BLOOM - a memorial for the inanimate 

“In 2003 a building housing the Massachusetts Mental Health Center (MMHC) was slated for demolition to make way for updated facilities. The closure was a time for reflection and remembrance as the MMHC had been in operation for over 9 decades and had touched countless thousands of patients and employees alike, and the pending demolition presented a unique problem. How does one memorialize a building impossibly rich with a history of both hope and sadness, and do it in a way that reflects not only the past but also the future? And could this memorial be open to the public, not as a speech, or series of informational plaques, but as an experience worthy of they building’s unique story?

To answer that question artist Anna Schuleit was commissioned to do the impossible. After an initial tour of the facility she was struck not with what she saw but with what she didn’t see: the presence of life and color. While historically a place of healing, the drab interior, worn hallways, and dull paint needed a respectful infusion of hope. With a limited budget and only three months of planning Schuleit and an enormous team of volunteers executed a massive public art installation called Bloom. The concept was simple but absolutely immense in scale. Nearly 28,000 potted flowers would fill almost every square foot of the MMHC including corridors, stairwells, offices and even a swimming pool, all of it brought to life with a sea of blooms. The public was then invited for a limited 4 day viewing as a time for needed reflection and rebirth.”  - via thisiscolossal.com

(Source: thisiscolossal.com)

“someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.” - Virginia Woolf from The Hours

-photo by Aëla Labbé

james wright poem—“back to my skull, that is our face”

and why should burying my father’s father

feel more like digging up a grave

than putting someone in it?

i thought we dropped that shovel

18 years ago, half of my blood

my father’s frozen fist 

under a cold midwestern snow.

dad used to say the size of the fist 

is equal to the size of the heart,

and from ear to stethoscope to breastbone

we hear lub dub.

(he preferred luv dub.)

so caught in a tangle of emotion

i held that shovel yesterday

a child again

hoping

that digging a grave for my grandfather

aside the now frozen ash of my father

would find me palms down

amongst earthworms, springtime and bulbs

piercing into frozen fists and bleeding them back to life.

pulsing that half of my blood from black

to red, luv dub.

but i’m not that child 

and the shovel is too heavy.

and springtime is in my fists now

not theirs.

We begin, we journey, we return.   Just like our salmon friends.  

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.