Forever Dead and Lovely: Notes on Melanie Pullen's High Fashion Crime Scenes

Melanie Pullen: Untitled (ELLE), 2014 

From the series High Fashion Crime Scenes (2003-17)

melaniepullen.com

If, like me, you love Izima Kaoru's Landscapes with a Corpse for their drop dead gorgeousness and thanatological interest, then you're also gonna love the work of Melanie Pullen in her photographic series High Fashion Crime Scenes ...


Born in 1975, in New York, but currently living and working in Los Angeles, Pullen grew up in the West Village in a family home regularly visited by poets and painters, including Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol. She acquired her first camera as a teen and began shooting images of rock bands for various publications and record labels.     

Pullen is most noted, however, for her extensive series of  pictures based on vintage crime scene images taken from the files of the NY and LAPD. Inspired by cinematic images and photojournalism, she employed not only well-known actresses and models, but the services of a huge technical crew so that her photo shoots often resembled elaborate movie sets. Each of her pictures could take up to a month to create and the High Fashion Crime Scenes series used millions of dollars worth of designer clothing and accessories. 

Surprisingly - or perhaps not - Pullen claims to dislike violence. She is curious, however, about the role that violence plays within the arts and wider culture, as well as the response that people have to violent images. Her work might therefore be described not as an attempt to make violent crime seem glamorous or stylish by dressing up bodies in haute couture, but a critical examination of the way in which the horror and traumatic effect of murder, rape and suicide can be diminished via its aesthetic interpretation and/or portrayal in the media.  
 

Pullen herself has expressed concern with the way that images and descriptions of female corpses - often naked or semi-naked - are used to titilate or add sleazy sensational interest to a narrative; be it a film, a play, a news story, a coroners report ... or even a blog post.

See: Melanie Pullen, High Fashion Crime Scenes, with an introduction by Luke Crissell and essays by Robert Enright and Colin Westerbech, (Nazraelie Press, 2005), 128 pages.  

To read a sister post to this one - Notes on Izima Kaoru's Landscapes with a Corpse - please click here.

The Surreal Resurrection of Salvador Dalí

Still from a promotional video for Dalí Lives (2019)

© Salvador Dali Museum, Inc., St. Petersburg, FL.

If someday I die, though it is unlikely, I hope the people will say: 'Dali is dead - but not entirely'.

I.

I have to admit: I've never been a great fan of Dalí.

Having said that, I did once make a trip to Figueres, his hometown, in order to visit the Dalí Theatre-Museum, that's famously topped with giant eggs.

And I do love the fact that the railway station at Perpignan, which Dalí declared to be the centre of the universe after experiencing a moment of cosmogonic epiphany there in 1963, has a large sign proclaiming the fact.  

What's more, Dalí is also responsible for inspiring the title of Serge Gainsbourg's infamous love song, having once declared: "Picasso is Spanish ... me too. Picasso is a genius ... me too. Picasso is a communist ... moi non plus."

So, whilst not a fan, there are elements of his work and aspects of the man and his life that I nevertheless greatly admire. Not least of all his attitude towards death: a biological fact that he refused to believe in. Indeed, in his final public appearance (until now), Dalí made a brief statement to the effect that, because of their vital import to humanity, a genius doesn't have the right to die. 

This idea amuses me and, as someone who - despite the evidence - doesn't quite accept their own death as a future certainty, I'm sympathetic to it. That is to say, whilst I understand it's a possibility - and, since my own father died, death could even be said to run in the family - I also think that, as a writer, as long as I still have something to say, then this affords me protection.


II.

Thirty years after his death, aged 84, in January 1989, Dalí is back - proving once more that Nietzsche was right to assert that some individuals are born posthumously and that the day after tomorrow belongs to them.  

I don't know how Jesus pulled off his final stunt, but Dalí has achieved his uncanny resurrection with the assistance of the curators at the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, working in collaboration with the clever people at San Francisco ad agency Goodby Silverstein and Partners, using the very latest AI-based digital technology.

Visitors to the exhibit, which opens in April, will be able to interact with the artist via a series of screens, as well as enjoy the collection of his works. For those who can't wait or those who, like me, can't go, here's a taste of what can be experienced: click here.  

Thanks to Kosmo Vinyl for tipping me off about the exhibition and suggesting this post.

On the Anguished Lyricism of E. M. Cioran

Emil Cioran - crazy hair, crazy guy!

I.

From out of the blue comes a book in the post: a copy of E. M. Cioran's On the Heights of Despair (1934), kindly sent to me by my friend and sometimes collaborator, the Dublin-based poet Simon Solomon ...

Originally published in his native Romania, this was Cioran's first book in which many of the themes and obsessions of his mature work are already foreshadowed. It might best be described as a series of existential meditations on death, suffering and life's absurdity, in which a young writer openly borrows some of Nietzsche's more theatrical poses and mystical clown's tricks.    

Unfortunately, however, Cioran isn't ever going to be my cup of tea. Even his translator, Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, concedes that he's a specialized taste - "too sharp and bitter for many palates and, paradoxically, too lyrical and funny for some others" - though I'm not entirely sure this explains my own aversion. 

After all, I'm perfectly happy with rancorous, darkly comic authors. So perhaps, then, it is the unrestrained lyricism; the fact that there's simply too much blood, sincerity, and fire within the pages for my tastes. If only Cioran had curbed his enthusiasm - and his rhetorical flourishes - I may have found this book easier to read and enjoy.      

Of course, I've no doubt that the self-professed barbarian and passionate young fascist who authored On the Heights of Despair would brand my unlyrical (and perhaps at times even anti-lyrical) call for the exercising of caution cowardly - a sign of my own sclerosis and hollow intellectualism.  

II. 

The vital importance of lyricism to Cioran in the above work is clear from the opening section, in which he roots it in what he terms inner fluidity or spiritual effervescence - the chaotic, unconscious turmoil of the deepest self. Lyricism is thus an outward expression of profound interiority:

"One becomes lyrical when one's life beats to an essential rhythm and the experience is so intense that it synthesizes the entire meaning of one's personality."

I don't know what that sentence means and it's not one I could ever imagine writing; not even in the throes of death or some other decisively critical experience, "when the turmoil of [my] inner being reaches paroxysm". In fact, such language and such thinking is antithetical to my substantial centre of subjectivity.

Thus, I'll just have to remain a stranger to myself and to reality; a loveless being, trapped in an impersonal bubble of objectivity and "living contentedly at the periphery of things", never knowing the lyrical virtues of suffering and sickness, but vegetating in scandalous insensitivity and sanity.  

For according to Cioran, just as there's no authentic lyricism without illness, nor is there absolute lyricism "without a grain of interior madness". Indeed, the value of the lyrical mode resides precisely in its delirious and savage quality; it knows nothing of aesthetics or cultural refinement and is utterly barbarian in its expression. 

Sounding more like Bataille than Bataille, Cioran concludes his vision of excess with the following:

"Absolute lyricism is beyond poetry and sentimentalism, and closer to a metaphysics of destiny. In general, it tends to put everything on the plane of death. All important things bear the sign of death."

As a thanatologist, I agree with this last statement. Only consciousness of death and of the fact that all being is a being toward death, isn't something that I find particularly troubling. In other words, whilst I might share Cioran's nihilism, I don't experience his intense anguish and black drunkenness.

I prefer a practice of joy before death, not a practice of misery (no matter how lyrical) ...

See: E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (The University of Chicago Press, 1992).

Reflections on the Death of Steve Ditko

Steve Ditko: self-portrait (1964)

The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1

steveditko.com

Regarded by many as a thinking man's Jack Kirby, American comic-book artist and co-creator of Spider-Man, Steve Ditko, has just been announced dead, aged 90. 

To be honest, I wasn't a great fan of his work; it was a little too weird for my rather conservative and conventional tastes as a child. But I'm perfectly happy to concede his genius to those who insist upon such and know better than I.

As always when someone dies, I can't help thinking about what happens to the corpse. The immortal soul of man conceived in spiritual-personal terms is of zero interest to me. But, as a thantologist, I'm fascinated by the body's shipwreck into the nauseous and the cosmo-molecular dispersal of atoms and their eventual recycling into all kinds of things, including new life forms.   

Interestingly, it just so happens that Ditko was an Objectivist (i.e., a devotee of Ayn Rand), so he would probably have agreed that there is no supernatural or spooky-mysterious aspect to death. There are physical processes and sub-atomic particles, but no heaven, no angels, and no life-after-death as theists conceive of it.

And to imagine that the mind might somehow transcend the demise and destruction of the body is just a ludicrous fantasy. Once your brain has liquidised and dribbled like snot out of your nose, you'll not be able to worry about it. In death, one does not exist; it's not the end of the world, but it is the end of the world for you ...

And so, after a long life of approximately 780,000 hours, Ditko's atoms are in the process of ending their happy affiliation and he's about to get a whole lot skinnier ...

Reflections on the Vulture 2: The Poetic Vision of Robinson Jeffers

VULTURE

I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling high up
    in heaven,

And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit narrowing, I
    understood then
That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the flight-feathers
Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer. I could see the
    naked red head between the great wings
Beak downward staring. I said "My dear bird, we are wasting time here.
These old bones will still work; they are not for you." But how beautiful
    he'd looked, gliding down
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering away in the sea-light
    over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak and
become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes -
What a sublime end of one's body, what an enskyment; what a life after
    death.

                                                      - Robinson Jeffers (Last Poems 1953-62)

This is a very lovely poem about what is believed to be a very ugly bird and the even uglier fact of our own mortality. 

But Jeffers has the knack - as a poet in his own right and as a reader of Nietzsche - of making ugly things and terrible truths seem beautiful and desirable. Not by sugar-coating them with the lies and aesthetic illusions of moral idealism, but by placing them within the context of his own Inhumanism and affirming all things as belonging to a general economy of the whole.  

Jeffers encourages us to revel in our experience of life as is - not seek refuge from it, nor try to transform or transcend reality via flights of fancy. Like Lawrence, he wants us to intensify our perception of (and participation in) the natural world, which is red not just in tooth and claw, but also hooked beak.  

For Jeffers - a tragic poet in the noble sense - it is the sacrificial essence of existence that makes life beautiful. It's astonishing that things are born and grow; but it's equally astonishing that they decay and die. In 'Vulture', he expresses his eco-paganism in relatively simple language, but with all the visionary dynamic of a man for whom the god-stuff is roaring in all things. 

Give your heart to the hawks - but let the vultures pick over your bones ...

See: The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Tim Hunt, (Stanford University Press, 2001).

To read part one of this post - on Lawrence's philosophical dislike of vultures - click here. 
To read an earlier post on Robinson Jeffers and his Inhumanism, click here.

This post is dedicated to Simon Solomon, who introduced me to the work of Robinson Jeffers.

Sailing to Byzantium (Notes on Yeats and the Singularity)

William Butler Yeats by Tricia Danby

deviantart.com

Written in 1926, when Yeats was 61 and starting to feel his age, the poem 'Sailing to Byzantium' was published two years later in a collection entitled The Tower (1928).

Composed of four stanzas, each arranged into eight ten-syllable lines with a traditional rhyming scheme (a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c) of Italian origin much favoured by poets who go in for a mock-heroic effect - not that Yeats didn't take himself and his work very seriously indeed - it describes the metaphorical journey of a man musing on his own mortality and attempting to imagine a vision of eternal life that might provide him with posthumous hope.     

In other words, given the problem of a heart sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal, Yeats looks to art for a solution, speculating that he might be able to escape his paltry body and transfer his soul into some non-natural form - such as that of a mechanical golden bird, that sits in a fake golden tree and sings about the mysteries of time.

This quest for immortality is, for Yeats, at the heart of all spiritual yearning; a yearning that becomes increasingly acute - and increasingly desperate - with age.

What's interesting - to me at least - is not that Yeats openly expresses his contempt for imperfect nature, which, in his mind, is full of ugliness and prone to decay; for that's common among idealists who despise the softness and (sinfulness) of the flesh. It's the fact, rather, that he's equally explicit in his positing of the artificial object as superior to the natural entity in every sense, including, the aesthetico-spiritual.

Ultimately, his is a material idealism of things, including golden birds, not an immaterial idealism of disembodied minds. And his dream is of being gathered into the artifice - not the reality or truth - of eternity. Once his soul has been released from nature, he wants it to be reincarnated in a man-made object.

I thought of Yeats whilst reading an interview with Ray Kurzweil, the American author, computer whizz, and Google's director of engineering. Kurzweil is a public advocate of artificial intelligence and transhumanism who eagerly awaits the singularity - i.e., the moment when mankind fuses with its own technology, finally securing immortality and a new Byzantium; albeit a scientific utopia wherein the knowledge drive is triumphant, rather than poetic fancy.     

If Yeats fantasized about becoming a toy bird, Kurzweil hopes to have his consciousness downloaded onto his laptop and eventually transferred back to his cryogenically preserved and technologically enhanced body, which will be all ready and waiting in its vat of liquid nitrogen at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Arizona.

Both of the visions described here are anathema to me; not only as a Lawrentian, but also as a Wildean. For like the latter, I too hope that if I am to be reincarnated one day it will be as a flower - no soul but perfectly beautiful.

And for that to happen, I need to be buried in the dark soil and allowed to decompose; returned to nature, not released from it; returned to death, which, as Nietzsche says, is a return to the actual, not projected into some virtual future founded upon techno-idealism and dreams of becoming-machine. 


See: W. B. Yeats, 'Sailing to Byzantium', in The Collected Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran, (Scribner, revised paperback edition, 1996). Click here to read on the Poetry Foundation website.

Anatomy Presupposes a Waxwork Venus

Clemente Susini: Venerina (1782)

Bella Italia! Terra d'amore! And home also to some of the most exquisite art works depicting the goddess of love, including, famously, Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (c.1486) and Titian's rather more risqué Venus of Urbino (1538). Less well known - although just as exquisite in its own macabre manner - is the life-sized wax sculpture made by Clemente Susini known as the Little Venus (1782).

Anatomically accurate in every detail and vividly displaying the internal organs, this and other disemboweled beauties were primarily used for teaching purposes at a special workshop within the Natural History Museum, Florence (La Specola). But they were also put on public display for those whose intellectual curiosity terminated in thanatological voyeurism.

Feminist commentators, keen to read these figures in terms of sexual objectification and what we might term necropygmalionism, find something profoundly unsettling about them. Indeed, for Zoe Williams:

"There seems to be something blasphemous, inhumane, in creating a corpse and trying to beautify it - or rather, in considering beauty to be a necessary trait in an anatomically accurate dead body. In taking beauty to be such a critical component of womanhood, it misses, and seals in wax its own misapprehension of, what beauty is."

But one might suggest that it's Ms Williams who, in this case, misunderstands; not what beauty is, but what its function is and why we need to lend to even the most revolting of all things - death, not womanhood - an element of aesthetic delight.

The unfortunate fact is, corpses don't look great: "Their droopy, open eyes cloud over in a vacant stare. Their mouths stretch wide like Edvard Munch's The Scream. The colour drains from their faces" - and no one wants to see that; not even in wax replica. 

As Nietzsche wrote: We need art so that we don't perish from the truth ...


See: Zoe Williams, 'Cadavers in pearls: meet the Anatomical Venus', The Guardian, 17 May, 2016 - click here. 

Note: the description of the corpse and its horrific nature is by Caitlin Doughty; Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, (Canongate Books, 2016), p. 116. 

Those interested in knowing more about this topic might care to read Joanna Ebenstein's beautifully illustrated book, The Anatomical Venus, (Thames and Hudson Ltd., 2016).

Corpus Delicti (With Reference to the Case of D. H. Lawrence)

Death is always an inconvenience. Not so much for the deceased; for trust me, corpses don't care. But for those who are left with the problem of disposal; be these grieving relatives, or fastidious killers hoping to cover up all traces of their victim and their crime.  

Fortunately, there are several long-accepted methods of disposal; including the top two, burial and burning. But even these ancient methods present problems. In the case of cremation, for example, there's the question of what to do with the ashes; stick 'em in a ghastly urn and put granny on the mantelpiece, or scatter them to the four winds and risk the unpleasant humiliation of having them blow back in one's face. 

The English novelist D. H. Lawrence was famously first buried in Vence, where he died in 1930, and then, five years later, exhumed and cremated on Frieda's orders by her Italian lover and third husband to be, Angelo Ravagli. 

As to what happened to Lawrence's ashes, this has become subject to confusion and controversy. Ravagli was supposed to transport them to the ranch in New Mexico, where a suitable shrine had been built. Frieda had even provided a lovely little vase. But it seems likely that Ravagli simply threw them away (possibly into the harbour at Marseilles) and then filled the urn with a handful of dust upon his return to America. 

Frieda never knew. As far as she was concerned, she'd brought Lawrence back to the place they'd been happiest and sealed his fate by mixing his ashes into a concrete block in order to prevent anyone from stealing them and, symbolically, to prevent him from wandering in death without her. 

Lawrence's biographer, John Worthen, suggests that Ravagli did Lawrence a favour by rescuing him from his wife's posthumous plans: 

"Lawrence may finally have managed to evade her ... and to finish his career solitary, free, unhoused, with no lid sealing him down or block containing him: scattered, perhaps into the estranging sea he had so often contemplated."

John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, (Allen Lane / Penguin Books, 2005), p. 418. 

Amorous Ruin (Or Why Nick Land Makes Bad Boyfriend Material) #TBT

In the name of Love, the amorous subject is prepared to burn himself up to the point of destruction within that exhausting wound like a madman for whom duration has no meaning. If we are blessed with enough courage and good fortune, he says, then the object of our desire is the one most likely to destroy us.  

For the terrible truth is that we have no real happiness except that of ruinous expenditure. What makes blissful is to betray the world of utility, the world of work, the world of self-preservation:

"Erotic passion has no tolerance for health, not even bare survival. It is for this reason that love is the ultimate illness and crime. Nothing is more incompatible with the welfare of the human species."

This is certainly the case when love is unrequited:

"One wastes away; expending health and finances in orgies of narcosis, breaking down one’s labour-power to the point of destruction, pouring one's every thought into an abyss of consuming indifference. At the end of such a trajectory lies the final breakage of health, ruinous poverty, madness and suicide."

But it can also be the case even when love is returned:

"There are times when the morbid horror of love infects the beloved, or one is oneself infected by the passion of another, or two strains of love collide, so that both spiral together into a helix of strangely suspended disintegration … Each competes to be destroyed by the other … to exceed the other in mad vulnerability. When propelled by an extremity of impatience this can lead to suicide …" 

Or murder.

Of course, it has to be admitted that neither outcome is common; most lovers seek security within the confines of bourgeois marriage and "conspire to protect each other from the lethal destiny of their passion … relapsing into the wretched sanity of mutual affection".

But, asks Nick Land, isn’t it the case that a love that doesn’t end tragically is always at some basic level disappointed ...?

See: Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992), pp. 189-90. 

Note: this is a revised extract from a paper presented at Treadwell's on 28 Feb, 2006 as part of a lecture series entitled Thanatology. Those interested in reading a related thanatological fragment should click here. 

The Test on Miriam

Heather Sears and Dean Stockwell as Miriam Leivers and Paul Morel 

Sons and Lovers (dir. Jack Cardiff, 1960)

An anonymous member of the D. H Lawrence Society has emailed to complain that in a recent post I "inaccurately and unfairly portray the actions of Paul Morel towards Miriam as cruel and rather sordid".

If only, they continue, I "understood more about their relationship and the complex character of love", then I would be able to see that "Paul throws the cherries at the girl with affection in a teasing, playful manner" and his subsequent seduction of her in the pine woods is "an expression of phallic tenderness".

I think the only way I can answer this criticism is by looking closely at the text in question; Chapter XI of Sons and Lovers, entitled - tellingly enough I would have thought - 'The Test on Miriam'.   

Firstly, it's true that Paul feels real tenderness for Miriam. But although he courts her like a kindly lover, what he really wants is to experience the impersonality of passion. That is to say, he wants to fuck her dark, monstrous cunt oozing with slime, not stare into her lovely eyes all lit up with sincerity of feeling. Her gaze, so earnest and searching, makes him look away. Paul bitterly resents Miriam always bringing him back to himself; making him feel small and tame and all-too-human.    

And so, in my view at least, when he throws the cherries at her, in a state of cherry delirium, he does so with anger and aggression - not affection, or playfulness. He tears off handful after handful of the fruit and literally pelts her with them. Startled and frightened, Miriam runs for shelter whilst Paul laughs demonically from atop the tree and meditates on death and her vulnerability: so small, so soft.   

When, finally, Paul climbs down (ripping his shirt in the process), he convinces the girl to walk with him into the woods: "It was very dark among the firs, and the sharp spines pricked her face. She was afraid. Paul was silent and strange." Lawrence continues, in a manner which suggests that whatever else phallic tenderness may be, it isn't something that acknowledges the individuality, independence, or needs of actual women:

"He seemed to be almost unaware of her as a person: she was only to him then a woman. She was afraid. He stood against a pine-tree trunk and took her in his arms. She relinquished herself to him, but it was a sacrifice in which she felt something of horror. This thick-voiced, oblivious man was a stranger to her."

And thus Paul takes Miriam's virginity (and loses his own): in the rain, among the strong-smelling trees, and with a heavy-heart; "he felt as if nothing mattered, as if his living were smeared away into the beyond ..." Miriam is disconcerted (to say the least) by his post-coital nihilism: "She had been afraid before of the brute in him: now of the mystic."

Anyway, I leave it to readers to decide for themselves whether my portrayal of Paul - and my reading of Lawrence - is inaccurate and unfair. Or whether my anonymous correspondent and critic has, like many Lawrentians, such a partisan and wholly positive view of their hero-poet - and such a cosy, romantic view of his work - that they entirely miss the point of the latter and do the former a great disservice. 


See: D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron, (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

It is interesting to note that Lawrence makes the same connection between cherries, sex, cruelty and death in his poem 'Cherry Robbers', which anticipates the scene in Sons and Lovers described above. Click here to read the verse.

A Thanatological Fragment

First she decided she no longer wanted to go out. Then she decided she no longer wanted to get up. Finally, in death, decision making was no longer an issue and her house-bound, bed-bound days gave way to a period of violent decomposition during which the religious-minded believe souls to be heaven-bound, when really it's merely a return of hydro-carbon atoms to the material world, having broken free from their imprisonment in a particular life-form. 

Whether we like it or not, matter is always struggling to escape essence and to abandon vital complexity; always seeking to return to a state of inanimate simplicity. Our bodies have no loyalty to their own organization or substance; they continually decay and race towards catastrophe (we call this ageing). 

But we shouldn't reify death, nor confuse the fact of our own individual death with non-being. At most, death might be seen as a temporary pause or refreshment before the inevitable return to what Nick Land describes as the compulsive dissipation of life. This sounds a bit like mysticism, but science will confirm that organisms are so vigorously recycled at death that every atom we possess will have already been part of many millions of earlier living (and non-living) things. 

Thus, whilst there is no personal survival of death - the self is destroyed and not simply transformed or spirited away from the scene of the crime at the last instance - we do house and reincarnate the atomic souls of the dead. This is why death is always our affair and why, ultimately, Nietzsche was right to say that being alive is simply a very rare and unusual way of being dead. 

I thought this in 2006 and I still think it now: I find it helps as I watch my mother, who is 88, and recently diagnosed with dementia, slip away ...

Necrophilia

www.hotdog.hu

The eroticised encounter with death is not something that many persons actively seek out. And those who do enjoy romancing corpses mostly do so in silence. And secrecy. And shame. Necrophilia remains one of the very few forms of love that still daren't speak its name and which hasn't been co-opted by mainstream society or made chic within the media.

The relationship between sex and death is, however, extremely intimate and long established and eroticism would be a fairly insipid state of affairs if this were not the case. For as Bataille points out, it is the latter that ensures the power of the former and only in conjunction do they constitute the tragedy of human existence. 

What do those who love long hair and sharp nails imagine excites them after all?

Even the Dead Don't Rest in Peace

Georges Bataille was not mistaken when he spoke of death as a shipwreck into the nauseous and repeatedly emphasized the excremental nature of the corpse which, thanks to putrefaction, rapidly dissolves into noxious base matter. 

First to go, as home to the greatest number of bacteria, are the digestive organs and the lungs. The brain also soon liquifies, as it is nice and soft and easy to digest. The massively expanding numbers of bacteria in the mouth chew through the palate and transform grey matter into goo. Quite literally, it runs out of the ears and bubbles like snot from the nose; in this manner, we're all destined to lose our minds. 

After three or four weeks, all of the internal organs will have become soup. Muscle tissue is frequently eaten not only by bacteria, but also by carnivorous beetles. Sometimes the skin gets consumed as well, sometimes not. Depending on the weather and other environmental conditions, it might just dry out and naturally mummify. Whatever remains, however, will be obliged to lie in a stinking pool of organic filth, or a coffin full of shit. 

Burial might serve to prolong the process of decomposition, but it certainly doesn't prevent it or delay it indefinitely. As Mary Roach in her amusing study, Stiff (2003), writes: "Eventually any meat, regardless of what you do to it, will whither and go off." Only the skeletal structure beneath the soft pathology of the flesh will last for any significant period of time. But bones too - just like laws and monuments - are ultimately destined to crumble into dust.

Thus we have little real choice but to accept the biological fact that life dies. But is this the end of the story? No. The truth is, we never stop dying because, in a material, non-personal, inhuman manner, we never stop living. In other words, it's mistaken to confuse our individual death with non-being.

"Is it because we want to believe in the loyalty of our substance that we make this peculiar equation?" asks Nick Land.* Probably the answer to this is yes. But it's a somewhat shameful answer. 

For whether we like to believe it or not, matter is always struggling to escape essence and to abandon complex existence; always seeking to return to a state of inanimate and blissful simplicity. Our bodies have no allegiance to life and do not seek to stave off disintegration or shut out death. They grow into the embrace of the latter (we term this ageing) and our mass of atoms enjoy a veritable orgy of delight after having broken free from their temporary entrapment in life.

Unfortunately for them, they don't get to enjoy their freedom for long. For death proves to be but a "temporary refreshment ... before the rush back into the compulsive dissipation of life".* Which is to say, atoms are so vigorously recycled at death that they don't ever get to rest in peace. 

It further means that we, the living, all house and reincarnate the carbon atoms of the departed and in this way the souls of the dead might be said to re-enter and pervade the souls of the living. Thanks to the conservation of mass, we can legitimately declare ourselves to be 'all the names in history'.    

* See: Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, (Routledge, 1992), p. 180. 

The Hour of the Star

To think is to confine yourself to a 

single thought that one day stands 

still like a star in the world's sky.

And what is this single thought? 

Arguably, it's the thought of death: death is the single thought of philosophy. And it's the single thought also of Clarice Lispector's great work, A hora da estrela, to which this Heideggerian verse could very fittingly serve as an epigraph. 

The hour of the star is the hour of death. And although Macabéa doesn't choose death (she certainly never contemplates suicide), death nevertheless chooses her and is present throughout the story. When she is killed at the end of the novel, it is something towards which she and we, as readers, are long prepared.

The Hour of the Star also happens to be Lispector's final work; published in 1977, the year of her death. It is thus a profound meditation upon her own mortality and that plunge into the void which is death. It is not easy to think death honestly and courageously; to make of death something uniquely one's own rather than belonging to the world of biological fact and universal extinction. 

'Everything in the world began with a yes', says the narrator of the work. That is to say, with an affirmation. And that includes death. For the same promiscuity of molecules which gave rise to life also gives birth to death and knowing how to die means also knowing how to live. If you have never lived, then you can never truly die: merely break down like a machine. Thus it isn't nihilism to affirm our own mortality, but, on the contrary, an anti-nihilism; the active negation of the idealism which would deny life and refuse death. 

Macabéa is representative of the millions of young girls to be found like her living in poverty, working a dead-end job, unwashed, uneducated and uncared for. But she is also a singular creature and, in death, she paradoxically comes into her own being at last; she is the star whose hour has arrived.

She might be empty-headed, but she has a strong inner-life and, without knowing it, Macabéa spends most of her time meditating on nothingness whilst listening to Radio Clock count away the minutes. Almost, she might be said to embody the fatal secret of the void; she is a black hole, hardly existing in human terms, as well as a tiny sun.

And so, when lying by the roadside with her eyes turned towards the gutter and the blades of grass that grow near the drain down which her blood trickles away, Macabéa thinks to herself: 'Today is the dawn of my existence: I am born.'

People gather around and whilst they do nothing to help the poor girl, they are finally obliged to acknowledge her presence in the world. It is a scene strangely reminiscent of one in Dickens, much loved by Deleuze, wherein someone held in contempt by society is found on the verge of death; for a brief moment their life takes on singular import.

"As she lay there, she felt the warmth of supreme happiness ... There was even a suggestion of sensuality ... Macabéa's expression betrayed a grimace of desire", writes Lispector, thereby overtly eroticizing the moment of death. For in death, Macabéa surrenders not just her life, but her virginity. Death fucks her into full being as well as non-being and it is an experience she finds "as pleasurable, tender, horrifying, chilling and penetrating as love".

She manages to speak one final sentence. In a clear and distinct voice, Macabéa says: As for the future. It is not understood by any of the onlookers present. But we know, of course, as readers of Heidegger, precisely what this means.

[Note: quotations taken from The Hour of the Star, trans. Giovanni Pontiero, Carcenet Press, 1992.]

Revenge of the Immortals

One of the more controversial ideas that Baudrillard put forward was the final solution, by which he referred to the extermination of sex and death and the return of humanity to a desexualized, non-individuated state of being prior to our becoming mortal and discontinuous.

Thanks to recent scientific advances, this dream of becoming-amoeba, or, as it is more commonly called, cloning, is no longer simply the stuff of fiction or neo-Platonic fantasy. There seems to be a general acceptance of the fact that we are about to be replaced either by machines, or a new species which will be sexless and immortal. No one seems particularly troubled by the prospect of a transhuman future and, ironically, whilst we speak endlessly about the right to life, it is the right to death that is being taken from us. 

In a crucial passage, Baudrillard notes: 

"Contrary to everything we ordinarily believe, nature first created immortal beings, and it was only by winning the battle for death that we became the living beings that we are. Blindly, we dream of defeating death and achieving immortality, whereas that is our most tragic destiny, a destiny inscribed in the previous life of our cells."

     - Impossible Exchange, trans. Chris Turner, (Verso, 2001), pp. 27-8

Relating his theories of evolution and cloning not only to the history of Western metaphysics, but also to modern sexual politics, Baudrillard argues that by dissociating erotic activity from procreation and reproduction from sex, fucking is increasingly regarded as a useless function; just as gender differences become irrelevant. 

Death too, it seems, is fated to become a useless function and, in the longer term, something inconceivable. Perhaps the time will come when the beings who come after us will try to understand something of our joys and sorrows by simulating a virtual experience of mortality; perhaps they will long nostalgically for nights shaken with terror and ecstasy and for what Houellebecq terms the possibility of an island.   

Snow

It's snowing and I hate it: the ice-cold wetness and the silent whiteness that isolates the soul and surrounds the heart with frozen air. 

It makes one think of poor Gerald stumbling towards his death amidst sheer mountain slopes; the terrible snowy landscape offering promise of eternal rest.  

Senescence

People - especially women over 35 who hold degrees in psychology - like to talk about spiritual growth and personal development, but are much less keen to talk about biological ageing.

Partly, this is because the violent changes to molecular and cellular structure over time invariably result in deterioration and death and no matter how priests, poets, and philosophers might like to dress it up, there's nothing fun about growing old and no one dies with dignity. In fact, death is the ultimate loss of dignity: a shipwreck into the nauseous, as Bataille so charmingly puts it.

The precise etiology of senescence is still largely undetermined and the process seems to be complex. Nevertheless, you can see it every time you look in the mirror, or, as here, by simply placing a series of photographs side by side showing the full ravages of time and decade after decade of fading youth and the failure of homeodynamics.