Glum

[poliphilo]

I stayed up till midnight- just. Ailz and I stood at the bedroom window and watched fireworks bristle along the skyline.

I got a call from Bolton in the wee, small hours. Happy, shining people wishing me a happy new Year. The lads had gone back to Sara's house and were partying with her parents. 

I'm not a party person.

I keep coming back to Saddam. There's a jolly picture in the press this morning showing him with his neck broke. His executioners (more like a Shia lynch mob actually) jeered him and loosed the trap door while he was still saying his prayers. All through the process he showed courage and dignity. The new Iraq makes the old Iraq (Saddam's Iraq) look good.

I'm so ashamed of what America and Britain have done.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

A couple of the officials at the Execution filmed the whole thing on their camera-phones. I believe the footage can be seen at YouTube

[besideserato.livejournal.com]

You're KIDDING. Horrible. I want to look but... don't.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I haven't looked. I think there are things that should be private. Even dictators ought to have the right to die in private.

[besideserato.livejournal.com]

When I read this first, a week or so ago, I thought of my aunt and how the family crowded with her in her last moments. This was not always so, I thought, this private dying.

And then I was reading the works of Walter Benjamin where, in his essay about Nikolai Leskov, "The Storyteller", he writes: "It has been observable fir a number of centuries how in the general consciousness the thought of death has declined in omnipresence and vividness.... And in the course of the nineteenth century bourgeois society has, by means of hygienic and social, private and public institutions, realized a secondary effect which may have been its subconscious main purpose: to make it possible for people to avoid the sight of the dying. Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual and a most exemplary one; think of the medieval pictures in which the deathbed was turned into a throne toward which the people press through the wide-open doors of the death house. In the course of modern times dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living. There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not died.... Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity, and when their end approaches, they are stowed away in sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs.... Just as sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life comes to an end--unfolding the views of himself under which he has encountered himself without being aware of it--suddenly in his expressions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him."

I thought of you, this comment in particular. It's not the same, of course, because he didn't die among his people--he was executed. That's the difference. But I wonder, if death had not been pushed out so far from our minds, would we react the same? Were executions once not a public thing as well? Do they not continue to be so in a way?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Good point. There's something to be said for the old view of dying as a social act.

One reads of public executions in the 18th century in which the victim was aware of him/herself as a performer and did his/her best to give the public a good show.

And when Joseph Addison, the essayist, was on his deathbed he sent out invitations to his friends to come and "see how a christian can die".