Alive in a cemetery (day 190)

Just got back from the fourth installment of Paul Wong's 5 Projects.  This time it was at the MountainView cemetery.  For some reason before I went there I had visions of Halloween with spooky soundtracks and disturbing images.  It wasn't that at all.  Turns out Paul has a fascination with death in a way that I can relate to.  There were 16 works in total, each really interesting.  Some highlights:

• Vigil 5.2 - Video documentation of Rebecca Belmore's performance at the Talking Stick Festival in 2002.  She wrote the names of the missing women in the DTES on her body and screamed out their names then ripped the leaves and petals off of flowers with her mouth.  She also nailed her dress to a pole and ripped it free.  Repeatedly.  A lot of grief.
• 60 Unit; Bruise - First colour video from Western Front, 1976.  Paul Wong and Kenneth Fletcher exchange blood.  The video was shown at Kenneth's grave site.  He committed suicide two years after the video was shot.
• in ten sity - an intense dance piece shot from above a padded room where bodies throw themselves about the room and each other.  Dedicated to Kenneth Fletcher.  It was projected on a petal-covered sheet underneath a tree.  A lot of grief and frustration and energy.
• Burka - slide show of soldiers killed in Afghanistan.  The slide show was projected on the wall, with a woman (mannequin) in a burka looking at it, lit from the inside.  She is standing on what seems like traditional carpets but upon closer inspection there were woven guns and war machinery on them.  The soundtrack is a machine voice.  I wasn't able to quite make out what it was saying. It was interesting to see all the faces.  Some looked very disconnected and dead even while alive.  Others looked completely normal and happy.
• Hungry Ghosts - A five channel piece about death.  Different types of deaths, rituals around death, talk around death, violent death, natural death.  A really touching piece.

Many other interesting pieces.  The setting of the cemetery was really amazing.  This was the best of the projects so far in my opinion.  Everything worked really well together.  I'm glad I went and gave it some time.

A song for this post.

The last breath (day 16)

There will be a last breath.  Just like there was a first.   Sometimes I visualize the last breath and what it might be like to not breathe in again.  Would it be better to know and be absolutely conscious of the last breath?  In that case, would the last breath be somewhat willed?  How is it that whatever it is that makes us breathe in again just doesn't activate after the last breath?  Is that when the fear sets in?  Is it like drowning or floating?   Or maybe the last few breaths are more and more willed until you realize that you are just delaying the inevitable.  The last breath is then the final renunciation.  In some ways I prefer that scenario because it allows for a certain control about when the last breath will be.  The first scenario is much more of an imposition.

I have a friend who was declared dead for a few moments before being revived.  She says that first breath back was violent and highly unwelcome.  She had been going somewhere better.  Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor also died for a moment when she had a stroke and she speaks of not knowing how she would ever get back into her body, her consciousness having become so spacious.   It's almost as if the breath is the thing that keeps us attached to our bodies.  Our consciousness passes through it like a funnel and becomes contained by it, by its rhythm and boundaries.

It's maddening that so many humans have had a last breath and yet each one of us has to wonder what it's like still.  And when I go through it, if I'm conscious, I wonder if I'll have the unsatisfiable urge to tell everyone.

A song for this post.

Spend to live another day (day 6)

A few months ago I finished listening to the audio version of the book "The denial of death" by Ernest Becker (I don't really recommend the audiobook, it's a bit relentless. But I do recommend the documentary "Flight from Death" derived from the book). The book postulates that our refusal to look at death directly makes us blindly spend our energy to "immortality projects", thing that will transcend death or make us feel part of a greater whole that will live on. It can also increase our intolerance of those who don't support our grand project. One example is the nationalistic feeling that compels us to support the troops, or whatever else is meant to make the 'us' bigger than 'them'. If asked I bet most people would assume that if our life was longer, trending to immortality say, our fear of death would diminish. The point made in the book which has stayed with me is that accidental death would not disappear and that if the possibility of living forever existed, our preservation extinct would increase in proportion. The example they give is that it is much more tragic to die at 7 if you could live forever. This is probably why vampires are always given super healing powers with very specific ways to die. If dying was too easy, the immortality would be meaningless. If there was no way to die, the immortality would be a life sentence. The other problem with immortality (one that was beautifully illustrated in the last Godric episode of True Blood) is that laziness would be rampant. Why do today what you could do tomorrow? Death is a powerful motivator. And not just big death, all the little deaths too. We do a lot to keep things from deteriorating. It is an interesting exercise to think of what motivation might exist outside it, or in spite of it.

We want to live forever. It's true, the fear of death permeates our being and influences the amount of the risk we are willing to take. This is why most of us take fewer risks as we get older. I would even say that it's why most of us gain weight as we get older. It's a protection instinct. We think if we expend less of our life energy we'll have more later -- a savings account approach to life which turns out to have disastrous consequences. The less you move, the sicker you get. That's just the way it goes. I think it's probably best to embrace the impermanence and just spend spend spend that life energy.