RE: Visions of Death - Introduction and Chapter 1: Decay, Fragility and Transience
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Enjoyed this. There's a few thoughts that popped into my sleep weary head:
why is it that it's always beautiful youth that appear in the artists imaginative play around death? Is it just the contrast between youth and the final season? Or is there something more tragic and compelling when a beautiful young woman does?
Millais - Autumn Leaves .. love this image more than Ophelia. Perhaps it's a more workaday image, reminiscent of harvest (obviously with the scythe) which feels like an ordinary human activity, as death is. Today we have a population increasingly separated from nature - the harvest is for mass agriculture, scaled to huge industry. Even men in tractors are behind glass in air conditioned cabins. There is wide deforestation, earth shattering extinctions. Less insects, less birds. How do we reconcile with death when we connect less and less to natural cycles? Do artists keep drawing on the natural imagery they've been taught at college, in studied classrooms? What does decay look like in an increasingly clinical world?
Yes, As goth idol and raven fan boy Edgar Allan Poe once wrote: “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” He died the year the Pre-Raphaelites were coming into bloom. While I do not think there is a formal link, this was certainly a feature of that era of creativity.
I do wonder if there is the fetishisation of the loss of fertility when it is a young woman, and man therefore is compelled to a greater urgency to procreate? Perhaps a far flung evolutionary link to literature?
This is a powerful image to simply think upon, let alone go into the enormous depth that I could (and kind of want to). I think, what does decay look like in the future?
We've only had rubbish tips for a short period of time in human history. What damage have we done by concentrating waste in a single spot, depriving the Earth of the natural waste that would otherwise fall where it may?
Well there's also space junk... Speaking of space.
Die young and leave a good looking corpse hey? Because we mourn the young and pretty more. And white, of course.
An older person dies and people ask how old. Then it's oh, good innings, for anyone over 70. But we lose libraries....
Men always feel the desire to protect and procreate, absolutely. It's no coincidence virile, powerful men like younger woman, and why we recoil when an older woman is with a younger guy, and why we secretly smirk : oh, we knew he was too young for her and wouldn't appreciate her as she ages, when they uncouple. Procreation is the driver of everything.
Sadly, yes. It appears to be the only reason I exist... I have a belly button, so I'm not some sort of divine messiah