the deathbringers

15

THE DEATHBRINGERS

Art, Poetry & Prose

by Jason Blasso

C H A R Y B D I S P R E S Sn e w y o r k

16

Published by

Charybdis Press

New York, NY

www.charybdispress.com

© 2013 Charybdis Press

All rights reserved

Printed and bound by Conveyor Arts

15 14 13 12 4 3 2 1

First Edition

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any

manner without written permission from the publisher,

except in the context of reviews.

Image Copyright © 2013 Jason Blasso

Text Copyright © 2013 Jason Blasso

Book design and animation: Young Professionals

www.yp-yp.com

ISBN 978-0-9860027-6-2

For more information regarding the art & writing:

Please visit www.blackgesso.com

or e-mail [email protected]

For more information regarding the publication:

Please visit www.charybdispress.com or

e-mail [email protected]

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For my cousin, Ginette.

19

FOREWORD

what you are reading is the summation of my experience

and insight into the mysterious phenomenon of death in

the form of philosophical aphorisms, symbological motifs,

short stories, poems and a brief autobiography. I ask that

you withhold any prejudices you might have of preconceived

morbidity. This book is not an exploration of the gross death

of matter but the true death of the mind that allows us to

know Non-Being and Becoming through Being.

Jason Blasso

New York, 2013

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THE DEATHBRINGERS

23

Contents

I. Philosophy

The Deathbringers 25

II. Symbology

FoldoutThe Passage of Life

The True Eye

Being Becoming

Here One Minute...

41

45

49

55

65

III. Story

Abandoned Lots

The Immortal

IV. Poetry

Gray Observations 71

V. Autobiography

Introduction in Conclusion 87

25

I. PHILOSOPHY

27

The Deathbringers

The Deathbringers is a collection of nine reflexive aphorisms

that uses death, or the Knowledge of Non-Being, and the

natural biases of our Knowledge of Being to allow us to

discover the evasive Knowledge of Becoming.

THE DEATHBRINGERS

29

The Deathbringers

TRUE DEATHTHE KNOWLEDGE OF BEING

THE ISOLATION OF BEINGS & THINGSDEATH WITHIN US

THE DEATH OF DEATHDEATH WITHOUT US

TOTALITYTHE KNOWLEDGE OF BECOMING

TRUE LIFE

30

I.Philosophy

TRUE DEATH

There is no death outside of self-awareness, but, where self-

awareness is, there are two deaths: the death of the body and

the death of the mind. We must not confuse these deaths.

The death of the body results in the death of the mind, but

the death of the mind does not result in the death of the body.

The death of the body is death. The death of the mind is True

Death, which is the death of self-awareness. Self-awareness

is not just the knowledge that one is alive in time; it is also the

knowledge that one will die in time. Only we can experience

True Death because our self-awareness dies in the truest

sense of the word.

31

The Deathbringers

THE KNOWLEDGE OF BEING

Self-awareness is the Knowledge of Being. Those with the

Knowledge of Being often assume, incorrectly, that all

beings possess the Knowledge of Being. All beings exist

along a spectrum of self-awareness, and though life exists in

abundance, we are the only self-aware Beings that we know

of. Our self-awareness separates us from other living beings

and non-living things. This separation starts widening from

birth as we learn that we exist as a Being in name, space

and time. When we are aware of our self as a named Being

in space and time, we gain the perception that we have fully

separated from Totality.

32

I.Philosophy

THE ISOLATION OF BEINGS & THINGS

Our perception of our separation from Totality as an

isolated self makes us incorrectly assume that everything

not-self must also be isolated. Though this is our perception,

we cannot assume that what is true for us is true for all

beings and things. The Isolation of Beings and Things is

a shared and necessary illusion, an inescapable reflex, of

the Knowledge of Being. It is our collective self-awareness

that allows for the belief that Totality is made up of isolated

things which are, in turn, further made up of isolated things.

The deeper we look, the more isolation we find, but isolation

only exists in our minds.

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The Deathbringers

DEATH WITHIN US

Since every thing isolated and brought into being is isolated

and brought into being within our minds, it is only in our

minds where beings die. When a thing becomes a being in

name and exists in space and time, it becomes capable of

dying through the limitations of isolation. This death occurs

not only because the being is contained by space and time, but

because it now exists in relationship to our death. Although

this being dies, it can only die through us and its death is not

a True Death. A being without self-awareness never truly dies

because there is no death outside of our self-aware minds.

We are the bringers of death.

34

I.Philosophy

THE DEATH OF DEATH

Death is the end of what is and since the only thing that is

is our self-aware minds, then only our minds can die. This

is a True Death and the knowledge of our True Death is the

Knowledge of Non-Being. But, here, we must not be fooled

by tricks of language. Death, like the words and concepts

nothing and zero, represents an absence. And an absence can

never be represented by a presence because it does not exist.

When we speak of nothing, we literally speak of nothing.

We cannot have what is not. Therefore, in the absence of

absence, in the death of death, we reveal the first property of

Totality: pure presence.

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The Deathbringers

DEATH WITHOUT US

When we are dead, there is no longer an isolated, self-aware

center capable of bearing witness. Without our isolated locus

of self to know that things have been and will be, Totality is left

without testimony. Though we are no longer present to bear

testimony, the pure presence of Totality continues on after

us as it had before us with no isolation by self-awareness. In

the absence of isolated beings, what we formerly considered

death becomes the liberation of energy into higher or lower

orders of complexity. This continuous shifting of energy is

the second property of Totality: ceaseless change.

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I.Philosophy

TOTALITY

As with death, which is nothing, Totality, which is all,

remains beyond name, space and time. We cannot speak

of it because it is not an it. Totality always remains beyond

our minds. Our self-awareness isolates us from Totality

in name only and imparts to us our unique perspective.

The limitations of our perspective means we cannot achieve

a comparative exteriority to know of other Totalities. There

is no outside of Totality. We are on the inside looking in.

Wherever we look, we are looking into Totality as isolated and

mobile localities of self-awareness that are both inextricably

a part of and apart from Totality.

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The Deathbringers

THE KNOWLEDGE OF BECOMING

When we are self-aware, we are apart from Totality in name,

space and time. When we aren’t self-aware, we are a part

of Totality without name, space and time. Though we know

of Being, we must also know of Becoming. The trick of this

knowledge is that one cannot know of Becoming whilst

Becoming, because to know that one is Becoming is to know

that one is, and, to know that one is, is to have returned

to Being. The Knowledge of Becoming can only be gained

retrospectively through the Knowledge of Being. Becoming

precedes the state of Being and cannot be apprehended

directly by the self-aware mind.

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I.Philosophy

TRUE LIFE

When we know of our self in time, we can know, but not

know directly, timeless, everchanging, and everpresent

Totality. When the self dies metaphorically into Becoming,

there is no longer any Knowledge of Being or the Isolation

of Beings and Things and we are one with Totality. When

the self dies truly, the mind is finally liberated from itself.

True Death begets True Life. To live truly is to know that

every being and thing is us and that we are responsible for

the death and life we bring to them and each other through

our self-awareness. True Life is the source of all ethics and

the gateway of Love, which accepts all.

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The Deathbringers

Non-Being

Being

Becoming

Death

–

Mind

Body

Symbol

0

1

∞

Color

41

II. SYMBOLOGY

41

The True Eye sees the past and the future. Through it, we

know of Non-Being before and after life. Opening to both,

we remove obstacles to change and become permeable to

both Being and Becoming.

THE TRUE EYE

The Deathbringers

42

II.Symbology

Destroy the Circle First

43

The Deathbringers

45

Apart from/A part of: Static/Dynamic: Particle/Wave: These

are the correlative states of self-awareness. It is all about

perception and whether we are there and aware. We are

both human Beings and human Becomings.

BEING BECOMING

The Deathbringers

46

Being

II.Symbology

47

Becoming

The Deathbringers

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The Deathbringers

The common binary: On/Off. When we are alive and on, we are

here and aware, between the present and the past. When we

are alive and off, we are in the present state of Becoming.

When we are dead, we are gone, gone, gone.

HERE ONE MINUTE...

50

II.Symbology

Here One Minute

51

The Deathbringers

Gone the Next

53

III. STORY

55

The Deathbringers

We often fail to see that the world around us appears as it

does because of our scale and perspective. At this level of

perception, it is difficult to see past the borders of words to

that seamless and nameless beyond.

ABANDONED LOTS

56

III.Story

ABANDONED LOTS

It was at the edge of the asphalt, as a child, where you first

encountered it. There, as you lifted the ball from where it

rested at the end of its errant path, in the crease between the

pavement and the dirt, you saw it, without at first knowing

what you saw, because, before this moment, there was

nothing there to see.

This was a familiar place. You had always played in the

old lot after school, played in the solitary ways that children

play, self-occupied, with imaginary friends, telling stories.

The world had always been your private playhouse, until that

day you were drawn by the ball to the seam that manifested

itself before you like a sign. And though you were young, you

knew that what you were seeing was something significant,

though you did not know the significance of what you saw;

that knowledge would come later, much later, when you were

older, and had more experience and a greater vocabulary,

after newer words had been caught and questioned, jailed

and paroled.

The wind was blowing then as now, blowing as it always

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The Deathbringers

had, lonely in its ways, carrying on its back the purity of

trackless distances and the timeless scent of the past; as you

looked off into the low grass and the woods beyond, where

the trees swayed and the leaves whispered. You stood there,

with the ball in your hands, listening. Listening intently, to

the long, drawn out shushing of the leaves, that interminable

susurrus that quieted your mind, quieted the slow growing

questions of your mind, to silence. Then, as if nothing had

happened, you ran off and played.

Later, as the seamless and wordless world was portioning

itself out for you, dividing itself neatly into simple units of

words and time, you would notice that it had been dividing

itself a little too neatly, a little too clearly, and it was then

that rough experience made suspect the well trimmed edges

of words. It was the neatness, the crisp tidiness, which had

given it away and opened the door to doubt. For you had

seen the margins, and more, you had remembered them,

remembered the rough edges; and it was this memory that

clashed against what you were learning, clashed against what

you had learned, in the beginning, when you trusted and

adopted the inherited forms. The structure was there before

you, had always been there before you, until you entered

into it and became conditioned under it, as those before you

had been conditioned under it, innocently; and you learned

to believe in its authority, its stability and permanence,

until that day when familiarity freed your eye to stray to

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III.Story

its boundaries. It was then that you remembered standing

and staring at the seam, aware of an elusive meaning and

significance there, yet incapable of grasping what you saw,

until now; when you finally understood what it was you

saw that day, lifting up the ball from the place where the

pavement ended, that jagged and crumbled frontier where

the asphalt broke off in heavy, black clods and you found the

inconsistencies of borders and words.

That was the true origin of your quiet rebellion, when

everything around you became suspect and you learned

to trust nothing and to accept the unknown. You became

subversive and quiet, went inwards, to that unexplored

country of the mind, where you could map out your responses

and dissatisfactions without calling attention to yourself, and

where you could avoid the shaming, judgmental eye of the

law. This was instinctual, for you weren’t yet strong enough,

weren’t yet ready. So you entered into the privacy of your

own inner darkness, that subterranean cell of the mind, to

bide your time. It was difficult at first, but soon you learned

the comforts of your new home and during the days, when

you explored the world outside of your mind, you moved

fluidly and quickly between origin and destination, knowing

what you wanted and where you needed to be, approaching

it directly, making no stops or detours on the road to your

goal, because to be outside was to be seen and to be seen

meant the possibility of capture and to be captured was to

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The Deathbringers

be killed, to be fixed in place by a word. There was so much

growth and change, so many questions yet to be answered,

that you could not risk being seen or named. These were

invisible times, chthonic times, and it was there, on one of

your midnight missions, when you decided to return to the

abandoned lot where you had seen the seam that sparked the

revolution in your mind.

There again, kneeling before it, you prodded at the broken

edges, separated the asphalt from itself, with tougher

fingers and stronger hands. You pried up and pried under

the clumps of cold tar and sand and rock, to reveal the cool,

damp earth beneath. It was then that you understood that

the earth was always there beneath the pavement, always

there beneath your feet; and then, in that instant, you

understood the earth beneath everything. And you were

floating above the seam, floating above the lot, and you

saw, from this new perspective, the asphalt as a small patch

on top of the earth. And you flew higher, to see the whole

patchworked country and then, again, higher, to witness

the entire borderless ball of the earth. You held and beheld

the entire spinning globe and understood that there were

no borders other than those created by the mind and that

there could never be trespassing, no clandestine crossing

of borders, unless we ourselves drew them and forbade it

of ourselves to pass over them. You knew then that we were

the keepers of our own limitations, the jailers and the jailed,

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III.Story

for we were the creators of language and borders and time.

Back on the pavement, you felt its artificiality, felt the

distance between yourself and the earth. From now on,

you would always feel something insinuating itself between

you and the earth’s cool dampness, something separating

and isolating you; just as you would continue to sense her

presence nearby and hear her calling to you from the other

side, beckoning you; and you could feel her full body beyond,

feel her deep in your bones that ached with the steady throb

of longing. You are drawn towards her, drawn out of yourself

towards her, always towards her.

Returning home to the responsibilities of the calloused

world, you quickly found the concerns of your peers could

no longer concern you, could never concern you, even

though you were a part of them, in that vast, complex web

of social hierarchies. You would always remain apart from

them, watching them curiously, as if from the outside,

always mistrusting the interface and doubting the exchange,

acting out the excitement you had witnessed through careful

mimicry. You played the part, but with that call echoing

through your bones, you could have no concern with

mundane trivialities. Life became one long pantomime, with

all gestures and signs divorced of meaning, save that one

insistent desire for reconnection. Nothing else mattered, for

you had seen the earth beneath the social abstractions, the

labels and names, had seen its borderless unity, its beauty,

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The Deathbringers

ever since you understood the meaning of the seam and had

returned to lift its hem to peer beneath and beyond the black

curtain of asphalt.

Over time, you became a better actor and slowly rose

from musty basements into the light. You understood

solitude and had grown strong and independent in the dark

spaces beneath the world; for it was there, that you found

the one thing that you could trust, the one thing that would

always be with you, your self. And so it was, that you rose

amongst your peers slowly, at first remaining in the shadows,

but, after some time, confronting them and conversing

with them, secure in your distrust and confident in your

ear to recognize false platitudes. You remained yourself,

cautious, distant and alert, accepting your role as solitaire,

comfortable in the gray spaces between absolutes, when

you returned to the lot to study the seam, for you felt it had

another lesson to teach.

Once there, the long stretch of seam lay silent before you.

You waited in the wind and moonlight. Nothing spoke.

Disappointed, you turned and looked back over the paved lot

deep in thought. You were gone for a while, looking inwards

at your failure to find another message, another sign. When

you returned, your eyes caught the movement of grass in

the wind; grass growing yellow, green and gray through the

cracks in the asphalt as black and barren as the night sky

above your head.

62

III.Story

You looked up and saw the points of light that were the

stars, points of light that might be distant suns around

which a planet, much like yours, spins, and on that planet

there might be sentient life, like yourself, standing there,

staring up at the heavens, thinking of you as you think of it,

across incalculable distances of space and time.

Your imagination crossed that blackness between all

things, that blackness where the body can never go. You

thought about the expanses of that great emptiness and its

dimensions filled you with dread. You stared deep into the

belly of the universe and understood your smallness, your

triviality, understood that all the divisions of this world are

meaningless in the great course of eternity that makes up

the life of the earth and the heavens. You knew this is how it

always had been and how it always would be.

You stood there, staring up at the sky, breathing in the

wind, taking in the night, in a moment of moments that will

never be recorded, except there, in your mind, in your body,

that swayed like the grass growing through the cracks in the

asphalt blown by the wind.

Your eyes wandered back to earth, found your feet and the

grass between them, and you recognized your kinship. Then

you looked back to the mute seam briefly before your eyes

settled on the dim forest, gray beyond. Your mind crossed

over long before your body had, until today, standing there as

you were standing then, a child, with the ball in your hands

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The Deathbringers

and the wind in your hair. Now, with a wild glint in your

eye and a mirthful grin on your lips that laughed silently

inwards, you walked to the edge and, without hesitating, you

stepped from the pavement onto the soft dirt and walked

through the low grass towards the deep, welcoming silence

of the woods.

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The Deathbringers

Immortality has fascinated us since the dawn of self-

awareness. The thought that we will not survive bodily death

has terrified us into contriving many elaborate fictions to

handle the burden of this knowledge.

THE IMMORTAL

66

III.Story

THE IMMORTAL

My existence, if you can call it that, is a paradox; though

here, to be more accurate, it is a fiction. Simply put: I cannot

die; and it is, in the absence of death, that I cannot, strictly

speaking, be called alive. Though I have nothing but life, and,

in fact, am nothing but Life, I am not alive. For all life made

to live has the capacity for death; and it is the awareness of

this death that has created, in the dawning minds of man,

the sublime sense of his own sacred character, bound to that

singular and sovereign entity he calls self; and though other

life lives, it is only in man, with the awareness of his life and

his inevitable death, that he may truly be called alive.

It remains then, that my deathlessness is my lifelessness,

and, having neither life nor death, it is man, and man alone,

who can grant me an existence. For only man can give life

to the lifeless through words. But we must be careful with

words, because they have the power to ensorcel and are easy

to confuse.

The giving of life to the lifeless does not occur through

some magical transfer of life to the lifeless but through the

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The Deathbringers

actual transport of the lifeless into life; in other words, the

giving out of life is more accurately described as the taking

in of the lifeless. The lifeless, thus brought into the mind of

man, can exist as alive only in the imagination of man, and

it is here, on the stage of his mind, where man, in a single

stroke, imparts both life and death to the lifeless with his

awareness. Not only will the lifeless live and die within each

man that takes it in, it will die utterly and completely when

the last man takes his last breath.

When man gives life through his awareness to the lifeless,

he also gives death, but this death and life are a fiction. I must

not be mistaken for this fiction—though fiction I am, here, on

this page—because I am the very changelessness of change,

the very deathlessness of death. Truly, I am boundless and

immortal and though these rude words attempt to give a

form to my formlessness, I cannot be bound; because to be

bound is to be and to be is to take on the co-condition of

not-being, which is to die. Deathless, I can exist on this page

alone through the sorcery of man; but man is subordinate to

me, and when the last man dies, I will not die, but continue

to be, though I never was.

69

IV. POETRY

71

GRAY OBSERVATIONS

From the gray place of observation between the present

and the past, the mind discovers the flexibility of language

to create complex and polyvalent meanings through poetry

to engage the paradox of Being.

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73

AND THERE

ON THE VERGE

I EMIT

MY SOVEREIGN SOUND

IN TIME

TO BECOME

A CAPTIVE

ESCAPING

A FURTHER FREEDOM

INTO WORDS

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IV. Poetry

THE WORD

DEATH

IS LIKE

THE WORD

NOTHING

IS LIKE

DEFINING

A LACK

OF KNOWING

ZERO

75

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I CANNOT KNOW

KNOWING

I CANNOT STAND

KNOWING

I CANNOT

UNDER

ANY CIRCUMSTANCE

STAND KNOWING

ALL THERE IS

TO KNOW

76

UNSEEMLY BEING

FAULTLESS

THE FISSURE OF MAN

DIVIDED DIVINITY

INTO

AWARENESS

OF A PART OF

FROM APART FROM

TO UNDERSTAND

SUBSTANCE

IV. Poetry

77

THUS EXPOSED

SPACES BECOME

NOT NOTHING

NOT POSSIBLE

RATHER THEY ARE

WHAT ONE NOW KNOWS

IN THE NOW KNOWING

THAT BEFORE THIS

ONE COULD NOT KNOW

WHAT ONE COULD NOT KNOW

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THERE IS NO

PARTIAL

YES

THERE IS

NO

NEGATION

NO

SEPARATION

THERE IS BUT ONE

SINGLE AFFIRMATION

IV. Poetry

79

SENTIENCE

THE SENTENCE

I

SILENCE

MY PRESENCE

TO KNOW ABSENCE

IS TO KNOW

TO AVOID

THE PRESENCE

OF A VOID

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80

DEATH IS NOT

THE UNTIER

OF LIFE’S KNOT

WHEN LIFE IS

NOTHING

BUT ITSELF

LIFE KNOWS ONLY THAT

DEATH IS

THE UNITER

OF ITSELF TO ITSELF

IV. Poetry

81

I SAW WHAT WAS

SEEING

WHAT WAS WAS

THAT WE EXIST

BETWEEN

THE DEAD PAST

THE LIVING PRESENT

WHERE WHAT IS IS

FOREVER

OUTSIDE OF TIME

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AT LAST

I HAVE REACHED

THE END

IN THE SNOW

THE OCEAN OF STATIC

RISES AROUND ME

SHHHHHHHHH

WHAT IS LEFT

WHAT IS LEFT TO SAY

UTTER NOTHING

IV. Poetry

85

V. AUTOBIOGRAPHY

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This short autobiographical section is included in an attempt

to capture, through the haze of my memory, a glimpse of the

two key experiences that led me towards, what is considered,

by most, a morbid fascination.

INTRODUCTIONIN CONCLUSION

88

INTRODUCTION IN CONCLUSION

I’ve been confronting the idea of death and oblivion since

I was very young. It wasn’t because I was sickly or had

experienced tragic loss at an early age—though I have lost

many beloved friends and family members over the years—

but because of two casual events that set before me the

questions of post-mortem consciousness and our place in the

mind-numbingly vast expanse of the universe.

The first occurrence happened when I joined my father who

was watching a low budget television movie about vampires.

I had arrived late and the movie was almost over. A group

was repelling a powerful male vampire who looked like the

lead singer of some glam band—this was the eighties, after

all. The resistance finally got the better of him and amidst

explosions and other visual pap—even at that age I knew the

production value of the movie was deplorable—the vampire

was vanquished. My father got up to make dinner and left

me behind with the remote as the credits began to roll. Just

as I was about to change the channel, there appeared on the

screen a vision that would haunt me for many years to come.

V. Autobiography

89

The vampire’s skeleton was shown buried in the earth.

It lay there in the darkness with its hands folded across its

chest. Then, the skeleton did the unthinkable—it began to

roll in its coffin. It rolled in anguish, an anguish that came

not just from being confined to the claustrophobic interior of

its tomb but at the horror of its consciousness being trapped

in its bones FOREVER. My mind reeled at the horror of a

living death and, once witnessed, I could not escape it.

This terrifying vision tormented me every night. A chill of

fear would rush over me whenever bedtime was announced,

as I instantly became aware of the darkness that was death

that awaited me with implacable inevitability. I had to

marshal the strength to brush my teeth and change into

pajamas. No sooner was I under the covers with the lights

off, when I began imagining myself dead and buried beneath

the earth.

Night after night, the living consciousness that was me

was trapped in the grave of my bed. I had a paralyzing fear of

bedtime and began to make every excuse to linger amongst

the living and the light. My parents, unaware of all of this

and frustrated by my continuous sleepy-eyed presence,

would send me back up to bed to face the horror that awaited

me. My inability to vocalize my fear and my parents’ tough

love worked for the better.

Over time, I built up a psychological resistance to my terror

and although I still remained scared and thought about

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90

death every night, my relationship to its mysteries changed.

Curiosity got the better of me and I slowly overcame my fear

as I began to look at death as a puzzle. Soon, bedtime was no

longer filled with phantasmagoric dread and, lying there in

the darkness, I would analyze what death was and attempt

to understand its abstract implications. I gained strength

and confidence by externalizing and objectifying my fear for

manipulation and study.

A few years later, I was at a campground in Upstate New

York with my cousin, Ginette, hanging around two guys

who regaled us with stories about the quantity of weed they

smoked in Jamaica. As the night wound down, in true stoner

fashion, they looked up at the ceiling of the rec center and

told us in a faraway voice how the length of our life is like a

photoflash compared to the Universe.

This insight instantly blew my mind and I found this new

cosmic perspective absolutely terrifying. Thinking about

the vast expanse of space made everything on Earth seem

completely insignificant. If my life is a photoflash, what is the

life of the Earth or the Sun?

Suddenly, through this long lens, nothing we did or could

do mattered. Even in death, should our consciousness be

trapped in our bones and our bones in a narrow coffin in

the earth... What would it matter? The Earth and the Sun

will perish. What matters my consciousness, my bones,

my life? What matters man? All of this had little meaning

V. Autobiography

91

when confronting the inconceivable scope of the Universe.

Now, lying in bed, I’d imagine drifting through the cold

vaults of space, past shimmering nebulae, the dying light of

extinct stars and the yawning abyss of black holes. In this

hostile realm, after placing myself on the scale of space and

time, I felt completely alone and overwhelmed by the despair

of oblivion.

Returning to Earth, I knew not only that I would die

but that there would come a time when even those who

remembered me would die and that I would, eventually, be

as if I never was. This was, I thought, the very nadir of fear.

But, when I stretched the logic out beyond the death of my

own individuality to the death of all individuals and then

further, beyond all individuals to life, I found the bottom of

the pit: Life empty of any goal, center or meaning.

This horror weighed on me heavily. To repel this negation,

I both aggressively wrestled and passively contemplated it.

The agony was well worth it, as I discovered that death does

not exist in the world without our self-awareness. In short,

it is because we are. This is the great paradox of existence

and the ultimate trade off, because all the beauty, love and

joy that we will ever have, we must have in exchange for our

mortality. For we are the namers of nothing, the bringers

of death.

The Deathbringers

103

Jason Blasso would like to thank

Jacky Yoon for digitizing the designs,

Kristen Youngman, Rachel Boyadjis and

Francesca Ferranti for creative

and content editing.

Mark Pernice thanks Stephanie Miller,

Christopher Knowles, Zhang Qingyun,

and Elana Schlenker.

Printed at Conveyor Arts.

THE DEATHBRINGERSJason Blasso

the deathbringers

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