poetry

DIALOGUE OF DEATH

What have you been reading?
Reading and reviewing, I replied earnestly. The Penguin Book of Death.
Ah! Will it be a best-seller?
Well, as a matter of fact...my answer trailed off as I watched my friend's disappointment that his spirited irony was about to meet a chalky end. That wise bird, Emily Dickinson, did say that Death is a Dialogue between the Spirit and the Dust.

And because people are never too certain about death and are forever searching their minds for its meaning, a book like this, with an impressive cast of contributors, is sure to be popular. It contains a wealth of material and methods of approach to enliven our introspective volley of questions and answers. As one of the authors, Inga Clendinnen, puts it, 'I have only introspection to go on...what else is there in this tight-lipped society?'

The dialogue is often didactic. With its tricky play of certainties against mysteries, death is deployed as a charismatic teacher. The Penguin Book of Death is full of facts, anecdotes, and cultural histories. While being interrogated, entertained, preached, the reader learns a lot. From John Ralston Saul, we hear that the 'series of highly ritualized tales...of the horrible deaths' of religious martyrs, optimistically titled The Lives of Saints, was indeed a best-seller in the nineteenth century. And did you know that as many people died from the flu epidemic of 1919 as were killed in the entire First World War? We are shocked to discover from Jan Mayman that the current life expectancy of Australian Aborigines is fifty years. And heartened by the mix of personal and professional respect for the body after death as it is expressed in the piece called 'Embalming Father' by Thomas Lynch, an American poet and undertaker.

Much of the information pertains to the adequacy or inadequacy of customary responses to death. There's discussion of the Mexican concern for giving the dead a 'good send-off', the Australian Aborigines' Sorry Time, taxidermy, relics, repression, and the role of the media. In her story 'Shooting in the Penal Settlement', Cassandra Pybus effectively describes the nightmare of becoming involved in a documentary filmed at Port Arthur and being required to drive past the burnt-out ruins of the Seascape guesthouse six times, until the camera-crew got the perfect 'shot'.

Inga Clendinnen is a prize-winning historian and an enticing essayist. She steps out with tales of Aztec killings in which the victors 'deftly' peel the 'still-warm' skin off their enemies, in order to wear it themselves ceremonially 'again and again' thus learning intimately 'the lesson of personal mortality and physical corruptibility.'

Intimacy is an important aspect of the discourse. There was a beautiful dead parrot on our lawn and I was going to ask a bolder member of the family to bury it. Reading The Penguin Book of Death with its many instances of bravely looking death in the eye encouraged me to be less squeamish and do it myself. Death is a dare, many of the authors suggest, a test of physical proximity. And even if the reasons are different, wearing someone else's skin is of the same order of 'feeling' death as the New York confessionalist Kathryn Harrison's rummaging through her grandmother's ashes. She licks the 'fine grey dust' off her fingers. And lest we think this a timid and quickly retracted tip-of-the-tongue experiment, no, she licks the palms of her hands as well. Her grandmother had raised her and Harrison interprets this sensual gesture of ingestion as a spiritual act of 'last intimacy between two women who, in turn, had diapered each other.'

Elsewhere in the book the preserved Ho Chi Minh's skin is likened to proscuitto. Then there's the example of a naturalist eager to be eaten -- after death -- by a family of giant horned Brazilian beetles. And Gabrielle Carey has great fun describing the menu for the Mexican ritual of the Day of the Dead, which includes corpse-shaped bread rolls sprinkled with pink sugar. This reminds me of my own venture into a Verdun confectionery to buy a Mars bar, only to be confronted with an enormous selection of chocolate grenades and other edible weaponry.

Eating death gives new meaning to the idea of near-death experiences. Jennifer Maiden takes this concept of intimacy further, to include the coupling of sex and shock and other 'workings' of necrophilia. Where there's love, there's laughter.

Dr Evelyn Juers is a critic and co-publisher of the literary quarterly HEAT.

Return to October 1997 / AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW