Many years have elapsed since I last updated this blog. Begun while lonely in London, wandering the streets of Paddington with a heavy iPod IV in tow - I thought my head would explode. The results of my musings lay entombed on this site, like a miniature time capsule.
Leaving London and my blog behind, I returned to Cleveland in the late summer of 2007. I spent my nights doling out Ballantines to the good people of Tremont, having secured a bartending gig at Prosperity Social Club. It was there, on a muggy September evening just after my shift, that I met two fresh-faced boys sitting at the bar. One of them, sporting a white blazer, ratty bicycle gloves, and thread-bare jeans, was particularly engaging. We discussed topics as far ranging as the merits of Saussure's structuralist linguistics to the new Formula One regulations, when what I assumed to be his girlfriend marched up and announced, "I'm leaving." The pretty girl dramatically stormed out of the bar, slamming the screen door in her wake. Red-faced, he hurriedly shook my hand and mumbled, "I'm Mitch, by the way." I watched, bemused, as he quickly collected his pool cue, and shot out the door.
I knew that night that I had met someone special - someone singularly exceptional. In the hazy, dingy, and ultimately superficial world of Cleveland bar culture, Mitchell shined - a man apart, a gentleman. With a razor-sharp wit and erudite knowledge of, well, everything under the sun, Mitch was truly a polymath - a polymath in cut-off jean shorts. In the five years since I last updated this blog, I would come to count him as one of my closest friends and confidantes. On Sunday, July 29th, 2012, he was killed.
I told myself I would not write on the subject for at least a month (several aborted obits and weepy elegies thankfully never saw the light of day), such a pause seemed necessary to allow the tremendous weight of the situation to dissipate, albeit slightly. And now I sit, nearing the one-month anniversary of my friend's death, unwilling or perhaps unable to accept the kind of closure implicit in this task.
Bridget Callahan, one of Mitch's many acquaintances and a seasoned blogger, wrote an eloquent and frankly touching memorial shortly after his death - it is the kind of piece I wish I had written myself, the true measure of its worth. She weaves through an impressively accurate list, "Mitch was this, Mitch was that," and he was, indeed, all she describes, but much, much more. And now he is nothing.
Left in such a vacuum, I cling to Mitchell's words - lost in the reverie of what amounts to a technological archive of our friendship. Death in the age of information, what a curious phenomenon - texts, emails, facebook messages, and a trove of jpg's - fragile, and ultimately intangible remnants of a life lost. So little hard copy - I scroll through years-old text messages, the very last, sent less than 24 hours before his untimely death, reading "i do feel a compelling urge to get outta here...and see you..."
At an exhibition on the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley at the New York Public Library in June, as I lingered over the meticulously preserved relics of his life I remember feeling a pang of jealousy - woe for our modern disconnectedness. Here was laid a panoply of Shelley-related objects, from his baby rattle to a section of his skull, lovingly collected, palpable reminders of the now incorporeal.
I recall pausing at the very last letter sent by Shelley's friend, John Keats, to the poet before his death. Rife with tuberculosis, he explained to Shelley: "I am pick'd up and sorted to a pip. My Imagination is a Monastry and I am its Monk... I am in expectation of Prometheus every day. In the hope of soon seeing you I remain most sincerely yours..." But Keats never saw Shelley again - the letter left hanging like an unanswered text. Keats's death that spring inspired Shelley's masterpiece, Adonaïs: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats (1821), to my mind, one of the more beautiful expositions on the loss of a friend:
"...he is not dead, he doth not sleep,
He hath awaken'd from the dream of life;
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife
Invulnerable nothings. We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay."
(Stanza 39, Lines 343-351)
Shelley recognized what I now know: that death is actually for the living. Left with the absence, we wander about aimlessly, keeping with phantoms, looking to fill the void.
Each day since July 29th I have been tagging along with Shelley, rotting, striking out at invulnerable nothings, on a losing search for comfort. This situation is all the more vexing given my background. One of my research interests is post-mortem photography, more generally the Victorian perception of death, and their materials of mourning. I have spent the better part of my graduate career trying to uncover their lost rituals, examining mementoes of death such as hair jewelry (making jewelry from the hair of the deceased was extremely popular in America, well into the twentieth century). I once organized a small exhibition of memorial hair jewelry for the Cincinnati Art Museum, and got the chance to handle hundreds of these small, poignant relics. Holding a tiny ring in my palm containing plated brown hair from the early nineteenth century, I felt it was strangely charged with emotion, nigh hundreds of years after the hair was clipped - remains of what was?
A Ring Containing Keats's Hair, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
Mitchell was killed by a drunk driver, struck down while standing at a street festival behind a barricade. His death was extremely violent and traumatic, therefore, I was shocked to see the casket open at his memorial. Wearing his trademark white blazer, sunglasses folded neatly on his lapel, his strange body laid awkwardly, hands like claws covered in heavy make-up. But his hair, oh his hair - spilling down onto his shoulders, faintly moving in the draught of air from a nearby door, a cruel mirage of life. I felt an uncontrollable urge to discreetly snip a lock of his blonde tresses, to make a talisman for my grief - but I could not move. Humbled in the presence of death, I searched his frozen face for a glimmer, a mere glint of what once was - and found, once again, nothing.
"For a corpse is essentially an absence, an abandoned, rejected thing -- mortal remains at last. A feeling of trickery enters into the hideous dismay which we experience at the spectacle of death: our loved one is there and is no longer there. He has escaped from himself and in his flight he leaves this part of his being, the only visible and tangible part, which nevertheless no longer resembles him." -- Cain, Where Is Your Brother? (1962)
As I said farewell to the shell of my friend for the last time, I noticed a stain forming on the arm of his white sleeve - something was leaking out of that thing that was no longer Mitch. A grim moment, but ultimately helpful - I took a deep breath, and stilled my heaving chest.
As I stood there over his casket, watching the circle of embalming fluid grow, I finally acceded that indeed, there was nothing there. Nothing.
I slowly weaved my way out of the bland chain-store funeral parlor room, packed wall-to-wall with so many heartbroken people, and remembered what Mitchell said to me back in May. In what I try not to think of as a horrendous bit of foreshadowing, I was hit by a van myself crossing the street in Brooklyn. Miraculously I escaped injury, but was rather shaken. "I don't know if I could deal with losing Brittany," said Mitch in a text message dated May 30th. Yes, you could, Mitch. Because somehow, we must.
As I stood there over his casket, watching the circle of embalming fluid grow, I finally acceded that indeed, there was nothing there. Nothing.
I slowly weaved my way out of the bland chain-store funeral parlor room, packed wall-to-wall with so many heartbroken people, and remembered what Mitchell said to me back in May. In what I try not to think of as a horrendous bit of foreshadowing, I was hit by a van myself crossing the street in Brooklyn. Miraculously I escaped injury, but was rather shaken. "I don't know if I could deal with losing Brittany," said Mitch in a text message dated May 30th. Yes, you could, Mitch. Because somehow, we must.
