To preserve the living, and make the dead to live

One of the great highlights of my recent trip to Kassel was a visit to the Museum für Sepulkralkultur, which is, surprisingly, a bright and airy modern building housing the most incredible collection of objects associated with death, funeral practice and mourning rites. How pleasant it was, as the sunlight streamed through the windows, to be walking amongst coffins and skulls, so beautifully preserved and cased, like precious objects. Because these things are precious, they are the stuff of us.

The Encyclopedia of Death and Dying (a truly wonderful internet resource) says this about the phenomena of the ‘death museum’:

The fact that the museums are relatively new or still in their founding or building phases seems to indicate a changing attitude toward death and dying. Questions about dying with dignity, modern forms of funeral services, or an adequate way of mourning and remembrance are more insistent in the twenty-first century than they were in the 1980 … These museums primarily foster a culture-historical approach related to the public interest in history, culture, and the arts. Therefore, collections and exhibitions focus strongly on the impressive examples of funeral and cemetery culture, pictorial documents of these events, and curiosities.

But the idea of a museum of funeral culture would have come as no surprise to Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth century physician and philosopher, whose essay Urne-Buriall is still one of the most eloquent and moving considerations on the disposal of human remains:

When the Funerall pyre was out, and the last valediction was over, men took a lasting adieu of their interred Friends, little expecting the curiosity of future ages should comment upon their ashes, and having no old experience of the duration of their Reliques, held no opinion of such after considerations.

But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? Who hath the Oracle of his ashes, or whether they are to be scattered? The Reliques of many lie like the ruines of Pompeys, in all parts of the earth; And when they arrive at your hands, theses may seem to have wandered far, who in a direct and Meridian Travell, have but few miles of known Earth between your self and the Pole.

The way Browne introduces his subject in those opening lines moves his readers from a consideration of ‘men’, i.e. ‘mankind’, through a series of rhetorical questions, to face themselves, through his direct second-person address, as he asks them to imagine holding the relics of the dead, like Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull.

Thus, the museum of death is a place that each of us should visit, not only as a way of coming to terms with our own fate, but as a way of preserving those who have come before. In my previous posts, I have mentioned how Kassel is a place that never lets us forget the past, and so perhaps it is a particularly appropriate location not only for such thoughts, but also for a building that gathers historical and cultural archives about how we honour the dead, established for the purposes of education and research. We will never be able to examine the subject completely dispassionately (as, apart from birth, it is the one thing that all of us will share and experience) but instead of living in fear of death, perhaps we can make use of it, as Browne says:

to preserve the living, and make the dead to live, to keep men out of their Urnes, and discourse of humane fragments in them, is not impertinent unto our profession; whose study is life and death, who daily behold examples of mortality, and of all men least need artificial memento’s, or coffins by our bed side, to minde us of our graves.

http://www.deathreference.com/index.html

http://www.sepulkralmuseum.de/en/home1.html

photos by Amy Stein

The invisible ruin

One of my favourite books, In Ruins, considers our perpetual fascination and joy at the sight of a crumbled wall or toppled tower. Its author, the art historian Christopher Woodward, writes:

When we contemplate ruins, we contemplate our own future. To statesmen, ruins predict the fall of Empires, and to philosophers the futility of mortal man’s aspirations. To a poet, the decay of a monument represents the dissolution of the individual ego in the flow of Time; to a painter or architect, the fragments of a stupendous antiquity call into question the purpose of their art. Why struggle with a brush or chisel to create the beauty of wholeness when far greater works have been destroyed by Time?

Yet in the last hundred years, perhaps since the notion of Total War was born, we are far more likely to rip it up and start again. It was certainly necessary to rebuild from scratch in the wake of bombs that destroyed entire cities (as evidenced in my recent trip to Kassel). Those parts of London which were particularly targeted are conspicuous in their uniform 60s architecture – the Elephant and Castle immediately springs to mind. But the recent (and completely brilliant) BBC documentary The History of Our Streets also told of a desire on the part of local councils to sweep away the old and replace it with the new (sort of like Mussolini’s plans for Rome). Blocks and blocks of perfectly sturdy Victorian terraces were demolished to make way for modern tower blocks (a number of which have already been condemned and torn down, while Victorian housing steadfastly remains standing). It was the Poet Laureate of the day, Sir John Betjeman, who spearheaded the twentieth-century campaign to save older buildings of architectural merit from the wrecking ball. The organisation that he started, SPAB (the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings) continues his work to this day by assigning listed status to buildings in an effort to protect them for the future.

I’m not saying that old is always necessarily better, but more that sometimes it is valuable to remember what came before. The character of London, that mix of ancient and modern, was to a large degree, determined by where the bombs fell, but it usefully shows us who were are and who we were at the same time.

Back to Kassel, where that character is harder to determine. As I mentioned in my last post, 90% of the city centre was annihilated, and so there was little left standing to preserve. Although the Fridericianum was completely rebuilt in 18th century-style, the impulse was to start from scratch, and so most of the centre is permanently locked in the 60s and 70s.

Which is why Tacita Dean’s piece for Documenta 13 is so fascinating. As a long-standing resident of Berlin, Dean understands the impulse to start again (although Berlin, as I’ve said before, is a great city for the recycling of buildings, and you can find traces of the Wall marked in a discreet pathway beneath your feet). She has collected a number of pre-war postcards of Kassel, showing views of the old city centre, and has painted over them to show what stands there now. In my previous post, I talked about my friend Siriol Troup and how she likes to go round Kassel with a guidebook from 1901; Dean’s piece stems from a similar desire – to understand what came before, what it was like before your time.

To understand what it was like before your time is the second dimension to the piece. Dean then sent the cards by post to Kabul c/o Jolyon Leslie, the former CEO of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. But the project is dedicated to another Jolyon, her late father. So she sent postcards of a place which no longer exists because of war destruction to a place which is currently going through what Kassel went through nearly seventy years ago; and addressed them to a man who shares a name with the father of the artist, who is no longer alive to receive them. The piece seems then to be about inheritance, noting things that have disappeared so that future generations do not forget to record what they have before it is gone.

A related installation is about bringing Kabul to Kassel, having already sent Kassel to Kabul. In the staircase of an ex-finance office (an older building, possibly from the twenties, which survived the bombs) Dean has installed a large panorama of the rivers and mountains of Afghanistan. These are drawn on chalk on large blackboards, so that the viewer could be a child in a classroom learning of this distant place which is being obliterated from the map (I remember a similar experience when I was growing up, learning about Viet Nam while the country in which I lived was destroying it). The chalkboards could also represent the fleeting nature of the landscape (which, like chalk, can be wiped away), although there is something more permanent about a mountain or a river than about man’s built environment, which can be toppled with one smart bomb.

Dean’s double work for Documenta is one of the most moving and beautiful I have seen recently which represents both our time and the past, and the desire to preserve and record, even those things which have already left us.

More images of Dean’s piece here: http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2012/06/documenta-13-tacita-dean/

Photos by Amy Stein and Andrew Lindesay

A suitcase of memories

Kassel is a strange setting for Documenta, now one of the largest contemporary art festivals, held every five years. It was a hotbed of Calvinism, a refuge for the Huguenots in the late 1600s, home to the Brothers Grimm, the capital of Westphalia, and later a Prussian province. It has a grand palace, built by Wilhelm IX (now the main museum, with a surprising collection of old masters) surrounded by the sprawling landscaped gardens of the Bergpark, culminating in a grand monument to Hercules, who lords it over the place. From his vantage point over the Wilhelmshöhe, you can see straight down into the city centre.

While the city centre cannot be described in anyone’s book as attractive or imposing, it stands as another kind of monument (so unlike the mythological hero on the hill) to the horrible history of the twentieth century. As a major industrial area and a hub for the German train network, it was a prime target for bombing, and 90% of the centre was destroyed during WWII. There is an extraordinary photograph in the vestibule of the St Martinskirche of the city completely flattened (the church itself was almost entirely rebuilt; the bottom half of its towers are what remained of the medieval structure, the upper half are 50s modernist), like Richter’s aerial paintings of bombed cities, reduced to a maze of rubble-strewn streets. My friend, the poet Siriol Troup, has a guidebook of Kassel from 1901, and she talks about the experience of going around a city now unrecognisable in its text, the historical city, the archeological city. You could be anywhere, with its anonymous 60s low rises, the hallmark of many British city centres.

But it’s what did happen here that is always present. The Aschrott Fountain, named after the Jewish benefactor Sigmund Aschrott, was destroyed by the Nazis in 1939. In 1987 the artist Horst Hoheisel created Negative Form on the spot of the fountain, a ‘counter-monument’ as he called it, a fountain that exists below the ground (and can be viewed through grates in the pavement).

There was a sub camp of Dachau located in Kassel, and from platform 13 of the Hauptbahnhof rail station, Jews were sent to Auschwitz. A permanent memorial marks their deportation: a wheeled trolley, the kind they might use to transport materials round the station, which holds a glass case containing narratives written by Kassel schoolchildren imagining the lives of the deportees; their stories are wrapped around stones, like the stones you lay on Jewish graves to represent the visit of the living to the dead, and placed carefully in the case.

The Hauptbahnhof is the setting for some of Documenta’s most poignant work: William Kentridge’s exuberant and inventive video installation on time and colonisation; Susan Philipsz’s haunting strings that echo across the empty tracks; and Janet Cardiff’s guided tour which fuses past and present.

Perhaps it’s because Cardiff, like myself, is a North American responding to Europe (the meeting of the new and old world) that I find her work so compelling. The tour begins when you are issued with an iPod and headphones, like so many modern travellers trying to block out the world around them, only this time you are being asked to engage in an entirely different way: you find yourself standing in the station watching a film of the spot you are viewing in real time, so that there is an odd sensation of experiencing the real and the imagined at once. Cardiff provides a narrative that records her thoughts and feelings about this place. As she watches people pass by in the busy station, she reflects, ‘so many people wear black here.’ A trombone player appears from nowhere to provide a soundtrack to her thoughts (like a mourner at a New Orleans funeral procession), a ballet dancer glides across the polished floor, and all the time, we see the people who are occupying the current moment, a moment which will flash by, while Cardiff’s film is about what we preserve, what we keep. There is the suggestion of a relationship, one which is recalled, as if it might already be in the past. She says:

Memories are like a different form of travel; it’s like filling a suitcase that we pull behind us and we open and close when we need to.

Cardiff’s tour is about how we commemorate what we have lost as well as what we can see before us, how certain places, like Kassel, contain invisible histories, which are palpable in our response. The suitcase provides an analogy to the way we move from one place to another, how our lives are portable and fast-moving, but also how we carry the past with us. I’m reminded of the poem The City by Cavafy:

You said: ‘I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.’

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.

More on individual works at Documenta in future posts. For the best coverage of the festival, go to my esteemed colleague Vici MacDonald’s blog: http://artorbit.me/2012/07/29/documenta-13-guide/

An excerpt from Cardiff’s film here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOkQE7m31Pw

Photos of St Martinskirche and the Hauptbahnhof by Amy Stein

A short tour of Scotland / inhabiting someone else’s home

There are no words to describe the beauty of Skye.

That’s the sort of lazy, easy, meaningless writing you get in holiday brochures and vacation websites. But, having just returned from the island, I find I’m struggling to summon any words myself. As a poet, I’m supposed to have the vocabulary to describe beauty and awe. Or am I? As a contemporary poet, beauty has become a no-go area. I have banned my students from using the word, telling them to draw on their powers of observation and description, to find better words, more personal applications. But now I’m lost too. When you dig deeper into the meaning of beauty, you find it is nearly impossible to avoid cliché, particularly in reference to landscape. The sky is always blue (although last week on Skye, there were the predictable storms), the water crystal-clear, the mountains majestic. Cliché embraces the familiar, the common experience that so many have shared; first thoughts verbalised when faced with something so important, so much larger than ourselves, that it is nearly impossible to express.

In Elaine Scarry’s famous essay, On Beauty and Being Just, she begins by making this point:

Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.

The poet’s dilemma. My personal dilemma made greater by the fact that I don’t have the precise terms for the natural landscape. As readers of Invective will know, I live in south London (a place which I have yet to hear described as beautiful). I have just published a sonnet sequence which took as its subject the ruined and blighted corners of my adopted city. When I was teaching a course on Crete a few years ago, there was a woman who knew the names of nearly every wild flower we encountered on our walks; I envied her knowledge. There is nothing that prevents me from getting a book and looking these things up (indeed, I now know that it was the marsh hellebornine I found on a lochside path). But maybe it’s to do with possessing that knowledge, feeling that it is somehow part of your wider understanding of the world.

And then there is the added issue of language. To see signs in Gaelic (although I didn’t hear much spoken) is to be reminded that you are actually in a foreign place. Although we didn’t make it to Raasay, I thought about Sorley MacLean, and the one and only time I heard him read, just a few months before his death. He came to read for me in London, and I’d dutifully leafleted the London Gaelic Society. I asked him to read some poems in Gaelic, and he was moved to find that so there were Gaelic speakers in the audience. But even for those of us who didn’t understand, the flow and sound of the language was an extraordinary experience. Going to his place, at least as far as Skye, if not all the way to Raasay, I know will add something to the way I read his poems.

A late poem of his begins:

The mountains are speechless
if what they say cannot be understood
and the many-voiced ocean is silent
if no-one knows its language.

So from language back to beauty. Is Skye really beautiful? Yes, the Cuillins are extraordinary, but also full of threat and menace, especially when the clouds draw down around them. ‘Rocky and terrible’, MacLean called them. The valleys are dotted with picturesque ruins, but when you consider that these are the ruins of settlements, sometimes whole villages (one of our walks took in what is left of the abandoned dwellings that made up the village of Erisco, on the north of the island), then that postcard vision takes on a different light.

From Skye we headed South (of course), stopping in Biggar to visit Brownsbank, the home of Hugh MacDiarmid for over thirty years. The cottage exists in a sort of time warp, with seventies packaging still visible in the tiny kitchen, and the great man’s collection of tattered Penguin paperback crime novels still cramming the bookshelves.

Although his language was different, the Lallands Scots of his childhood, he and Sorley MacLean had a great admiration for each other. I have to admit that sometimes I find it hard to extract meaning from MacDiarmid’s Scots, the textures are so thick to my North American ear, but hearing them read (incredibly robustly by Alan Riach) was a great treat, and something of the energy and anger of the work came through to me (again, helped by being in the poet’s landscape) for the first time. There were other readings from Richie McCaffrey, Angela McSeveney, Lorna Waite (who read an incredible poem about learning Gaelic), and Andrew McCallum, all of whom have been resident in the cottage at some time. Catherine Sadler, who has just finished her stint there, is particularly interested in the intersection of poetry and place, and writes about

A reconciliation with living in what was someone else’s home. I have been using their plates and pans, sleeping in their beds, not quite eating their porridge, making more mouldy the wallpaper with the hot baths that steam up the bathroom …

She talks of the tension between past and present; maybe this is something I’ve felt during my whistle-stop tour, in addition to being aware of a different landscape, a different language.

I met a couple of poetry friends I hadn’t seen in some time, both of whom have settled in Scotland from other places. Chris Powici lives in Dunblane, but grew up in Guildford. He’s now the editor of Northwords Now, a magazine dedicated to writing about the highlands. In this role, he has travelled all over Scotland. He very kindly suggested I might send him a poem if I get round to writing about my Skye experience, and I said to him that any attempt I make at writing about Skye will go no further than the postcard impression of a tourist. And that goes back to possession. I’m not saying poets shouldn’t write about places outside their own experience, but I feel uneasy about writing on a place unless I feel I can inhabit it more fully (the way that Catherine has spent a month thinking about MacDiarmid by inhabiting his house).

Vicki Feaver was also there, and gave a short reading. Later we talked about place (she has been in Dunsyre now for eleven years, having come from the south), and she remarked that she doesn’t think of herself as a poet of place – I agreed, her poems are more about human interventions and relationships (although in her most recent book, often the relationships are between humans and the natural world, surely the result of living in the country rather than in the city). And I found myself saying that London is my place; it may seem obvious from my recent work, but it was the first time I really thought of myself as being situated somewhere in my poems. Maybe it takes a trip to somewhere else (and a journey from the place you started) to figure that out.

I’ll finish with a few lines of MacDiarmid’s:

What happens to us
Is irrelevant to the world’s geology
But what happens to the world’s geology
Is not irrelevant to us.
We must reconcile ourselves to the stones,
Not the stones to us.

Short meditations on rain

I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face …

(from Rain, Don Paterson)

And rain was rainier for being blown
Across the grid and texture of the concrete.

(from Lightenings, Seamus Heaney)

Hidden, oh hidden
in the high fog
the house we live in,
beneath the magnetic rock,
rain-, rainbow-ridden,
where blood-black
bromelias, lichens,
owls, and the lint
of the waterfalls cling,
familiar, unbidden.

(from Song for the Rainy Season, Elizabeth Bishop)

The rain, its tiny pressure
on your scalp, like ants
passing the door of a tobacconist.

(from Romanze, or The Music Students, Frank O’Hara)

We only imagine it ends
like childhood, or rain:
fever, the purl in the bone, the amended
lustre of the self, all shell and glitter …

(from The Body as Metaphor, John Burnside)

She thought the distance smelled of rain and lightning.

(from The Black Lace Fan my Mother Gave me, Eavan Boland)

I have put a blockade on high-mindedness.
All night, through dawn and mid-morning,
Rain is playing rimshots on a bucket in the yard.
The weatherman tells me that winter comes on
As if he’d invented it. Fuck him.

(from After Laforgue, Sean O’Brien)

Oh I could go on …