Love-and-Death                                                            Page 13

To "come back to the kind flesh, to love and simple sight" is to step away from

dichotomous dualisms and to move towards the "non-dialectical, non-

oppositional difference" Mark C. Taylor sees as essential to postmodern

theological reflection. It is possible to gaze on death and love and see them as

other than but not in opposition to each other:

The question of otherness, as Derrida teaches us, involves neither

fundamental difference nor simple opposition....What oppositional and

dialectical thinking cannot conceive is an altarity that is neither identical

nor different.¹¹

"Simple sight" is able to look at dualities and not see them in opposition to

each   other   but   rather   as   "the   play   of   opposites,   their

interpenetration"("Patterns" C.P.p.426).¹² Traditional theological thinking has

seen dualities and placed them in opposition to one another by considering one

to be above the other, prizing light over darkness, order over chaos and love

over death. Death is so quickly transformed into resurrection that death itself is

almost denied. In the context of "neither/nor" thinking it is possible to say that

love and death "correspond" with each other. As life corresponds with love so

does death. Death belongs with the flow of everything from "The eyeless

labourer in the night" ('^Woman to Man" C.P.p.27) to “We are born of

ethereal fire and we return there." (Patterns C.P. p.426). Love and death are as

intimately united as tree, star, root, earth, worm and flower. The divine is

revealed as much in death as in love.

Bringing love and death into a unity is something to be creatively achieved:

It does not suffice for man that he is mortal;... he has to become mortal.

That is his vocation. Death, in the human perspective, is not a given, it

must be achieved. It is a task, one which we take up actively, one which

becomes the source of our activity and mastery. Man dies, that is

nothing. But man is, starting from his death.... He makes his death, he

makes himself mortal and in this way gives himself the power of a

maker and gives to what he makes its meaning and its birth.¹³

¹¹ Mark C. Taylor, "Postmodern Times", RLA Conference pp. 94-95.

¹² For a reflection on these themes see Jennifer Strauss, Judith Wright, Oxford Australian Writers, (Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1995) p.2

¹³ Blanchot ,The Space of Literature, p.96