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BOOKS — A Glimpse of Death from the Vantage Point of Love

Serious heresy is rare, necessary, and never easy to put across. However, there are times when the level of discontent felt by a significant number of individuals makes the connection possible. Their dissatisfaction and grief are so intense that to continue seeking contentment in the usual half and quarter measures stops being an option. When this occurs, the heretical vision of reality appears, along with some people’s willingness to open their minds and hearts to it.

A clear vision of the crisis in which humanity finds itself that includes an honest appraisal of one’s complicity with some or all its intertwined causes inevitably leads to an unsettling realization. Namely, the crisis we face is total precisely because it is the cumulative result of the multiple and contradictory thought and behavioral patterns we have used for thousands of years to gain some measure of exclusive tribal and personal security and well-being. Now we are all insecure and ill at ease. The innumerable and deeply interconnected social, psychological, and ecological problems presently affecting us personally and collectively stem from a general, chronic, and dangerously irrational mental system. The same system from which we derive personal identity and a sense of separate existence. 

The heresy this book aims to express is that we are all equal; equal sources, vectors, and victims of a mental illness that has affected the species for millennia and is presently impacting hundreds of millions of people and threatening the very survival of the species. This illness is self-centeredness, the general and particular claim to a proprietary existence that, among other things, entitles everyone to an equally personal and permanently dreaded death. 

It is high time we acknowledge that our identification with pre-determined cultural and psychological patterns of thought and behavior is one with the constant fragmentation, exploitation, and trashing of what little we perceive of the integrity of life. And this tragic myopia extends to the systematic misunderstanding, wrongheaded postponement, or outright denial of death through multiple secular and religious means. 

This book presents death not as the necessarily humiliating end to the pleasures, travails, and sorrows of a separate personal life, nor as an escape hatch to a better, perhaps divine, future existence, but as a reality inseparable from daily life. It does so through a peculiar combination of writing and photography; four essays and eighty-four images by Fernando Llosa, and eleven electrifying poems by Mario Hernandez. 

At the heart of our collaboration lies the conviction that the enigma of death and the pain and sorrow usually associated with it can only be correctly approached and dealt with by fearlessly questioning the presumed separate life of the self. Given that we have no interest in gratuitously offending or annoying anyone with this primer for such a radical query, a warning notice is in order. At least initially, the contents of this publication (especially the writing) may be seen as offensive, foolish, or outright insane if you happen to be still feeling good about current and foreseeable global circumstances and the state of your mind and life or, perhaps, still hoping that the remedy for general and particular woes will eventually come from doubling down on the thought and behavior patterns that, while being are at the root of our general mess, also happen to be the most familiar and cherished. 

The claim to a separate and additive existence has forever fragmented, conflicted, and tormented the individual and the entire species. This fraudulent claim must end, and this end, this death, can only come through an unprecedented insight into the wholeness of life. The most fundamental truth is that there is no separate existence. There is nothing —no one— outside the indivisible stream of life and death.

The images in this book were selected from a large body of photographic work made in a relatively small section of Taughannock creek, near Trumansburg, New York, mostly upstream from the famous waterfall bearing the same name. Most of them are composites made from three to nine different exposures capturing different sections of a single scene subsequently reassembled using an image-editing program.

The price of a copy is $45.00 if you can pick it up here in Trumansburg or I happen to be able to deliver it, and $50.00 if it has to be shipped within the United States.

If cash or check payment is not convenient or possible, please use PayPal. My name and email: f@unboundart.com is all the information you’ll need to complete the transaction. My address is 32 Elm Street Trumansburg, NY 14886