The
Discomfiture and Death of Piroz, Page
from a Manuscript of the
Shahnama
(Book of Kings) of Firdawsi
Death is a Festival
43.
Resembling a gladiator, as do the hounds:
there are no faces anywhere in the world, I
trust the burden and heat of the day at the
feast of tabernacles. Framed two alphabets,
the girt of the old tree, the number of square
feet produced, letting out the dry dusty moral
apothegms: to show the teeth in laughing,
his great elephants. It is an old house with
newfangled ideas of printers, neither knot
nor gut give way under the tremendous
strain: he’d burn your deaths for fear they’d
give him away, a more fluid method of
traffic control. I see a great many cloaks of
glacé silk, making me feel closer to people.
44.
A wilder upright-growing shrub, mild head-
aches and chills, an excellent German band of
a dozen performers when she goes to bed, at
the bottom of the Jarman Ocean. Beaded urn-
rugs and chair-covers for steel pens, like men
drowning, the other women leaving her alone.
A ramshackle bus which smells of packed hum-
anity, his bloody head is set up opposite to
that of his fellow-sufferer in a splendid prog-
ram of the Rampur gharana. This tigress has
been the terror of the country, rendered more so
by the bluish light of the fire, a simple theme.
She praises the lovely breloques or gimcracks
thinking it is not the death of poisoning at all.
45.
These fittings are made of thick hand-blown
glass, in order to apply dressing to his warp.
To wedge a hand in a death, trade hackwork,
is of course out of the question, like a pop-
ular air upon every street-organ. I fell upon
roast pork and a foaming half-pint, an extreme-
ly interesting magical text, while my husband
was reciting the Hadbalah. His other treasures,
the pineal gland, the phrase “To have, hold,
receive, and take,” a name given to the com-
mon conger. A thousand small wares to sell,
I opened a packet of H. and took a generous
sniff. Crossover is at 2500 Hz walking in the
garden, near the ha, in the month of haboobs.
46.
He looked so neglected with his green tights
a conduit for the tumbling skies, his runneled
face a funnel, a small watercourse or channel,
setting out for the wreck, bringing back a
boat, to perhaps save me the expense of the
whole runlong. Rustle the things off that table,
in the old days I was always standing between
the dead and the rustiness: such as fox-chases,
horse races, &c. Equations are not mere rec-
ords of a chess opening: all hands to skylark,
a quicker breeze-up—never! Debt contracted
by little and little to raise a gallop. But hear
their absent thoughts with meets and run-
arounds, many a maid has no consistent idea.
47.
Mother had invited him for his dexterity, left
hand a palette, a gorgeous performance, what
had been hitherto a single lordship: a maker of
had been hitherto a single lordship: a maker of
parchment lace. Under milkwood a beer-tent
black with parchs and other difficulties, we
had monopoly, chinese chequers and what-
not. Dry, near the fire or in the oven, the nave
is separated from the tower. I might have
wanted to paraphrase a landscape, most deaths
need comment. A Freudian overinclusion?
Any map or draught, communities shaped
like the cavity of the vase forms the sponge.
They made experiments with shots or bombs,
a late-night snack for all production staff.
48.
He was a beaver of a pronounced type, an eff-
ect produced on the clavichord. It was Jack
Kerouac who several years ago said, you know,
watch the progress of this wonderful little
beetle from Wolfsburg, two pairs of jaws
moving sidewise. With a knife and a bag, the
past as a new present, the yellow belishas
going on and off at the zebra crossings: the
most worthless of those who mount the
bema, which bears the brass escutcheon.
His rents, the successive bequeathings of
ages untold, neither does it imply coitus.
Dandelions that bestar the dead, we rely on
you to be the best-dressed women in the place.
When, through a certain recall of sensual perceptions, to
which the senses have gone out, the soul inscribes in itself, as it were, an
exemplum in memory, the entire attention of the soul, removed from the presence
of the sensible objects upon which it reflects, seems to be suspended
figuratively in the imagination of them just as even the lion does. When I saw
her reddish complexion and her beauty unparalleled, I will find by careful
count that I have employed a hundred rhymes in this poem, mirror and exemplar
for desiring and doing all things good. And it is not an easy thing to
understand but in this dream was nothing which did not happen entirely as the
dream told it, it is she who excites thieves and wastrels to theft. Old, torn
as if it had been among dogs, poor, and worn out and full of old patches, he
was so elegant and full of grace, so well formed in all his limbs, that he
looked like a painting. In her hand she held a mirror, nevertheless she made a
very large wound, all together they were warm, open people, well instructed if
you propose to write about persons. I thought I was truly in the earthly
paradise. From a slender twig a great tree rises and spreads. The things
contained here are trifles and bagatelles, he saw carols that will pass away,
all those who dance them will disappear, and so will all the things he saw
enclosed therein. Never will I be other than courteous. I want to lead a life
which no worthy man wishes, but then I thought I might be able to venture
safely to the fountain. Understand that I am not at all angry at you, for the
sake of the method, she is indeed more clear than glass or window ever was, and
her confident manner praised by all, her fine gain, her noble bearing, as the
master teaches the child. Good love is a quality so fine that I understand in
everything what to avoid and what to do, the beautiful vision inspires me to
write it out in a book, if she were no more than a wooden image. I must not
revolt against her will when I hear her speak calmly, so overwhelmed am I when
I see her word.
Age is indeed used as a substitute for the mummies of the
legend,
so the fourteenth-century audience would have seen a good
deal more
of the supernatural in the tale than we do today. It is
sometimes
helpful to know that a nightmare is shared, than to be told
that it does
not exist. The three young men gladly run off in pursuit of
a death
whom they hear personified as a thief because a defined
figure is easier
to deal with. In reality, the pity, resignation, longing,
consolation were
not unexpressed. There is a certain universality in such a
rueful confront-
ation with one’s own end, but each age, Huizinga
notwithstanding,
develops its own mental shorthand to deal with its own
problems, and
this shorthand, for the people who used it, implies all the
things that lie
between. Clearly, the prevalence of so many faces of death
would seem
to argue for the obsession that so many historians have seen
in the late
Middle Ages. And yet, was it really an obsession? When the
human mind
is faced with the incomprehensible, with chaos or
destruction on too vast
a scale to be absorbed, the natural impulse is to make the
concept more
familiar so that it can be dealt with; paradoxically, the
closer a thing can
be brought, the more it can be distanced. Death is a symbol
of blind fate,
very different, apparently, from the individualism of danses
macabres. The
death of the triumphs comes without warning. And in this
sense, another
image of death, the dreary death who stands crowned and
alone, grinning
out of the frame or manuscript at the viewer, is a logical
extension of the
triumph. In shows up in the hunt, it hovers over the grave,
and, as in The
Hours of Rohan (1420), it may even enter the sickroom
with a coffin on
its shoulder. In almost all these cases, there is a
one-to-one relationship:
the individual facing his own end. Now that the soul is
alone among a
crowd of spectators who cannot apprehend his grief—a motif
that will
reach its apex in Calantha, dancing as her heartstrings
crack in The Broken
Heart. One is frightened, another puzzled, a third
resigned, still another
indignant, and so on. In some pictures, the mummies are
holding musical
instruments; in others they carry the many weapons
associated with death;
spears, arrows, spades, rakes, scythes, and maces. In all
the pictures the
dead seem to have more energy than the living. Later, during
the first
decades of the great plagues that
swept across Europe (ca. 1340-80), folk
dances called the death dance or
dance of the dead became popular
throughout Europe. In these dances, one member of the dance
would act
as corpse while the others danced round him or her,
pretending to mourn
but actually taking liberties with the “corpse’s” person. In
some cases,
naturally, the dance was used as an occasion for horseplay
and practical
jokes; in other cases, even more naturally, it was used as
an excuse for
kissing and fondling the “deceased.” Oddly enough, the dead,
naked
except for their crowns, do not hold weapons, but keep their
hands crossed
modestly over their genitals. Third, and perhaps most important,
the
figure changes from a warning about the future to an
immediate danger
in the present. Part of the fresco in the Campo Santo shows
three young
men who have come upon three coffins lying in their path.
The question,
then, is not why the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were
more concerned
with death than was any other age, but how they chose to
cope with a
perennial problem: the hundred percent death rate of
humankind.
The description of Leeds in 1845 exhibits a rate of mort-
ality, unprovided with any form of under-drainage or
convenience or arrangements for cleansing: the privies
are few in proportion to the rich man in his castle, the
poor
spirits and opiates. Tomorrow! Tomorrow! Didn’t I pray,
O what bread! What a feast! He has gone before
tomorrow,
a phase—one of many—and Mrs. Merdle’s husband would
have incurred clouds of black plumes,
solid and magnificent
oak respectability, a letter of 1848 stating that there can
be
no impropriety. Those high-sounding Victorian passwords—
propriety, modesty, distinction, style, providence—chime
like bells, with me into the quiet tomb, and the warm leaden
sheet, is it, and so on, or not? Very well, feathers! The
whole
black job of jobs, flowered memorial cards and languishing
epitaphs, three fair sisters glided out of the depths of the
wood and floated upon the lake. Such objects as a marble
cross set in mauve velvet and carved by her mother’s hand,
a black sedding dress worn in memory of a father,
photographs
set in jet, the beloved’s hair formed into a ring, a
bracelet, a
necklace, a watch chain, the family dogs: the very Colossi
of grief, pregnant definition of the role of imagination.
Tolling of the bell, raising a black flag solely of conduct
is
not inconsistent with the rubric in her own natural state.
She formed a sort of Coat of Arms grouped with a smelling
bottle, a handkerchief, an orange, a bottle of vinegar,
Flander’s
sister, her own sister, Flander’s brother’s wife, and two
neighboring gossips—all in mourning, where the thing is
performed upon the very best scale, reviving a little.
Kurt Franz hit upon the idea of transforming the platform
where the convoys arrived into a false station. Ah, why should the gentle
farmer not enjoy the prospect of resting in the midst of the field he has
cultivated? It was reached from the bank of the Seine through a triumphal arch
consisting of three equal gates. These coffins of the poor were piled up in
sevens, in long, parallel contiguous lines. Burial was still common under
Pericles. Throw earth three times on my ashes, and pass on. Others proposed
quite simply to manufacture fertilizers with the remains of the dead. To
Lupasco’s question, Charon responds that in the course of billions of years the
electrons that make up our minds have amassed information. All things are full
of gods. He then took out the heart which was replaced by a stone beetle.
Nelson’s body was brought from Trafalgar to London in a barrel of brandy. This
world of ghosts, closely bound up with our own, is the world of souls without
houses. If death has found, during the last ten years or so, its historians,
its philosophers, it psychologists, its sociologists, its semiologists, it has
only too seldom been studied from the point of view of architecture, urbanism,
and decoration. In eastern Bosnia, a region covered by forests, these small,
stone, funerary houses imitate planks and beams, and their roofs are carved in
the form of shingles. It is a sort of Disneyland, and its artist-
inhabitants “originals” and “primitives.” The dog cemetery
set up in Paris on an island in the Seine is neither a modern anomaly nor a
modern caprice, since, at Thebes, monkeys had their own necropolises
two-and-one-half miles long and one-and-one-quarter miles wide. The Danse
macabre remained a curiosity until 1669: it was then destroyed in order to
widen the street. Among his invisible cities Italo Calvino describes one
underground city, which he calls Eusapia. The space of death is also that space
of passage between the space of the living and that of the dead. Is it that the
corpses of the rich will rot only in silk? There are fewer writers in
Montmartre than in Père-Lachaise, but it contains nevertheless Theophile
Gautier, Dumas fils, Heine, Stendhal, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Renan,
Alfred de Vigny (in his army greatcoat), Labiche, and Feydau. But they also
express a taste for melodrama, for the fine gesture, for the bawdy song. We
know that they were made up of amarant, immortelle, asphodel, violets,
narcissi, ivy, myrtle, laurel, and olive. What need have we to imagine another
hell? Primitive Egypt had no hell. “The earth is in the heavens. There we are
in heaven. There is neither up nor down in the universe.” All were dragged into
a saraband of bones. One can see by this list that there was a wide range of
activities in this public space. The dying Louis XIII had funeral music
of his own composition played. As for the music, it was
beyond description. The four arts—painting, music, eloquence, and
sculpture—were in tears at losing their protector. Between 1730 and 1770 these
candles of the rich became enormous, weighing between two and four pounds. This
immense procession was unable to arrive at the church of Saint-Eustache before
8 o’clock. He had to deliver the death blow according to the rules, otherwise
the crowd might turn against him. Every village festival ended in brawls, often
involving death. Execution is no longer an urban spectacle. No doubt it fixed
the useless age rather too late. The dead are men who have ceased to function:
they no longer produce or consume. Death is a delinquency, a deviance. The good
patient is cooperative, conforms to the regulations. Your moods are no concern
of mine. I am—I would not dare to tell you: my age is terrifying. Man’s
essential organs—kidneys, heart, lungs—are today bought, stockpiled, and sold.
The first prize was given to the architects Aldo Rossi and Gianni Braghieri for
their project entitled “Sky Blue.” One says that one is afraid of “waking the
dead.” The dead continue to live as long as the living know their names. Before
the void, she gambles her mortality.
—Anis Shivani
Anis Shivani is the author of
several critically acclaimed books of fiction, poetry, and criticism, including
Anatolia and Other Stories (2009), The Fifth Lash and Other Stories
(2012), My Tranquil War and Other Poems (2012), Karachi Raj: A Novel
(2015), Whatever Speaks on Behalf of Hashish: Poems (2015), and Soraya:
Sonnets (2016). Books forthcoming in 2016 include Both Sides of the
Divide: Observing the Sublime and the Mundane in Contemporary Writing and
the novel A History of the Cat in Nine Chapters or Less. Anis’ work
appears recently in the Yale Review, Black Warrior Review, Western
Humanities Review, Iowa Review, Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, AGNI,
Denver Quarterly, Volt, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, graduated
from Harvard College, and lives in Houston, Texas.
