Writing, Death Anointing the World
by André Marques Chambel

She is sat at the table, leg-crossed,
But not in the way one crosses a leg over the other.
She is sat at the table, leg-crossed,
Like the legs of a spider or the root system of a tree
Cross with the fabric of the world, stitching life into being.

She nods to the plate set in front of me
Where a hand rests, covering something precious, something small,
Something more.

Next to the plate there is a feather,
Inkless, untouched. It calls out to me:
Let yourself go to that other place, where everything begins.
Let yourself fall into that mournful center of your heart.
You know what to do. You have been expecting this.

Earth,
Hearth,
Heart,

Let me descend, let me meet you where you are at.
Let me be filled with dreams of life and creation.
Let me learn from the one making life from that which is unmade
And from the ones that have gone forth to the space I hold inside.
Let me cross that meridian, where I can blow my heart through the air,
Into form, birthing that which had been before into something new again.

Uncurling the hand.
Unresting the feather.
Unhiding that which has been gathered inside.

Letting the ghost build a new home, a new body,
A new being for itself.

Maybe that’s what it is all about.

To be able to forge and to sow.
To be able to express life,
Worlds, new homes, into being,
On the space that has been left empty of it,
After mortality has descended into the humus.

Writing.
Death anointing the body.

Writing:
Death anointing the world,

Filling it with life.
Gathering it in thoughtful minds,
Awaiting the release of spirit
In feathers dipped in ink, meeting the leaves and

Pages, where spell-ing can happen, sure as the sun
Beneath the earth, scorches, into a seed, about to grow.
A seed that was something before, ready to be something else

Again.
Anew.

The heart is the underworld
Where a ghost can always, and forevermore,
Grow into something other.

That is the secret she carries
In her closed hand:

A fallen leaf, a piece of paper.
And the feather resting upon it
In anticipation.

~
André Marques Chambel is an artist and writer interested in the connection of animism, storytelling and cultural heritage. Their work finds a creative expression in the visual, literary and sound arts, where they research the relationship between the human and the non-human, the notion of the sacred and the experience of finding meaning in the natural world.

~
Artist Statement: “Writing, Death Anointing the World” was inspired by the relationship between death and literature, informed by my readings of writers such as Maurice Blanchot and Federico García Lorca. There is a lot of nourishment in the act of writing. Nourishment of our soul and the soul of the world at large. That is what creativity does: it nourishes the inner world of those that it touches. And that nourishment, although it may seem paradoxical, comes from the force of death and its effect on our lives, being a force of transformation and deep change, since it is from death, that capacity for radical mutability, that art becomes possible. Because what is art and creativity if not a need to respond to that otherness, to make do with that that has been changed or that that has always been unknown to us inside of ourselves, and to eternalize it into form? This poem is a reflection on death’s capacity for nourishment in our human lives, in communion with more-than-human voices.

~
Featured Image: Photo by Evie S., 2020.