The Undertaking

A lot of my excerpts have been from Thomas Lynch, poet and undertaker, and one of my new favorite writers. This is a short excerpt of a PBS special called "The Undertaking" - which focused on Lynch. I like hearing his voice, and his poetry.



The entire episode can be watched here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/undertaking/

Meyers and Chopra Talk Death

I was watching Iconoclasts on the Sundance Channel with Mike Myers and Deepak Chopra. They talked about death quite a bit. Three really good stories that I hope I can remember properly.

One was Chopra going to deliver his father's ashes to the River Ganges. A man comes down and asks him questions about his father and his family in order to record them, as is tradition. So, Chopra and the man go inside the building where these records are kept. The man shows him that his father did the same thing for his parents. And, if he wished, Chopra could leave a note for his own children when they did the same for him. He did. Now, when his children go to place his ashes in the Ganges, they can view a message from their father, wishing them love from beyond the grave.

Myers and Chopra were doing an improvised interview and discussion for the show. They stood in a theatre and just talked in front of an audience. Death was brought up. Look behind you and you'll see death following. Look behind you again and he's even closer. Look again. Even closer. And the audience was laughing during this, which was his point. This is how humans deal with the knowledge of our own mortality. We laugh. We can't help it. Which, explains why so much comedy comes out of pain. This quote has been assumed to be taken by a few different comedians, so I won't specify anyone. “Tragedy is when I stub my toe. Comedy is when you fall into an open manhole and die.”

Myers was always a fan of The Beatles. When George Harrison died, he was devastated. Then, he got a letter. It was the last letter Harrison ever wrote and it was written for him. See, Myers always felt so sad at the end of A Hard Day's Night. Because, when the helicopter flew away at the end, he wanted to be on it. In this letter, Harrison wrote how he was a fan and that he was sorry he had to fly away on the helicopter without him again.

posted by: Shaina Lyn-Waitsman

Obituary

Nancy Dugan, nee Haase, age 52, of Oak Forest, beloved wife of Gerry, loving mother of Christine (Charles) Weccele, Steven (Linnea) and Patrick; cherished grandmother of Bridget and Hannah; dear daughter of Robert and Joan Haase; fond sister of Robert, Jr. (Kay) Haase; also nieces and nephews. Funeral Tuesday, 8:30 a.m., from Modell Funeral Home, 12641 W. 143rd Street, Homer Glen, to Incarnation Church. Mass 9:30 a.m. Internment Holy Sepulcre Cemetery. Member of Oak Forest Jaycees and Daughters of the American Revolution, Swallow Cliff Chapter. Nancy passed from lung cancer, in her memory she would have liked for one person to Stop Smoking. Visitation Monday, 3 to 9 p.m.

Tonight I attend her wake; tomorrow, her funeral.

Firing squads

Bilal is correct in verifying Anthony's comment; one shooter is given a blank. This way, everyone in the squad can assume that they were the one with the blank. There is a psychological phenomenon called "diffusion of responsibility" that describes this feeling. Wikipedia article.

I also found this page about modern firing squad rituals from all around the world, including, to my shock and horror, Utah.

Here's a segment from a paragraph on Thailand.

On the day of execution, the prisoner was taken from their cell and photographed and fingerprinted. They were then taken to the execution chamber and handcuffed to a cross like wooden frame with their back to the machine gun, 4 meters behind them. A white cloth blindfold is applied and the hands tied with a sacred Buddhist cord. Flowers are hung from the prisoner’s hands as an offering to Buddha and a canvas screen is pulled between the condemned and the gun. A target is fixed onto the screen level with the prisoner’s heart and the gun aimed at the centre of the target. The executioner takes up his position, watching another member of the execution team who raises a red flag, and on the signal from the prison governor, the flag is dropped and the executioner fires a fully automatic burst of 15 rounds into the victim’s heart.

The picture is of Thailand's last shooting executioner. The country officially moved to lethal injection in 2003. An interview with him is available here.

Fools Collective Meeting
1/27/08 @ The Edgewater
Attending: John, Luke, Evan, Ryan, Kurt, Jessica, Anthony, Chloe
Minutes taken by Luke

****
Possibility of a trip to the Museum of Mourning Photograhy (http://mourningphotography.com/) was discussed. John is coordinating a trip (or multiple trips) via email.
Possibility of a cemetery tour was discussed. Specifically mentioned was Bachelor’s Grove, though its unclear whether they give tours or we would need to sneak in.
In order to schedule some physical workshops for the Collective, Anthony is going to email John some available 3Pear dates which have come open. John will then use those to determine the best times to have workshops.
One-off performance ideas are needed. Specifically, the Collective should be thinking of ideas for spaces in which to do these performances. Basements, theaters, alleys, public places, etc.
We talked about using a wiki to track some of our ideas/collaborations, but it was brought up that a wiki is more of a central repository of information. If the blog is insufficient for our purposes, we should consider moving to a message board-style format.
Questions were raised about how to be notified when comments are posted on the blog. Evan has since discovered that this feature exists in the blog settings. Up to ten email addresses can be added.
Kurt and Peter talked a bit about using video and images in our work. Specifically mentioned were Resurrection Mary (a popular Chicago ghost), death photography (and the idea that trying to preserve something kills it), and investigating the history of cremation.
I was told to write down “witches don’t have souls.” I drew a little scale with a witch on one side and a duck on the other.
Anthony brought up the fact that when firing squads would perform executions, only one member of the squad would be given a real bullet. No one knew who this person was. This served to relieve the conscience of the firing squad members. It is an example of a disconnect between intention and act.
One-off shows:
How does the audience enter? How do we treat them?
Perhaps there should be a death survey: How do you want to die? Would you like to have the real bullet or the fake bullet?
We need to drum up a test audience for our audience boxes.
We should look into French horror theater, aka Grand-Guignol.

The audience boxes should limit perspective. Perhaps we can incorporate a video delay so the audience member sees what happened to the box just before they got in, or what happened to the previous person in the box. We could take a photo of the audience member and their friends all standing around the box, like a mourning photo. We could have these available as the audience leaves.
The boxes should be built and then given to the Fools to design. Lee Valley Hardware was mentioned as a potential resource for materials/plans.
Death is not a unique experience, perhaps we should survey the audience and somehow use that information. A death mad lib?
The tech for the boxes should include sound. Perhaps we can work it out so that each box its own sound system. Ideas: convey the impression of being buried alive, someone speaking to you through dirt and wood. Have claw/nail marks inside the boxes.
Images that were brought up: refrigerator filled with a person, emerging from the boxes at the start of the show, having different light sources for each coffin.
We should somehow acknowledge the fact that we are directly above a funeral home.
We had some meta-discussion about how to make the show itself more accessible to the audience. We need to be considerate of how we frame the experience, i.e. what happens before our section should somehow clue the audience in to what they are getting ready to experience.
Death is a visceral topic and there are many social taboos around it. The taboo against “morbidness” would be an interesting thing to explore through our one-off shows and then incorporate into the final.
We can also deal with how those left behind deal with death. The traditions are too numerous to mention. Is it celebration, mourning, etc? How do people meld and mix together all the emotions surrounding death into a cultural tradition?
Maybe the goal for the audience is to survive.
Is there a narrative through which we explore all of this? A mission? “Resurrect the dead girl?” Can we have an “audience corpse”? Perhaps the audience is the manipulator of the show.
Action Item: think about box types for different audience types.
Should the Fool Collective propose a show for film fest? A really bad horror film? A silent film?
***

Bury Me Standing, Post 1

"Gypsies everywhere went to unusual extremes to prevent death. Not just the death of loved ones, but of any known ones. It went beyond compassion into the more exigent realm of the superstitious. The more diligent would try to scare death away, perhaps literally by screaming at it, or by raising their skirts and flashing at it. They may try to trick death by changing the name of a sick person to that of someone they hated - a known thief, or a policeman - with the idea that no one, not even death, could want to inhabit that soul. Others would try to fob the bad luck off onto some other creature. In Britain in the 1940s, Brian Vesey-FitzGerald recorded how Gypsies suffering from pulmonary disease attempted a symbolic transference by breathing three times into the mouth of a live fish, and then throwing it back into the stream from which it had been fetched. The hope was that, confused, death would go for the fish."

- Isabel Fonseca, Bury Me Standing, p.248

Greatest Fears

So I was inspired by both Peter and Ryan's last blogs, about death dreams and ear spiders, respectively. Ryan, thank you for triggering my gag reflex. Anyhow, my first reaction was "Wow. Spiders in my ear. That's like, my greatest fear." And then I vetoed that thought because my greatest fear, ever since I was about four years old, is being crushed by a piano.

Needless to say when we were moving the pianos up the back stairs for Fluxus I 'bout done had a heart attack as I stood on the landing squeezing my intestines and feeling my jaw petrify from bone into stone.

I don't know whether this fear came from the fact that I was forced to play the piano when I was a child; I knew instinctively that it wasn't my forte and I was afraid I wasn't going to be quite good enough at it. Or whether I just hated practicing and thoughts of death by piano was actually a rebellious fantasy. All I know is that I would often stare at our beautiful antique stand-up piano and imagine myself under it, being pressed, contained, suffocated, more afraid of being conscious while it was happening than of the pain itself.

I also had a recurring dream of infinity, where I would be forced into some repetitive act in the afterlife, and again, the fear of being conscious during this endless afterlife overrode any fear of pain. The first dream that I can remember, again when I was four years old, was that I was stuck in a piano key, a miniature me, forever and ever conscious of the white ivory walls as I was played, pressed, contained, suffocated. Only you can't suffocate when you are dead, can you?

I wasn't an overly-morbid four-year old. But what are the images that we initially associate with when we first become conscious of death? Why? And are we interested in the why, or more interested in the physical reactions to these images? The what. I like the what, because I often feel like it's not my job to ask why. You could ask why for eternity, and never find the answer. And that would be suffocating.