Death

Guy Yedwab Victoria Anderson 9/24/06 Death is not something which I normally like to think about myself, but like many things, death comes upon us unexpectedly. Sometimes that's because death happens, claiming a friend or an acquaintance or a public figure, but at other times its a thought, or a book, or a piece of art. The piece of art which prompted my recent intellectual grappling with death is an untitled production still which hangs in the lobby of the Tisch Building on our campus. Three days a week, four times a day, I pass by this photo, and it always sucks the voice out of my throat. I can't speak when I see it; I can't think of anything other than the overwhelming feeling that I am looking at a crystal-clear representation of death. There lies a young girl on a bed with an empty cup next to the hand of hers that dropped it; a clear image of unexpected death. How terrifying is it for a man with dreams to have to face the chilling idea that death might not claim him at the end of a fruitful life, but rather in the middle of an action as simple as having your cup of tea! As an actor, as a writer, as a political dreamer, as a man who may want a family some day, the idea that I might die before realizing any of that is crippling. I have seen almost no photographs, no hung paintings, no sculptures with quite the same emotional kick as this one strikes me in the stomach with. It's a very confusing fear about death; it's probably based on the assumption that if I feel like I died at the right time, having added something to the world, death will be okay; as though my life is a sculpture which I am constantly working on all the days of my life, and when I die it is the end of preparation and the final museum viewing. The philosopher William Benjamin saw this view when he famously said, “The work is the death-mask of its conception.” It's a comforting idea, that says that even though I'll be dead, it will all have amounted to something. It also holds me to a higher standard of living while I'm alive, knowing that deep down I will be judged for having lived my life beautifully. That, perhaps, is why I am so involved in the rituals of death; it's the final punctuation of a life

beautifully lived. How frustrating is it to reach the end of the play (for instance, the play I saw a week ago named 'Nami) and have the good work of the playwright fall apart because of a weak ending? Great sentences refuse to trail off; great paintings do not skip the final detailing; I cannot die without that final punctuation mark. I love the last words of great people: whether it is the beautifully constructed irony of Oscar Wilde's “Either the wall-paper goes, or I do,” or Karl Marx's self-assured “Last words are for people who haven't said enough in life.” The saddest last words I ever remember are Che Guevara's last words: “Don't let it end like this—tell them I said something.” Does it really matter that his last moments in life were filled with terrible regret of writer's block finishing his last moments? Probably not. If there is an afterlife, than theoretically he has eternity to get over that regret (and realize that his life will be judged by more than it's ending; Che's live has not been cheapened by that last failure). If there is no afterlife, then nothing will matter to him at all. As Rosencrantz aptly points out in Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard (which compares life to being characters onstage, and looks at the tragedy of two bit-roles), people imagine that being dead will be terrible because in the end they are imagining being alive instead. They get hung up on the idea of being trapped in a box underground so much that they forget that their consciousness is literally going to be erased. For myself, I would hate to think that my consciousness would be erased. Just thinking about it causes my breath to catch in my chest, as if by holding my breath now I could somehow avoid the future that is to come. I think of all the things I want to do, all the things which I will never have time to do and which, once I am dead, I will never have the chance to do again. Sure, I want to act. I also want to write. I also want to be a Spoken Word Poet. I'd love to be a Supreme Court Justice. I'd love to be a mathematician. I'd love to be in Congress, or the Presidency. I'd love to rewrite the laws, rewrite history, rewrite knowledge, rewrite people's souls. Just to do it once will not be enough – I want to do it again and again until I've left an incredible mark on the world that will put my awkward name among the greatest names in history. And once I've died, no matter how much I've done, I will have lost the

opportunity to do more. Ironically, the more I do while I'm alive, the more I could have done after my death; and the less I do while alive, the less I will have achieved. But if my legacy is large enough, I now realize, my very legacy will only grow in time. I recently read the play Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde by playwright Moises Kaufman. It's a play which uses the life and death of Oscar Wilde to examine persecution of homosexuals and artists. In the afterward, fellow playwright Tony Kushner ends with the words: “Look at the legacy that Wilde's industry has left behind, from which so much has descended, including this beautiful play.” (emphasis mine). From which so much as descended... those words refer not to Oscar Wilde's immediate influence on humanity. Those are not the ripples in the pond that Oscar Wilde made. Those are the ripples that each of those ripples made; those are the indirect influences that Oscar Wilde enabled, but which he didn't even have to be alive to see. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. He did not write The Lion King. The Lion King is based on Hamlet, and has influenced its own generations of kids. Oscar Wilde did not write Gross Indecency, but its appearance in 1990s America is every bit as influential as the appearance of The Picture of Dorian Grey in his contemporary Ireland and England. Because while Oscar Wilde himself is but mortal, Wilde's art and his legacy are immortal for as long as people find his legacy worth recording and for as long as his legacy inspires them. The fact that I'm writing an essay which references him is a testament to his timelessness. Every time I see the name of a dead person and do not know who they are, I feel an incredible sadness inside because I know that they will be forgotten. Once I heard of a story (the name has been erased with time) which posited that the afterlife was a mansion on an island, and the dead on the island got to stand based on how many people remembered them and how deeply they were cared about by the living. Famous people (a Kennedy or a Martin Luther King) who left deep impacts got to stay in the living rooms, and as one faded from the living collective one faded further and further out of the mansion and toward the edge of the island until suddenly you went out to sea and your soul was lost forever. How many people have been lost out to sea forever; how many people are only barely kept on

that island thanks to the small honors that one may get in life? Every time I pass down the 5 freeway on the way to San Diego, I see a stretch of freeway called the Gunnery Sergeant John D. Basilone Memorial Freeway. I've never met a person who could name John D. Basilone, or make any sort of a comment as to who he was. A little investigation, however, brought me to the Congressional Medal of Honor citation that Sergeant Basilone received after his tour of duty in the Pacific during World War Two: where he was critical in many tight scrapes and saved many lives by his own strength and courage. Maybe when I decided to look him up, he stepped a little further out of the water on that island. I don't know. But it did make me realize that when we try to honor the dead it is so that their effect does not become nothing once they are dead; the way that we hope that we won't become nothing once we are dead. Our legacy is the only thing we leave behind us except decaying biological material locked in a wooden box under some green acre nearby. That's why in war especially, there is such a need to honor the dead; even if there is no time to bury, even if there is no time to think, there is at some point a moment of remembrance, and the letter written home to secure his legacy at war to the people at home. That's why in How To Tell A True War Story by Tim O'Brian, Rat needs to share the story of their time at war with his dead friend's sister: in hope that his legacy will be a little stronger, a little more real. And that's what strikes me in that production still hanging in the Tisch Building. This girl is trapped in the moment of her death, and every person who walks by gets to share that moment of her death. And in the background, a pair of strangely ominous men salute her body. That mysterious moment of death, and that mysterious salute, makes me want to know so badly how she died, why she died, who killed her or what was in her tea, and most of all: what legacy is she leaving behind that those two men are attempting to honor. She is not an old woman; she does not look fully into adulthood. So what impact does the life of this Girl, Interrupted have on us all? Is it because even an incomplete work of art, like the unfinished final novel of an author or the aborted sketches of a perfectionist painter, has something to tell us all?

God, I hope so.