. In his song How Do You Sleep John says those freaks were right when they said you were dead, earlier he had likened death to getting out of one car and into another, in his song the Kiss of Venus Paul speaks of scoring a bulls eye, packed with illusions, harmonic sound and secrets blown.
The poet finds his soul his soul attached to a body but being indestructible by terms divine it feeds itself and grows and voraciously it devours the devouring and feeds on death that feeds on men; and death, as they say, once dead, well, there is no more dying then, all is swallowed up in victory.
Cease to resist
Saying goodbye
We drive our cars into the ocean
You think we’re dead but we sail away
TS Eliot was called Old Possum by Ezra Pound, a name bestowed due to Eliot’s prudence, canniness, shrewdness, his infinitely reserved and quiet presence. Old Possum’s Book Of Practical Cats was published in 1939. When threatened or harmed, possums will play possum by feigning death. This physiological response is involuntary (like fainting), rather than a conscious act. To understand the origins of the idiom play possum, we must first look at the behavior of actual possums. When threatened or attacked, these marsupials have a unique defense mechanism: they feign death. They become completely still, their eyes glaze over. This trick often fools predators into thinking that the possum is already dead and not worth eating. The term playing possum was first recorded in print in 1822, but it’s likely that people had been using this phrase long before then. It became popular in America during the mid-19th century when possum hunting was a common pastime. Hunters would sometimes shoot an opossum only to find out later that it wasn’t actually dead – it was just playing possum. Over time, playing possum came to be used as an idiom to describe someone who feigns sleep of death for some ulterior motive.
Counterfeit? I lie. I am no counterfeit.
To die is to be a counterfeit,
For he is but the counterfeit of a man
Who hath not the life of a man
But to counterfeit dying
When a man thereby lives
Is to be no counterfeit
But the true and perfect
Image of life indeed.
It is the oldest one in the book, really, the staple of initiation rites the world over: assume the hallmarks and hues of death in order to be born. Death is only another milestone, a stage on life’s way. Death the last illusion: bend down to the water wan lover and kiss thine own lips and look in the unclouded mirror sans ripples and see yourself for the very first time.
One cannot be more serious than dead serious and no reckoning can be more on target than a dead one.
Perhaps it was dreaming of the forest of mother Arden that did it; but five years after the fatal day in Deptford in May 1593 when his friend and rival was taken from him he returned in his mind’s eye to that primal scene of murder (most foul as in the best it is); of course many think that no such thing occurred, that the man just feigned death and that he lives on and on in the proud sails of Shakespeare’s verse; others wondered what would have become of them had he lived; friendship and rivalry is a combustible and often lethal combination, as the saga of Lennon and McCartney bear witness. Would Marlowe’s mere presence have crabbed Shakespeare’s spirit?; as it was with Marlowe buried in death’s dateless night he had a free reign to create; or would Shakespeare’s example have led mad Kit Marlowe on and on to out top even Ilium? But dead men tell no tales and only the living can sing of death’s dateless night. And so in the comedy Shakespeare encoded a reference to his dead friend, and way of making amends and of remembering, for when the great reckoning happens understanding will be forward, and there will be no reckoning then.
When a man’s verses cannot
Be understood
Nor a man’s good wit
Seconded with the forward
Child, understanding
It strikes a man
More dead than
A great reckoning
In a little room.
Truly, I would the
Gods had made thee
Poetical.
Hamlet speaks of death as the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler has returned; this despite having seen the ghost of his father but a few days before and in his mind eye he sees the graves standing tenantless in, of course, the most high and palmy state of Rome.
***
Notes:
Creation: Cremation
The Neptune Society Columbarium of San Francisco is an architectural landmark in San Francisco and is the city's only nondenominational public burial space. The columbarium was built in 1898 by architect Bernard J.S. Cahill and is currently operated and maintained by the Neptune Society of Northern California. The copper-domed, Neo-Classical structure houses more than 8,500 niches for cremation urns. The building was designated as a San Francisco city landmark in 1996.
Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial, or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns lately found in Norfolk is a work by Sir Thomas Browne, published in 1658 as the first part of a two-part work that concludes with The Garden Of Cyrus. The title is Greek for "urn burial": A hyria (uopia) is a large Greek pot, and taphos (tapoc) means tomb. Its nominal subject was the discovery of some 40 to 50 Anglo-Saxon pots in Norfolk. The discovery of these remains prompts Browne to deliver, first, a description of the antiquities found, and then a survey of most of the burial and funerary customs, ancient and current, of which his era was aware. The most famous part of the work is the apotheosis of the fifth chapter, where Browne declaims: But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing Nativities and Deaths with equal luster, nor omitting Ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature. Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us. The totality of Chapter V the longest piece, perhaps, of absolutely sublime rhetoric to be found in the prose literature of the world.
The word die was, among other things, Elizabethan slang for sexual climax; the French echo this in their “petit mort”; a mortgage is a legal agreement by which a creditor lends money in exchange for taking th the title of a the property; death frees all debts and property is appalled.
Death: doubt: debt.
Contrary to myth, the term "dead reckoning" was not originally used to abbreviate "deduced reckoning", nor is it a misspelling of the term "ded reckoning". The use of "ded" or "deduced reckoning" is not known to have appeared earlier than 1931, much later in history than "dead reckoning", which appeared as early as 1613 in the Oxford English Dictionary. The original intention of "dead" in the term is generally assumed to mean using a stationary object that is "dead in the water" as a basis for calculations. Additionally, at the time the first appearance of "dead reckoning", "ded" was considered a common spelling of "dead". This potentially led to later confusion of the origin of the term
