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If nothingness is the ground of all being, then death is the ground of all life
You gather at night. It begins with drinking. The exact locale is unimportant. The more out-of-the-way, the better: any little beer joint near the highway will do. You keep to yourselves, off in a corner, exchanging litle chitchat, few social pleasantries. The object being the intake of alchohol. Get it in your system: It opens the blood vessels, gets the heart pumping. The ancients used wine in their rituals, thinking it brought them closer to their god, gods, whomever. Tonight you have rituals of your own.
No one pays much attention to the stuck-up little group huddled in the side booth. You down your drinks in peace. Any type of cold, cheap booze will do, usually whatever drafts are sold by the pitcher. You drink quietly, exchnging mostly knowing glances with one another, your little group, your little sect. Three, four pitchers are put away and everyone is feeling pleasantly buzzed. Minds just on the edge of reeling, you head out into the brisk night air, to the cars and the open road.
When a person operates an automoble, the car becomes an extension of the body. Reflex arcs take over as the individual operates the clutch, shift lever, brakes, gas pedal, steering wheel, almost unconciously. The ancients believed wine put them in touch with the gods: what would they have made of your little group, hearts pounding, flushed with spirit / spirits, inhabiting these metal mechines, bringing them to life? One by one, you roll out of the parking lot out onto the open road, into the darkness.
The car becomes an extension of the body: steel cables and hydraulic lines your nerves, your heart eight churning cylinders, from the exhaust pipe, your voice bellows like the frenzied cries of ancient priests invoking their most terrible god. Your cars, your bodies, accelerate. You surge forward, your little group, eyes blazing out to illumine the road ahead, the road now reduced to a blur as you gain speed: the world transformed, adrenaline and alcohol, metal, gasoline, asphalt, oxygen, all come together in the supreme ecstacy of the moment. Where does man leave off and metal begin? How to separate the self from the sensation? You are as one, you are one, your little sect, picking up even more speed. Oblivious to the way the cars are shuddering now, the ever increasing force needed to keep the vehicles on the road, you push forward together, faster now, faster means higher and so faster still must be higher still, pushing toward some transcendence that seems to be just arould the next tick of the speedometer...
In an instant, it is over. You have lost one of your own. Screeching of brakes as the remaining cars slam to a halt. One of you crushed up horribly against a light post, the post itself, a big metal tube, bent over at a wild angle by the force of the collision, twists crazily out over the road. All around a sickening quiet: nothing could have survived that crash. You are in the presence of death.
The ancients believed in sacrifice, that the willful expenditure of life force could make tangible the powers that shape the universe. Here in the darkness, you have lost one of your own, a fresh, full young life, obliterated all at once in an instant, as by the swift judgement of the omnipotent. You almost feel the spirit dissipating around you, flowing out of the crumpled steel, over your skin, out into the atmosphere, into space, the cosmos. One by one, you shed your clothing, turning and moving toward each other. You fall together, leaning against the wreckage, the immediacy of such sudden and terrible death heightens your hunger for living to an unbearable pitch. You reach out to one another, men, women, whatever, coming together, kissing, groping, fucking, on and against the mangled car, the streetlights casting broken shadows every which way, the reek of smoke and death filling your lungs. One by one you climax, expending yourselves in and on one another, rubbing against each other's warm needful bodies, against the cold steel of the dead car. Spent and exhausted, you disperse. Dressing yourselves haphazardly in whatever articles of clothing you pick up off the ground, you stumble back to your cars, driving off, slowly now, back down the highway. Along the horizon the encroaching daylight pushes the night away.
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