Things that are making me think about death:
1) One of my favorite professors, Feliz Eda Burhan, died last week; she was an amazing woman — a brilliant scholar and teacher. She was demanding and always v. critical of my writing (and I loved her for it). “This is good,” she would write on my essays, “but I know you can do better.”
A classmate of mine wrote to me to inform me of her death; she said that Professor Burhan had “passed away.” That’s what everybody said about her, actually: she passed away. I’ve always found this an incredibly strange phrase; I preferred the way another of my friends put it: that Professor Burhan had come to inhabit one of her own phrases, the “absence of presence and the presence of absence.” She is not here, but she has not passed away. In her absence is presence.
2) Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. Mahler was obsessed with death his entire career, but he was particularly afraid of the curse of the ninth — to which, in fact, he ultimately succumbed. As he was writing the Ninth, his four-and-a-half-year-old daughter suddenly died of scarlet fever; he himself was diagnosed with a fatal heart condition; WWI was rapidly approaching. So the symphony became his farewell to life — his own, and that of his entire world’s. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold — I was thinking of this line as I listened, especially during the third movement when the cracks in the structure are revealed and everything indeed begins to crumble. The second and third movements are intense and twisted, carnivalesque, ridiculous and sinister at the same time; the first and fourth are movements of the body: the symphony begins with an irregular pulse, a hesitant arrhythmia, and the final movement ends in much the same way; it is the heart-beat slowing down.
Herbert von Karajan said that this symphony is “music coming from another world, it is coming from eternity.”
I highly recommend both the program notes by Dr. Richard E. Rodda from the performance I attended (the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, conducted by the incomparable Marin Alsop), and the essay “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony” by Lewis Thomas. It’s rather apocalyptic, but so is the symphony.
3) These recently-declassified photos from Hiroshima, 1945:
This one reminds me of the human body, a spine or a rib cage.
