I saw a funeral today. The cars, parked in front of a humble Victorian house where a modest crowd assembled, were covered in flowers. Beautiful flowers. Despite their sad faces and limited understanding, you can tell how in funerals people momentarily fathom the beauty of death. There they were these four impeccable black cars. They shined with such joy that you could almost hear the trumpets of heaven, blowing in all their glory. The first one, the hearse, was covered with the most amazing bouquet I have ever seen. So intense was the white of the flowers, so smooth their petals and so erect their stamens that its very sight put me straight away in a rather lecherous mood. Simultaneously, the background of black and white murmuring narcissus, looking at their reflections on each other, dropped the image of a hangman in my head. I could hear the gallows creaking, slicing with their elegy right across the souls of a silent audience. There it came out of the house like an immense razor. The lustre of the ebony coffin somehow made it look lighter. When that procession crosses the town, I thought, the onlookers will turn their heads in awe and anguished confusion, and some will even silently wish they were the corpse. If you think about it, most of them are probably dead already. The elegance of that peculiar delegation brings them out of their miseries for the moment they hold on their breaths. There it was again, that sublime feeling you get when the stiffness of a dead cold body and the fiery bursting of a blossomed bouquet blend. There it was again the deep, immeasurable space seizing our fat juicy brains and squeezing them dry of understanding. The tears of the mourning are of incomprehension, they are of fear of the unknown. A day ago, their little blue cage was all they ever knew and all they ever wanted from life and suddenly, out of nowhere, a black hole opens in it without warning, and they are forced to gaze upon it. Their eyelids clamped wide open, exposing their corneas, pupils and irises to the flames of a hell they never though of this world. No priest has enough holy water to put that fire out. No verse, parable, proverb, oracle, theorem or prophecy can ever render in words that blow that momentarily shakes their entire existence. And it is at that very moment, when words or thoughts have no meaning, that they feel most alive.
