'You Want to Be Immortal? Disappear.'

What has disappeared? Ambrose Bierce, Weldon Kees, Jimmy Hoffa. Aristotle’s second book of Politics, three-decker novels, rhupunts. Typewriters, payphones, civility. In his story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940; trans. James E. Irby, 1961), Jorge Luis Borges describes a fanciful world of radically subjective idealism, as premised by Bishop Berkeley. “Things become duplicated in Tlön,” he writes; “they also tend to become effaced and lose their details when they are forgotten. A classic example is the doorway which survived so long as it was visited by a beggar and disappeared at his death.” The Louisiana poet Gail White in “The Fascination of What Disappears” examines our preoccupation with the vanished: 

“There must be something in us that accounts

for this endless fascination with Amelia

Earhart, the Titanic, or George Mallory                                                         

on Everest. Perhaps we still believe

that we might find out more about what happened:

islanders on a solitary shelf

of land, brought up on stories of a woman

who fell from the sky in a silver bird, became

their queen (or else perhaps was eaten,

but they saved the shoes). We dream of finding one

more cache of jewelry from the Titanic,

or Mallory’s frozen corpse, long overlooked.

Why write a hundred sonnets every year?

You want to be immortal? Disappear.”

 

There’s a poignance built into disappearance. Perhaps at several removes it reminds us of our mortality.