WHEN I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high pil`d books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And feel that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.
I think my view of death is best summed up by Woody Allen who said, "I'm strongly against it."
His films often take a comedic view of death and obsessive fears of dying. This one is a favorite of mine.
Allen has been influenced by the great Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman, who viewed the subject through a considerably more somber lens, and whose film, The Seventh Seal, is about a knight who challenges Death to a chess match. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seventh_Seal
Both the Allen and Bergmar films end with a Dance of Death--the concept of a dance with death is another enduring cultural image.
Quote:
Dance of Death, also variously called Danse Macabre (French), Danza de la Muerte (Spanish), Danza Macabra (Italian), Dança da Morte (Portuguese), Totentanz (German), Dodendans (Dutch), Surmatants (Estonian), Dansa de la Mort (Catalan) is an artistic genre of late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's station in life, the Dance of Death unites all. The Danse Macabre consists of the dead or personified Death summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, child, and labourer. They were produced to remind people of the fragility of their lives and how vain were the glories of earthly life. Its origins are postulated from illustrated sermon texts; the earliest recorded visual scheme was a now lost mural in the Saints Innocents Cemetery in Paris dating from 1424–25. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danse_Macabre
This simple fable, where Death speaks, has an interesting twist.
Quote:
The Appointment in Samarra
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
Death speaks: there was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the market-place I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me. She looked at me and made a threatening gesture; now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me. The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went. Then the merchant went down to the market-place and he saw me standing in the crowd and he came to me and said, Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning? That was not a threatening gesture, I said, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.
I think you want to check out the HBO series Six Feet Under. Created by Alan Ball, whose American Beauty and True Blood you might be familiar with, it follows the lives of a family that runs a funeral home. Every episode, you have a different corpse, different circumstances of death, different communities with different ways of mourning. I recommend it both in its own right and for your project.
0 Replies
JLNobody
1
Reply
Sat 15 Dec, 2012 10:32 pm
@FBM,
Then there's the moving work by Philip Roth, also titled Everyman.
