Sublime

And raised conscious, in rejection of a Christian God, I could see no higher purpose in Prince’s death. I believed, and still do, that our bodies are our selves, that my soul is the voltage conducted through neurons and nerves, and that my spirit is my flesh. Prince Jones was a one of one,

To die violently is “righteous,” a flash. To keep on living, as Peter Fonda points out in The Wild Angels, is just to keep on paying rent. A successful bike movie is a perfect Rorschach of its audience.

Death exists, not as the opposite but as a part of life. It’s a cliché translated into words, but at the time I felt it not as words but as that knot of air inside me. Death exists – in a paperweight, in four red and white balls on a pool table – and we go on living and breathing it into our lungs like fine dust.

I consider airing my theory that our culture’s coping strategy towards death is to bury it under consumerism and Samsara, that the Riverside Villas of the world are screens that enable this self-deception, and that the elderly are guilty: guilty of proving to us that our willful myopia about death is exactly that.

It makes her think of a documentary she saw about Bob Dylan. A folk singer from Greenwich Village in the sixties said, “He was just another guitar player trying to sound like Woody Guthrie. Then all at once he was Bob Dylan.”