Lamar Howell's Weblog

If I knew I were dying, how would I feel? Would all of life around me suddenly change, and everything at once become that strange adjective – poignant? Why, the very air would be filled with tiny visible carbonated bubbles which would sizzle as I passed through them on my way to anywhere. The world would become more colorful and less washed-out by the speed of life. I would be more aware of smells because every ordinary thing would have its unique aroma.

That fugitive world is the place where bare feet on carpet sound like boots crushing autumn leaves. Every object would become more defined and have a black, traceable edge. Life would slow down and everything would happen in slow motion, or in still frames like the old movies. It would be like walking knee-deep through silent pools of yielding gel.

My twin lenses would take snapshots of everything and everyone I meet. My words would speak to the life behind every hiding pair of eyes and my mouth would be loath to utter the dull, daily cultural isms. My tongue would be a sword unsheathed and aimed at the soul, and at the same time balm-coated to heal and close the slightest emotional wound.

If I knew I were dying, I would not be contemplating it by the safe exercise of journaling.  I’d be out there – like a huge, tightly wound ball of string, soaked in passion’s kerosene and launched into the black night sky to the delightful youthful screams of glee and awe, unwinding and burning all the while.

I would be gushing out all the Niagara truths and helpful advice I know, and tying my Titanicly-urgent message to the foot of every swift beast and every winged messenger. I would be splattering myself like paint on the rock-faced sides of mountains, designing a panorama to be interpreted in light of the unblemished view of our Artist Creator. I would be a gigantic, comically over-soaped washing machine, slobbering out bubbles of revelations to the inhabitants of planets surrounding seven suns of the unfathomable wonders of the world-to-come.

If I knew I were dying, I know one thing for certain: life would not go on as it appears to me and to others – methodical, dutiful, comfortable, realistic, optimistic, cynical, blase. No! I’d get up that fateful morning, turn myself wrong-side out and show the whole world my naked insides. The extreme, razored, deliberate and deliberating convictions and lifelong, rope-taut motivation to declare the One , the Only Begotten, and to present an unsmoothed, heavy, haunting view of his ugly-brown instrument of death, its explosive and horrific implications on the one hand, and its ethereal, supernatural, bouying, outshining glory on the other.

Oh, why can’t I embrace my imminent demise with even a wince from a divine pinch? Oh, God! To tell it all in one gushing, silence-inducing micro-second of exuberant extinguishment! And in the same sweeping movement gather up the emptied-out, limp garments on my way out Earth’s rusty screen door!