Lewis Payne

In 1865, young Lewis Payne tried to assassinate Secretary of State W.H. Seward. Alexander Gardner photographed him in his cell, where he was waiting to be hanged. The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

Camera Lucida

Shortly before the end of her life, shortly before the moment when I looked through her pictures and discovered the Winter Garden Photograph, my mother was weak, very weak. I lived in her weakness (it was impossible for me to participate in a world of strength, to go out in the evenings; all social life appalled me). During her illness, I nursed her, held the bowl of tea she liked because it was easier to drink from than a cup; she had become my little girl, uniting for me with that essential child she was in her first photograph. In Brecht, by a reversal I used to admire a good deal, it is the son who (politically) educates the mother; yet I never educated my mother, never converted her to anything at all; in a sense I never "spoke" to her, never "discoursed" in her presence, for her; we supposed, without saying anything of the kind to each other, that the frivolous insignificance of language, the suspension of images must be the very space of love, its music. Ultimately I experienced her, strong as she had been, my inner law, as my feminine child. Which was my way of resolving Death. If so, as so many philosophers have said, Death is the harsh victory of the race, if the particular dies for the satisfaction of the universal, if after having been reproduced as other than himself, I who had not procreated, I had, in her very illness, engendered my mother. Once she was dead I no longer had any reason to attune myself to the progress of the superior Life Force (the race, the species). My particularity could never again universalize itself (unless utopically, by writing, whose project henceforth would become the unique goal of my life). From now on I could do no more than await my total, undialectical death.

-Roland Barthes

Word of the Day

The Study of Death is known as Thanatology.

I would like to continue the idea of objects that block the face. I don't want to repeat the crate idea, but I do want to carry that idea across in Fear. What can we use that may have the affect of the crates, but with less bulk. Maybe we just make sure parts of the face are covered. Perhaps on one person the eyes and on another the mouth. In Fools the covering the face played into themes of disconnection, isolation, and just down right foolery, but with this piece I would like it to be more of dehumanizing us, but in a way that is disturbing. Perhaps like the morose feeling one gets reading about the use of cadavers for crash test dummies and experiments talked about in "Stiff," I would like to get this same feeling seeing the fool machine cast used in this piece, without having to pander to the concept of monsters, zombies, or any of the incarnations of living dead.

A Disconnected Heart

I have been reading Mary Roach's book "Stiff." Which has quickly become an inspiration for me in regards to ideas for the Fear show coming up this September. The only other book in my large collection of death tomes that has affected me as much is Phillipe Ares' exhaustive historical study called "The Hour Of Our Death" Both study death's affect on society's construct. Where Phillipe Ares' study is buried deep in ancient texts and historical literature, Roach's book is a study of the here and now. Her graphic take is submerged in humor and pathos, which I imagine is much needed to move from one dissected corpse, to discussing waters affect on body parts in plane crashes, to standing in a garden of dead bodies lying around decaying for the sake of science. One must have to find the humor in order to avoid having never-ending horrific nightmares and existential dread. She is out their "in the trenches" taking part in cadaver examinations and the observing of crash test carcasses falling from meticulously measured heights.
I am trying to figure out how to avoid the pitfall of making our section of Fear episodic in nature, which is the most used approach in neo-futurist shows, probably because we spend most of our time writing short plays for Too Much Light. The idea I have to avoid this is to have the narrative follow one member of the Fool Machine collective, not specifically as a rounded out character but as a vehicle for the study to take place. I see this person manipulated in the space by the rest of the cast. We will pursue this idea. Along these lines, I came upon this section in Stiff. The chapter explores transplants and possible soul residue from the organ's previous host. This text is from a letter a patient sent to their doctor after they had been given their life back. They had been given someone else' beating heart. I think some arresting images could be pulled from the text:
"The Consciousness of my donor's heart was in the present tense...He was struggling to figure out where he was, even what he was...It was as if none of your senses worked...An extremely frightening awareness of total dislocation...As if you are reaching with your hands to grasp something...but every time you reach forward your fingers end up only clutching thin air."
I would love to create illusions of moving away from parts of your own body, not out of body, but moving away from actual parts, this can work with the ideas around sterile deaths and our abilities to disconnect in order to save ourselves from depression, anxiety, or fear.

Coming Up for Air

This except is taken from the George Orwell book 'Coming Up for Air.' The context is that a man grows disillusioned with what his life has become and travels, or escapes, back to his hometown to revisit his youth only to discover that things have changed. He is just arriving to his old town when he stumbles upon a new grave yard and has these thoughts:

It was enormous, twenty acres, I should think. There's always a kind of jumped-up unhomelike look about a new cemetery, with its raw gravel paths and its rough green sods, and the machine-made marble angels that look like something off a wedding-cake. But what chiefly struck me at the moment was that in the old days this place hadn't existed. There was no separate cemetery then, only the churchyard. I could vaguely remember the farmer these fields used to belong to - Blackett, his name was, and he was a dairy -farmer. And somehow the raw look of the place brought it home to me how things have changed. It wasn't only that the town had grown so vast that they needed twenty acres to dump their corpses in. It was their putting the cemetery out here, on the edge of town. Have you noticed that they always do that nowadays? Every new town puts its cemetery on the outskirts. Shove it away-keep it out of sight! Can't bear to be reminded of death. Even the tombstones tell you the same story. They never say that the chap underneath them "died", it's always "passed away" or "fell asleep." It wasn't so in the old days. We had our churchyard plumb in the middle of the town, you passed it everyday, you saw the spot where your grandfather was lying and where some day you were going to lie yourself. We didn't mind looking at the dead. In hot weather, I admit, we also had to smell them because some of the family vaults weren't too well sealed.

George Orwell

Coming up for Air

I think this passage address some of the questions that have been raised about how we remove ourselves from death in our modern culture. How we satanize death in our language and space so we don't have to address it directly. Raising the question. How does shielding ourselves from death affect our attitudes about death? and for that matter, how does shielding ourselves from death affect our appreciation of life? 

Here today, canned tomorrow...

Caught this article in the Guardian today...click and enjoy!

"Ashes of man who designed Pringles packaging buried in crisp can."


"(Fredric) Baur requested the burial arrangement because he was proud of his design of the Pringles container, a son, Lawrence Baur, of Michigan, said on Monday."


As well as this being a novel idea - it made me wonder about other people that were so proud of their accomplishments that they either chose to be buried along with something they created, or in this case, buried inside of something they created. I'm sure there's more examples that I just can't think of at the moment...perhaps the Kiss Koffin?