Death: a magazine for the enthusiast and non-enthusiast alike #2

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A MAGAZINE FOR THE ENTHUSIAST AND NON-ENTHUSIAST ALIKE

with contributions by: Lynda Barry / David Rees / Michael Zavros / Ian Stevenson Stevenson / Mark Warren Jacques Chad Chesko / Brett Glass / Christopher Stanton / Jason Lazarus / Justin Limoges Experimental Jetset / Lori Jones / John Faithful Hamer / makelike / Shannon Wianecki Mark Searcy / Dr. Roger Sty Bantam / Eugene Jefferson / Jai Sheronda / Jason Maurer Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn / Brecht Vandenbroucke / Nate Nat Hill & Death Bear ......

EMILY DICKINSON: ANGEL OF DEATH / David Rees....02-03 Mark Searcy.........................................................04-05 ......................................................... + 13 SUPERSTITION............................................................06-15 ............................................................06-15 Brecht Brett

Vandenbroucke Glass

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Nate

Hill

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Jason &

Death

Maurer Bear

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Justin

John

Limoges

Faithful

Hamer

HEALING JOURNEY / Dr. Roger Sty Bantam........16-17 Bantam 16-17 + 20 Ian Stevenson..............................................................18-19 ..............................................................18-19 ..............................................................18-19 Jai Sheronda....................................................................21 ....................................................................21 ....................................................................21 POETRY IS A DUMB-ASS SPIDER / Lynda Barry..........22-23 Barry 22-23 Jason Lazarus.............................................................24-25 ............................................................. .............................................................24-25 SOME LOSSES / Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn Zeitlyn.......................26-27 .......................26-27 .......................26-27 Chad Chesko.............................................................28 .............................................................28 + 32 .............................................................28 Michael Zavros.............................................................29-31 .............................................................29-31 .............................................................29-31 FUNERAL REVIEWS....................................................

REVIEWS....................................................33-35 REVIEWS ....................................................33-35 ....................................................33-35 Shannon Wianecki / Eugene Jefferson / Justin Limoges /

Lori Jones

Christopher Stanton.........................................................

Stanton.........................................................36 Stanton .........................................................36 .........................................................36 front cover: back cover (color reversed with permission): inside front & back cover background pattern:

Mark Warren Jacques Experimental Jetset (2007) makelike

publisher/editor: Forrest Martin copy editors: James Boyda, John Wilmot thanks to Nathan Cearley, John Wilmot, Dana Bruington and David Scherer

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“And when there is always time for everything, there is no urgency for anything. This is the paradox death imposes upon us: it grants us the possibility of a meaningful life even as it takes it away." - Todd May issue #2, September, 2010 ©

EMILY DICKINSON: DAVID DAVID REES DA REES

ANGEL OF DEATH Because I could not stomp on Death, He kindly stomped on me; The carriage held but just ourselves And Immortality and mozzarella sticks.

-Emily Dickinson

EMILY DICKINSON WAS AN old woman poet who lived in an attic and dressed like an undertaker.

Widely known as the poet least likely to ever fly in a helicopter, she wrote with a quill dipped in a crow’s eyeball juices.

Dickinson wrote poems based on her true-life adventures. Her poem “A narrow fellow in the grass” is about when she was mowing her lawn and almost ran over Abraham Lincoln sleeping one off in her backyard; “She sweeps with many-colored brooms” is about the time she dosed her maid’s coffee with LSD; the famous “Hope is the thing with feathers” is about her bra-strap being too tight; a poem called “My life had stood a loaded gun” is about taking a trip to New York City and buying the wrong brand of shampoo.

(And people wonder why Emily Dickinson only published a handful of poems in her lifetime! The real question is how she got any poems published at all. I’ve thought about this a lot, and my conclusion is that people just like reading crazy shit. Sometimes this fact makes me sad, but other times it makes me happy.)

EMILY DICKINSON WAS OBSESSED with three things: fashion, baseball, and death. But mostly death.

Her journals are filled with morbid references to “kicking the bucket” and “biting it” and “getting the shit died out of you,” and her poetry reflected this concern.

An early draft of “Because I could not stop for Death” reads as follows: Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me.

But I used my invisibility potion to cloud his eyes so he couldn’t see.

That’s why I’m still here, chillin’ up in my little room where I write poems.

Basically, I outsmarted Death.

Somebody needs to get off their ass and buy me a fancy new shawl Because I win.

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This was a fantasy, of course; nobody was ever going to buy Emily Dickinson a fancy new shawl.

Furthermore, you can’t outsmart Death—not with invisibility potions or garlic-gamma rays or even Hadron-collider boots that let you run faster than a proton. Death comes for everyone. Emily Dickinson knew this. Her poetry wasn’t a denial of reality; it was an attempt to knock Death off its pedestal, to make Death less intimidating and annoying. This is why she’s sometimes called the spiritual godmother of death metal, and why you can buy Emily Dickinson scrunchies at Hot Topic (my favorite store), and why Cannibal Corpse’s only top-ten hit was called “Presbyopic Goat Carcasses Mercilessly Skull-Fucked By The Dessicated Corpse Of Emily Dickinson Underwater.”

ONCE UPON A TIME, Emily Dickinson was

buying groceries in the tiny little town where she lived.

She bought milk, cough drops, potatoes, flour, and a five-pound bag of carrots. Hidden deep down in the bag was a black carrot—a carrot as dark and dry as a witch’s turd—a carrot as ominous as Death itself. It must have been infected by spiders. Or maybe a family of grubs was using it as a condominium. Anyway, because she had the soul of a beatnik, Dickinson didn’t scream and throw away the black carrot like a normal person would. She placed the carrot on the windowsill in her office so she could look at it while she wrote her poetry: I’m a dried-up carrot, who are you?

Are you a dried-up carrot, too?

There’s a pair of us, don’t tell!

They’d banish us, you know— To the garbage.

The carrot rests on Emily Dickinson’s windowsill to this day; it’s now so dry that if you enter the room, it leeches the moisture out of your pores and your skin starts cracking open.

DEATH IS A LOT LIKE one of Emily Dickinson’s

poems; it’s over quickly and doesn’t make sense and usually involves snakes and doilies. And sure enough, eventually Death came for Emily Dickinson. She heard a fly buzz and dashed off a few lines and then dropped dead from a heart attack. She was buried under the floorboards of the attic where she had written so many of her amazing poems.

NOW EMILY DICKINSON LIVES in Heaven

and knows just about everybody and dances to rave music with her puritanical New England titties flapping every which way, and she’s never been happier. It’s funny how life works.

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l: Under The Rug No.2 r: SLEEPING IN SPACE Mark Searcy

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SUPerSTITIon brecht Vandenbroucke

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e a c h i s s ue of Death includes a themed s e c t i o n asking writers to comment on a p a r t i c u l a r topic, as it relates, of course, to d e a t h . S een here: superstition.

Illustrations by Justin Limoges

AT NIGHT BEHINd THE BARN Jason Maurer

i Don’t reMeMBer hoW I ended up behind the barn in a foot of snow in the middle of the night, but that’s where I was, stuck. I had spent the last hour or two—or maybe five, I don’t know—being drawn into the darkness back there. And now it held me in its arms.

“Is this death?” I asked. Not yet, not quite. I took another step.

They call obsessive-compulsive disorder “brain lock” because your mind is literally trapped in a loop of irrational logic brought on by fear. The greater the fear, the tighter the loop. And each break for freedom is met with higher stakes. It’s like gambling with Satan—eventually you risk having your soul stripped like flesh from bone and feasted upon by faceless children. I’d lived with OCD forever, usually showing up as a race to the bathroom or a sock that absolutely had to be turned right side in. But after my best friend’s death, the disease spread, and the voice grew stronger.

“Is this how it felt,” I asked, “when you killed yourself?”

Close. You’re getting closer.

My wet socks were beginning to freeze as the snow collected around them. The night was so still I could hear my heart pounding between breaths.

Everything glowed. The edges of the barn were sharp and threatening, like a knife being waved in my face. Every angle and object created a plane that split danger from safety, demanding to be crossed and re-crossed in ever expanding patterns and numbers of patterns until my brain was a racehorse on fire. There have to be a million better ways to lose your mind than by staring into the trough of death in your backyard.

When I was little, I saw a man at a bus stop shuffling his feet. The bus had come, but he was unable to commit to stepping aboard. Each time his foot left the ground, it came back down and scraped at the sidewalk rhythmically, like a donkey counting numbers. I was too young to even know what was happening, but I understood his plight completely. Dad used to tell me that you can’t step in the same river twice. That it’s impossible, because the river is always changing. You can’t go back. You can’t hold on.

Your only option is to move forward into the unknown. And as terrifying as the unknown feels, it’s your destiny. Insanity is your only loophole, to deny the truth and balance in that impossible space between what you know and the infinite black of uncertainty spread out before you.

I gulped five times (Five is good, I think) and took a step.

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TELLING LIz Brett Glass

MY

Mother toLD Me she choked on a sandwich at a party, a fairly benign and unglamorous way to die.

Liz’s family moved out a few months later, but were unable to sell the house; it stood empty for over a year. Most likely it was because of the poor housing market, but I decided it was because Liz was haunting the house, scaring away potential buyers.

It was the only two story house in the neighborhood, a faux-colonial painted baby blue with white trim. No other house in our neighborhood would have worked as a setting—ghosts don’t haunt flat-roofed ranches. Liz was the ideal ghost, too. She had been beautiful in life— flowing red hair, ivory-girl skin and long legs she liked to show off in short shorts and pin-thin designer jeans.

Ghosts are rarely, if ever, ugly.

I couldn’t believe my luck.

I learned about storytelling from two people: my mother and my cousin Shelly. My mother was a good storyteller— she changed facts, but only to move the story along and make it more interesting. The gist of the story remained true so you forgave her if she changed a detail or two for dramatic effect. Shelly, on the other hand, took a seed of truth and grew a big purple redwood tree of lies.

For example: Shelly looked like Stevie Nicks, true, but she told people she sounded like Stevie Nicks, and then she told people she had a band, and then she told people she had a record contract, and then she told people she was opening for Journey, and so on.

Nobody ever believed Shelly’s stories, and I wanted people to believe mine; so I erred on the side of simplicity.

I told the neighborhood kids that I’d seen Liz, the Ghost of Liz, in the window that faced our house, looking out at me with red, glowing eyes.

Only the most gullible, poor Aaron Roche, believed me. Everyone else required evidence, or, at least, a more more interesting story.

So, the next day, I broke into the house while Aaron and Danny and John Dymtrow waited for me on our patio.

Liz’s house had a screened-in pool for a backyard; it was easy to rip a hole where nobody would see and crawl through. It was also easy to jimmy open the sliding glass doors—we had the same doors, and I’d done it a bunch of times after locking myself out. All you had to do was hold the handle and give the door a violent shake to knock it off the frame and then giggle it to the side, little by little.

Of course it made a lot of noise, but no parents were around in the afternoon.

The doors lead into the living room, carpeted in powder-blue shag that smelled strongly of industrial shampoo. The only things left from Liz’s family were curtains over the bay windows—gold velvet, too heavy and dark for Florida—and a wall clock that had stopped at ten

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‘til twelve.

I stayed in the living room for a few minutes, then ran out the glass doors, back around the pool, through the hole in the screen and underneath the ficus hedge that separated our yards. I was breathless and dirty when I got to the patio.

I told the boys that I saw something out the corner of my eye, a movement, a flash of red, but when I turned my head it was gone. All I saw was a clock. I watched as it floated away from the wall and hovered briefly before crashing to the ground. The hands were frozen at ten ‘til twelve. I paused and pulled the clock from beneath my tee shirt.

The exact time of Liz’s death.

The story got around and kids from blocks away asked me to retell it. I was known in the neighborhood as a bit of a pansy, but my story seemed to be turning around my reputation. Even the kids who didn’t believe it were impressed I had the guts to break into a house and steal something.

Eventually the story reached the pasty-faced Pabst girls. Being devout evangelical Christians, they immediately told their parents, who in turn called my mother.

She wasn’t angry that I broke into a house and stole a clock. She wasn’t angry, exactly, that I made up stories about our dead neighbor...just that I had done such a mediocre job of it.

Being a more experienced and nuanced liar, she has a better story to tell.

“Sit down,” she says. “I didn’t tell you the truth before, because I didn’t think you were old enough.” She pauses for a drag of her cigarette. “I thought it would scare you. But...you broke into a fucking house so I guess you can handle it.”

She looks at me in a serious way, her eyes narrowed, her head tilted down, the cigarette burning to ash between her fingers as if forgotten in the drama of the moment. It’s one of her signature storytelling devices, I’ve seen her do it a million times. Still, it works. I’m riveted.

“That girl died of an overdose,” she says. “Do you know what an overdose is?”

“Drugs.” Drugs mean hippies, and hippies mean Charles Manson, and Charles Manson means chaos and forks stuck in pregnant bellies just for kicks. I feel my heart give a jump. Nothing scares me more than the thought of Charles Manson.

“That’s right. She died of a drug overdose. A speedball.”

I don’t know what a speedball is, but I imagine it’s a large flame-colored pill you swallow whole or let melt in your mouth like a gobstopper.

“Her parents were tore up about it. I don’t know what happened. That girl was a lot of things, but she was not

a druggie.” She sits down at the kitchen table and leans toward me.

“They didn’t find any more drugs, and nobody else was high. Not even her boyfriend.” She takes a final drag and then stubs out her cigarette.

“He’s a paramedic, but they didn’t call 911 for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes!” She shakes her head.

“She was dead when they got there.”

“Here’s what I think happened. He shot her up. I don’t know if he held her down or if he just talked her into it, but he shot her up. Then he left her alone in the bedroom to die. He would have known how much to give her and how long it would take.”

She taps out another cigarette from the pack, lights it. She takes a drag—the first drag is always the longest, the most languorous—but she draws it out an unusually long time, a superhuman time, before finally exhaling.

The kitchen gets a lot of sunlight in the afternoon.

The smoke mingles with the light, catches a draft of air conditioning and swirls around her face like fog. I’m not scared anymore.

“That’s why you saw that ghost,” she says at last.

“She was trying to get your attention, trying to tell you something. Lead you to a clue maybe, to catch her killer.”

She looks out the window at Liz’s house, which will remain empty for another year. “Think about that the next time you tell a story.”

ONLY THE BAd dIE YOUNG John Faithful Hamer there was a mighty tempest in the sea, so that the ship was like to be broken... the mariners were afraid...And they said every one to his fellow, Come, and let us cast lots, that we may know for whose cause this evil is upon us...the lot fell upon Jonah...

So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea: -Jonah 1:4-15 (King James Version)

M agic

fish asiDe, what strikes the modern reader as odd about the Jonah story is the mariners’ unthinking assumption: that human behavior was to blame for the storm. The idea that the weather could be altogether indifferent to their welfare was foreign to these ancient mariners. The storm had to have a meaning because they inhabited a world that was in every respect meaningful, a world without mere coincidence, a world that was yet to be disenchanted. A romantic longing for that meaningful, enchanted world—where bad things only happen to bad people—has been a hallmark of health-conscious America for well over a century.

In The Laws of Health (1857), for example, nineteenth-

century health reformer William Alcott declared that there were at least two things that we could all be sure of: namely, “that, if the wicked do not live out half their days, it is because of their wickedness” and that “if the infirmities of age come upon us, it is because we have disobeyed, either intentionally or ignorantly, the Divine laws.” Alcott was here articulating one of his Judeo-Christian culture’s most fundamental assumptions. Philosopher Susan Sontag correctly stressed that in “the world envisaged by Judaism and Christianity, there are no free-standing arbitrary events. All events are part of the plan of a just, good, providential deity...Every disaster or calamity must be seen either as leading to a greater good or else as just and adequate punishment fully merited by the sufferer.” “Sicknesse comes not by hap or chance,” as one seventeenth-century New England Puritan put it, “but from mans wickednesse.”

It took the West centuries to move away from this moralistic Judeo-Christian worldview toward a scientific one that recognizes the often accidental and arbitrary nature of human suffering. Anthropologist Lucien LévyBruhl maintained that “our distinctive achievement” as moderns “was to invent the idea of natural death and actually believe in it.” For Lévy-Bruhl, “the defining feature of primitive mentality is to try to nail a cause for every misfortune; and the defining feature of modernity, to forbear to ask.” Continuing this thought, Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky emphasized that the “concept of the accident rate and the normal chances of incurring disease belongs to the modern, scientific way of thinking. Faced by statistical averages there is no point in my asking why a particular illness should have struck me.” Douglas and Wildavsky suggested that had Lévy-Bruhl lived to see the 1970s, he would have been astonished to see moderns “asking those famous primitive questions as if there were no such thing as natural death, no purely physical facts, no regular accident rates, no normal incidence of death.” In health-conscious America, the older way of thinking—“the primitive mentality”— made a spirited

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comeback in the twentieth century.

The Meaning of Death in Health-Conscious America Humans are probably the only creatures that can see death coming for them, so to speak, years before it arrives. The human brain has evolved a capacity for foresight that is, to the best of our knowledge, unrivaled in the animal kingdom. We can anticipate problems and opportunities long before they happen and plan accordingly. In some parts of the world, for instance, people plant and tend to trees whose fruits will be tasted only by their grandchildren. Foresight is an evolutionary adaptation that has given the human species a tremendous competitive advantage. Even so, foresight has its costs. Humans are perhaps the only intelligent animals that fret about death when they are in perfect health and safety. Most people fear death. Often, they also fear the mental and physical decline that so frequently precedes it. Unorthodox health reformers have consistently taken advantage of these fears. They have informed people that decline is not inevitable and that the human lifespan can be vastly extended.

William Alcott went so far as to claim that the mortal life of a human being need not ever come to end. All death was failure, as far as he was concerned, even that of the famously long-lived patriarch Methuselah, who, according to the Book of Genesis, met his end at the ripe old age of 969. Alcott maintained that if “Methuselah suffered from what we call the infirmities of age, it was his own fault.

God, his Creator, never intended it. The very common belief,” added Alcott, “that old age must necessarily bring with it infirmities, besides being a great mistake, reflects dishonor to God.” Twentieth-century health reformers were, for the most part, considerably more reasonable than Alcott. Still, they set unrealistic longevity standards that few people, if any, have been able to achieve. For instance, Gayelord Hauser (1895-1984), bestselling author of Look Younger, Live Longer (1950), claimed that if we took care of ourselves we could all live to be 140 years old. Adolphus Hohensee (1901-1967), always prone to hyperbole, believed 180 more accurate. Prevention writers, with relative

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restraint, usually pegged the “normal” human lifespan at 120. Proclamations such as these gave graying Americans a kind of hope that doctors could not in good conscience provide.

Harvard nutritionists Elizabeth Whelan and Fredrick Stare maintained that licensed medical professionals were in this instance, as in so many others, competing at a distinct disadvantage. As men and women of science, they were obliged to tell their aging patients the unpleasant truth: namely, that some diseases thus far cannot be cured and some suffering cannot yet be alleviated; “that popping vitamin pills every few hours, or avoiding white bread and refined sugar, is not going to either cure or prevent degenerative disease”; that “there simply are no wonder supplements or magic potions”; and that until “medical science advances far beyond its present state, humans will necessarily continue to die from something.” Although reasonable, this analysis proved a bitter pill that many Americans refused to swallow. Instead, more and more people came to believe that one could bargain with death.

They were encouraged in this belief by the remarkable promises made by health reformers.

For better or for worse, the ideology of natural health has permeated virtually every facet of American society in the last four decades: health-food stores and health clubs have proliferated; antismoking campaigns have won astounding victories; breastfeeding and vegetarianism have become much more common; and the demand for organic food, herbal remedies, vitamin and mineral supplements, exercise gear and alternative health care has created massive industries. The ideology has resonated particularly well in the United States because its emphasis upon individual responsibility is, at bottom, largely a secular restatement of deeply-rooted Judeo-Christian assumptions about the meaning of suffering and the capacity for choice.

Health gurus such as Jerome Rodale, Adelle Davis, Carlton Fredericks, and the editors of Prevention—“America’s Leading Health Magazine”—promised much to the healthconscious Americans. They maintained, for instance, that aging—a human experience so thoroughly fraught with danger and uncertainty—could be controlled by the right mixture of vitamins, exercise, organic food, dietary restrictions, and positive thinking. Although the natural health movement provided new choices and a sense of self-mastery to many, especially women, its success has spread a new orthodoxy across America, with a harsh and unforgiving approach toward aging, obesity, motherhood, disease and death. Health reformers such as Robert Rodale helped redefine tragedies such as cancer, heart disease, depression, schizophrenia, crib death and miscarriage as punishments meted out to those who failed to obey the natural laws of health. They promised to free the American people from the tyranny of Western Medicine. Yet they replaced Doctor God with an equally demanding deity: Mother Nature.

When Bad Things Happen to Good People Every so often, the promises propounded by the preachers of prevention proved problematic. Freshly published results based on a well-designed scientific study might, for instance, demonstrate that a beloved supplement like vitamin C or echinacea does not, in fact, cure the common cold. Still, nothing has proven more problematic than the death of a leader. The death of Jim Fixx is a case in point.

In the early 1980s, Jim Fixx was the most well-known fitness promoter in America. His best-known work, The Complete Book of Running (1977), broke numerous records for non-fiction sales. More than perhaps anyone else, Fixx popularized running as sport, religion, and lifestyle.

His sinewy physique was legendary. And his superior health was assumed. Indeed, that is why his early death came as such a shock. Fixx was running along a quiet tree-lined street in Vermont on a sunny July day in 1984 when he dropped dead of a heart attack. He was just 52 years old. Remarking upon the intrinsic irony of Fixx’s death proved irresistible for irreverent late-night comedians such as Denis Leary.

In the comedy routine No Cure for Cancer (1993), Leary maintained that Fixx’s death was a refutation of the health-conscious lifestyle. Health enthusiasts were always telling Americans, he claimed, that if they would only give up their bad habits and replace them with good ones they could add an extra ten or twenty years to their lives.

“Hey,” Leary retorted, “I got two words for you, okay. Jim Fixx. Remember Jim Fixx?

The big famous jogging guy? Jogged fifteen miles a day. Did a jogging book. Did a jogging video. Dropped dead of a heart attack. When?

When he was fucking jogging, that’s when!” In 2004, twenty years after Fixx’s death, famed running instructor Hal Higdon posted an editorial on his website that took issue with those critics of long-distance running who characterized Fixx’s death as an indictment of the sport. Jim Fixx’s father, Higdon observed, died of a heart attack when he was just 43 years old. Had he not taken up running when he did, it is likely, Higdon argued, that Jim Fixx would have died of a heart attack at 43, too. Running, he maintained, probably added nine years to Fixx’s life. In 1987, three years after Fixx’s death, health writer Carlton Fredericks, famous for his syndicated radio show “Good Health,” also died of a heart attack. He was 76 years old, which is not a particularly good score for a health reformer. But it was an open secret by then that he had been smoking heavily on the sly for years, so his death was fairly easy to explain away. The death of Prevention magazine’s founder Jerome Rodale was, by contrast, much more problematic.

Jerome Rodale once argued that all of the teachings

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of health guru Horace Fletcher (1849-1919) were inherently suspect because of his untimely demise.

Fletcher, famous for his advocacy of extreme mastication, was 70 years old when he died. “To be proof of his system,” Rodale maintained, “he should not have died before 90.” Thinking along similar lines, Prevention’s executive editor claimed in 1974 that the teachings of 80-year-old health promoter Gayelord Hauser were to be heeded because his longevity and vitality were “a superb testimonial to the value of the nutritional principles he has been writing and lecturing about for over fifty years.”

“If more of us followed his simple advice,” he added, “we might also find ourselves as ageless and vital as Gayelord Hauser.” Jerome Rodale said that he intended to live until the ripe old age of 102, so that he could say that he had lived in three different centuries (he was born in 1898).

He insisted that his healthy lifestyle would allow him to achieve this goal. Alas, he suffered a massive heart attack in 1971, while he was being interviewed on the Dick Cavett Show.

Though the episode was never aired, Cavett recalls that Rodale was a splendid guest: “He was extremely funny for half an hour, talking about health foods, and as a friendly gesture he offered me some of his special asparagus, boiled in urine. I think I said, ‘Anybody’s we know?’ while making a mental note to have him back.”

Among the many remarkable things that Rodale said on the show, Cavett remembers these as the most startling: “‘I’m in such good health...that I fell down a long flight of stairs yesterday, and I laughed all the way.’ ‘I’ve decided to live to be 100.’ And the inevitable, ‘I’ve never felt better in my life!’” Rodale slumped over slightly to one side while Cavett was interviewing another guest—Pete Hamill, a columnist for The New York Post. Initially, Cavett thought that Rodale had fallen asleep. With characteristic wit, Cavett exclaimed, “Are we boring you, Mr. Rodale?” The studio audience burst into laughter. Of course it soon became clear that Rodale was not sleeping.

Like Robert Atkins, Jerome Rodale was 72 years old when he died. His passing sent shockwaves through healthconscious America. “Rodale,” as one panicked follower put it, “has ruined the health-food industry by dying.”

The death of Adelle Davis three years later was even more problematic. At the time of her death, Davis was by far the most well-known health guru in America.

As with Jim Fixx, her superior health was assumed. Even so, Davis died of bone cancer at the age of 70—in 1974, when the life expectancy of a white woman in America was 76.7 years. Mean-spirited critics were quick to note that not only did Davis fail to improve upon her expected longevity, she barely even made it into her 70s. Detractors of the natural health movement had a field day with the deaths of Jerome Rodale and Adelle Davis. These deaths were a public relations disaster that required a great deal of energy to explain away. In much the same way that Hal Higdon defended Jim Fixx in 2004, defenders of Jerome

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Rodale insisted in the wake of his death that he had in fact lived a virtuous life, but that the congenitally weak heart that he was born with could only take him so far.

The argument had merit. Rodale’s father, Michael Cohen, died of a heart attack at 51. Eerily, his oldest brother, Archie Cohen, also died of a heart attack at 51. Cardiac arrest claimed his brother Solomon at 62, his brother Joe at 56, his sister Tina at 64, and his sister Sally at 58. Given this dismal family history, Prevention writers maintained that Rodale would have in all likelihood died in his early 50s had he not taken such good care of himself. He had added twenty years to his life. This was cause for celebration. Rodale’s death at 72, they argued, was nothing that the health conscious need be ashamed of.

Explaining Adelle Davis’s death was more difficult.

She had died at the relatively early age of 70, more than six years below the national average. How could someone who lived such a healthy life develop bone cancer? Davis was initially shocked when she received the diagnosis in 1973. But she soon came up with an explanation that left her belief system intact. True to form, Davis blamed herself. Her cancer had come about, she argued, as a result of two important lapses in judgment.

The first was acquiescing in numerous x-rays over the years. Insurance companies required them for periodic examinations, but she reasoned that they were carcinogenic and that she should have known better. Davis claimed that the second transgression took place long ago in her youth. She maintained that she had eaten well on the Indiana farm where she grew up, but that she had turned to junk foods when she left home for college. She had continued upon this nutritionally unsound path for much of her 20s. She insisted that her life since then had been thoroughly virtuous. But clearly, she lamented, the damage was already done. Davis concluded that she was now paying for the sins of her youth. Prevention magazine accepted her analysis and praised “the great lady of the natural health movement” for battling it out better than most. In her death, Adelle Davis maintained the principle of personal responsibility, appropriately so because she was one of the health reformers most insistent on placing it on individuals. As luck would have it, health-conscious America’s nemesis Fredrick John Stare managed to outlive all of his lifelong enemies. He died in 2002, at the

ripe old age of 91.

Uncertainty and the Moral Imagination

Mark Searcy

A healthy respect for uncertainty has been conspicuously absent in health-conscious America. And it is here, I think, that the psychological origins of the movement’s heartlessness are to be found. To put it plainly: If you don’t believe in luck, you probably don’t believe in compassion either. True compassion stems from an awareness of your own limitations and from a careful assessment of the limitations of the person you wish to judge; it stems, as well, from an honest appreciation of the good fortune that has helped you achieve whatever it is that you have achieved. “To respond with compassion,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum rightly observes, “I must be willing to entertain the thought that this suffering person might be me;” compassion requires “a sense of one’s own vulnerability to misfortune.” Thinking along similar lines, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argues in Emile (1762), that the moral imagination of a child ought to be shaped by an awareness of “the vicissitudes of fortune:” “Make him understand well that the fate of these unhappy men can be his...Unsettle and frighten his imagination with the perils by which every man is constantly surrounded.” Only thus, avers Rousseau, can a man be made humane. Yet this is precisely the kind of moral reasoning that has been consistently opposed by the leaders of the natural health movement.

Luminaries like Adelle Davis and the Rodales claimed, time and again, that good health is not a matter of luck or fate; it is a decision—a decision made by self-disciplined individuals. A healthy physique is, in health-conscious circles, an accurate indicator of a person’s moral worth. Conversely, a diseased body is seen as fundamentally aberrant; “it is foolish to be ill,” thunders Adolphus Hohensee. “We can have health,” declared another, “or we can have disease. It’s all up to us.” Of course, it’s not all up to us. Things fall apart. People get sick and die, often for no apparent reason. The world we inhabit can be an unpredictable place. This horrifies most of us. So we ignore it when we can, and deny the evidence of experience when we cannot. When all else fails, we embrace illusions of total control. Health consciousness is just one of those illusions. There have been others in the past, and so long as our desire to control the capricious

revolutions of the Wheel of Fortune remains intact, there will be others in the future.

In The Future of an Illusion (1927), Freud argues that our colossal attempts to make sense of suffering and death are ultimately fueled by a childish fear of growing up. We are afraid of leaving the home where we “felt so warm and cozy.” We do not wish to come to terms with the arbitrary nature of existence. Illusions fulfill this wish.

They coddle us, stunt our psychological growth, and allow us to prolong our childish fantasies well into adulthood.

All of this renders us, at least as far as Freud is concerned, pretty pathetic: “A person cannot remain a child for ever; eventually the child must go out into what has been called ‘hostile life’. The process might be termed ‘education for reality’.”

The resigned realists of the future would, Freud hoped, resolutely reject all infantilizing illusions. Like St. Paul, they would “put away childish things.”

This widespread cultural maturation would lead, in turn, to the dawning of a more enlightened age led by sober scientists. But alas, the somber souls that Freud idealized remain— especially in the United States—little more than a melancholy morbid minority. Freud’s adults cannot help but feel like misfits and outsiders in 21st-century America.

Even in these difficult economic times, their pessimistic worldview places them at odds with the morals and mores of the mainstream. The same could manifestly not be said about health-conscious Americans. Their ideas are, at present, a central feature of our shared experience.

Between 1970 and 2010, millions of Americans embraced concerns that were once the exclusive province of a quirky subculture. Throughout this vast country, on the blessed isles of health-conscious America, aging Americans are quixotically asserting their freedom over fate and fortune.

Freud would be horrified by their optimism. Rousseau would be horrified by their lack of compassion.

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Have you ever passed a Mobile Shredding Unit and wondered what it would be like to make your living destroying other people’s things? Death Bear doesn’t shred them, but if you live in Brooklyn he will make your painful possessions disappear, by appointment.

Death magazine talks to Nate Hill and his alias, Death Bear, about superstition, ritual, and hungry caves.

dm: Death Bear, thanks for agreeing to answer some questions.

The first thing people seem to be curious about is the place you ferry these objects off to. What are the attributes of your cave? dB: It is dark with a bed. Everything I put inside disappears. I don’t know where these things go. They just go. My bed stays though. It stays right where it is. I don’t know why this is or how anything really works in there. I think it might be some kind of magic, but I don’t even know if I believe in magic. It’s warm inside. I don’t get cold, but sometimes it is lonely because I am alone.

dm: Hi, Nate. This section of Death magazine is asking people to comment on superstition. My old copy of Funk & Wagnalls Dictionary defi nes it as “credulous belief in, or fear of, what is unknown, mysterious, or supernatural, marked by a trust in or reverence for charms, omens, signs, etc.; also, any rite or practice inspired by such a belief.”

As Death Bear, your domain intersects with this defi nition, both in the act of people assigning power and extra signifi cance to objects, and in having strong feelings about how to properly treat them.

What are your thoughts on superstition in relation to your performances as Death Bear, and why do you think people entrust their emotionallycharged memorabilia to you, a stranger, rather than dispose of it themselves?

NH: Personally, I am superstitious about the five boxes full of objects that I have collected as Death Bear.

In my studio apartment, I have them taped shut and see no reason to open them. Whatever energy is inside, I do not want to release into my house.

The myth of Death Bear, as you may know, is that the objects collected from people, and the painful memory energy held within, are extinguished when brought inside my bear cave.

Of course, there is more to

dm: Is it hard to find a cave in New York City? dB: I don’t know. I don’t know anyone. I was born in my cave, and I’ve lived there alone all my life. The people I visit I only see for a short time, and then I come back to the cave. I have a lot of time to think. That is OK. dm: You’ve said before that you don’t relate to emotional trauma. Would you say, then, that your motivation for this service is not empathetic? If it’s not, what is your motivation? dB: Once I discovered the power of the cave to absorb objects, I

thought I might put it to good use. If I had something else to do, I would do that. But I don’t have anything else to do, and this allows me to leave the cave once in a while. I’m also starting to really enjoy the feeling of bringing things to the cave like I am feeding it. Perhaps that is how the cave stays so warm.

dm: You appear to have both a dark and a comforting presence, being reminiscent of a stuffed bear, but creepier. What range of responses have you had to this, alone with strangers in their houses? dB: Some people are intimidated by my height and darkness. That is just the way that I was born. There is no need to be scared of me because of the way I was born. On the other hand, being as I am a bear, I do have human predators; so it doesn’t hurt to have them respect me for everyone’s safety. There are some people out there (not many but a few) who would like to do me harm. I would

this myth than just a story. I think the most important symbol is the cave. It is the cave that is really the star of the whole Death Bear show. So isn’t it cool that no one ever sees it nor does it exist?

But it exists in your mind! The cave is the thing that is really doing the work and giving the person who calls Death Bear peace, because it is the cave that absorbs your pain. dm: So do you offer a guarantee that the articles Death Bear is

given will never again be seen by their former owners?

NH: That is my promise. But I have thought about breaking the promise and doing something with the items. I don’t know what this is yet, or how I will rectify this with the people whose things I have which are supposed to have disappeared. Maybe I’m taking the myth of Death Bear too seriously? I probably am. dm: The things that people give away are heavy with the weight of

personal meaning for their former owners. Do you have a ritual or process that cleanses the objects of the negative energies after you receive them? If so, what does it entail?

NH: I keep it very simple. It’s kind of like when you break up with a girlfriend you love. I’ve done that a lot; so I should know. Once those words cross your lips and you make the break, your business with that person is kind of over. There’s no need for talking or hugging. It’s a shift and a change in the world that unless undone, you cannot reconcile (at least immediately) between each other because the emotions are too strong in that moment. That’s how I see my time with people as Death Bear. Once I collect your items, after you told me what they are and I put them in my black duffel bag, there is not much else that we need to do or discuss. I leave. If you have anything else that you need to say or express, it’s best done with a friend, kind of like in the same way as if you’d been dumped by me. I’m not sure this is making sense. dm: It does. How about this: Given the amount of energy contained and transferred in the ritualistic passing of objects from lost loved ones, is it possible that this energy can be sold back to the grid?

NH: No, but I think there is more potential for other artists to mine

this realm that I have stumbled upon. Someone told me that I have made a ritual for something that before had no ritual. Before Death Bear, you had just about two choices; either throw the

stuff in the garbage or keep it. What other things in our lives could use a ritual? I may explore this in the future with a new animal character. dm: What is your earliest memory associated with death?

NH: I don’t remember my childhood, but I used to kill things like most young boys. I remember that. When I was in high school in Florida, I killed a lot of lizards. I remember doing it as humanely as possible though. I used to stun them with a squirt of rubbing alcohol. Then I’d put them in ice water and into the freezer. Why did my parents let me do this? Then I got into taxidermy in college and started making things out of all kinds of found dead animals and roadkill...but that’s another story. dm: What were some of your childhood Halloween costumes?

NH: Again, I’m not trying to sound cool, but I really don’t remember my childhood. But as an adult, I like wearing costumes because the anonymity allows me to assume new identities and shape characters that I like living. When I first started doing performance art in mascot costumes about two years ago, I was real afraid to admit that I enjoyed playing with “new identities,” because I didn’t want to be perceived as a furry. Now, people know my work and hopefully realize that I’m not a furry? Exaggerating parts of my personality is also something I like. Death Bear and his cave are kind of a tale of goodness kept in isolation and alienation, and doing good for a world that you don’t feel a part of. dm: What do you do to keep in shape?

NH: I am not really in shape right now. All I do is eat and perform and then smoke weed and eat more and then perform. I’m naturally slim, but if you saw me naked, you’d see I’m not actually in shape. The direction my art is going right now, seeing me naked may not be far off. My latest project, “Fake Fake Fantasies,” is a photo series that will feature topless girls of my fantasies, even though I’m currently in a committed relationship. I will be posing with these “other women,” but only after having myself artificially Photoshopped into the pictures. So these pictures are doubly fake in that these girls were paid by me to do this project, and in that I am being added to this already phony setting. I’m working on depersonalizing my fantasies in this way, so that I can make them acceptable to my girlfriend for having them. Anyways, I’m not in shape, but maybe if the production companies that are calling me about doing a Death Bear reality show pan out, I can buy a new shiny bike. I really want a bike.

like to present myself in a slightly formidable way so they think twice. dm: What was it like being a teenage Death Bear? dB: Lonely...I didn’t see much of the sun. I spent most days and nights in the cave. Sometimes I would come out at night.

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Dr. Bantam is the co-founder of Discovery Center International, a new age Healing Arts Center based in Olympia, Washington. He is a medical doctor with a Ph.D. in Orthomolecular Psychiatry. He is also an ordained shaman of Gehgiah. Gehgiah is a religion that began in the 1950s near West Palm Beach as an off-shoot of Astara. In the 1980s, Dr. Bantam worked at the Brookhaven National Laboratory and was the director of the Montauk Project. Today, Discovery Center offers counseling, workshops, professional certification programs, and produces the controversial radio phenomenon, Healing Journey. Healing Journey uses subsonic frequencies between 410 and 420 MHz to alter emotions. With similar results, Dr. Bantam has a specialized text version of his radio program, a sample of which appears here.

WARNING: CONSULT A PHYSICIAN BEFORE CONTINUING. The following four pages are a new kind of printed guided meditation employing psychiatrics. Through the text itself, by reading, you will be exposed to Neurolinguistic Triggers (NLT). The U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires that magazine publishers make this warning concerning the potentially dangerous effects of NLT. Until research on NLT is completed, the FDA has temporarily designated NLT as a type of drug.

While reading this guided meditation out loud to others or reading silently to yourself, the text fonts, words and phrases may evoke subliminal hypnotic responses.

Neurolinguistic Triggers have been proven by the State of California to have adverse health effects.

NLT can cause dizziness, upset stomach, nausea, vomiting, chills, loose bowels, diarrhea, constipation, loss of appetite, dementia, anxiety and sleeplessness.

Readers being treated for emotional difficulties are advised not to continue. By providing this warning the U.S. Food and Drug Administration considers the publishers of this magazine held harmless from any adverse effects, damages or health problems. By continuing, readers are agreeing that they have read (or heard) and understand this warning, that they are adults over the age of 25, and have agreed to waive any findings of fault, damage reparations or legal claims.

this is Dr. roger stY BantaM

, writing you from my office on the top floor of The Guardian Light Building in Olympia, Washington. I welcome you to the Healing Journey.

Healing Journey is an exciting new kind of literature. In addition to being informative, Healing Journey uses word combinations and text formatting to trigger a psychiatric mind-body state of tantric certainty. For this to work all you need to do is read.

During this guided meditation my words will be emitting a cataleptic transmission. Readers who open themselves up to the golden hope of the GOD TIGER can experience Healing Journey as a full body, mentalmystical synergy.

In doing this, I’m bringing light to mystery by taking you on a bio-electric excursion into the forbidden wilderness of deep discovery.

Welcome to the Healing Journey, a practice that will leave you enlightened in ways you never thought possible.

In a few moments, you’ll experience a set of feelings. These will take form as mental sensations. The sensations will stir heavy doubts in your mind. The doubts will challenge your fundamental picture of reality. As we proceed, your ability to distinguish right from wrong will leave you. Some may find this unsettling. However, through this process, you will re-emerge renewed and completely changed as a person.

I invite you to notice the feelings. There’s no cause for alarm. The feelings you’re having CANNOT hurt you as long as you remain OPEN, remain open to the golden hope of THE GOD TIGER. Let the sensations wash over you and take you away.

We’re traveling, moving into a land where the number of dimensions are increasing and the limit to what’s possible approaches a horizon of FOREVER. We’re entering a land where the boundaries of your being are becoming one with the universal constant of SCIENCE. Let your body dissolve into SPACE. Let your mind soften into the golden couches of TIME. Let your spirit melt into the fog of ETERNITY. In this guided meditation we’re going to explore one of humanity’s greatest obstacles: the boundary that separates LIFE from DEATH. We’ll explore the border that separates the living life of reality from the mystical land of the dead, an untouchable world filled with the spirits of the departed.

Despite everything you’ve ever learned, this is a perfectly real place. This won’t be an imaginary journey. We’ll be going to this real place FOR REAL. As we approach the land of the dead we remember that it is made up of two distinct parts. These are the two contrasting states of karmic judgment. The righteous are at the higher part. Sinners are at the lower part. The higher part is a place of perfect peace and

wisdom. The lower part is a place of mindless violence and endless misery.

We call the upper part of the land of the dead HEAVEN. The lower part is known as HELL. The beings in Heaven express themselves in an ever-blossoming flower circus of creativity and wonder. The beings in Hell are trapped in a cycle of endless stupidity, forever making mistakes. Heaven is a place of endless joy, cool breezes and contentment.

Hell is a place of endless suffering, smoke and frustration.

You will go to the land of the dead. You will see your personal destiny, either Heaven or Hell, the place YOU will go when YOU die.

Before that can happen, there’s an important step that has to happen first.

there’s onLY one WaY to get to the land of the dead. There’s only ever been one way to get there. I think you know what I’m talking about.

Of course you know. It’s no surprise. To get to this place you must die.

I’m going to end your life. I’m going to end your life with this guided meditation. This guided meditation is going to end your life.

YOUR LIFE IS ENDING. You’re dying. BY READING THESE WORDS A MESSAGE IS BEING SENT TO YOUR BODY THAT WILL SLOW YOUR HEART RATE. BY READING THESE WORDS A MESSAGE IS BEING SENT TO YOUR BODY THAT WILL EASE YOUR CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM AND DECREASE THE SYNAPTIC IMPULSES OF YOUR BRAIN. Let your breathing come to a stop. Let your body go limp.

You’re experiencing real physical death. As your life comes to an end, I ask you to embrace this final journey. For this to work, you’ll need to PUT ASIDE ALL PHYSICAL SENSATIONS. What you’re feeling, incredible pain. This is the time to transcend physical pain. Let the pain of death wash over you. You can ignore these sensations of pain and just tell yourself

l: R.I.P. POP MUSIC r: R.I.P. FASHION

IT’S NOTHING. The pain is your body resisting.

Don’t resist. Take the journey. Let your body go. There. It won’t take much longer. THERE. Good. Good. Just a few more seconds and it will ALL BE OVER. Soon you’ll be in the land where feelings like this won’t matter.

As you turn the corner, you’ll begin to feel the uncontrollable tug of MYSTICAL ROPES. These are the ropes of passing. This is you passing out of your body. This is goodbye. Goodbye.

We are approaching the GREAT BORDER. This is the border that separates LIFE FROM DEATH. On this knife-edge we linger. Take in the deep meaning of this pivot point. This is the crux of humanity’s greatest dichotomy. This is the ultimate boundary.

Listen to the wind. Listen to the wind blowing through this dark valley of ultimate transition. Listen to the whispers in the weeds.

Listen to the approaching crow floating in the deep grey, grey sky. The crow knows. The crow knows about your golden hold. Let go of your hold. Relax your grip. Let your mind slip into this final finish. Embrace the black blackness of the black, black crow. Your soul is calling for a final home.

You must surrender your soul. When you release this attachment, you’ll be free. Listen to the wind. Surrender your soul. I AM THE WIND. Surrender your soul. I AM THE CROW. Listen. I AM CALLING YOU HOME. Give him your soul.

I AM THE CROW. Let go. Let your soul go. I AM THE WIND BLOWING INTO YOUR SOUL. Listen to the wind. I AM CALLING YOU HOME. Give him your soul. I AM THE CROW. Let go of your soul.

As you release you will know, and the crow will show. I AM THE JUDGMENT CROW. The crow looks into your soul and knows what you know. The crow knows which way you’ll go. I KNOW YOUR SOUL BECAUSE I AM THE JUDGMENT CROW. There are two roads. One goes up…and the other goes low. I KNOW WHICH WAY YOU’LL GO. The crow will say which way. Prepare for eternity. Soon you will know. I KNOW WHICH WAY YOU’LL GO. The crow looks in, looks into your soul and he knows, he knows which way you’ll go. The crow opens and shows. I KNOW WHICH WAY YOU’LL GO. NOW THE CROW REVEALS THE UNKNOWN.

i’M

so sorrY.

LOW! Low. Low, low. LOW, LOW, LOW. You’re going to go LOW. Hell will be your final home. Hell. Hell!

Many live lives that aren’t perfect.

They still go to Heaven. Perfection is not a requirement for heaven. You’re going to HELL. Let this sink in. YOU’RE GOING TO HELL. You’re going to Hell. Not because you haven’t been perfect, you’re going to Hell because you have given up. YOU’VE STOPPED TRYING. You’ve been defeated. You’ve caved in to your fears. You’ve given in to your doubts. You’ve accepted LIES in place of the holy hope of THE GOD TIGER’S GOLD. You must go LOW. GO NOW! GO! GO BELOW TO THE LOW, LOW HOLD! As the dark doors opens and you move away, we must say goodbye as you enter the prisons of eternity. Here you will live in the care of the damned. You will spend eternity tortured, poisoned and killed over and over, over and over.

You will never know warmth or joy or hope, you will only know cold stone and loads of coal. This is the passing passage. This is the ending end. As you pass the last curtain, you disappear behind the bend. You’re going. As permanent pain fills your being, we see your soul go low, low, low.

You sense the start of the endless ending of Hell.

Fires burn you and stings sting you, razors slice you forever.

this is the enD of the healing journey. This is where I leave you.

S i x g o u rd u r n s b y J a i S h e ro n d a . O n e i s c u r re n t l y o c c u p i e d , a n d o n e i s t h e a r t i s t ’s o w n ( e v e n t u a l ) c a s k e t . C l o c k w i s e f ro m t o p l e f t : M ag d al e n a’s Smil e, Le G o urdbo t Billy, My Own C as ke t, Len in’ s Tomb, From El der To An c estor or U p I n Sm o k e , C h ai ns Th at Bi nd.

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Lynda Barry

Chicago hotel room, September 2009, 14th floor.

Hung over and awake too early because of strong sun, at the window pulling down the shade, I see a new spider web bigger than a dinner plate on the other side of the glass.

I think, why there? You dumb ass spider. What are your chances? How many bugs are flying around downtown at 140 feet? Why build your web almost flat against the glass when it reduces your capture area by half?

Pull down the shade, back in bed, I think of being a bug in a wind storm blown straight toward the hotel window, knowing I’m going to die, preparing myself for impact when I’m suddenly caught by a net at the last moment, the feeling of the miracle of this, of being saved, which turns quickly to the opposite of a miracle which is being eaten alive.

Which death is worse?

And then the utilitarian thought: At least the bug did not go to waste.

And then the memory of the fellows who have been skinning human bodies and plasticizing their insides and putting them on display in action poses. There are shows of them which travel to museums and other venues including one in Las Vegas. People can see the miracle of the insides of the actual human body: the arteries, the veins, the muscles and tendons. It’s not a somber display. Some of the bodies are running. Some are ice-skating. Some are throwing basketballs. Who are these people? And how did the skinner-men get so many of them?

And the memory of the photograph of the mobile execution vehicles used in China, looking like recreational vehicles, rolling in a utilitarian way, cutting out the middleman, combining death sentence with pick up and delivery service and on-theroad organ harvesting.

And the memory of a photo taken in China on a cloudy day. A picture of two dead young men with wrists zip-tied behind their backs, laying naked in a driveway where a man is casually hosing them off like floor mats from a car.

And the memory of reading that the skinner-men get their bodies from China.

And a memory of accusations of using political prisoners as the body source, the controversy over the skinning and displaying of those put to death for their ideas, for the very specific electrical impulses that shot around their living brains, now plasticized, looking both real and fake. Then the utilitarian thought, the people who say at least these bodies didn’t go to waste. At least some scientific lemonade has been made out of a sour situation.

And I am suddenly so thirsty, and my head is pounding. And I know the $9.00 beer in the mini-bar fridge will help. And as I’m pouring it down my throat, a fragment of an A.E. Houseman poem memorized two years ago presents itself as vividly as if someone were shouting it at me: When I watch the living meet, And the moving pageant fi le Warm and breathing through the street Where I lodge a little while, If the heats of hate and lust In the house of fl esh are strong, Let me mind the house of dust Where my sojourn shall be long.

Only now it means the exact opposite of what I thought it meant. It’s not about forbearance and taking the long view in life at all. It’s saying, “Life! Life! Get it while it’s hot!” I lift the beer to that. To the dead A.E.Houseman’s still living ideas.

And as the alcohol soothes me back into sleep, I think what are the chances of a spider building a web against my hotel room window on the 14th floor while I drunkenly slept? How lucky I am! Not a dumb ass spider at all. A genius spider. A genius spider speaking to me as clearly as the fictional Charlotte spoke to the fictional Wilber. My eyes get wet. I lift my beer can toward the window. I say, “Some spider!” I sleep again.

What I don’t know yet is the spider I’m toasting is long gone, and that the web I thought was new is old and empty except for the tiny gray bodies a lot like ours wrapped tightly in the web’s edges where we shall vibrate together in the useful wind until that moment when the poetry finally lets us go.

23

When t h e a r t i s t and te a c h e r Rober t H e i n e c k e n died, h i s c re m a i n s were d i s s e m i n a t e d in a n u m b e r o f salt sh a k e r s t o friend s , f a m i l y, and w h o m e v e r t h e estate s a w f i t .

With t h e permi s s i o n o f t h e H eine c k e n Tr u s t , Jason L a z a r u s made a s e r i e s o f exper i m e n t a l photo g r a m s u s i n g these a s h e s .

Picture d h e re a re five in t h e s e r i e s of twe n t y - f i v e .

Heinecken Studies Jason Lazarus this page: Study #19 facing page (clockwise from top left): Study #7, Study #21, Study #10 & Study #25

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25

The first room I had in Portland was at Debbie’s old place, just north of Lombard and west of MLK and near enough to some kind of cookie factory that the air always smelled like sugar. I spent my first days there ripping the knotty pine interior from the walls. She had bought the house in spite of that detail, and since neither of us wanted to live in the dizzying spiral of wood, I enthusiastically took on the removal project. On one of those days, tuned in to the public broadcasting station and in between songs, came a news update. Nina Simone had just died. And not that I had ever doubted my great love for her or her music, but I myself was surprised by how quickly I was down on the floor, nails and splintered siding all around, sobbing.

I must have just come home from running errands.

I was putting my bike away in the storage garage under my apartment. Ryan and Marta let me keep my bikes there, next to the broken-down truck they had up on blocks.

In thanks, when there was one ripe enough, I would pick a tomato and throw it down from my little kitchen deck above the garages. Ryan would catch it, not minding that his hands were covered in motorcycle grease. I liked that he usually smelled like pot and that on most days one or both of them would be down there fixing something.

It lent my residence an air of hope, and I appreciated their kindness to me those months.

The calm transience of their lives somehow refleced permission for mine. And that they took Jess and I out for a sail on the river on my birthday and fed us angel food cake with raspberries helped

26

to add some magic to the melancholic and slow-motion months of that summer.

I was standing there about to pull the door down when Tara came sauntering around the corner, standing in the hot sun a few feet from where I was in the cool of the garage.

Cigarette, sandals and shorts, shaggy hair, creep hat, big sunglasses; the way she always looked in the summer.

“Michael Jackson just died,” she said, and we just stood there blinking at each other. I didn’t feel very much, hearing this news, except perhaps a slightly vertiginous quaking of time. It made me feel old.

We talked about the details of what she heard on the radio, but then moved on to talking about other things, music probably, how hot it had been, our failed or failing relationships.

I got to see her perform once, in Seattle, with Eli just before we started dating. I thought the event to be an auspicious dawning to our yet unconsummated love affair. It was probably a year from then before Eli and I fell in love, three years before she broke my heart. But that’s all the past, and now we’re great friends. When we’re together I can still get shocked by love when I look at her face. I take this as a true sign of forgiveness and trust—and good fortune, since things don’t always turn out so well as that between two people who were once in love and then no longer.

That same week in April, when I was elbows-deep in knotty pine, I got the phone call from Jess. Was she in Amber’s car?

I pictured her laying down in the backseat, curled up. She had to get north, to Victoria, and then further, upriver. Lee had shot herself in the heart. I was on my knees again, in the splinters, all broken. All I could do was hold my heart out through space, my voice on the phone. Jess was going to be with her family, to wash and clean her sister’s body, to bury her in the place she loved, the place they all loved.

I only visited up on the river once, beheld the wide swift current and the opaque silty waters. I made radish sandwiches, helped to pick salmon from the nets, and saw my first bear. I learned how to kill a fish with a single swift jerk of the wrist. One finger hooked through the gills, plus that decisive motion, would snap them like rubber bands and pitch the body into the big square plastic container filled with blood, ice, and more dead fish than I’d ever seen in one place before. Death is strange and always there, no matter how much time is spent pretending that it’s not.

Death is the big pile of fish you just killed. Death is someone you love moving on for good.

I remember that Lee would take herself hiking up the mountain with rocks in her pockets, I think so that she could feel more the push against gravity as she ascended. Jess and I would set out hiking but wouldn’t make it very far due to getting sidetracked by all the huckleberries.

This was all long before before they’d finished building the assisted care facility across the street from Debbie’s place, where I was toiling away with my knotty pine demolition.

That building, once it reached its full stature, blocked my view entirely. On the day that Jess called about Lee, I could still see Mount St. Helens from my bedroom window, its eerie misshapen form my daily reminder that disaster is natural.

I remember seeing it on the news when I was a kid, that there were some people who refused to evacuate. We knew that they would probably die, but there was some sense of heroism in their resolution, in their willingness to remain. What would I do if I lived on a mountain about to swallow me in a cloud of poisonous vapors and hot rock-filled winds?

We went to Mt. St. Helens for my birthday and watched a flickery movie with a warped soundtrack about the eruption in a funky home-made theater at the property with the buried A-frame. It was raining, and because we had forgotten our tent, the owners at the funky home-made theater with the real movie theater seats but a sagging and damp plywood floor let us all sleep in what they called “the condo.” This was the cheeky name they used for the little pre-fab cabin whose fake stucko drywall and tacky fixtures gave it a decidedly suburban feel. Foregoing judgement of the aesthetic, we were thankful for the generous way they helped solve our lack of preparedness, and that the stars were so bright that night, and that the nice couple paraded up the hill after dinner bearing weird gifts—a jug of apple juice and a clear plastic water cup with strobing red, blue and green LED lights in the base. I kept that cup for years, not because I liked it very much, but because I am inclined to sentimentality.

There was only space enough in the condo for six of us; so Lala and Jay slept together in the rental SUV, even though earlier that year they had split up for the third and probably final time. I had invited them both to fly out for my birthday on the condition that they “get along” for the duration of the visit. This unabashed demand for illusion was what I wanted from my parents for my 30th birthday present. I wanted the make-believe, the everything-alright. I wanted the facade of togetherness to temporarily soothe over the great rupture of my family as we tucked in that night, surrounded by the patterns of bleached-out downed trees, still laying with beautiful geometry right where they fell at the moment of the blast.

I opened presents in the morning. Runner gave me a microphone, and also a belt she had made out of thick leather which I never ended up having the patience to break in. She inscribed her love for me on the inside of it with a sharpie and at the time, it seemed so true, that ours was an indelible love, that wouldn’t wash or wear away.

For Runner’s 30th birthday, I decided, in an awkward show of my often ill-regarded extravagant taste, to take her to Italy.

We spent a few days in Rome because I knew she’d always wanted to go, and then a few days at the Amalfi coast, because I thought it would be romantic. But we fought like dogs about every little thing, and I woke each day wondering if I’d made a big mistake. Maybe we should have just stayed home instead of subjecting ourselves to all the cappuccinos and sightseeing.

On the last day, we finally made it to Pompeii. This was my original impetus for the trip. I liked volcanoes. I liked birthdays.

I liked my girlfriend. Whether or not she liked volcanoes was not a question I had really bothered to ask before planning the trip, and I always knew she didn’t enjoy a big deal being made out of her birthday. No wonder we’d been so embattled.

But while wandering through what was left of the ancient city, holding hands, we finally found with each other the equilibrium which had been missing. We listened to the pre-recorded tour on headphones, the descriptions of the brothels and baths, the public market, the amphitheater. We studied the erotic frescoes adorning the walls. We studied the plaster castes of long-dead Pompeiians. It had been a whole bustling world before getting buried in Vesuvian ash, forgotten, then found. There in a place where the damage had already been done, we were calmed.

Runner and I loved each other, and that’s how it was sometimes: impossible, and then the clouds would clear, allowing us to see each other again.

She and I lasted for seven whole years, until it all imploded that hot summer, which is how I landed in the apartment above Ryan and Marta’s garage, with the sad tomato plants struggling in their containers against the hot brick wall. I kept an Impressions album on my turntable and listened to “People Get Ready” over and over, dancing all slow, singing, arms around myself.

Six months after I had left Portland for San Francisco I got a call from my landlady. I had kept a bunch of my stuff in my very own rented storage garage under the old apartment. It wasn’t the strangest thing to see Robyn’s name pop up as in incoming call on my phone. “I’m calling with some bad news,” she said.

“All the garages were broken into last night.” She told me she was standing there in front of mine, and so I asked her, “Is my bicycle still there? Did they take my bike?” It wasn’t there. It was the only thing missing, aside from Ryan and Marta’s bicycles, which were stolen from their garage. Runner had built that bike up for me as a present not long before the break-up, but instead of the sting of loss, I again noticed feeling almost nothing.

Not that I hadn’t loved that bike, but somehow the unexpected release of it felt relieving. Things and people, entering and departing. I was far away, neither young nor old, and I didn’t long for things that I just didn’t have anymore.

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reFLeCTIon Chad Chesko

D eath & disappearance are nearly synonymous, and physical beauty is a deep reminder of our impermanence— fleetingness being the reason why flowers and twenty-year-old models are especially enchanting. In his Debaser series of large format charcoal drawings, Australian artist

Michael Zavros meets these topics. dm: The portraits in this series

are intensely precise, and large; approximately four feet tall. The work involved must be especially immersive. Can you describe the process of making them?

mz: Most often I work from

found imagery that I manipulate.

Images for my Debaser drawings come from a variety of fashion sources, and occasionally I shoot my own models. Importantly, the photo must be very straightforward—a standard portrait shot.

I select models with elaborate hair and garments, which become almost a baroque frame, redolent with detail around what is made absent. In the studio, my work becomes technically old-school.

I use various techniques to carefully render the charcoal drawings with this compressed stick of black pigment, including grinding the pigment up and painting with it. This is the only way I can achieve the very subtle mid-tones, and because I’m brushing the powdered charcoal on so lightly the work takes on something of an airbrushed look.

The final gesture is, of course, the removal of the model’s features. This is a random and aggressive erasing of the drawing.

This final destructive act takes just moments after hours of meticulous effort.

DEBASER/YSL Michael Zavros

dm: As well as referencing absence—and, one could say, death—there’s a contrast of richness and life in the textural details around these ghosted faces. Is the tension of death a conscious influence in your work? mz: I do think about death in relation to my work but more in terms of creating something less mortal than myself, perhaps

something that will live on past my own death.

In some ways nothing ever really dies. Like memory, the paper surface here is stained by the charcoal. The portraits cannot be wholly removed, and we’re left with a beautiful ghost. There is a contrast between the drawing that is left and the one removed, and certainly a tension between a drawing which seeks to deny a surface and appear three dimensional and the erased marks which counter this.

This physical surface treatment mirrors the metaphoric surface—the beautiful model.

Charcoal has a deathly quality. It’s a velvety and rich black pigment but, unlike paint, it’s completely matte and lifeless. It doesn’t shine. The black appears infinite. And the stick itself is a testament to death—burnt timber.

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l: debASer/PoLkA doT r: debASer/MArC JACobS Michael Zavros

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TongUeS Chad Chesko

F U N E R A L R EV I EWS illustrations by Justin Limoges

[Ritual]

street VenDors in UBUD sold tick-

ets to the funeral. The cremation ceremony would engulf the Balinese town the next day whether or not its inhabitants paid for the privilege of attending. The matriarch to be honored had been dead for two years. She waited underground while her family saved for the occasion, an extravagance generally reserved for royalty. Villagers labored day and night to construct a massive scaffolding of green bamboo and a two-story-tall horse to carry her to heaven.

On the auspicious day, her body was exhumed, swaddled in silk, and hoisted onto the scaffolding between two priests. A fifty-person gamalan orchestra assembled in the street. When the music began, it wasn’t the saccharine swoon played in shops and restaurants, but a deep, primal vibration that wove the afternoon’s golden light, suffocating humidity, stink, sadness, and euphoria into a seamless tapestry. The buildings hummed as if the ancestral heart of the village had emerged to tell its story.

The strongest men heaved the scaffolding onto their shoulders and began to run. The priests rode at the top, on either side of the body, one waving a burning bundle of incense and the other tossing coins into the crowd. Driven by the music, the procession zig-zagged up one street and down the next, so that the spirit of the deceased would not find its way back home, but proceed to its next life. A ticket-wielding American paused to catch a coin and was almost trampled.

The frenetic pace barely slowed when the tower collided with electric lines above the narrow streets. The scaffolding kneeled like an elephant then was off again. Silk umbrellas shielding the priests from the sun were torn off and left hanging.

The sun set as the crowd reached the sacred monkey forest. Beneath the trees it was already dark. Invisible monkeys watched from the shadows.

In a clearing, the bright white horse stood, red mouth agape, eyes piercing eternity. The scaffolding became a ladder. The priests carried the body into the horse’s belly. They lit the fire.

Swaying women dressed in sarongs chanted prayers. Flames licked the enormous legs, then the belly. The American braced herself for the smell of burning flesh, which never came.

[Principle] When his second wife died, his unflinching atheism remained intact. She was his beloved high school sweetheart, lost during the war, then miraculously recovered after they’d both married, had children, and divorced their first spouses. With her passing, the joy in his life was snuffed, but he refused to succumb to sentimental mourning or to cling to the notion of greener pastures in an afterlife. Why should he? This was it, all there was.

All there could be.

Driving to the funeral, he asked his granddaughter, who awkwardly held the urn in her lap, if he should get flowers. At the next stoplight he told her to get out of the car and pick some roses from a stranger’s yard. She did

so, and the owner of the house came out yelling. From behind the wheel, the bereaved hollered back, “Don’t be so selfish! They’re for my dead wife!”

His sole nod to sentimentality was to bury her in the same cemetery as Marilyn Monroe. The movie star, he felt, paled in comparison to his late wife—a decorative teacup of a woman, who gave up considerable wealth to live with him in a house with plastic lining the stairs and who never once complained. The ceremony was short, no prayers. The blazing Los Angeles sun barely had time to singe the skin of the handful gathered. Her adult children from the previous marriage cried quietly, collecting their tears in tidy handkerchiefs. His children, envious and embarrassed by displays of emotion, stared dry-eyed into the fresh dirt.

The wake was little more than an opportunity for him to force bags of her clothing on female relatives. The floor-length ruffled dresses and size 0 polyester pantsuits were items only one person could wear, and she was gone.

The rose thief did take an unworn pair of control-top panties embroidered with butterflies to use as inspiration for art projects. Leaving the house, she realized she’d never asked whether her grandmother had any spiritual beliefs of her own. Ah, well. The living bury the dead.

[Celebration] No one in town knew Nagar’s given name. When the free-loving vegan motorcyclist disappeared one rainy evening while shooting photos of

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the active volcano at Kilauea, people speculated about what might have happened. Did he slip on the wet lava? Did the shelf he was standing on collapse into the molten river below? Was he asphyxiated? Instantly incinerated?

Maybe he was still alive, hidden in a kipuka, a pocket of rainforest surrounded by fire, or marooned on a black sand beach? The possibilities were tantalizingly gory. His friends knew what had happened: he’d gotten too close to Pele, the Hawaiian volcano goddess. For months he’d been talking about her. He’d crossed some line, finally, and she took him. In a single searing second, he became pure energy. It wasn’t a bad way to go, really.

His eventual funeral was advertised as a costume party. Attendees wore red and orange scarves and burnt shirts that said, “My friend Nagar went to the volcano and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.” The cashier at the local health food store performed a song about how her customer’s love affair with the hot-tempered goddess came to a passionate finale. People traded stories, ate food, and danced into the night. Staring at the stars, someone remarked, “Maybe death is like taking off a too-tight shoe.” Down the road the volcano smoldered.

small step for a man,” thus creating the comparison he intended. Either way, the point that I’m getting at here is that nothing matters—in death or in life—unless you’re willing to pretend it does. Neil’s achievement was no less monumental because of his grammatical error. So if it seems at all insensitive that I am a few sentences away from demeaning my own grandmother’s private memorial service, please keep this in mind: no great person is lessened by extenuating rememberences or trite commemorations, even less so if a person—in this case, me—is merely describing elements arranged by a third party for someone who has no choice in the matter.

Even at the most perfectly awesome of memorial services, there is the distinct reality that one of the people whom everyone present cares about just so happens to be dead. The

-Shannon Wianecki

ensuing melancholy set in motion by the shared accounts of a life loved and lost can only be held at bay by scripted acts of mourning. And, simply put, this is where the service fell short.

Is there any sense to anything in this life? By looking at the set decorations in the viewing room, I would assume not. Dark, drab, faux-wood paneling sealed a stale ten-by-twelve room of lifeless brown carpet. Two chairs, left over from the set of countless other “moments,” flanked an exquisitely generic oil painting of a lighthouse along a patch of coastline somewhere.

Even in that moment, prior to knowing I would soon be formally reviewing this service, I stood solemn, critiquing each element presented to me.

Minutes before, I was standing outside in the sunlight and gentle wind of a pleasantly warm spring day in Eugene, Oregon, thinking to myself, “Can’t we

Before getting into this, I’ll make

a benign confession; while a typical review is conducted by an independent third party with no connection to the piece under scrutiny, this one is not. I was asked to review a funeral merely a week after my own grandmother’s passing, and, with permission of the editor, I am writing this piece three days prior to her public service. However, a private service for immediate family has already taken place, and this is what I am reviewing.

Are you familiar with the fact that Neil Armstrong blew it when he delivered his famous “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” quote?

“Man” and “mankind” mean the same thing. He was supposed to say “one

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do this outside?”

But no. Ten family members and one guy, who was some sort of a nondenominational pastor, crowded into this dim little room where my grandmother had been placed on a table in front of us. I say “table,” and although it may seem shallow to refer to the place where my grandmother—my mother’s mother, matriarch of the entire family I have ever known—was posed for her final appearance as a “table,” as though she were a turkey, it was simply a table. In fact, referring to it as a table could be considered a compliment. It was actually a metal gurney. Disguised by the cunning use of a sheet, it was still hard not to notice the bare steel legs and black wheels locked into position beneath, a cute reminder that as soon as we left she would be wheeled into a dark room with a group of strangers, who also happened to be not living anymore, awaiting trips to the viewing room or perhaps the incinerator.

Now, about that non-denominational pastor; he was pretty good. He confessed, first and foremost, that he didn’t know shit about what happens to us when we die (although he chose other words to express that sentiment), but if we loved our mother/grandmother, everything would be just fine.

I couldn’t happen to agree more–everything will be just fine, that makes sense. Aside from that, the whole thing sucked.

-Eugene Jefferson

A

pair of dice dotted his bright red tie. A lottery ticket peeked out of the breast pocket of a powder blue suit jacket. Stiff fingers clutched four aces and a joker. If funerals were theme parties, my grandfather was being ushered into the afterlife on Casino Night.

Kenneth “Casey” Jones was my dad’s father. He’d been a gambler, a roofer, a storyteller and, when his diabetes was out of control, the kind of man who beat his children with sticks until their legs bled. By the time he died from an accidental overdose of insulin at 83, he was a one-legged, half-blind old fart with tomato seeds on his chin. But pri-

marily, he was a gambler.

He lived to play cards, even when there were five kids to feed, even after a magnifying glass was necessary to see the flush. Using failing eyesight to add credibility to the bluff, Grandpa Casey regularly cleaned out his poker buddies. He especially liked taking money from Digger, the funeral director. Tormenting him was equally good fun. Hobbling into a visitation, he’d squint around the room, crack Digger in the shins with his steel cane and say, “Where’s that Digger? Tell him he doesn’t have me yet.” Like a tired comedy routine, this went on until Digger finally got him.

The services were either sweetly appropriate or a fitting fuck you, depending on whom you asked. My dad was squarely in the latter camp. Since the rest of us were ambivalent at best, that left Aunt Susie to plan the day. The fact that Dad let her was the fuck you part. My eldest aunt, while sincerely upset, smelled like an ashtray and occasionally heard voices. Three packs a day dulled the chatter but didn’t make for the most lucid event planning. She had always preferred the soft gray smoky haze to the sharp edges of being fully present. Maybe it allowed her to be more forgiving of Grandpa’s edge.

All I know is when “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers came on the loudspeaker, my brother and I pulled up a floral loveseat and settled in for the show.

It was a pretty good crowd by small town standards. Besides various relations, there were the usual mourner-type characters, straight out of a Coen Brothers casting call. Old men in polyester sport coats shuffled around sweet old ladies with drawnon eyebrows. One of the farmers was wearing his dressy overalls. Aunt Betsy tucked the aforementioned Powerball ticket into Grandpa’s suit with a good luck pat.

Know when to walk away. Know when to run.

Most people walked away from the casket looking amused or bemused. Grandpa had wanted to be buried in the powder blue suit because it matched his eyes. This logic was

flawed for obvious reasons, except he had also wanted Digger to rig it so he winked. “I want people to know I had a good time when I was here,” he said.

Thankfully, even Aunt Susie’s voices found a winking dead guy disturbing.

Digger compromised by sewing his lips into a slight grin.

You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table.

After the wake, we were ushered through collapsible wall dividers into the chapel area by a generic-looking minister. It quickly became apparent he’d never met Casey Jones in life but had heard a few things around town.

He opened with a revised joke about how Grandpa could cheat the devil at a hand of cards, except Satan and hellfire were substituted with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. I’m fairly certain there wasn’t a person in the building who would’ve put money on the likelihood of the revisionist location. Dad rolled his eyes. Aunt Susie cackled.

My brother had that shoot-me-now smirk that sends me into inappropriate giggle fits.

Then it was on to a problematic sermon with the minister attempting to draw a correlation between Grandpa’s good-time reputation and living a good life. Something about appreciating the hand you’re dealt.

The metaphor lost its way at one point and meandered for an uncomfortably long time. In his defense, he probably assumed we needed to hear nice things about our dearly departed.

There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.

The day ended in Uncle Bill’s half-finished kitchen listening to everyone tell favorite family stories for the umpteenth time. I looked across the table and thought about how much I love my aunts and uncles. Despite their upbringing, or possibly because of it, they are all fiercely loyal, deeply kind, and wickedly funny. My Dad is the oldest and took the brunt of the beatings. He could have become a mirror of his own father, selfish and abusive, but chose to be the polar opposite. When the sad day comes, my brother and I will honor him as our hero.

The wall phone rang, and my uncle answered it. “It’s Pop. He won the lottery.”

-Lori Jones

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For My FATher, who dIed In A MoTorCroSS ACCIdenT Christopher Stanton

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