Hamburg-based photographer Carsten Witte creates a series of portraits that are a strangely gorgeous juxtaposition between external beauty and and it’s imminent shelf life.  He states “One main idea behind my work is the belief that everything is constantly changing but photography can preserve the moment. Beauty is almost nothing without the knowledge of how fast it will fade…”     

(Source: thisiscolossal.com)

Candy Chang is an artist who explores making cities more comfortable and contemplative places.  Her project Before I Die is expanding to cities around the world, including New Orleans, Amsterdam, Portsmouth, Querétaro, Almaty, San Diego, Lisbon, Brooklyn and London where she turns abandoned houses and buildings into giant, living chalkboards where residents can write their hopes and dreams. 

(Source: candychang.com)

Chilean painter Fernano Gómez Balbontín works with the subject of death and vehicle accidents.  Haunting and strangely whimsical, this series makes me wonder if a bath of pastel and fancy surrounded my dad when his soul slipped away on Hwy 43. 

(Source: emptykingdom.com)

NOX - Anne Carson

“I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds,” Carson begins in Nox, written for her estranged brother ten years dead. “But death makes us stingy.”  Noxis a history as well as an elegy, charting her brother’s life through memories, photographs and letters, and recording Carson’s own process of translating Catullus’ poem 101, an elegy for a brother.  The methodical, laborious working out of the mechanics of the poem becomes a metaphor for the way we live with loss and absence, not as a sudden happening, but as a practice, as a condition of being. Carson takes us into grief but also the process of computing it, while simultaneously allowing us to witness the impossible project of translating it from private to public experience.

Nox is marvelously designed as an accordion book (it comes in a box)- you can turn the pages one by one or spread out many at a time.  The book consists of a series of English definitions for each Latin word of the Catullus poem pasted in from a dictionary (they are both found poems and found objects), accompanied by Carson’s prose poems that double as translator’s notes.  In between are Photostats of letters, envelopes, postage stamps, and black-and-white childhood photographs with ribbed edges.  “It is when you are asking about something that you realize you yourself have survived it,” Carson writes, “and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing that carries itself.”  The book, the thing that carries itself, is composed with a fierce sense for its materiality; where Carson has made a drawing, smudges of pencil are preserved on the opposite page, or the impression of the pencil tip recorded on its back, as though we were turning the pages of someone’s journal or scrapbook, an object recently marked up, seething with life.

Carson is the quintessential scholar-poet.  A Classicist, she has translated Euripides, Aeschylus, and the complete fragments of Sappho, and her most lauded work, the verse novel Autobiography in Red (1998), is an eccentric modern day telling of the Greek myth of Geryon.  Carson appropriates the often clinical, precise language of scholarship in her creative work, blurring the distinction between the essay and the poem, the cerebral and the emotional, but it’s more than just affect.  The essay and the poem have in common the attempt to scale the vast, senseless world down to human size.  The role of argument and logic in Nox is to show how inadequate these devices are, but never to mock them, or our reliance on them; more importantly, Carson demonstrates and observes the way we persistently use what we can, what is available, to capture unspeakable, unattainable experience.

Carson’s voice is candid, uncompromising, full of furious calculation.  “His voice was like his voice with something else crusted on it, black, dense,” she writes of a phone conversation with her brother after his flight.  In passages like these, when Carson turns to descriptions of her mother and brother and those specific, stilted encounters with them overflowing with complex feeling, she is at her most vulnerable and her most generous.  Nox is about the metaphysics of life and death and the translator’s imperative, but maybe most importantly it is a book about custom—the rituals we build up around death and the persistence of life, the gulfs between people so close they don’t know how to speak to each other, the alienation of family, the inadequacy of language as our only recourse for telling out stories.

In a way, custom is also the defining feature of translation, which mixes creativity with duty, infinite possibility with finite meaning.  The poem is a closed room, Carson says, “not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch.  I guess it never ends.  I prowl him.  He does not end.”  Translation, grief, personhood—each is at once expansive and limited, more than itself and no more than itself, like the accordion book that can spread the length of a corridor or fold back into itself, like the sprawling dictionary entries that list so many minute gradations of just one thing. Nox is mystifying and exquisite, and, to reverse Carson’s metaphor, it opens doors that won’t close—even once you fold the book back into its box, you remain inside it.

review written by Amanda Shubert for www.full-stop.net

sarahannloreth:

Death Looking into the Window of One Dying c.1900 | Jaroslav Panuška

(Source: mutagens)

“there’s only one word to describe the picture here, and that’s grief.  and much of it.”

(Source: erwinolaf.com)

“he then greeted death as an old friend, and went with him gladly, to parting this life as equals.”  

(Source: youtube.com)

Sculptor Manuel Martí Moreno lives and works in Valencia, Spain and forms these figurative pieces out of iron nuts.  He explains on www.thisiscolossal.com that he is “most interested in showing the passage of time, the transience of life, and our collective awareness of our own mortality, seemingly evidenced by the specter of decay at the edges of his work.”

(Source: martimoreno.blogspot.com)

New York Times invited readers to contribute photographs of someone close to them who died this year.  This is just a snapshot of the page that, once opened, just keeps loading new images.  Heartfelt and heart wrenching.  Farewell brave souls.  

City Room: Preserving Memories of Pets, and Then Some

Some pet owners will go to extreme lengths to preserve their pets long after they are dead, and Amy Finkel is working on a documentary of their efforts.

(and sometimes we grieve the inanimate)

State Park Road, Wisconsin

faithful backbone

etched with storied pot-holes and grit,

you are the pocked face of a midwestern parade queen

waving and reaching your quiet song,

proud and natural and knowing.

summon your horizontal kingdom

and we bow in awe.

 

at the climax of summer’s romance, 

you are unbuttoned and sweating, 

your poise an upward reception 

of bicycle tires and slow fertilizing feet.

you yawn and sway like a hammock as

crickets and manure hypnotize themselves 

into feeling beautiful.

 

and you reach on.

leaves turn orange,

men follow.

orange cap and overalls 

hot orange tang in an orange mug 

crisscross ribbons across your spine

and mock the slain flesh that emerges,

still wild-eyed from dog day’s deception.

glittered frost and your stained rosy cheeks

hush the horror and leave summer ashamed 

and naked in her naivete.

 

and you reach on,

frozen puddles bow to frozen sky 

bows to frozen breath.

even the sparkle of deceit 

now fades under a gown of black,

so black it’s white.  so white, decades of roadkill 

at last feel tucked in for the night

and wonder if their souls have been saved.

slow feet are now no feet,

slow cars are now ditched cars.

your vertebrae is calloused

and unforgiving

as pulseless life forgets the impulse to live.

 

and you reach on,

bones creak and new expressive fractures

threaten your beauty queen poise.

but you laugh 

as light and shadow only make you more regal 

and the hum of 

a million winged harbingers

swarm to anoint you with the green 

stench of another cycle.

and you receive them.

their dark water chant hovers over your breast.

and you love them,

their imbecile promise of rebirth despite time’s ultimatum.

pocked and mud-puddled and devoted

you call to the horizon

unfurl the mess and insanity of your eternal wingspan

 and reach on. 

Portland band Starfucker’s official Bury Us Alive video.  Flesh to dirt to flowers. That’s it, isn’t it.  

Dead Man’s Bones performing ‘Name In Stone’ live in a cemetery with L.A. Inner Mass Choir and The Silverlake Conservatory of Music Children’s Choir.

A Sister’s Eulogy for Steve Jobs

At a memorial service for her brother, Mona Simpson recalled his love of beauty and his family, and his final moments.

For Miami graffiti artist Typoe, death vomits rainbows.  

(Source: 24flinching.com)