A Bluesy Dead-Rabbit High

I am the man who stops and stares at roadkill. Not for any morbid thrill, or out of fascination with a body ripped apart by sudden, unexpected force, but for the succulent flavor of meditation that inevitably follows such a raw and brutal image. For lack of a better word, I call this mood a “bluesy dead-rabbit high.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if this feeling struck my readers as perverse, or at least queer. After all, I’ve only seen this feeling shared by one person, and a fictional character, at that. Ricky Fitts, the soulful, eccentric, artistic neighbor of the protagonist in American Beauty, captures this emotion when he films a dead bird near his high school campus. When a shallow cheerleader asks him “why” he is doing this, he responds simply, “Because it’s beautiful.” To this she retorts, “I think maybe you forgot your medication today, mental boy.”

The feeling is hard to explain on account of its intrinsic contradiction. As I gaze at the lifeless, glistening entrails and blood-matted fur of this fallen creature, I feel its emptiness, its nothingness, its lifelessness. I am reminded that at any moment, I might become like the body on the road. I am, for a moment, taken down to the level of dirt, reunited with my essence. However, in being alive and conscious, I then rise out of the gloom to a new appreciation of the simplest aspects of my being: heartbeat, breath, thought, and sense.

Regardless of the feeling’s obscurity among the panoply of human emotions, I stand by my bluesy dead-rabbit high. Roadkill captures a special beauty: random, yet inevitable; ordinary, but sacred as a grave; brutal, yet untroubled as the deepest sleep. It is a kind of death untouched by social custom — for, after all, there is no decorum for looking at an animal’s corpse — and, as such, brings the mind to an unsullied sort of consciousness, where one need not take any action but what comes naturally. And, standing naked and curious before the brute fact of death compels a person to resurface from a long illusory swim, like a long-submerged whale, for a breath of reality, a glimpse of the true light of the stars, or a moment of peace beneath the glowing mystery of the moon.

There’s a unity all living creatures have in death. In looking down at death, one looks down at the world from a god’s-eye view, as it were, and sees — behold! — a billion scattered strangers’ souls marching a finite parade. With one’s eyes sunken into the abyss, there appears nothing more precious, nothing more coveted, nothing more beautiful than a single moment of shared consciousness. In death there is no East or West, North or South, male or female, Jew or Gentile. There is no privilege, no wealth, no fame, no power — but only one great fellowship of compassion. In the certainty of death, our sins unshackle us, our great ideals unburden us, and the fire of hatred sputters, steams, and cools like lava rushing into an endless sea.

And so, here I am, riding the slow, undulating waves of my bluesy dead-rabbit high. I am refreshed in death; it is the air that meets my lips as I rise from the ocean of illusion to breathe. And with two fresh lungfuls of air, I take my time living, sensing, thinking — before it’s my time to bring someone else to this special state of mind.