Death
Seeing the leaves against the granite, orange and green and red, gave me vertigo. I thought of the Japanese aesthetic of death, that a way of dying can be beautiful. I think in the U.S. the idea has an unfortunate association with kamikaze pilots. But what would it mean to honor death, to see it as potentially ugly and potentially beautiful? How might an aesthetics of death shape, for example, health care policy?
I’m trying to think of my favorite film death. I think it is the end of Le Samourai (Japan again, but filtered through France!), which I am now going to spoil by saying that it involves a sacrifice, a clean modern line, a kind of love that can’t really be love. It’s death as a Sade tune — “We move in space with minimum waste, maximum joy.”
2 Responses to “Death”
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I read “Sade” as “de Sade” on the first go. A slightly different esthetic.
I read you whenever you will be read. I’m loving my new RSS feed solution. I’ll save it for a post, though.
And what a pretentious bugger your nightmare is! Mine are all hand-wringing and worst-case-scenarios, “for your own good”-ing me from behind the fridge where I shoo them in the morning. They’ll wait there until I eat a handful of olives on the way to bed, and then they’ll fall upon me like a pack of hysterical aunties, warning me of the dark hollow that awaits, just around the next sleep.
My nightmare is very, very pushy, and thus, I imagine, pretentious as well. Nightmares being in part our worst fears about ourselves.
Glad to know you are reading. It’s an elite group!