#artanddeath

[oktopuscomics]

“I’ve always said that the artist dies twice. And the first death is the hardest which is the career death, the creative death. The physical death is an inevitability.” -Sylvester Stallone #maadoktopus #issue3 #artandfear #artandlife #artanddeath #artadvice #sylvesterstallone https://www.instagram.com/p/CO6gU-YhMYI/?igshid=1jm7hyf3jv87l

[boatfire]

Writers and music, death and boats.

Interestingly, two writers who have somehow crossed my reading path,Teju Cole and Tomas Transtromer, have written passages or poems that include boat imagery and link specific pieces of music to meditations on death.

In his poem The Grief Gondola (or Sorrow or Sad Gondola) Transtromer writes of Franz Liszt’s composing the piano pieces La Lugubre Gondola I and II whilst “under a premonition” of his son-in-law, Richard Wagner’s death. Liszt was visiting his daughter and Wagner in Venice at the time and his title references the funeral gondolas float past their apartment. A month later Wagner died.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaIrJoqO1xc

Teju Cole’s death-haunted book Open City ends with a scene in which the protagonist attends a performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, the ending of which is generally interpreted as a farewell to the world following the death of his daughter and a diagnoses of his own heart disease.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZI_RRdVTGQ

In the final movement, an elderly woman walks up the aisle. “As she drifted to the entrance and out of sight, in her gracefulness she resembled nothing so much as a boat departing on a country lake early in the morning, which, to those still standing on the shore, appears not to sail but to dissolve into the substance of the fog.” Later in the chapter the protagonist finds himself on a boat as well, contemplating the Statue of Liberty. Cole ends the chapter and the book with a little know historical fact, that a colonel cataloged the thousands of confused birds who met their death colliding with the statue. Given the incidents of atrocity at the hands of progress woven throughout the novel, a reader might conclude that the birds are a metaphor for exactly that.

Perhaps I am predisposed to this pattern of imagery due a random find that somehow has gained it’s own power as a metaphor. Many years ago I came across a book cover for a children’s book in a pile of my neighbor’s trash. The cover was for a book, which was no longer attached, entitled “Tabby and the Boatfire,” presumably about a cat who saves the crew of a ship. The phrase instantly stuck with me and, as it happens I had occasion to give pseudonyms for a couple of things and chose that title.

For years I thought of it as a good name for a band and then, as Tabby was somehow dropped from the phrase, a metaphor for climate change. The earth is our boat and it is on fire. But recently a possible meaning of the phrase has gained prominence in my Memento Mori-obsessed mind. That it is our body that is the boat and it is the human condition that this vessel with which we travel life is doomed to burn, decay and sink. But as with any metaphor, I am more interested in exploring it’s range rather than restricting it’s meaning.