3.54
Thinking of our death leads us, in some ways, to the brink of our world—any world—yet it’s nested into our world by our prismatic god. Death isn’t a hole like other holes (§3.3); it’s a darkness, metaphorically speaking (§3.53).
The god of death doesn’t say, “Look at things like this.” It says, Look!
(Look! bounces back like an echo.)
Death is the complete loss of an opening of world.
We house those we lose in our world as ghosts. Ghosts are absences: they haunt from outskirts and bordercrossings — their presence is as essential as their presumed absence. For the deaths of others, the god does say, “Look at things like this.” Ghosts, too, say this: the thisness, a structure of emplaced loss; the void can resonate out to all things.
Crossing-over like crossing the river Styx.
Ghosts are present absences, the unburied dead.
A being needn’t be dead or gone for a ghost or haunting, for us to house their being.
— Ghosts are more numerous than we tend to notice.