As I had managed to elude the zombies the night before, I decided I would finally view THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in its entirety, something I have never been able to do. The first time I saw it, when it was first released in 1971 or 72, I fled the theater and barricaded my doors. What perverse impulse induced me to buy a copy for a buck from a bargain bin?
We can imagine almost any form of the after-life except inactivity, but this is why they are the dead, after all, and not having their nails done or filing their taxes. What we are suppose to be afraid of is becoming one of them--decaying and looking ugly--which is not death, exactly, but aging. As for getting eaten up by them--which is what Romero's flesh eaters do--this could be a metaphor extended through many daily activities--the way the world willfully trivializes all of us with computerized answering machines with a repertoire of options, all of which put us on hold,rush hour traffic, television (I could go on)--not to mention real atrocity, which makes horror films look demure. Who would not prefer to rise nightly from a well and waltz to organ music in an abandoned ball-room(CARNIVAL OF SOULS) to forced labor in a concentration camp? The real horror is in what men do to each other, the real hells are taken for granted in an elsewhere on this earth even now at this moment today.However much I know I can not comprehend this, and however deep my concern ,it is shallow and ineffectual.
Last year at this time I was working on a hologram-painting of the ossuaries or bone yards left in the wake of the Khymer Rouge. I worked from a number of photographs. In one, three little boys peer over the fence to view the acres of human bones. I wonder what they were thinking.
My purpose for painting such a work was to try to look at these issues squarely in my own medium. I thought to use this as part of a set I am working on for an adaptation of the Bach Johannes Passion with the redoubtable David Tang, who is the conductor I have mentioned elsewhere. The central conceit--that Golgotha where Christ was crucified--was the place of the skull was a concious inaccuracy, as the hill where men were crucified then was said itself to be in the shape of a skull, and indeed is translated as "Skull Hill" in the highly colloquial Philips translation of the New Testament. Throughout this project I have tried not to use any Christian symbols for the simple reason that they did not exist at the time of the action. And I believe I would have been afraid to do this painting except for my deep trust in Bach, who I have always felt was my interlocutor, and friend to my soul. I did the painting in a little over a week. It was a peculiar time. Throughout, I had a great deal of dental problems, and the sort of migraine in which one feels one's cranial fissures like etchings.
At one point I saw how I could give a detail a certain beauty, and plunged my brush into the pot of vermillion--and broke the brush, and burst into tears, because I wasn't supposed to be making...beauty. It was an odd, sharp moment when I felt the limits of what it is to be an artist like a thunderclap, and I remembered the account of a photographer who was documenting a recently liberated concentration camp, who said that they began to lose sight of the atrocity the moment that they started to compose their shots. When I was young, I developed something like anorexia over these questions, and so it was useful to discover that I was strong enough ,or callous enough,to do this now. Then I was sure of my own virtue, and recoiled in horror from what humankind can do, as if I was a sort of lily-white innocent transposed to this barbarous planet. But when I painted this painting it was with a wierd sense of complicity, of being inextricably part of what human beings do to each other, of being fortunate not to have been broken under the wheel, of never having been beaten or worked to death or starved or tortured, or having become an executioner, which is another kind of misfortune. Then as now, I try to imagine some leap of human conciousness, some collective grasp of what genocide does to humankind, because I believe that it diminishes us, that in some unmeasurable and unprovable and undemonstrable way it keeps us from our true home. This is plainly absurd in the face of the statistics, I know. But I also believe that this is what we, the spared, owe the past and the future, even if for the present all I can offer is my own sense of cognitive dissonance.
TALISMAN
Hyperion's star is not yet risen,
Dawn brings a tenuous light across the earth,
The watcher to the sleeper cries "Arise",
Dawn over the dark sea brings on the sun:
She leans across the hill-top:see, the light!
Behold the ambush of the enemy
Stealing to take the heedless in their sleep,
And still the herald's voice that cries, "Arise!"
Dawn over the dark sea brings on the sun,
She leans across the hill-top, see, the light!
The North wind from Arcturus now blows free,
The stars go into hiding in the sky,
And nearer to the sunrise swings the Plough.
Dawn over the dark sea brings on the sun,
She leans across the hilltop:see, the light!
(from a medieval latin ms. trans Helen Waddell)