Secretly Flirting with Death

In hospital, I swallowed narcotics at 4 hour intervals and listened to ambient music on headphones. And I studied the drawing my daughter had taped to the wall next to my bed: a single flower in a vase, perched on the ledge of a window sill, everything rendered in vibrant pinks and purples and yellows. “It’s still life,” she explained. “You like still life.”

During these days of pain and monotony, my mind kept coming back to something Brian Eno once said. It’s a long quotation, but an insightful one that I think is worth sharing more-or-less unabridged. Eno is talking about the inception of his seminal ambient album, Music for Airports. He describes a morning he spent waiting for a plane in the Cologne Airport in 1977. He said:

“I started to wonder what kind of music would sound good in a building like that. I thought: it has to be interruptible (because there’ll be announcements); it has to work outside the frequencies at which people speak and at different speeds from speech patterns (so as not to confuse communication); and it has to be able to accommodate all the noises airports produce. And, most importantly for me, it has to have something to do with where you are and what you’re there for—flying, floating, and secretly flirting with death. I thought: I want to make a kind of music that prepares you for dying, that doesn’t get all bright and cheerful and pretend you’re not a little apprehensive, but which makes you say to yourself, ‘Actually, it’s not that big a deal if I die.’”

Notice the transition Eno makes across the body of this paragraph. At first, he is thinking largely about how to compose airport music from a pragmatic standpoint. (How does one deal with the fact that airports are noisy and have lots of announcements?) But then he moves away from describing the airport in functional terms and focuses, instead, on the meaning of the airport. Eno doesn’t just want his music to work in that particular location. He also wants it reflect back the reasons humans congregate in airports in the first place: flying, floating, secretly flirting with death.

It’s no accident that Eno’s meditation on the symbolic meaning of the airport leads, ultimately, to a reflection on mortality. A lesser composer might have written Muzak to accompany the selling of gaudy trinkets to distracted travellers. Instead, Eno cuts to the heart of the matter. “I want to make a kind of music that prepares you for dying,” he said.

In his novel White Noise, Don DeLillo makes a very similar observation about these quotidian spaces where consumerism distracts us from our anxieties about death. In DeLillo’s case the subject is the supermarket, rather than the airport. But his conclusion is strikingly similar. “Here we don’t die, we shop,” explains one character. “But the difference is less marked than you think.”

While in hospital, I frequently found myself channelling Brian Eno. What kind of music would sound good in a building like this? Superficially, hospitals are rather like airports: there are announcements, interruptions, distracting noises. But the essence of the space is different, isn’t it? After all, there’s nothing even remotely secretive about how we flirt with death in a hospital…

For a time, I shared my room with an older man who had suffered a fall and broken his shoulder. One morning, a doctor came in to tell the man he’d been cleared for surgery; however, it needed to be emphasized that the procedure would be risky. The older man apparently suffered from a litany of pre-existing health conditions, any of which might lead to serious complications. The man interrupted the doctor partway through this monologue. “Okay, okay, I get it,” he said. “You’re saying I might not make it. That’s fine. I’ll be asleep, right? If I’ve got to go, I’d rather go while I’m asleep.” He might as well have been quoting Eno: “Actually, it’s not that big a deal if I die…”

Over the course of the next 24 hours, I listened to this man on his cellphone, making his final arrangements, saying his final goodbyes—just in case. In total, he spoke to two or maybe three people. He shared the one password he apparently uses for all his various internet accounts. Beyond this, the man didn’t feel the need to broach any subject weightier than the weather.

One afternoon, when the tiny patch of sky I could see through the window was grey and featureless, the porters came and took the old man for surgery. I never learned what became of him.

The reason that quotation from Eno stuck with me during my time in hospital isn’t because I have any special interest in airports or music composition. What interests me is the process of abstraction, the idea of taking some familiar place like an airport (or supermarket) and cutting through superficialities to lay bare its central meaning. Both Eno and DeLillo understood that, regardless of the starting point, this process of abstraction invariably leads deathward.

As an artist, this way of thinking about things and places feels very natural to me; it’s at the heart of still life, after all. In the context of a 17th century Dutch painting, a pocket watch isn’t just a device for telling the time, it is time itself. What matters isn’t the aesthetics of the clock, it’s what the clock represents. What matters is the irreversible march toward entropy that will one day claim all things worthy of love.

The still life painters of the Dutch Golden Age extended this process of symbolic abstraction to nearly every inanimate thing they could think of: lemons, candles, books, coins, dice, … In my own still life art I have appropriated most of these iconographic elements at one time or another. But also I extend this process of symbolic abstraction to more contemporary objects, including sex toys, pornography, fast food, and even Garfield the cartoon cat. Without fail, if you play this game of abstraction, if you peel away the superficialities of all these inanimate things, you will arrive, in due time, at a meditation on mortality. To greater or lesser extent, death lurks in the heart of all things; as William James put it, death is the “worm at the core” of the human condition.

Which bings us back, at last, to the hospital room where I lay, day after day, surrounded by symbols of death: the shattered bones in my right leg; the drugs that muted but did not erase my pain; the anguished cries of the woman down the hall, ignored by all who passed her; the reek of antiseptics and chemicals and human waste; the unseasoned food that appeared and disappeared at my bedside table; the overhead speakers announcing emergencies and calamities in colour-coded language… And, of course, the picture. My daughter’s picture, affixed to the wall with scotch tape. Flowers on a window sill. “It’s still life. You like still life.”

Whether she understands it or not, my daughter’s picture exists within the context of a long tradition of floral still life—a sub-genre whose death-haunted roots trace back at least as far as the Old Testament. “All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field,” according to book of Isiah. “The grass withers, the flower fades.”

The images that accompany this essay represent a few of my own contributions to the cannon. These arrangements seek to expose the worm at the core as explicitly as possible. The colours are muted; the sets are dark; the flowers are withered; the bones of the dead litter the table… I prefer not to share my daughter’s brightly-coloured arrangement. There is death at the core of that image, of course, if one is willing to peel away enough layers of meaning to find it. But her art is as unconcerned about the worm at the core as art can reasonably be. I still have the picture, affixed to a wall with scotch tape. To remind myself.