No Epitaph by Karyn
Sandlos
When Ann Carson writes “…death
lines every moment of ordinary time” (166) she suggests that mortality resides
in the quotidian details of our lives. Time, as we know it, is a progression that is measured by clocks,
calendars, the passing of days, the changing of
seasons. When a loved one dies, the
knowledge of time passing may allow us to hover over the chaotic reckonings of
the present and imagine an afterwards; a prospective view that makes the
immediate impact of loss bearable. But in the midst of bereavement, ordinary
time is a view from the proximate clutter of a present that can’t envision a
future, a heightening of the minor drama of death that permeates the everyday.
For
What took place every day was not what happened every
day. Sometimes
what didn’t take place was the most important thing that happened. ¾Marguerite Duras, Practicalities.
Death is a recurring fascination in Phil Hoffman’s
oeuvre, a body of films that seem to rehearse a penultimate death that will
take Hoffman to the outer and inner reaches of grief. In the film cycle that
concludes with Kitchener-Berlin in
1990, be it the figure of a young boy lying dead on a Mexican roadside or an
elephant falling at the Rotterdam Zoo, death is an indelible presence that is
often left out of the frame. After 1990, by undertaking a series of collaborative
works (Technilogic Ordering 1994, Sweep 1995,
Destroying Angel 1998, Kokoro is for Heart 1999) and
inviting audiences to order the progression of his Opening Series films (1992
ongoing project), death becomes a method in which Hoffman as maker is
displaced. Phil’s latest work, What these
ashes wanted, documents the death of his late partner Marian McMahon from
cancer, and the film is a declaration of insurmountable grief. But the death
that Hoffman has been rehearsing since assuming the role of familial custodian
of memory at the age of fourteen is his own.
What these
ashes wanted is populated by the
familiar – even banal – images of home and family that I have come to expect
from Hoffman, but here he makes use of the ordinary to evoke a profound experience
of loss. Hoffman’s iconography is that
of the immediate material that surrounds him: a garden alive in summer and dead
in winter, the view from a hotel window, highway traffic signs, the brick wall of the farmhouse where he lives. Ashes finds a
gentle rhythm in the unexceptional that acts as a refrain throughout the film,
proposing a way of seeing how extraordinary loss illumines the daily practice
of death-in-life. The film is not a story of surviving death, but
rather, of living death, of making
life hospitable to the prospect of mortality.
It is through Hoffman’s carefully crafted attention to the minor details
of loss that the presence of death in the ordinary fabric of life is acutely
felt.
If you can read this you are standing too close.
¾Epitaph for Dorothy Parker.
Bereavement has become a thriving industry in Western
culture, replete with therapeutic approaches and self-help strategies that
instruct on how to grieve well and for discreet periods of time. Many forms of
bereavement counseling treat life after
loss as a healing strategy, a way to reach toward a time when grief will be
less shattering, when the pain of loss will be less present. Funerals also act
as occasions for shaping and articulating grief, and for marking the distinction
between the mourner and the mourned; a kind of reality check that affirms what
the mind at once understands and resists knowing. And it may well be the case that loss is far
too amorphous and terrifying without the containers of formality into which we are
compelled to pour it. Hoffman’s project is, however, less committed to protocol
and more concerned with a practice of bereavement that mixes psychic
disintegration with the provisional solace taken through secular therapies or
devout rituals of mourning. Early in ashes we partake of a playfully private moment shared between Phil and his late
partner Marion McMahon, the first of several sequences that will draw us into
the small circle of their relationship throughout the film. Heavily bundled against the cold they frolic,
home movie style, in the yard outside their
People may die and be remembered, but they only
disappear when they are completely forgotten, when no one ever uses their name.
¾Adam Phillips,
It was Freud’s observation that dreams are populated
by incidental images and fragments of experience from conscious life. The death of a loved one, he noted, is often
obliterated from the dreamscape only to return to memory with unusual force
upon waking. (78) Perhaps, then, in the midst of grief the unconscious makes
itself known through a heightening of the minutae of
waking life, like a long, slow swim under deep water where every movement,
every sound, and every glimpse of color and light is attenuated. The
irreconcilable clash between psychic longing for the lost loved one and the
reality of absence is less an event than a palpable emptiness, a heightened
view from the jumble of experience that has fallen out of step with the
continuity of time. In ashes, the
brick wall of the farmhouse contrasts the brick facade and pillars of a more
monumental structure, a relic of ancient history. A figure walks slowly past an Egyptian
temple, appearing, disappearing and reappearing from behind the columns. When
the body is absent, this sequence implies, the shadow remains.
A person will walk through a hundred doors to carry
out the whims of the dead, not realizing that he is burying himself away from
the others. ¾Michael
Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost.
In the days approaching her death Marian asks, “If
you had to make up your own ritual for death what would it be? And would it be private, or shared?” Phil responds that it should be shared, and
his tone resonates with the force of this deeply held conviction; for Phil,
death is a lived practice that must
necessarily be shared if one is to live at all.
It is often said that funerals are for the living; but how, precisely,
does ritual help us grieve and move on?
With this question in mind, I often visit cemeteries and wander amidst
gravestones belonging to people I have never met. Something troubles about the tone of
epitaphs. The words say that the loved one is gone. Etchings in stone mark the
finality of death, but they don't account for how life is lived as the practice
of death. The severing of attachment and the abruptness of absence may be life’s
most shattering experience, yet loss itself has a lingering presence in life.
Lovers leave, but the inevitability of death, if not desirable, is wholly
enduring.
Death, although
utterly unlike life, shares a skin with it.
¾Ann Carson, Men
In the Off Hours.
Ashes is no epitaph, no tribute to the solace of monuments or
the passing of time. In his latest work, Hoffman remains in his own time, a
daily practice of loss lived precariously on the margin between disintegration
and ritual. A voice on Phil’s answering machine enjoins that “in times of great
grief it is important to go through the motions of life until eventually they
become real again.” When Phil films Marian making calls on her route as a home
care nurse, he rides in the back seat and watches her face in the rear-view
mirror. Caught up in the demands of the
everyday and the immediacy of the task at hand, Marian thinks out loud about
how peculiar it feels to provide intimate physical care to complete strangers.
In illness, she observes, the body becomes public property. The conversation takes on a heightened
anxiety as Marian describes the awkwardness of the situation, and her inability
to talk with Phil about things she really wants to talk about while he complains
about the weight of the camera. The
nuances of Phil’s response are missed in an exchange in which Marian teases him
for failing to appreciate the gravity of her insights. The conversation becomes
a speculation on the daily minutae of loss; the
disappointments, missed connections, and absences that act as small rehearsals
for the larger drama of death.
Although I never met Marion McMahon, I remember her
in a very particular way. I was a new
graduate student waiting for a meeting in the hallway outside a professor's
office. Wanting to absorb the culture of
collegiality and ideas I studied my surroundings. The walls were plastered with memoranda; posters advertising political rallies, calls for papers, and
cartoon strips ¾
the clutter of academic life. What I
recall most vividly is a poem that was taped to the door directly in front of
me. Reading that poem, I felt a momentary break in time that I have yet to
understand.
Perhaps there are no accidents. I had skimmed the eulogies on e-mail, and
heard fragments of conversations in the hallways about a colleague who had
passed away. She was a doctoral
candidate, and she died of cancer just as her dissertation was approaching
completion. The poem was written by one of Marian’s professors, but it read as
if her hand was urgently tracing his words…I
am still here.
She might have spoken the words, or whispered them.
It is a common clinical experience that bereaved
people fear that talking about the person they have lost will dispel their
contact with them.
¾Adam Phillips, On
Flirtation
Ashes speaks most profoundly through a story that Hoffman
struggles to put to words, not only because he cannot bear to articulate his
loss directly, but because language itself can only approximate the void that
is absence. In ashes, loss is evoked
through a reordering of referentiality, a
fragmentation of the details Hoffman depends upon to order his world. A window
provides the only source of light for a darkened bedroom. Although the light fluctuates, it is
impossible to determine when it is morning and when it is evening. The camera
hovers on time lapse. Are seasons
passing, or merely hours? Formless
images, shapes, and shadows are intercut with lush
scenes of the garden awash with the color of emotion, with the vividness of an
image one might wish to have shared with a lover. Anecdotal remnants of Marian
contained in answering machine messages procure the flavor of shared lives,
recount daily events, confirm appointments, and announce the birth of a baby
girl.
A nurse calls, wondering what to do with a blouse
left behind at the hospital.
It is possible that we have no idea what secular
grief is; what grief unsanctioned by an apparently coherent symbolic system
would feel like ¾Adam
Phillips, Promises Promises.
Obsessing over the hidden meaning of a photograph
taken from inside a cave, Marian reflects on learning to live life “from the
inside out,” from the midst of happenings yet to be understood, yet to be
integrated into a coherent realm of experience.
Transposed in text across the darkness of the cave’s interior, her
reflections on loss – in this case the loss of memory – resonate with Phil’s
own struggle to articulate his grief.
The power of naming, Marian insists, gives experience its credibility. Attuned to the capacity of the symbolic to
legitimize, Hoffman takes ritual as an entry point directly into the midst, the
incoherent centre of sorrow.
“Seventeen’s the number,” Hoffman repeats, “One is
for one, and seven is for doing.” With
childlike insistence, he translates a personal lineage of life and death into a
number game. “She was born on May
seventeen, and died on November seventeen.
My Dad was born on April seventeen, my uncle was born on April seventeen,
and my grandfather was born on April seventeen.
Seventeen’s the number. One is
for one, and seven is for doing.” Seventeen, we are told, is the number of
Phil’s hockey jersey, and of his seat on a plane, and it is the number entered
in his log book on the day an elephant fell down at the Rotterdam Zoo. Seventeen is just a number, a minor detail
easily discounted in the rush of daily experience. But in Phil’s efforts to account for a series
of happenings from the midst of bereavement, seventeen becomes the number, the numerology of loss.
Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home.
Your house is on fire and your children are gone.
Hoffman’s method is that of reiteration without
redundancy; loss, we are reminded, is never just this loss. In ashes we learn that Hoffman is once
removed in the birth order of his siblings from an older brother who died as a
result of a miscarriage. Because the child died in utero,
the priest refused to perform the funereal rites that would have legitimized
this life in the eyes of the church. But funerals are meant for the living, and
this disavowal prompted a loss of faith that would sever Phil’s father’s
commitment to the church. Later, this man would have another son who would also
be named Philip.
Good mourning, in Freud’s terms, keeps people moving
on, keeps them in time…
¾Adam Phillips, Darwin’s
Worms
What becomes of grief that traditional practices of
mourning cannot, or will not, contain? Ashes
suggests that ritual serves us less as a remedy for grief, and more as a
glimpse of ordered time from outside the midst of our daily reckonings with loss.
When her mother died, Ann Carson scanned the pages of Virginia Woolf's diaries in search of something, following Woolf's own premise that there is pleasure to be derived
from "forming such shocks into words and order" after the fact of
Death. (165) On the day after the funeral Carson sat at her desk, books spread
out before her, looking not for meaning, but for the comfort of structure. I turned to
He didn’t just die, he was taken.
Sudden death doesn’t begin to feel real until you see
its impact etched across the faces of the people standing directly in front of
you. Or, as in the case of my uncle’s death, until I read the horrible truth in
what would otherwise have been an ordinary newspaper headline, on an ordinary
day. Even then, these were cues that only hinted at what I should feel.
Everywhere it said that my uncle was gone, but I could not write of his life in
the past tense. I could not write “My uncle was
a committed painter for over three decades.” In writing that “he has been painting all my life”…has been, and will be, I clung to the
present perfect, the tense of continuity. I
do not release him, my uncle’s friend choked from the podium on the day of
the funeral with an urgency that cut through my carefully measured sentences,
my own attempts to fashion the inarticulate expression of my grief. With those
words came another break in time. If mourning requires our participation in the
flow of time, ashes
insists that we live with death in capricious ways that exist outside of
this ordered progression. Perhaps learning to live “from the inside
out” means learning to live while dying at the same time - learning to live with death and not despite it. Loss, it
seems, is a persistent presence.
Works Cited
Carson, A. Men in the Off Hours.
Freud, S. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. James Strachey.
Originally published in Landscape
with Shipwreck: The Films of Philip Hoffman ed. Hoolboom/Sandlos,
YYZ/Insomniac Press, 2001.