Our Death 33 / On the Hatred of the Sun

Every evening its like the sun smashes into the earth. Its been doing it now for a few weeks. The sky splits into two and all the details of our lives - desires and facts and seizures - flare up from somewhere behind the horizon and produce embittered maps, random shreds of detritus that seem almost to be meaningful. All human data is scrawled across the sky. There is the date of your birth, for example, that arbitrary pivot. There, next to it, perhaps, a set of fairly random memories. Somewhere further off is the tenderness you feel at the thought of a loved one’s beating heart. But then unfortunately that tenderness gets entwined with the screams of the victims of the Peterloo Massacre, gets entwined with the hideous noises something like George W. Bush would make when they look into the mirror at midnight. The darkness of that mirror, which is not quite equal to the darkness and silence inside the opened mouth of someone being burnt alive. So many things to hear and see etc., in the dreams of the dying sun. Fortunately, all of this passes after half an hour or so, the sky closes and the calm night begins, but still it leaves us feeling raw. The calendar, that particularly esoteric version of music, was invented as a means of warding off the fear associated with that rawness. But us, we embrace it. What else are we supposed to do, as we sit here waiting for the end of everything. Re-invent prayer? Behave yourself. As the sun nears the rim of the planet we stare directly into it. We are unsmiling and terrified. We can feel it etching itself into our retina. The shapes it makes are repellant. Here is the burning hospital. Here is the salivating fascist. Here is the eternal ringing of the imaginary city walls. When the sun goes down we can still hear that ringing. It is our voices. A huge cacophonous reckoning before the night silences us with its fists.