Chapter 38: A Flat Death

From Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida:

All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death. This is the way in which our time assumes Death: with the denying alibi of the distractedly "alive," of which the Photographer is in a sense the professional.... This image which produces Death while trying to preserve life.

(video still from Princess Diana's accident scene)

more Barthes:

"He is dead and he is going to die..."

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 handsom, 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'... the photograph tells me death in the future.... Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

Insert photo of coffins returning from Iraq (not available)

A Question of a Caecum Or a Kidney

The doctor said: such and such indicates that you have such and such, but if an analysis of such and such does not confirm this, then we have to assume you have such and such....One simply had to weigh the alternatives: a floating kidney, chronic catarrh, or a disease of the caecum. It was not a matter of Ivan Ilyich's life but a conflict between a floating kidney and a disease of the caecum.

He remembered his medicine, raised himself, took it, then lay on his back observing what a beneficial effect the medicine was having, how it was killing the pain. "Only I must take it regularly and avoid anything that could have a bad effect on me. I feel somewhat better already, much better." He began probing his side--it was not painful to touch. "I really can't feel anything there, it's much better already." He put out the candle and lay on his side--his caecum was improving, absorbing. Suddenly he felt the old, familiar, dull, gnawing pain--quiet, serious, insistent. The same familiar bad taste in his mouth. His heart sank, he felt dazed. "My God, my God!" he muttered. "Again and again, and it will never end." And suddenly he saw things in an entirely different light. "A caecum! A kidney!" he exclaimed inwardly. "It's not a question of a caecum or a kidney, but of life and...death. Yes, life was there and now it's going, going, and I can't hold on to it. Yes. Why deceive myself? Isn't it clear to everyone but me that I'm dying?"

--Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Recording the Moment

From the invention of the camera arose the need to record important familial events, including funerals. This website has a good handful of them, and claims that they were bid on through Ebay. I searched on Ebay and sure enough, you can bid on and win the photo of a funeral for some long forgotten relative. Or a photo that claims to be from the funeral of Sharon Tate. That seems very sad to me. It is fascinating, but at the same time very private. I find I can't look at these photos for very long before I feel like I am intruding or something. I am, however, really interested in this need to preserve the funeral moment---people did it often in the late 19th and early 20th-centuries, particularly for their children.



I thought that this was something only of its time--that by the mid-20th century people no longer took photographs of their deceased loved ones laid out before burial. I thought that in time, once the camera became more a part of everyday life, people no longer wanted to use it to acknowledge death. Then I did a Google search this is what came up:



This photo was taken in 2000. It can be found on this website, where it is joined by hundreds of other photos from the same funeral. A lot of the photos are of the flowers, and different angle shots of some of the mourners by the coffin. Check it out, it's strange, intriguing, and freaky.

P.S. Thanks for the invite. Here all my morbid interests will be unleashed.

First Meeting of the new collective

The Collective is dedicated to condensing specific but vast histories down to their essence using abstract physicality, fragmented music, multiple sound systems, foreign influences, and practical lighting. The collective studies its subject for extended amounts of time collaborating with a larger collective via the blog. There should be no less than one entry per week. The fully active Collective holds monthly and/or bi-monthly discussions and workshops all centered around the current subject. The performing cast will scout out locations and times in which to perform one-off experimental shows with invited audiences. (Anywhere from 3 to 10 of these per year.) These performances will take place in basements, small rooms, outdoor locations, practically anywhere we want. The performing cast is based on overall participation, specific interests, and seniority. A full length scripted show with open invitation and extended run will hopefully take place no more than and no less than once a year.

Attendance: John, Kurt, Luke, Jessica, Ryan, Peter, and Evan.
This was a more or less spontaneous meeting and it must be stated that this in no means is the full collective. That is yet to be determined.

First Meeting:
1: Solution to prime time show “Fear.”
This week a show called Fear was proposed in the Neo-Futurist Prime Time Salon. This is a show proposed by Noelle Krimm Benjaman. It is a continuation of her work with Alice. Alice was a project that took place in many stores in Andersonville with many theater groups lead by a hand full of White Rabbits. The idea now is to have a smaller scale version dedicated to the subject of Fear. Noelle wanted the Fools Collective to have the last room (the theater.) She proposed this idea to John, and it so happened that the collective had been working on the subject Death, which seemed to fit in well with the theme of fear. The one problem is: If Fear is put in the prime time rotation it won’t happen until October 2009, which is a little less than two years away. The first topic of the meeting was what to do in the time between then and now. The solution was to work on the subject of Death for a full year and to put up small invited shows based on this topic, and then if after a year this topic has been dealt with to our liking, we will move on to another subject, and a few months before Fear is staged we will resume work on Death.
2: Pursue discussions on the meaning of history and how it relates to our collective.
John had been frustrated with the majority opinion that calling this a study of history was misleading. He has had many discussions with Kurt about what is history, and how do you stage a living history that takes place over hundreds of years in a short amount of time. The history that the collective is exploring is more based in the emotions and the images of history interpreted through metaphors. The concern is how do we help ourselves and the audience to understand this in order to experience the productions with more complexity. Many defenses of what we did were spoken about and we all felt good. We want to keep the study of the study of history an open topic we keep approaching and attacking from different angles.
There were two clear attempts at defining the way in which we tackle history. Evan’s was more of a summing up of how the study of history has changed in our modern times, and Ryan’s was a humorous and accurate metaphor that accidentally created the new name of the collective. Ryan’s explanation will be discussed in the following section. Here is Evan’s:
“In essence, there are two ways that history is generally written. One is a macro-level, descriptive style and the other is a micro-level, narrative style. The first kind is very much related to the way that we are taught history in schools. There are facts and figures, names, dates, and events. It seems very linear and is meant to be objective, though it can never truly be.
The second kind of history deals with such epic events and time periods, but through the lens of people's lives, often their everyday lives or their experiences of single events. The purpose of this approach is to create a narrative of how large scale events affected people on the ground. For example the book by Erik Larson's *Isaac's Storm*. The book tells the story of the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, the greatest natural disaster in American history (10,000 people died). By telling the story of Isaac Cline, local head of the National Weather Bureau, and various survivors of the storm, Larson not only speaks to the trials and tribulations of ordinary people, but shows how their experiences reflects larger social, cultural, and political conditions: namely the nascent scientific revolutions as exemplified by the National Weather Bureau's ability to make something as fickle as the weather rational and predictable and the hubris that went along with the science and industrial advancement (the US ignored warnings from backwards Cuba that the storm was coming).
Both of these approaches to history have their place with the current project on death. Certainly their are large sweeping trends on how death has been understood (think of the movements of world religions spreading different philosophies of death and the afterlife), as well as accounts of how people experienced and interacted with death on the ground.”

3: Ryan spoke up and basically said:

“We are feeding timelines into our fool machine and it comes out fractured with different parts influencing different people and being changed into different things, it’s like how when light is shined into a prism it comes out fractured.
we take all of this research and are influenced by it and then it comes out looking different and not like history that we are used to seeing.”

We grouped this statement with a comment Anthony had said during one of the early meetings for The Fool returns To His Chair: “Sure lets continue creating a fucked up island but we need to build a boat that carries the audience to the Fucked Up Island.
And so we decided to call the collective: The Fool Machine Collective (on a fucked up island)
We are still toying with it.

4: Is a visual timeline a continuing concept from show to show? Yes. The structure of the timeline should reflect the topic we are studying. We came up with many ideas on how to create a timeline for Fools including a tree, roots, hidden objects, headphones and disguised audio sources, and Kurt’s Box. We finally decided not to talk about it anymore and to try and let it happen organically.

5: Kurt’s Box. The one idea from the discussion of the timeline will very soon become living reality. Kurt was very interested in John’s initial idea to make the state park and the show in the theater mirror each other with intentional contradictions, actual facts studied in the show and misleading historical enquiries. This is similar to Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass and The Green Box. Kurt has charged us with the continuing dedication to writing out our thoughts on scraps of paper and to give them to him to put in a box of his designing that will sit out at all the collective’s performances.

6: Workshops should focus consistently on contact improvisation as a language. We should explore different approaches to group physicality. Invite companies to works with us with payment.

We also drank and ate food and chatted about other topics. We walked away happy because we actually spoke about more than we expected to. Now the goal is to stay active. We must all work hard to let life affect us and to let reading wash over us, and to let art manifest. It’s what we do.

Buried Alive

For a long time people had feared premature burial, and ancient wisdom precautions for avoiding premature burial. CONCLAMATIO was the calling three times in a loud voice the name of the person presumed to be dead. Conclamatio was still in use in the time of Tolstoi; the doctor called his name three times in the railway station where he lay dying. Even today, church protocol dictates that when the pope is on his deathbed, he must be called three times by his Christian name.
- Phillipe Aires, The Hour Of Our Death

I would like to do an experiment with the audience boxes we are considering that plays with the idea of being buried alive by being restricted while watching: maybe some of the boxes can have scratches in them, like someone trying to claw their way out. Maybe we have parts that go completely black, and then the sound systems in the boxes cause the sound outside to be muffled in tone.

I wanted to get a post up, and I've found myself at the computer, so here are some things I've underlined from the big book of death that I found interesting or imagistic, in no particular order, with my own italics...

"...the signs most often mentioned to indicate imminent death in the Middle Ages were signs that today we would call natural: an obvious, routine observation of the common and familiar facts of everyday life."

" ...'I pray you, do not bury my body in this country.' So she was laid in a boat without sails or oars."

"The dying person must be the center of a group of people."

"Ovid relates that on the day of the Feralia, the Day of the Dead, the Romans sacrificed to Tacita, the mute goddess, a fish with its mouth sewn."

"...unfeeling phantoms of exhausted humans...."

"...refrigerium..."

"The man of the seventeenth century exhibits a lesser degree of sensitivity [than that of our own] and demonstrates in torture and death a resignation and endurance that we would find astonishing."

"We read that there are many whom the devil has dug up and flung far from the consecrated land."

"...no more than a block of stone laid over them (imblocati [yes, there's a Latin word for that])to preserve the appearance of the land."

In these first chapters, what I'm thinking about most is the proximity of the dead, as in there seems to be a lot of meaning put in where your bones are laid when you're done; what the meaning is when you're placed closer to a church wall or even inside a church itself, with people walking on you every Sunday and how that's more glorious than being in a field, in a mass grave, in the company of people in your same situation.

The Grim Reaper

"Our earliest records of the Reaper date back to Greek civilization. Gaia and Uranus were Kronos' parents. Uranus, fearful of all his children including Kronos kept them constrained inside Gaia. Gaia wished to free her children and decided to give Kronos a sickle. With this sickle Kronos eventually castrated his father and bled him to death. Knowing how he had killed his father, once Kronos had children of his own, he feared his fate would be the same. As each child was born he swallowed them one by one.

From ancient folklore and other anthropological sources it is believed that Kronos was a harvest god worshipped by a culture before the Greeks. It is understood that his sickle was used in harvesting grain. Harvest was also associated with death because it signaled the end of the growing season and the beginning of Winter. Time devouring all things was represented poetically by Kronos eating his own children. It was the Greeks very dramatic way of saying nothing lasts forever.

The Grim Reaper wielding a sickle and, at times, an hourglass is directly derived from Kronos. One must understand how important grain was to these ancient civilizations. How horrible the thought of some mystic creature with the power to swipe away their whole harvest with a single swing of the mighty sickle. Not to mention the flock of famished crows, which would accompany such a terrible figure. It undoubtedly symbolized death in an extremely effective way. Though the Grim Reaper poses no real threat to our life, his legacy, which has been handed down from generation to generation, has instilled in us all the fear we need to ensure the desired effect."

There are, of course, different opinions as to where the idea of the Grim Reaper came from, I particularly like the one above, because the historian reminds us that we need perspective when dealing with the subjects level of impact. Today, still, seeing the skeleton holding a sickle is scary. (And cool as a drawing, but if you were actually see the Grim Reaper, I don't think you would grab an air guitar and rock out.) That sickle can be plunged into my head. But to have the resonance of the ability of the sickle to wipe out all grain, all nourishment, doesn't only affect my own perile, but that of my family's and my community's. Perspective. Often when I think about perspective it brings me back to the trip I took to Germany to study castles. One particular castle had extremely tall outer walls, fortifications and parapets, and machicolations for pouring out hot tar onto offending armies. I said to my friend, "Wow they must have been holding gold, diamonds or some important Dignitary." And she said, "No, something more important than that, Salt!" Salt? I immediately pictured a swarm of angry housewives with mixing bowls and Chefs with large wooden spoons pounding on the outer walls of the castle, demanding salt for their souffle. At the time, I knew about, but did not realize the importance of salting the meats, to keep them from spoiling. It wasn't just for seasoning it WAS the preserver of food, the preserver of life itself!