Death? This is Doxy...

Every now and again, I am drawn along a necrophilic path of curiosity that never fails to uncover the most amazing observations of humans' relationships with Death. The woman to the left is from the Capuchin catacombs in Palermo, Italy. I have as yet been unsuccessful in gathering any other information about her. The Capuchin tombs are listed, along with the Sedlec Ossuary in Czechoslovakia, the necropolis of North Ossetia, and the burial sites of the Tana Toraja in Sulawesi, in a little article on humankind's most impressive extant tombs.

Further down this morning's path of beautifully confrontational mortality, please behold Kittiwat Unarrom, an artist who absolutely caramelizes my little bread baker's heart. In his shop in Ratchamburi, Thailand, he fashions the most heart-stoppingly realistic representations of (bits of) human bodies...out of bread. I read a blurb about him in Juxtapoz several years ago and only yesterday found this little video of the gentleman working in his shop. It's fuckin awesome.

Uhmmm, lessee...more dead stuff...

Yes, of course! The inimitable Sarina Brewer of Custom Creature Taxidermy has stitched together the most enchanting little capricorn in the whole wide world (and it's even blue!). Ms. Brewer's a naturalist with what appears to be a deep reverance for life, beginning to end. She deals with death by honoring the already-dead (roadkill, etc.) with beauty and immortality. I totally have a crush on this woman for both her aesthetics and her pragmatism; would that more people could see like she sees.

Another amazing artist in the necrophilic realm (and another girl, oh my palpitating heart!) is the taxidermist of A Case of Curiosities. She's done some chimerical physical illustrations of 18th and 19th century Russian, French, and German fairy tales. ...I'm talking real kittens in princess dresses here. Secondly, she's got a really lovely piece on exhibiting human corpses (mummified or taxidermied) and its longlived status as social taboo.

Yeah...,

Yeah, Death has been on my mind again, as she is during life-changing and -challenging spaces. I'm getting married, and so it is perfectly natural that my preternatural obsession with our inevitable quietus should resurface now, now, now.

My awe-inspiring brother D~ and I were recently discussing awareness as it applies to personal mortality. Knowing, or at least being pretty goddamned sure that we will eventually die, we agree that it behooves us to be as aware as mortally possible up through the very last moments of our lives, to be awake, in the most naturally esoteric sense, down to our very last inch. I have, of course, been reading about this awareness stuff through my whole life, through teachings of christ/buddha/mohammed, and etc. However, all my efforts at willful awareness, through meditation and the like, have proven pretty fruitless. The only times I have been really, truly in my skin, in my every breath, in whatever I have that feels like a living soul, are times when I have deliberately put myself in the way of Death:

Skydiving. Cliff-jumping. Formerly ingesting and insulflating massive quantities of potentially mortally harmful chemicals. It's like...

It's kinda like doing psychomimetic substances, specifically organic ones. Mushrooms, for example, always make me hyper-aware of beauty. When I'm up for a fungal, kaleidoscopic afternoon, colors seem brighter, more vivid, more like themselves. Ditto all organic shapes, smells, textures, tastes, and on and on. They help me remember how the world felt when I was a little, little girl. Y'know, back when I knew everything was made of magic way, way older than god.

Lovely as hallucinogens are...well, frankly, hallucinogens are tools, are means to an end. They are a cut-to-the-chase way to kick my brain out of its entanglement in the short-sighted day-to-day quagmire that we pass off as Reality with a capital 'R'. Visionary plants are not solely for recreation; they are not toys. They are keys to the doors in our own perceptions, our own realities. I take, have sporadically taken for years, mushrooms (and their organic cousins) to show my brain what it feels like to be open. 'Cause, y'know...sometimes I forget. The goal, though, the goal is to eventually be at a point where I can see Beauty for what it is all the time, without any additional help from the plant kingdom.

And it works.

Not quite like LSD does; I don't have uncontrollable flashbacks or disorientation. I don't suddenly see giant dahlias in my sautee pans or hear the cats talking to me (they do that all the time, anyway). It's way gentler than that.

I just perceive more. I actually notice season changes, even the super-subtle ones to be found here in the subtropics. I am much more prone to stop and smell the frangipani than I was before taking mushrooms. I observe and appreciate life. I know that the reward for occasionally sitting and watching the daily drama that takes place among the tiny anole lizards in my yard will far outweigh the "lost" time I could've spent doing something more industrially productive. I remember that this stuff, the unending performance of all living things, is actually important, each timeless moment of it, for reasons that are prohibitively difficult to articulate to the consumer-minded. And, difficult to explain or not, I am a hell of a lot wealthier for it.

So, back to the Death thing, I like to do stuff like skydive and cliff-jump and whatnot because these also function as tools to help my brain learn how it feels to be really, really present. While circling up and up and up in a little Cessna just built for jumping out of, Death is sitting, in all but physical form, right next to me, thigh to thigh. And lordy, is that girl grinnin! I've gotta be cool, gotta be calm so I don't do something stupid and panic-driven that might endanger myself or the pilot or the jumpmaster. Thus, it behooves me to look over at Death, acknowledge that she's got a job to do and know that I cannot stand in her way if it's my time, then just grin at her sweet and sideways, and give her a little flirtatious wink that says, "See ya at the bottom, baby; I'm goin for a ride!"

It seems to me that...well, that Death likes to give her blessing if you approach her humbly and mischeviously like that, y'know? And when I jump? Once I have come to that understanding with Death? I have absolutely nothing to worry about. Nothin. No future. No past. No grocery lists or social obligations. For all I know, I may be dead in a couple of minutes, and these sky-high, spellbound moments may be my last; I am sure as hell gonna live 'em. Peacefully. Thankfully. Joyously.

I will be Here.

Death is Birth is Death is Birth. Ain't nothin to be afraid of. In fact, I'm invitin 'em to my weddin. To all the events of my life, great and small.

All of the people I mentioned above?---the baker, the churchmen, the taxidermists and the preservationists?---all of them are working with their chosen charges in ways that pose a kind of anathema to our whitebread, plasticene, fear-based, UStian ideals concerning mortality and our relationships to Life and Death. In doing so, they absolutely honor us by gently, beautifully showing us what we fear to see: the immutable frailty of Life, and our heartbreaking, heartswelling connection to every single aspect of it.

How fuckin gracious and aware is that?