Sunday of the Dead – Resurrection is possible

The dead have no secret. They are the overwhelming majority and are in possession of one immutable truth: that they have died. We remember them, we long for them to speak again. If we were honest with ourselves, we would have to admit: They are talking to us, but we don’t really want to hear what they are telling us. They don’t say much, but the essential thing: they predict the future for us. They are waiting for us, “on the opposite slope,” as Heiner Müller writes.

The question remains inscribed in all memories of those who have died: When remembering, do I consider whether I am really alive? We are synchronized people, equipped with trained self-soothing: Yes, yes, later… when there is time, then I will… The statement that it is never too late for what is truly worthwhile is one of the worst lies. “You can start with your last breath,” writes Brecht and lies along with it.

Death means lack of proportion, says research. Existence is therefore the beautiful, rich opposite: relationship wealth. Death therefore appears early on, sometimes silently like the sand in a clock; we pay for it alive. For example, when relationships break, are missing, blown away. To disrupt relationships, death has many names: habituation, conformity, self-assurance, perfection, greed, validity, power. Death is a damned clever piecemealer in this battle against relationships; Day by day, moment by moment. Imperceptibility is his strongest weapon. But where relationships are allowed to last, you are less dead in the middle of existence, the word “dead” has two more built-in letters and thus becomes: consolation.

Life is this world. And this world is moderation and temperance, is religious duty and a sense of order; all beauty is limited, plus this burdensome unity of cover between the world and the province. There needs to be an afterlife that one can hope for. A life beyond, yes, but please: long before death. So life beyond the insight into the narrow course of things that is forced upon us. Faith defends itself against this narrowness. The belief that you can take your own life. Take it. Accept it. Taking on him. Claim it. Protect it.

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Joy in life does not consist in completing each day as required. No, the joy of life is to remain a beginner every morning, without being asked but demanding. Keep it up! This requires confidence. It cannot trickle out of those who need it, it must flow to those in need. And nobody has to know exactly where from.

“It may be that I love life more than anyone else,” said Heinrich von Kleist, but he would also note that he “couldn’t be helped on earth.” And will reach for the pistol. The love of life, a life towards love – how many tremors are possible on this path, how much breaking and burning and bursting. Until the life that can no longer no longer wants to. Nothing more wants, in this world, from this world. And suddenly what often sounds so liberating sounds hard: a person sets off – and away.

Sometimes escape comes from bitter own initiative. Yesenin and Toller, Tucholsky and Inge Müller, Mayakovsky and Levi. There is no law, no statute anymore, when the fear, the obsession, the wound and basic pain push you beyond all limits, when the longing for sovereignty reaches out to you as an invitation to die. So if this ice-cold Doctor Faust in you and this gentleman Raskolnikov in you and Joseph Conrad’s Marlowe in you and the humiliated Jesus in you, if they all supply that heart of darkness in you – which no cardiologist can attest – with material. A material that brings together self-elevation and self-dissolution. The courage and the courage. Suicide is freedom? Don’t tell anyone that this is unthinkable in their own lives. Don’t trust anyone’s heartbeat of honesty, his temperatures of symmetry, his acceptance of the servitude of everyday life. A heart attack lurks in wait for every person.

Again and again there have been poets who have tried to describe the transition to death: “And a stone between stones, in the joy of his heart he entered again into the truth of the immobile worlds” (Albert Camus). Yes, yes, say the enlightened and like to repeat the callous sentence that death is, quite naturally, a part of life. The sentence is an infamy, like almost every truth. Martin Walser: “Please say this sentence loudly and cheerfully and with agreement when you see the sun, the clouds, the snow, a beloved face, the hustle and bustle, your children’s children or yourself doing something that strengthens your spirit!” No, that helps no reason: Death comes to us as an enemy, said Elias Canetti. Having to die, in addition to the incontrovertible fact that a person becomes irredeemably guilty at the beginning of life, is the only real scandal there is!

In cemeteries we believe just a little bit in the unthinkable: that we will be spared. It is a belief out of pure necessity that you cannot change anything, because: You are not immortal just because you are allowed to fall in love immortally. But necessity is the midwife for this most beautiful activity: believing. Examples? Where the need is greatest, belief in a better world is strongest and probably most honest. Where loneliness is at its worst, belief in togetherness paints the greatest pictures. The fiery hour of utopia strikes at five to twelve. Where guilt plagues you most violently, you want to believe just as strongly that innocence is possible again. We believe what is not. This way it is. Although it may never be. Only solution, rather than salvation, is always possible; Healing instead of salvation; Pacification instead of peace. And so we believe most deeply in life when we become aware of its merciless brevity and unrepeatableness.

At some point it will become apparent how many deaths you have died over the years and which small resurrection steps towards yourself you have refused, missed or postponed. Resurrection? Yes. By living up to the desire to no longer stand everywhere, to stop queuing at every venue, to no longer want to get through everything and no longer want to be in charge of anyone. Letting things settle is resurrection. Letting go is: letting the wrong efforts die – in the service of the (remaining) life.

Sunday of the Dead. Then a new week begins. Death’s power to elicit tears from us then meets again with life’s offer to dry them.