mnemosyne

“And there is St. Sebastian, my favorite.”

“Vampires, burial, death: inter the corpse where the road forks, so that when it springs from the grave, it will not know which path to follow. Drive a stake through its heart: it will be stuck to the ground at the fork, it will haunt that place that leads to many other places, that point of indecision. Behead the corpse, so that, acephalic, it will not know itself as subject, only as pure body. The monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment–of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence. The monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically “that which reveals”, “that which warns,” a glyph that seeks a hierophant. Like a letter on the page, the monsters signifies something other than itself: it is always a displacement, always inhabits the gap between the time of upheaval that created it and the moment into which it is received, to be born again. These epistemological spaces between the monster’s bones are Derrida’s familiar chasm of différance: a genetic uncertainty principle, the essence of the monster’s vitality, the reason it always rises from the dissection table as its secrets are about to be revealed and vanishes into the night.”

A tragedy is the story of a human growing into his death mask. What has been done is too total to be undone, or even regretted; it defines the doer once and for all and renders the future impossible. (Macbeth is the story of Macbeth growing into his regicide, even as his wife collapses under it; the hesitant hen-pecked man of the first act becomes a monstrous king with burning eyes, master of the deed that mastered him.) The tragic hero attains something like divine completeness, except that for human beings completeness is death. So the ubiquitous counsel of the chorus concerning the hero—look what fortune has done here, she used to be on top of the world, don’t count on happiness, don’t believe anyone happy until he is dead—says more than it seems to. In the last analysis, what can one say of mere mortals? A human is just too partial, too speckled and subject and already-half-gone, for anything to be really true or false of him. Is he happy, is she sad? Maybe, a bit, for a time, but really—who can say, who can even care? That’s how it is for humans, unless and until they are tragic. The tragic hero is complete. You can call him unhappy (miserable, utterly broken) even before he is dead. For an instant he is something like divine. And then he dies, because there’s nothing left to do. The center of every tragedy is the image of a human being who has already died but keeps talking, someone whose face is a mask. Antigone says this explicitly—she is already dead; Oedipus acts it out in gouging out his eyes.

“In the past, they used to bury people in the foetal position, which symbolised death as homecoming, the tomb as a womb. People used to carry soil from the home inside a medallion when they travelled, and if someone died abroad, they tried to throw a handful of their native soil onto the grave. If a person made a promise, and swore on the Earth, they would not break that vow.”