ÁNGEL DE LA MUERTE/2

As we near that time of year again, I thought I’d re-post this:

The angel image used as a logo for Writing Unchained I found on a wall near my house last November during the time of Day of the Dead. The walls are full of such imaginative depictions; I could have chosen others equally provocative from beneath the bridge below my house. Here in Mexico, where the invisible still counts for much, I find the routine presence of death in daily life, as opposed to the Northern inclination to keep it offstage, appealing, comforting even, a rich source of irony and wit. The clattering skeletons, the sugar skulls sold in the markets with your name on it, the leering crania that lurk just beneath the skin, serve as droll, exuberant correctives to our uneasy reliance upon reason, and the mortal fate which the advent of AI will not spare us. As D.H. Lawrence once wrote objecting to psychoanalysis’s presumption to explain the unconscious: Respect the mystery!

Again, thanks for joining this small adventure in serial fiction. Tomorrow, Sunday, I’ll post chapters 23 and 24 of Valparaíso.