Dieu Seul: The Death Sentence
by Charlene Elsby
At the edge of the Notre Dame cemetery stands the Lourdes Grotto, but with no way to move between them.
Unless you want to jump a fence.
But I think that would be somewhat disrespectful to the dead, like you’re showing off how capable your still-living body is, and there they all are, stuck in boxes. It’s bad enough we get to walk on top of the earth. I imagine it’s pretty constrictive down there, everyone stuck in their own little spots.
No way to move between them.
They must get so lonely, but if they do, they can look to the entrance of the grotto, to the sign there: “Dieu Seul.”
That is to say, God’s alone too, or perhaps God is only, or perhaps God is only and lonely, not even a body to stick in the ground, the one and the only, the lonely, with no way to move between them, or even move at all.
You don’t need to move if you’re everywhere, but if you’re everywhere, you’re never alone. Perhaps it’s a chastisement to the people underground, who wonder why they must stay in their spots and never move, while others politely decline to hop fences and instead move all the way around — another form of arrogance, to be sure. The sign says to them, “Not you. Never you. You stay there in your spot. Who gets to be the exception to this rule? God alone.” Maybe loneliness is as close as we get to divinity.
I’m not Catholic, but she was.
Now that she’s gone, I’m pretty sure I’m lonelier than most but not that alone. There’s only air to stop us meeting here, not earth like for the rest of them.
The banished.
All the elements in between. There’s a resistance in the medium. We walk through the air unimpeded. We walk through the water and fire, both with some success but ultimately both of those will lead you back to earth, the great separator. All the living set in a centrifuge above ground, until finally we’re sufficiently separated to sink, maintaining our distance through the densest element we’ve got, so distinguishing we named the planet after it.
Fragmenting its inhabitants.
Making sure they never speak to one another, ever again.
They can’t move their air through the earth.
They’re alone and can’t tell anyone they’re lonely.
They don’t have a sign for it.
Only God gets a sign to say he’s only.
Lonely, alone and only.
No way to move between them.
But it doesn’t say that, does it.
It’s not a proper sentence as it reads.
The first station of the Cross is “The Death Sentence.”
But “Dieu Seul” isn’t a sentence at all.
No death sentence for dieu.
They didn’t do any of the Catholic things when she died, because they didn’t know how to, or because they didn’t want to.
At the grotto, they’ve got prayer candles you can buy for one or five dollars. They have two big signs in red, that say $5.00 for the big candles or $1.00 if you don’t have much to ask, and then little signs thanking you for the suggested donation. It all seems a little unfair to me, because the candle is supposed to take your place, so you don’t have to think about your prayers anymore. Let the candle do it for you. For a dollar, it’ll pray for you a while. For five dollars, it’ll pray for you all day. Everyone knows you can be poor or you can be saved, but not both. They leave the boxes of new candles just underneath all the tiers of burning ones, and you can see right on the box that these are real devotional candles for real devotions only.
One of these days, I hope someone takes all the prayers home for themselves.
Just take the fucking box of them and pray for yourself, for fuck’s sake.
There’s always more want to go around.
Take them home, or use them to light up the houses around town.
There was another arson last night, this time a house on Longpré. The last thing that burned was the restaurant in the Museopark. Before that, it was the house on St. Denis St., and that was its second turn burning. All the neighbours say the boards they used to close up the place on St. Denis are nicer than the ones they used for the place on Ste. Anne. All they did was paint them. Maybe that’s enough.
It seems like there are always a lot of things on fire, but never the right things.
Maybe all the dead need is a little warmth to get them by.
They didn’t die, they just got cold and stayed that way.
But when they burn things “to the ground,” they never get farther than the surface. So the fire from above never gets as far below as maybe it should.
Not far enough down to warm the dead alive again.
If a small candle is a dollar and a large candle is five, I wonder how many prayers a house would get you.
Not enough, probably.
Not enough warmth to get far enough down, and they never bury the bones of the houses, do they.
Once a tree grows into wood, it’s condemned to the surface to burn.
But here we all are on the surface too, burning until it’s too much, too hot to burn and too cold not to, too much to want and yet they want you to, so there’s always something left but nothing worth it. Something’s always got to go to somebody’s suggested donation, while she’s down there, too far from even the most valuable fires to make the cold subside and all of the earth in the way besides. Hot on top and cold below, keep the fire to ourselves and no one gets hurt. Keep them safe and lonely too, it’s the only way, the alone will tell you. Dieu est seul, but you wouldn’t know that just from one single death sentence. The condamnation à mort, on the other hand, won’t board up the void of the deathless.
You can’t burn the dead back to life.
That heat won’t penetrate their kind of cold.
And there’s no way to move between them.
Charlene Elsby, Ph.D., specializes in Aristotle's metaphysics and realist phenomenology. She is the Vice President of the North American Society for Early Phenomenology and the general editor of Phenomenological Investigations. Her fictional works include Hexis, Affect, Psychros, Agyny and Musos.
