The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

by not naming, has not happened

years ago i drove up to montreal and i remember it was night and 
when we arrived all the cafes were playing john lennon and we 
felt torn apart, a kind of exile there, we were cut off, the new 
city was singing, we had left the old. now here in providence, 
repetition with another singer, another voice, in the bookshop, 
and another death and with each there's the shortness of the 
span which contracts with every passing. there's nothing to say 
beyond that, beyond exiles, as we're all exiled in this world 
and not in the world to come, which is always and always already 
without us. every death is the death of a world and every world 
is inside one, or another, and every world is private, shared 
and unshared and without translation. and it doesn't matter if 
one dies at forty or seventy-one or ninety-seven, it remains the 
death of a world, and the world's death, and the death of being 
and being's horizon. and we can mourn only so long as we are in 
exile, and when our exile ends, others mourn may in our stead or 
perhaps not at all, and we shall not know, we shall never know.