Opening remarks
Death takes Matter to be the origin of creation and hence the final determinant of everything.
Careful steward
A careful steward of Truth’s limited means,
Treasuring her founded facts from the squandering Power,
It tethers mind to the tent-posts of sense,
To a leaden grey routine clamps Life’s caprice
And ties all creatures with the cords of Law.
Death regards Matter as the chief host of all that emerges out of its womb. Its means are limited though and it treasures her founded facts from the squandering powers of mind and life that emerge from it. It ties Mind to the senses to prevent it from running far away from its grasp. It holds Life captive to a leaden routine lest it flies in its whims and fancies. It ties all creatures with the cords of binding Law.
Vessel of transmuting alchemies
A vessel of transmuting alchemies,
A glue that sticks together mind and life,
If Matter fails, all crumbling cracks and falls.
Matter is a vessel in which all kinds of experiments are being conducted transmuting one element into another. It is Matter that holds mind and life together. If Matter crumbles then all crumbles and falls.
All upon Matter stands
All upon Matter stands as on a rock.
All is therefore built upon the foundation of Matter.
A cheat of substance
Yet this security and guarantor
Pressed for credentials an impostor proves:
A cheat of substance where no substance is,
An appearance and a symbol and a nought,
Its forms have no original right to birth:
Its aspect of a fixed stability
Is the cover of a captive motion’s swirl,
An order of the steps of Energy’s dance
Whose footmarks leave for ever the same signs,
A concrete face of unsubstantial Time,
A trickle dotting the emptiness of Space:
A stable-seeming movement without change,
Yet change arrives and the last change is death.
Yet what is Matter but an appearance, a deception of the senses, a symbol of nothingness. Its forms are unreal and its seeming rock-like stability is simply a cover within which there is incessant motion, a dance of Energy in fixed repetitive pattern giving the sense of fixity. It is simply the concrete aspect of time which is itself something unsubstantial as a trickle dotting a vast empty space. Matter seems stable as a movement without change. Yet change arrives and the last change that comes is death.
Nihil’s show
What seemed most real once, is Nihil’s show.
What seemed most real is essentially a show put up by Nihil.
Seeming shapes
Its figures are snares that trap and prison the sense;
The beginningless Void was its artificer:
Nothing is there but aspects limned by Chance
And seeming shapes of seeming Energy.
The forms and figures of objects are snares that trap and imprison the sense. The beginningless Void is the artificer of forms. There is Nothing but aspects lined by Chance and seeming shapes of seeming Energy.
Closing Remarks
Death voices the extreme view of scientific materialism that sees Matter as the origin and end of everything.
