Good Cemetery Guide: The Art of Death and Dying: Books, Movies, Art, Rites, Guest Columns

IN EXTREMIS

On Friday night I watched the movie A Mighty Heart with Angelina Jolie playing the role of the feisty Mariane Pearl. I'm not sure who impressed me more, the real-life journalist on whose book the film is based, who had the guts to stick around trying to uncover her husband's whereabouts and who displayed utmost courtesy and respect to the people of the Pakistani nation throughout her ordeal, or Angelina Jolie who performed the role of her career (after that lunatic asylum film she deservedly won an Oscar for - Girl Interrupted - anybody remember that gem?). Anyway, I couldn't sleep after watching the movie. If my imagination was working overtime on the agony that Daniel Pearl suffered (no whisky for him like in the cowboy films) as they severed his head like butchers in a meat market, what must Marianne Pearl's imagination have done? Same thing Saturday night. Angelina Jolie aka Marianne Pearl, one version of gallic style merging with another, wafts in and out of my dreams looking unbelievably translucent and together. In the background is a visual of the men from many nations who never gave up searching for Daniel Pearl and his kidnappers, until they watched the video of the one they were not able to rescue getting his head sawn off with a knife. The close-ups of the watchers' facial expressions are the only mirrors that are held to his grisly death.

"A LITERARY SHAG FOR PRINCESS DI"

Sunday morning arrives and one of those spooky synchronicity things happen that have been happening ever since I started to write as if my life depended on it. A LITERARY SHAG FOR PRINCESS DI. That's the heading of an excerpt in the Sunday newspaper of 15th February 2008 (attributed to Sunday Times, London) which alerts its readers to a unique literary take on the sex life of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Robert Olin Butler, a respected American novelist who won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1993, is about to publish a short story collection called Intercourse imagining the sexual encounters of famous couples which include not only the heir to the British throne but Bill and Hilary Clinton and George and Laura Bush. The article goes on to say Butler is regarded as something of a literary ventriloquist, inserting himself into heads of characters in his stories (isn't that what all fiction writers do?), often at moments in extremis (at the point of dying). My interest piqued I read on. Two years ago Butler published Severance, another volume of short stories, not about anything as prosaic as retrenchment packages and severance pay, but instead he imagines the final thoughts of decapitated heads, based on scientific evidence that the brain keeps functioning for up to 60 seconds after the head has been severed from the body. This is something I did not know. For the umpteenth time I consider how much there is to know about living and dying, and how for me the interesting ground, the spaces to be written, lie in the detail. His characters included Marie Antoinette, John the Baptist, a victim of al-Qaeda and a dragon slain by St George. I'm reminded that Daniel Pearl is in illustrious company.

"I've always agreed with W.B.Yeats, who said that sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind. Severance was my death book; Intercourse is my sex book."

Butler said the above in an interview. Even more spooky. I'd savoured that quote of Yeats' for years.

Anyway, I was finally free of the Pearls and able to get some sleep. I now harboured the distinct hope that if Daniel Pearl had 60 precious seconds where he was free of physical torment then he spent it imagining his unborn child Adam, the 5 month old foetus Marianne Pearl carried, and left his life in a blast of light. One other thing: the film suggests possible reasons for his kidnapping and murder, and his Jewish nationality comes up since he refused to deny his origins if directly asked (although not a religious man), even when his work meant he often interviewed people known to be Muslim extremists. I wonder how many of us would have that kind of respect for our ancient roots if our lives were on the line. Robert Olin Butler reminds us what great fiction writing can be: the pure distillation of real life interpreted as a unique emotional event thereby re-organising human experience into new constructs of the imagination. Through fiction's conceit a solitary death can throw light onto the darkness of Death's mystery. Daniel's Pearl's ghost surely hovers in the fictional corridors of Severance.

Hirschorn National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art

www.visitingdc.com/museum/hirshhorn-museum-washington-dc.htm

Entry for an art contest requiring artist to use only one sheet of paper, Hirschorn Modern Art Gallery in Washington DC, USA.

Yasser Arafat loved the cartoon Tom and Jerry. Learning on the eve of his triumphant 1994 return to the Gaza strip that the show didn't air there, he joked that, in that case, he wasn't going. He adored the program, he said, because the mouse, not the cat, always won. All his life, Arafat was the little guy of the Middle East, scampering feverishly to avoid one lethal trap or another.
Lisa Beyer on Yasser Arafat; TIME Magazine, Nov 22, 2004

TOM AND JERRY

" Oh, Jerry, Jerry, where are you?"

Tom and Jerry, ultimate players of the cat-and-mouse game, are cultural icons of the Twentieth century; the century most of us were born into. In real life the cat usually wins; Arafat must have known that but it didn't matter to him. Tom's heroic hilarious battles of wit against a larger, faster enemy gained Arafat's respect and affection; even if he was an American mouse.

In The Good Cemetery Guide Anthony Loxton conducts his own hilarious heroic struggle against the circumstances of his upbringing and the apparent inevitability of the birthright of a third-generation caretaker of the dead. Like Tom he reminds us that it's the way we conduct our life that's important.

Tom is a cartoon character, in real life death cannot be averted with clever strategems. All the plastic surgery in the world, all the age-defying measures, all the advanced surgery and medical procedures to prolong life are merely delaying the inevitable. All we can hope to do is gain consolation and understanding of the path to death, and find better ways of coping with our own mortality and the mortality of those we love.

From time immemorial humans have conducted ceremonies as rites of passage. Under Features we present some of the rites, rituals and runes that surround death, and encourage contributions that will present a wide variety of viewpoints and opinions, from the mundane everyday reality to the bizarre, because what is bizarre to one human being is mundane to another. The death of one sentient creature often represents food for another. Paradox is at the heart of our existence; controversy has the potential to move us out of our comfort zone and put us on the path to enlightenment.

WE WELCOME CONTRIBUTIONS OF SPECIAL FEATURE WRITING ON THE INTERPLAY OF LIFE, LOVE AND DEATH.
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TOM AND JERRY

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