Death, oh baby ...

... you know that dying is fine, but maybe,

I wouldn’t like death if death were good,

Not even if death were good.

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.

The Original London Underground

Why is it that so many British place names sound like parodies of British place names? I imagine that I can put together any combination of roughly old-worldly sounding saxon, old norse, norman french, and middle english words and come up with something inevitably ridiculous but vaguely plausible. south kinswaite. aberswick-upon-casterthorpe.

I suppose they all have long and rich histories which I should not mock (does anyone else encounter disapproving toponymysts in their dreams?), but that is precisely why they are mockable: they are usually composed of various recognizable units that one encounters again and again, each one endowed with specific meaning. They also tend to seem rather obvious once deciphered.

(Not so with American place names, which are too often new or just unimaginative. The practice of assigning numbers to blocks in cities might be effective, but is really rather lackluster. The neighbourhood in which I grew up featured streets named after various native american tribes. Most weren't even indigenous to the area, and the ones who were had been long forced out by my neighbours' ancestors. I suppose these sorts of things happen when you build streets before you have people to live on them.)

But I digress, slightly. Today I journied to the southeast London suburb of Chislehurst (Chisle from the Saxon word Cisel, or gravel, and hurst from the Old English hyrst, or wooded hill), which is indeed a gravelly wooded hill, but perhaps most well known for what is under the hill (beneath the name). It's home to the Chislehurst Caves, which are not caves at all (perhaps the fact that they are misnamed already tells us something about them), but 22 miles of passages created to mine flint and chalk. They're old- the earliest historical evidence for their existence is sometime in the 13th century, though the tour guides at the caves claim that the Druids and Romans had been mining there well beforehand, and that the Saxons were relative latecomers. Indeed, the whole operation is much more about transmitting a kind of creative history of the caves than an actual one. It's not as if the documented history of the caves is dull; on the contrary, they served during WWII as a massive bomb shelter (harboring 15,000 people for 22 months), later as a mushroom farm of epic proportions, and most recently (though sadly no longer) as a music venue hosting the likes of David Bowie. It's just that their version of the history is better, mostly because they've had a hand in making it up, constructing fake Druid altars, ghost stories, bad models of former inhabitants, etc. You can call it cheap and dishonest, or you can see it as their attempt to not simply bow down to what history has given them for raw material. I like that mentality, I think.

What is it with this passionate insistence on fidelity to historical fact, anyway? Yes, yes, I know- it allows us to view Holocaust deniers as terrible people and enemies of truth, which isn't a bad thing. But what happened to this tendency to season history, to spice it up with a few tales here and there that are not expressly factual? This territory has become solely the property of grandparents, and the ocassional tour guide. I want it back.