Doors to No-Where: Here-Before, Here-Now, Here-After

On a searing summer’s day, we move within the shadows of the wilting cemetery, hiding from sunshine beneath the branches of monumental trees whose subterranean roots cradle and caress the dead beneath our own rootless feet. We search indiscriminately, without map or purpose, recalling the departed as we pass, making their final grandiose statements meaningful as we invoke the meaningless names of the unknown. Names not yet forgotten, because we speak them aloud, and in speaking them something of those they referred to remains in the world of the living. Thus, we inadvertently conjure a momentarily shimmering hoard of phantasms in our wake, an insubstantial reminiscence of those who have departed for the nothingness of the here-after from the beingness of the here-before.

This here-before is a decaying, sinking, city of doorways that, for the sensible, lead nowhere. Some locked, some rusting, some broken apart, weakly refusing entrance to the void that none should desire to enter so finally. This here-before is a crumbling, hermetic, city of doorways that, for the reckless, are liminal and transitionary, leading from the world of substance to an imaginary ethereal other. A hopeless hopeful symbol not of an end but a fantastical passage for the wretched impossible soul. Better to remain sensible, better that such doors symbolise not the no-where, but the now-here, the here-now. Better still to live as though each day were the one that might lead to our own final withdrawal through immutable doorways to remain perpetually here-after, obscurely below.