You Will Be Fragmented
When an artist dies young there is always talk of the paintings unpainted, the books unwritten, which points to some imaginary storehouse of undone things and not to the imagination itself, the far richer treasure, lost.
q1. the body as loaner.
in doughty’s “green burial” passage she writes about the body as atoms on loan. lispector says the roach is holier because it never notices its own coming and going. what does it mean, for you, to live like something on loan?
q2. intimacy and decay.
both doughty and lispector describe contact—with corpses, with insects, with sex—as ways of shedding illusion. do you think intimacy always involves some form of decomposition?
q3. love and annihilation.
clarice lispector’s hell isn’t punishment—it’s the neutral joy of losing yourself. chee’s lovers talk about becoming what they “wanted to be next.” why do love stories so often end where identity dissolves?
q4. god in the neutral.
“whatever god is,” lispector says, “was more in the neutral noise of leaves.” how do you read that next to doughty’s practical god of decomposition? are they speaking about the same sacred neutrality?
q5. creative aftermath.
chee writes that when an artist dies young, we mourn “the storehouse of undone things.” do you think death actually interrupts art—or completes it?
q6. closing reflection.
if you could redesign the rituals of death to tell the truth these books circle—what would that ceremony look like?
- How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee - Search Google
- Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty - Search Google
- The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser, and Idra Novey - Search Google
- The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver - Search Google
I had already decided on a green burial for my own body. I understood that I had been given my atoms, the ones that made up my heart and toenails and kidneys and brain, on a kind of universal loan program. The time would come when I would have to give the atoms back, and I didn’t want to attempt to hold on to them through the chemical preservation of my future corpse.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
There is nothing like consistent exposure to dead bodies to remove the trepidation attached to dead bodies.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
people put the idea of sin in sex. But how innocent and childish that sin is. The real hell is that of love. Love is the experience of a danger of greater sin — it is the experience of the mud and the degradation and the worst joy. Sex is the fright of a child.
--The Passion According to G.H. - Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser, and Idra Novey
Whatever God is was more in the neutral noise of the leaves in the wind than in my old human prayer.
--The Passion According to G.H. - Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser, and Idra Novey
He wanted my human divinity, and that had to start with an initial stripping-down of the constructed human.
--The Passion According to G.H. - Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser, and Idra Novey
A roach is greater than I because its life is so given over to Him that it comes from the infinite and goes toward the infinite without noticing, it doesn’t miss a beat.
--The Passion According to G.H. - Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser, and Idra Novey
Our all-weather coats hung on their six pegs; possibly they were meant for all weather but this.
--The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
Janet had rented an apartment in Carmel for Peter to spend Christmas with her down in Carmel, and it was shortly after, upon returning, that Peter called her to say, “It’s time. It’s my time.” He had been living at home until then, getting meals delivered and having home care, and when he called Janet, he gave as his reason, “I can’t take care of myself anymore. It’s my time.”
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
I remember he said once, ‘I have to give Laura a baby!’ and the people at the hospice really thought he’d lost it, but I knew. We used to talk about having a child, and then, well, he got HIV, and he never talked about it again. And so he mentioned the baby again there, and I said, ‘No, remember? You got sick. And so we didn’t have it.’ And he got quiet again.”
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
WHEN I FELL IN love with Peter, I fell in love with what I wanted to be next.
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
While writing an article about love and HIV, I interviewed many young gay people who would say, I can’t imagine getting older. Most of the people who might have shown them what it would be like to be gay and alive even at age forty or forty-five are dead.
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
Someone somewhere who maybe thought there wasn’t a thing called strength feels how you care enough to stand in front of the passage of a train. As children, we thought Superman was brave to stand in front of a train. That’s not brave, though. Superman never stood before anything that could destroy him. Peter did.
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
When an artist dies young there is always talk of the paintings unpainted, the books unwritten, which points to some imaginary storehouse of undone things and not to the imagination itself, the far richer treasure, lost.
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
The Portuguese have a word with no equivalent in English, saudade, which indicates a longing, tinged with nostalgia, madness, and sickness over something you have lost. The ghastly image of Luke’s face detached from his skull was a preview of his death; at any moment, he might disappear.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
A good warrior (or medical examiner) might have a whole collection of scalps on his belt.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
The plot of Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s original 1836 story “The Little Mermaid” is, in fact, entirely devoid of tuneful sea animals.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
The bargain is that if our mermaid cannot convince the prince to love her, she will die, turning to sea foam on the water and losing her chance to have an immortal soul. Luckily, the prince does appear enamored with her, “and she received permission to sleep at his door, on a velvet cushion.” Because nothing says love like being allowed to sleep in a man’s doorway on a dog bed.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
Mythologist Joseph Campbell wisely tells us to scorn the happy ending, “for the world as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
Since I was also on my school’s competitive outrigger canoe paddling team, the next morning I would have to peel off the vinyl ball gown and paddle in the open ocean for two hours as dolphins leapt majestically next to our boat. Hawai’i is an interesting place to grow up.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
Therese was born when World War I—World War I!—was still years in the future. After returning to Westwind and placing Therese’s body in the cooler, I cremated a newborn baby who had lived a mere three hours and six minutes. After cremation, Therese’s ashes and the ashes of the baby were identical in appearance, if not in quantity.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
A man or woman jumping off the side of the Golden Gate can expect to hit the water at 75 miles per hour, and count on dying with 98 percent certainty. The trauma alone kills most jumpers—their ribs shatter and puncture fragile internal organs.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
Tourists walking along the bridge to catch the sunset over the Bay encounter signs reading: CRISIS COUNSELING THERE IS HOPE MAKE THE CALL THE CONSEQUENCES OF JUMPING FROM THIS BRIDGE ARE FATAL AND TRAGIC The Golden Gate Bridge creates a new corpse in this way about every two weeks.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
The current under the bridge didn’t recognize their relative status; it didn’t care what helplessness led them to the bridge. The Bay’s current fulfilled feminist Camille Paglia’s lament: “Human beings are not nature’s favorites. We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
You will be fragmented.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
“Well, hypothetically if God can reconfigure decomposed bodies that have passed through the digestive tracts of maggots, I guess He could probably heal a cremation.” She seemed satisfied with my reply and we spent the rest of the session in silence, pondering the degree to which we would ultimately be fragmented.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
There is a slim possibility that your donated head will be the head, the head that holds the key to the mysteries of the twenty-first century’s great disease epidemics. But it is equally possible your body will end up being used to train a new crop of Beverly Hills plastic surgeons in the art of the facelift. Or dumped out of a plane to test parachute technology.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
That is hell: there is no punishment.
--The Passion According to G.H. - Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser, and Idra Novey
The orgy of hell is the apotheosis of the neutral. The joy of the Sabbath is the joy of getting lost in the atonal.
--The Passion According to G.H. - Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser, and Idra Novey
Ah, could it be that we were not originally human? and that, out of practical necessity, we became human? that horrifies me, as it does you.
--The Passion According to G.H. - Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser, and Idra Novey
Even he was on the verge of heaving after the tenth round of smoke, heat, scrub, swab, repeat. “It’s the floor,” he said, defeated. “The floor? The beautiful new retort floor?” I said. “The old floor had all those craters, the fat could pool there and burn up later in the cremation. Now the fat has nowhere to go, so it’s gliding out the front door.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
As a business, the funeral industry has developed by selling a certain type of “dignity.” Dignity is having a well-orchestrated final moment for the family, complete with a well-orchestrated corpse. Funeral directors become like directors for the stage, curating the evening’s performance. The corpse is the star of the show and pains are taken to make sure the fourth wall is never broken
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
Dead people look very, very dead. It is difficult to grasp what that means, since it’s unlikely that any of us will stumble across a roving pack of dead bodies in the wild. We live in a world where people rarely die in their homes, and if they do, they’re carted off to the funeral home the second after taking their last breath.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
Untreated, a dead person’s face looks horrific, at least by our very narrow cultural expectations. Their droopy, open eyes cloud over in a vacant stare. Their mouths stretch wide like Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The color drains from their faces.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
Corpses, by law, are quasi-property. Elena’s family owned her dead body until burial or cremation.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
but only if it is night, for I am a creature of great moist depths, I do not know the dust of dry cisterns, and the surface of a rock is not my home. We are creatures that must plunge into the depth in order to breathe there, as the fish plunges in the water in order to breathe, except my depths are in the air of the night. Night is our latent state.
--The Passion According to G.H. - Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser, and Idra Novey
Five million years ago perhaps the last caveman had looked out from this same point, where once there must have existed a mountain. And that later, eroded, had become an empty area where later once again cities had risen which themselves in turn eroded. Today the ground is widely populated by diverse races.
--The Passion According to G.H. - Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser, and Idra Novey
I left it for him in his mailbox in the middle of the night. I felt sure that he was expecting this, and that his response would be as ardent as my declaration. And then—silence. After several days, I received a single-line e-mail from Luke: Don’t ask me for this. I can’t see you again.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
Everything smells of corpses here.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
I was surprised to learn attendance was, mysteriously, not mandatory. It’s an occasionally controversial part of the Workshop. But the policy acknowledges a deeper truth: if you don’t want to be a writer, no one can make you one. If you need an attendance policy to get you through, then, go—don’t just skip class, go and don’t come back. Writing is too hard for someone to force you into it.
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
Some of my friends from college, whom I would see periodically, proceeded with a self-assurance that I didn’t feel into careers that seemed beyond my reach. I told myself I didn’t have the connections they had, to get jobs at The New Yorker, the Paris Review, Grand Street, the various publishing houses—and I didn’t realize that, if I knew them, it meant I had connections too.
--How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee
I thought I saw tears in his eyes. It was dark. I can’t be sure. Mike was human after all—another soul coping with the strange, hidden world of death, trying to do his job and figure out what it all meant. As desperate as I had been for someone to talk to about these very things, in the moment all I could do was mumble, “I guess so. It is what it is, right?” “Sure it is. Good luck in L.A.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
Q: Are you aware of, or have you participated in any religious/spiritual rituals surrounding death? Please describe these events. A: I play with the wigy board once. Q: Are you able to be empathetic to people without becoming personally involved? Describe a situation where you were able to do this. A: I kill a bunch of people once.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
the family had placed a Häagen-Dazs coffee-and-almond ice-cream bar between her hands like a Viking warrior’s weapon. Those are my favorite. So I yelled, involuntarily, “Those are my favorite!” I had successfully kept my mouth shut up till that moment (even after the insult to my skills as a corpse beautician), but ice cream proved a topic on which I could not remain silent
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
Jeremy also had tattoos that were brand-new, from his time post-prison. They were colorful images of birds and waves and other metaphors for freedom. He left prison and sought liberation in a new, different life. The tattoos were stunning. The concept of the body as canvas becomes more powerful if the canvas is dead.
--Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
Infinitely increasing the plea that is born of neediness. It is not for us that the cow’s milk flows, but we drink it. The flower was not made for us to look at it or for us to smell its fragrance, and we look at it and smell it. The Milky Way does not exist for us to know of its existence, but we know of it. And we know God.
--The Passion According to G.H. - Clarice Lispector, Benjamin Moser, and Idra Novey
