Love-and-Death                                                            Page 14

In writing of making one's own death Blanchot is in no way suggesting the

taking of one's own life in suicide. He sees that as a denial of death:

When Rilke contemplates the suicide of the young Count Wolf

Kalekreuth... what he cannot accept is the impatience or the

inattention which this form of death shows. Inattention is an offence

against a certain profound maturity which is the opposite of the modern

world's brutal agitation.... Impatience is also an offence against

suffering: by the refusal to suffer the frightful, by eluding the

unbearable, one eludes the moment when everything reverses and the

greatest danger becomes the essential security.¹⁴

Judith Wright is at home with the apparent contradiction of death as maker or

creator:

Darkness where I find my sight,

shadowless and burning night,

here where death and life are met

is the fire of being set. ("Midnight" C.P. p.59)

The earlier poem ,'The Moving Image", explores the ceaseless passage of time

and, after wondering if the heart can "know no better than to pray that time

unwind its coil", sees that '”the lovelier distance lies ahead" and claims:

I am the maker. I have made both time and fear,

knowing that to yield to either is to be dead.

All that is real is to live, to desire, to be.

Her creative activity, at that stage, does not extend to death, which is seen as

undesirable non-being. In “Woman to Child" the vision is more comprehensive

and admits to a link with the night:

I am the earth, I am the root,

I am the stem that fed the fruit,

the link that joins you to the night.

¹⁴ Blanchot, p.121.