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For A Dead Star That Still Shone In Me
There was the time when I got tired. A magnificent black labrador who I had named Gabby, had died in my arms. I was starving and freezing. I thought it was death for sure but it was simply a turning point in my life. It was the time in my life where I wanted the pain to stop the most. I knew that I wanted to die but how to complete the task was beyond me. At the same time my body was resisting the knife blade like the soft white throat of a veal calf, it was saying, 'please don't cut me open.' There was a strange despair inside me, that I needed in order to commit this self killing. Whilst simultaneously, I had actually been rescuing puppies and kittens and in trying to keep the city alive. But there comes a point in one's life where they are tired, so very very tired of the pain. With the magnificent Labrador now gone, all the world moved under me and around me like a wind. I stood still at its core with the wind of the world even within that core. It seemed a waste of the earth's resources to be the breathing dead. But later I was to learn that to understand the deadness of the world, was to understand why evil was allowed to manifest and perpetuate itself. At least I am now able to recognise and point out the saddest things in the world to people. I looked out of the glass window at a very bright star that may have been a planet. I focused all my thoughts on it. The star replied, 'do you really want to die?' A hundred thousand animals cried out from the vivisection laboratories. Nobody's cats with their eyes missing and heads stitched up. The unloved rabbits with the burn marks on their sides, chemicals eating through to organs that were slowly disintegrating, cried out. Rabbits are silent animals but they scream in those places. And then those dogs, the loneliest dogs you ever did see in those laboratories, more lonely than dogs dumped in bins at the inhumane society, cried out as well. For this was torture worse than death. Finally the infant hand of a chimpanzee began reaching towards me in through the steel bars. The fabulous hand that I could place my own hand in. They were hands that hungered for one another, filling with air with the loneliness from where the hand had extended. I followed the hand to the arm, back to its deep origins. I came to the absolute desolation of the cage and the stitches that had put the body back together, in that odd and angry way. I came to the eyes that said, 'don't leave us here.' I knew that if I died now, that that would be the last thing I ever saw and I didn't want it to be so. I thought, who are the perpetrators? I looked at the star and focused on it, not only for my own death, but for the death of my soul. I prayed for the death of the cold and of the vision of the hands of the chimpanzee reaching out to me. The bright star said, 'do you really want to die?' 'Yes,' I said. For I knew that as I died the vision of vivisection would die with me, and then there would be nothing, closure to nothing. 'All right,' the star responded. This showed me how lonely I was. The thing that spoke to me was a star whose light had died several hundred thousand years before my eyes could see it. In that instant I moved two centimetres outside my body and looked down. Although only out of my body for this short space, I felt far out of reach of myself as I looked down. I did not like it. I screamed. I fell back down into my body. The star indicated that I had had a taste of it. It was at this point that I decided to turn my life around, and to dedicate my brief existence fully and consciously, to saving the animals in city of Detroit. I had abandoned all suffering in order to reach this point. But I didn't feel strong enough and so came the rest. The star whom I had asked to work through me and who said, 'yes,' would work through me. So that I would do this work in Detroit. Again I walked around surrounded in this light, this strange unearthly light. But I must say at this point, that since that trip outside of my body, I am only ever partially on the streets or in the buildings, significantly more fearless and aloof to my life. I know that it is this gentle and forthright connection with the death star, that keeps me working here, whilst being slightly apart from the work. Part of me had lifted off a leaf that was my life. Each little death as thin as a butterfly's dust lifting from its wings. Wings that grow more and more tattered, until they fall to earth travelling in the opposite way to a butterfly. The bright summer atmosphere filled with the tangerine dust. It was the balance between working calmly and knowing that time was running out that drove me. Since the time I came out of my body and followed a star that's light had died. I first heard Ingrid speak publically by the fountain, beneath the rags that were her clothing. She only talked to what seemed to be so few of us. Still there was this general feeling of being shaken up and affected in some way. I stood with the puppies and kittens that I had been collecting still overflowing from my backpack. In the afternoon I walked off and sat with them as they drank from a puddle if icy water. We watched the sun go down over the Detroit River towards the bridge of Canada. I knew the sun to be the sun and then more than the sun as if god was present in it. At this moment its light became wider and brighter, and then it went back to how I have always seen the sun. Too soon it was gone, and the near to deserted streets of Detroit fell dark. But after listening to Ingrid speak, I seemed to see long into the night. Although I was hungry and cold and one of the kittens had died, there was this strength in me and this absolute joy at the basis of all my suffering. This joy that would always be what my parents arms could never be to me. A joy that was something soft and good to fall into despite of it all. |
