Death and Co. by Nicholas Tolkien

Death was a collector. He had looked into the eyes of every living soul who died and remembered the colors. The blues, the greens and the browns. Sometimes he would come upon an albino and watch their final moments. Death was always present for these terminations, he had witnessed millions of car wrecks and terminal illnesses and was so used to plane crashes that the screaming of desperate passengers didn't phase him. He had slunk along the starboard deck of the Titanic, carefully observing the iceberg in the distance and had solemnly walked through gas chambers, covering his eyes for even death could not watch such a perverse debasement of human nature. Watching the last moments of every human being's life had given death a certain loving kindness for the human spirit, he had seen the courage, the bravery and the relentless acceptance of the cataclysmic fate that awaits all human souls.
Death was not a god nor devil but a passive observer; a gatherer of the souls who took each human by their hand and led them into the light of time. Death did not know what happened after the light for he had never died, he had always existed in a half-state, a creature of limbo and lifelessness; undead but almost human. Death often wondered why human beings were fated to die. Sometimes he liked to go to maternity wards and stare dimly at the faces of the weeping babies and wonder if they knew the hapless fate that awaited them. He looked into their curious eyes and knew that one day, he would look into their eyes again and lead them on into the labyrinth of death. Death had no friends for he was visible to human beings only after their hearts had stopped beating and as his spirit rose to the top of the great pyramid of Giza: a place he liked to perch atop to stare out at the silent world - he felt a great loneliness infect his heart and yearned for someone to share his sadness with.
Death remembered the field of the Somme where a million souls had perished on one fateful day. He remembered the smell of the towers at Auschwitz, the green radioactive clouds of Hiroshima and the monstrous flu that made 1918 a busy year for death. These were death's memories, his keepsakes and his tokens for they were the collective sum of a life lived only to satisfy its ending. For as human beings progressed through the slow passages of each new and more fulsome generation - death knew that the same relentless meeting awaited them. It was in this knowledge that death looked upon the great pyramids, the skyscrapers and the beautiful works of classical art with a keen sense of irony. These objects of human intelligence were created in the knowledge that their creators would perish and be unable to see their creations evolve through time. "Why create anything", death wondered - "when you will not see what will become of it?" Death wondered where he came from and who created him: why would anything create something that would be so horrifying and so destructive?
Death had seen an ocean of tears spilt for his existence. He had watched loving mothers wave goodbye to their children and children gather at their parents funerals. Today he was sitting in a hospital, a usual haunt. He was waiting for a young woman to give birth but death knew that this maternal journey would be her final action before her own life would be extinguished. He looked into the woman's eyes as she underwent another heavy contraction and felt a great sadness for her that she would not be able to see her child's life, their birthdays and their own lifetime. Death had tried to kill himself a thousand times, endlessly trying to join his silent victims in that vast, angelic light but it had always repelled him back to continue his thankless occupation.
As death wondered through the hospital ward he looked at the old, sickened faces he would soon meet. Women and men, ravaged by cancer holding on to a last, childish hope that their final days would not be in this white, sterile graveyard. He came upon one old woman who was weeping without end and sat by her side wondering when her time would come. Death would not receive instructions of a death until their final moments when he would quickly appear at the destination and witness as a voyeuristic prisoner - the sad final moments of a human lifetime.
A boat had capsized and death sat, crossed legged on the water as the passengers desperately tried to keep afloat in the frozen waters. A woman had been brutally murdered under a highway overpass. Death watched the murderer in his sick, excited act and felt a terrible guilt that he couldn't tell on this monster or even punish him. Death had witnessed thousands of unsolved murders, he had all the answers but no one to share them with.
Death had a photographic memory. He had been present throughout time and wondered if his duty was some form of universal punishment for some crime against nature he couldn't remember. Sometimes he looked up at the stars and had flashes of other worlds and comforting words. He wondered if this may have been his childhood. He thought constantly about the course of lifetimes: the victories and the joys, the highs and the lows and what the purpose of all this cyclical existence was? Just as the waves recycled their endless shell dance, over and over again - human beings came and went like a flickering candle, blowing out in a dark cellar.
Death was riding in a car with a young woman. He knew the train that would soon kill her was patiently making its way across nearby tracks. He looked at her curiously wondering if she could feel his cold presence. She was flicking through her phone when she got a text. It was a break-up text and death could see her lose complete concentration. The music was blaring and it droned out the loud train sound. Still holding onto her phone, her finger shaking a little - death did something he had never done before. Suddenly he turned off the music on the radio station. Replaced by the sound of the shrieking train barreling down the tracks, the woman suddenly looked up and broke just in time, narrowly avoiding hitting the oncoming train. As shock pulsed through her  face, death looked at his reflection in the car windshield and then back at the radio. Death had endlessly tried to stop deaths from happening but some universal force had always stopped him and made his silent contributions ineffective and moribund.
Death wandered through a field of lilies wondering why he had been able to save this young girl. Why was she important? He had seen millions of car wrecks, the endless blue police lights and the charred red remains that stuck to the dash board. Perhaps it was the music but why her? Death came to her house that evening and sat at her bedside. He listened to her sad tears of loneliness and fear and walked about her house looking for some clue to her survival. Everything looked so ordinary, so unoriginal that death only grew more confused and curious to why, after so many repetitions of the fate of human beings: this one had escaped.
One hundred and fifty thousand people die every day,  two every second and death watched them all but he didn't think about them and their own personal misery. He existed outside of time and today his mind was wondering elsewhere, to the events of the previous day. He thought about the girl and why she was different to all these others. What about the poor pregnant girl who was mercilessly killed in a robbery in Cape Town? Why wasn't she saved? Again death came to the house of the woman he saved. He looked through her mail and read her name "Mary Sullivan" - how ordinary a name, death thought.
And as death watched Mary slowly go through her nightly rituals: a shower, brushing her teeth, peeing and changing: he began to slowly believe that her survival had been as random as all the deaths he had ever witnessed. And as death stalked away from Mary Sullivan's house the moon threw a cold shadow over him: casting him in a hollow glow of muted colors and half-light.
And as death slept: he dreamt of a existence where he could bring life to souls. Where he could witness the ornate pleasure of sexual reproduction, where he could spark the gift of existence into a billion eyes and watch children grow like flowers beneath a speckled sun. It is a sad and beautiful world and to death, the end is a beginning and through the journey of life itself: there is the terrifying feeling of existence that permeates each soul with its own, intrinsic meaning but what was his meaning? What was he but some ghoulish agent of time itself, dragging each soul to its unknown conclusion before it was ready and overseeing the vast wasteland of life itself. Death wondered why he was immune to his own punishment: why had he not discovered what lay beyond the light?
Death hovered over the graveyards, casting a green spell over the tombs of the souls he had captured within his paralyzed and gormless hands. He saw the names written on each stone and knew that every day, more headstones would be added and more initials carved. The names they called us, from loved ones to enemies would be etched upon our final resting place as a final calling: that we could always be found, even in death but to what end, would the knowledge of our final resting place have but as a kind of sad certainty that we would never be lost again even if our eyes couldn't see and our hearts couldn't beat.
Death had been to Kabul many times over the last few years and the sweltering heat of the Afghan summer made his brow sweaty. He was sitting in a crowded market waiting for a car bomb to explode. He looked around at the happy faces of the crowd busily shopping and knew their final moments were close at hand. He thought of all the last moments a human being has: the final word they say, the last expression their face makes, the final thoughts that run through their brain - their last smile. All these moments, lost in time. Before the bomb went off, death saw another man - about his size looking at him from across the market square. No one ever looked at death and as the car bomb went off, causing debris and rubble to fly through the air - the man kept looking at him, as if death had been noticed.
Slowly as an old woman's aching hand held her husbands for the last time in the hospital room - death walked inside and sat down at her bedside. Slowly her hands fell from her husbands and the color drained from her eyes, he kept crying and calling her name though he knew in his heart she had passed. She sat facing the window looking at the dour city skyline and slowly turned around to look at death.
"Hello. I am here to help you move on" death began, reciting his usual speech - "the process is quick and painless. Do you have any final requests?" Sometimes people would ask to see their loved ones one last time or to visit a happy place from their childhood or relive a perfect memory - their wedding, their first kiss - the memory of their mother's embrace. But this old woman had no last requests. Resigned to her fate, solemnly she followed death out of the hospital room. At the end of the long hallway - the bright white light was shining, as if it had appeared out of nowhere and only these two souls could see it.
"You will walk towards light and move on to the next part of your journey." Death had spent eons on the words he said to the dead before they left him.
Slowly the old woman began to walk towards the light but then quite suddenly she turned around. She walked back up to death and using all the force in her broken, sickened body she kissed him on the cheek. Slowly she put her arms around him embracing him as if trying to find some kind of comfort in her last lonely minutes.
"Will you walk with me towards it" the old woman whispered.
Solemnly death took the old woman's hand and they walked slowly towards the burning yellow light and when it was time, like so many others - she disappeared in its bright mystery. Death's fragile hand rose to his left cheek where she had kissed him and felt his skin burning.
Death sat at the top of a skyscraper. A young man was standing atop of it looking at the blurry city beneath him. Slowly he got onto the ledge ready to jump down and face his annihilation. Death solemnly took his hand and without the man knowing, they jumped together. Death felt himself falling endlessly down as the mass of souls beneath him grew larger and larger. Death wondered what it would feel like to hit the hard gravel on this suicidal downward spiral but before death hit the ground he found himself looking down at the charred remains of the man who jumped. The man was also looking down at his broken body and then turned to see death.
"What did it feel like?" death asked, timidly.
"I wish I hadn't done it" the man replied, broken as all men are who've made grave mistakes.
Death sat at a large train station. He wondered who was next and looked around at the great mass of people, waiting to catch the next train. He thought about the woman he saved and wondered if she even knew he had saved her. And then, a man sat next to death and offered him a cigarette. Death recognized the man instantly as the man who had starred at him before the car bombing. The man was nondescript and wore a hollow black suit.
"Thanks but I don't smoke" death replied.
"My mistake."
Death wondered if the man had died, had he missed it? The man seemed too relieved, too content to be among the dead. Death was slowly starting to understand that this man had come to speak to him, a strange reversal of his usual handiwork.
"I came here to speak you directly" the man began, almost soothingly. "about the young girl you saved."
"How did I save her? I tried to save so many others" death countered, ever curious for answers he'd never been given.
"Because it is your time to move on. I have come here to replace you."
Death's throat choked up. He looked into the man's eyes and saw a nothingness in them, a lack of humanity that he saw in his own eyes.
"There were others before you" the man continued, "and now your turn is complete."
Slowly death heard a train approaching the station.
"What if I don't want to go?"
"I'm afraid that isn't up to you" the man replied, as cold as snow.
Slowly the man boarded the waiting train and beckoned to death follow him. As the train slowly rolled out of the station, death found the train was empty but for him and the man. And sadly, death began to feel fear. He was shivering and frightened like a small child.
The spirit of death hovered over the face of the ocean. He lingered in the wind. He walked upon the clouds and fell beneath the waves, further and further towards the endless deep.
And then he was brought back to the train. Unwilling to go, death kept moving around the world. A sandy beach filled with laughing children. Death saw a collection of crabs fighting each other. He sat perched upon the tallest tree in the world and looked out upon the sad, empty view and felt what all the souls he had taken had felt once - the sadness and the paralyzing certainty of their collective fate.
Back on the train, death looked out at the window at the passing countryside. He yearned to be able to be alone in the knowledge that nothing bad was going to happen, that there was nothing that need concern him but to fulfill his duties and be present for all the others that had died before him.
The train slowly ground towards a halt and death followed the man off of it. They were standing in the middle of a field next to a farmhouse. Death looked around it and remembered playing in the grass on long summer days, he looked at the animals - the cows, the chickens and the horses and remembered that he had been here before long ago when he was young.
"Do you have any final requests?" the man asked.
And of all the things death wanted, he asked for only one.
"I'd like you to hold my hand as I walk into the light. I don't want to be alone."
The man nodded and took death calmly by the hand. The white light was shining perfectly in its glory in the middle of the field. Beautiful colors consumed the sky as death and the man walked slowly towards the light. Death could feel a hot, burning sensation upon his face as terror welled up within his eyes.
He thought about the faces that had walked into the light. What had they felt?
He felt embarrassed for being so vulnerable and child-like. He thought about the destructiveness of life - the murder and the horror. But then he looked down and felt his hand being held and was comforted by this small gesture. He thought back to all the loving people that had said goodbye, the bravery in their hearts that burned more brightly than the stars. How courageous is the bravery of man! How loving is the kindness of women! A mother's touch. A child's smile. The unending hope of a better life. A new world. The promise of an end to the mystery.
Death thought about life and death and the great mystery that what lies behind the curtain of light was a knowledge none of us could truly know. Perhaps we couldn't comprehend it or perhaps the disappointment of answers would be too much to keep us going, year after year on into the unending continuation of human existence.
Slowly the light enveloped death and he felt his body disappear. He was everywhere he had ever been and all the faces that had departed with him were all around him. He had never seen a more beautiful collection of souls in his whole life than the people that had gathered around him leading him behind the light.
Death finally let go and relinquished the human feelings that still lurked within him: the fear and the sadness and finally he was free and was taken away into the light.

Thomas and the Whale by Nicholas Tolkien

It had washed up like God draped in his sweetest fineries and as the children poked and prodded at it, they couldn't quite comprehend the giant beast that lay before them. What was once a proud voyager of the seas had become a dead, sullen carcass collecting sand. Thomas, the oldest boy had never seen a whale before but he'd read about it in a dusty book he found in a library. This smart, ancient creature had outfoxed even the most cunning sailors and now it lay here, open and vulnerable for these little children to inspect it like an old man at a funeral. Thomas remembered the day he saw his dead grandfather, dressed in an old suit in an open casket. Did this whale look any different? Thomas moved around to face the beast eye to eye. He starred at its eye and saw that the whale had a little life left in its cold, human eyes and as Thomas watched it, he thought he heard the whale's heart beating 'tap, tap, tap'. And as Thomas's eyes filled with tears and his friends laughed at this abominable and heartbreakingly beautiful creature in its final moments of life - Thomas put his hands on it. He tried with all his might to move it back into the ocean as its giant brain longed for the watery home it needed most vitally but it was like blue rock, cold and immobile and there it laid, in its horrendous finery - dying in a sandy grave. As the other children soon grew bored of the dead God and went down the beach to build a sandcastle, Thomas sat next to the whale and looked out at the sweet blue ocean behind it. How appalling it was, Thomas thought that this beautiful whale had washed up on this sandy beach and died alone and vulnerable as little children who could not understand its beauty laughed at it like a circus freak. How appalling that it died beneath a smiling sun. How appalling that it couldn't sing anymore. Thomas gathered stones and laid them around the whale and prayed for it, trying childishly to remember the prayers he had ignored at church. Soon, the men would come and take pictures of the beast, maybe they'd even put it in a truck and take it from town to town as a circus exhibit. Thomas looked up at the sky as the sun began to set and wondered if there  really was a heaven. Was this the saddened God that the priest talked of every Sunday? Had he fallen from the rainbow sky and dried up like an old man, buried with the worms? There was something gruesomely beautiful about the dead whale, like the make-up that Thomas's mother applied to her dead father's face before he was lifted into the open casket, the shoe polish applied to the dead man's shoes. Why did they need to make the dead look beautiful, to cover up the atrocity? Thomas looked again into the whale's eye and let out a soft sigh, a grave realization of his own mortality. The simple knowledge that he too would face this fate, one day.
And as Thomas slowly began to walk up the beach, he looked back one time as the whale's body glistened in the blue evening light and he thought about the day he read Moby Dick. To him and his child-like imagination, this beautiful animal had seemed so powerful, so dignified and now it stood there, a colossal reminder of the power of death and the weakness of beauty. He thought about his mother's face, her beautiful smile, the warmth it left in his beating heart. He thought about the pretty girl he sat next to on the yellow school bus. And then, running back up the beach he looked back into the eye of the whale and with all his might, he slowly closed its giant eye and honored it, in a way only a child could. And knowing that this small gesture was enough, he turned back around and began to walk home. Slowly the ancient beast grew smaller and smaller till finally it was only a dark shadow, cast against the moonlit beach. We all become shadows, Thomas thought - beautiful ruins of God's perfect creation but in a strange way, in our brokenness - we form a more perfect shape, for anything that breathes must also die and anything that is dead, has once felt the energy of life. Thomas never forgot the whale or its giant eye, it lingered with him forever but he never came back to the beach, he never found out what became of it. For it often happens that whales wash up on beaches and children learn of death just as the birds sing in the trees and babies spring into existence.

Chinese Whispers by Nicholas Tolkien

Chinese Whispers

I.

I remember the house where I lived as a child

the lagoon of tubas that sang to me in cold evening.

I remember the sound of children playing

their laughter harpooning through the hyacinths.

I remember seeing daffodils bloom,  hearing their first words

(and their last)

As the moon burdens the sky and banishes the sun

I am lying awake watching from my pillow.

Walled men knock at the door of my father 

Poisoned voices.  Speaking, hissing

words I’m too young to understand.

Beneath my window people are talking

while strangers walk on Chinese fields after a bad harvest

a woman is crying

there is a scream…

Then a silence that can never be disturbed.

(I remember a harbour where ships are leaving and waving goodbye to a face.

I remember going in a carriage to see a relative I never saw again.

I remember the sound of a funeral being broken by birds chirping.

And I remember the nights I dreamed of you.)

II.

A naked man drinks and lies on his back watching the stars.

His body is boneless and his eyes are spirals.

Stoned, he wakes from the dreams of experience and the dreams of life

Then wanders to the garden where he used to sit…(with her)

Watching the same stars, sipping the same wine from the same glass.

He remembers the air.  Its perfume.

Only people change.  Nature is always the same. Endlessly the same.

And its perfume is the same as the night when they first kissed.

His black hair fell against hers like a mirage…

Now his hair is white.

And noone sang his song in the end.

(I remember watching the river and wondering what becomes of water?

And I remember the end of childhood, how my hands were bigger than before)

III.

He walks to the river.

IV.

Fish are swimming, quail fly home from southern winters on southern lakes

He is on the water now

and the winds of Pallas from a distant time

billow Chinese whispers in the moonlight.

The stone dragons of the water are speaking

and he is listening; listening to sounds he cannot hear.

Enthralling the interest of the geese, the man falls into the water

and begins to drown in cold evening

The fish are swimming still

The birds are chirping  still

(A woman is crying

There is a scream…)

And now a goose is being born.

V.

Bluebells are calling, a moth is on her way

and lovers hold hands in a picture…

for all things are connected by how far they are apart.

And sometimes, the man remembers nothing.

He watches from windows

while dark souls depart through shadows of  moonlight

and the southern winnow moves across the sky.

Silent, as if thunder is silent, as if our hearts are silent.

(as if the trill of violas could tame the tigers lame)

As if we all are silent.  As if we all were silent once.

VI.

I cannot hear the Earth turning or an ant dying

but I remember a person.

And I remember a body

And how they were at birth bonded by a blinding light (that came from heaven)

And I remember how different the face and body became

And how at the time of passing

The person swam away into the river where children played

And floated to a new hill, to a different body, to a foreign sky

And I remember nothing more than the sound of laughter and the sound of memories

(Because even though I did not remember them, I had not forget them either)

VII.

And while I dreamt of you, tiger lillies danced on blue vestiges.

I felt part of some wider picture that I wasn’t painting

a million fireflies were dancing that night

and tomorrow a million more would dance again.

After all; in the seizure of a picture, there is no centre

and that night, someone was looking at me,

admiring the paint and admiring the figure.

Who is sleeping now on a bed of violets?

VII.

Dreaming and remembering, thinking and cursing

an old man tells his life:

“What Fate.?”

(I remember youth’s promises.

I remember the rain and all of  its consequences)

Bone-dead, he whispers in her ears, silently,

(as if thunder was silent)

“It doesn’t matter, I have continued life.”

But tomorrow will hold its grudge.

And winds are coming from Eastern lands.

I remember the Gargoyle’s sacred song that told of what’s to come…

(a silence that can never be disturbed)

It began like this.

The Journey

The Journey is long. It is as endless as the stars. Every night I hear the ocean, her tides pulled on by the restless moon. I live in a natural world filled with beauty and wonder. There is a song inside the hidden pathways of the planet. It bends around us and carries us on its tune like a feather blown in the wind. If there is a heaven above me, I live for the present. The sweet nocturnal longing for childhood wonder that leaves me thinking about everything I've ever seen.

The modern world has become formless. Every face looks the same. We are formless and without humanity. Let my soul sing of the sadness of the sea. Let my tongue speak of the wonders of the life that was gifted to me. And in the passing, mourning melancholy of the deepest ocean - let my words live on forever.

The moon watches over me. She is beautiful and without form. She is like an ancient God living in a world of half existence and oblivion. But she knows the faces that have come and gone upon the sands of time, she cares for each one. We rise and fall in the greater puzzle of life. Each moment new eyes open and look upon this mysterious world with a newfound sense of wonder and confusion. And soon those eyes come to realize that the beauty of our miraculous world soon fades into a lifeless simplicity that obscures all our first curious thoughts about who we were and why we were brought here. The questions we first asked no longer seem to matter in the rush of life. We forget to ask the vital questions and pass on into the dance of hopelessness that envelops all of us, soon enough.

I can hear my first words though I cannot hear my last. There is a symphony within my mind of all the moments that ever came to be. How curious it is that this life happened to me, this wonderful life. I could see it lived no other way. I think of the fantastic creatures within the Mariana Trench, gruesome and god-like within the dark underworld they call home. Where is my home? I know that I am far from it. And like a banana fish I long to find my equilibrium but I am trapped in a prison of desire and like all lost beings - I keep building the walls of my lonely hideaway.

Long ago there was a world of Gods and monsters. They weren't much different from one another and absorbed the luminous images that swelled within the great divide. And upon the face of the saddest waters, the souls of the dead swirled like colors no human eye could see. And within those first scientific moments, as man's slow evolution began its timeless journey into humanhood - a strange thing happened. We came into existence.

And now, so many years later - I look upon this empty world and the miracle of life and all I see is emptiness. The vast cities of oblivion with their tall skyscrapers fade into a complex silence that has engulfed all of humanity. In one, vast collective scream the tower of Babel falls from the stars and we are all gathered together, like a billion souls in a paper bag and born again, anew in a world of wonder and chaos.

We came out of darkness and moved slowly towards the light. And now as we make our new journey towards the stars, the cold and harsh moonlight casts a shadow over our progress and calls us back to the places we knew and called home. Home is warm and delicate like a child's heart or a backyard filled with memories, caterpillars and idyllic summer afternoon's. The cold streets of the future are filled with smoke and the choking Gods of yesterday gather together to enter the fire. And they burn, just as they did at the beginning of time for all of us to forget them and move on to other beautiful creatures.

And we wake from the dream of life and look around us, in every direction. What do we see but the places beauty used to be, the hallowed echoes of blind Gods and the sadness of a fish in a net contemplating existence.