The Art of Dying—And Coming Back Plural
FOR MUCH OF the past five years, poet and photographer Judith Nangala Crispin has been fashioning elegies to dead animals, accompanying the souls of roadkill in their afterlives, singing them back in image and care to their place in the stars. Judith is a near neighbour of mine—she lives in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, near Canberra. She’s a descendant of the Bpangerang people of the Murray River. And the work she has been making forms an exhibition, Dangerous Stars, showing right now in Sydney, as part of the Head On Photo Festival in Sydney.
I’ll be in conversation with Judith at the Mosaic Room in the beautiful Nishi Hotel in Acton, Canberra on the evening of 5 December. The event is to launch my new book A Beginner’s Guide in Canberra, and to unveil the special hardbound, linen-covered edition of that book.
Here’s a story on Judith’s photographic afterimages from this weekend’s Guardian.
At a glance, our most recent works are polar opposites: Judith’s contemplations of death and my reflections on beginnings. And we come at things differently, which is why our conversation on art and country, on integrity and belonging should be rich and challenging. But in truth, I think, our work—Judith’s poems and photographs and my poems and essays—are close kin, and we share a similar lyric project: to wake ourselves again—and anyone else who cares to engage with our work—to the spiritual and physical geography in which our lives are set down and made meaningful. To begin us again. To reconnect our human lives to the mystery they inhabit—often, it seems to me, so glibly and recklessly.
For beginning, as a way of living, an eternal kind of openness of mind and heart and eye, entails first a dying. A dying to self-concern, to ambition, to the many shabby forms of self-concept and humanity and reality, to which prevailing discourses doom us all. There is a kind of dying to our egos and into love that opens us back into the organic world, our animal selves, the land, the songs of forests and birds, the clouds of witness, the stars, the lives of saints and ancestors, the world as it is, beyond knowing, and way beyond brands and ideologies and fashions of dress and thought. There is a kind of unbecoming that beginning again, and living deeply and sympathetically with each other and the earth, entails.
I’m looking, as I write, at a beautiful edition I have, thanks to my partner Jodie, of Attar’s The Canticle of the Birds, a twelfth century Persian masterpiece. This great poem, this allegory of the spiritual journey toward truth, is a flight of birds, and their transfiguration into Oneness with all things within the flame of the Simorgh’s presence. Their journey from physical form to “original self” reminds me of the journey Judith’s artworks depict for her found birds and foxes and other deceased animals:
“The substance of their being was undone,
And they were lost like shade before the sun…”
And as the Simorgh tells the birds when they come:
.”…you will be lost to mortal sight,
Dispersed to nothingness until once more
You find in Me the selves you were before”
Rumi, a Sufi mystic like Attar, has the same kind of dying-rebirth in mind when he writes:
“There is a way of passing away from the personal,
a dying that makes ones plural.”
The art of beginning is the art of dying, then, and each of us needs to find their way there urgently, and the world in general needs this kind of radical reboot. Photographs and poems may seem flimsy vessels for carrying us to this necessary afterlife in life. But so it always was. It has always fallen to art to run urgent lyric repairs on reality, to restore some of us at least to the sanity upon which all justice and the preservation of the earth depends.
I’m not sure exactly what Judith has in mind to say on Monday 5 December, but death and life and reconnection to country are going to be most of what we consider—the role of art of many kinds in leading ourselves back to our selves, to country, to the wildness in our hearts, to all beings, and to each other, before it’s too late.
Get along to Head On in Sydney and join us at the launch event at the Mosaic Room on Monday 5 December (from 7pm). IT’s a free event but please register on Eventbrite. Numbers are limited.
