Dance Me To The End

by Teresita Pumará

Some texts belong to eternity. Others, like this one, are stuck up in time. It was written between the end of 2016 and the beginning of 2017 and it resists to be struck out of the long German winter wanderings that not so secretly inspired it.

No art is possible without a dance with death.

                                                                         Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

I

In a print called Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), Durero pictures Death as a barbed skeleton crowned with snakes and holding a sand clock. The skeleton rides beside a Knight and reminds him each step forward is a step closer to the end. The Knight smiles knowingly. He is determined. The thing about death is we will die, whether we keep going or we stay still. But there are different ways to relate with death.

David Bowie and Leonard Cohen died last year. Both of them released an album short before their deaths. Those albums seem to me the result of an intense dance with death. But what does this mean: to dance with death? Is not life itself a dance with death? Think of a couple dancing. Their bodies are close. They look at each other. They travel through space and time in a close embrace. To dance with death means to embrace death and feel it closely. Life is not always a dance with death.

II

In Slaughterhouse Five I read that writing an anti-war book is like writing an anti-glacier book, because they are both equally inevitable. The book´s narrator was an allied soldier in the Second World War and was in Dresden as prisoner during the bombarding of 1945. He believes wars are inevitable but he still decides to write the book.

That feeling of hopeless inevitability is also present in 2666, by Roberto Bolaño. The heart of this novel is, to me, the assassination of women in Sonora dessert, in Mexico. In its huge tapestry, the maidens killed by Dracula, the dead women in the pictures of a nihilist artist and the women killed systematically in Mexico are the same women. Their broken bodies pop up in the dessert, as if the dessert was responsible. There is no villain, no sick serial killer to blame. The dead women in 2666 seem as inevitable as the war in Slaughterhouse. And yet the writer writes.

III

David Bowie died on January 10^th, 2016. He left one last strange album, Blackstar. I am not sure if I like the album. It makes me childishly afraid. But, like a child, I come back to it again and again. I feel it holds a hidden message. The other day, while listening to it, I imagined Bowie was already dead when he wrote and recorded the songs. In Blackstar Bowie sings and dances in his grave.

In Pedro Páramo, by Juan Rulfo, dead people sing and talk to each other from their graves. They do not talk about death. There is nothing to say about death. Dead people talk about the world they lived in. From their point of view, it is a vast, cruel and sometimes unbearably beautiful dessert. In their dance with death, artists see what dead people see. Bowie sings and dances in his grave: I know something is very wrong, The post returns for prodigal songs, The black-eyed sharks with flowered muse, With skull designs upon my shoes.

IV

Leonard Cohen died some weeks ago. In the past four years he recorded three beautiful albums. In them breathes an intense cemetery peace. A peace that expects something. The last of these three albums is calledYou want it darker. In every song, except one, Cohen addresses an anonymous “you”.  Who is the poet addressing to? Who wants it darker? Death may be one answer.

I imagined the poet having a long conversation with death. The poet is old. He is ready to die, although he does not really want to. I´m ready, he sings. I´m out of the game. I´m leaving the table. And yet he loves life, he would like to stay. He is dying, and yet he dances. He declares his love to death: death makes life real. If we turn our back on the devil we turn our backs on the angel. If we turn our back on death, we turn our back on life.

V

I have struggled to end this text for over a week. One day, looking for some kind of zombie inspiration, I went for a walk in a Düsseldorf cemetery. Some graves had Christmas decorations. That night I blamed Heidegger, who convinced me that the awareness of death opens a distance between us and the world, so we become tragically free, tragically alive.

Yesterday I had a short conversation with the owner of a little Arabian shop. I wished her a happy new year, she wished the same to me, and added: hopefully it will be better than the last. I hope that too, said I. She concluded: last year was so hard for everyone, I do not know why. In Bowie´s words: I know something´s very wrong.

Each time I return to 2666 I think: that is what the apocalypse feels like. Then I notice: the apocalypse is always happening. Sometimes we feel it, sometimes we do not. Nietzsche whispers to my ear: a little oblivion is necessary to life. And Bowie sings: the post returns for prodigal sons. I like to think the prodigal sons are Bowie and the generation he belongs to. The kind of freedom they built is dying. Dark forces are profiting from that death: winter is coming. What can our work stop, prevent, or change? I do not know, but I will only find it out if I write, if I dance, if I ride.

Teresita Pumará studied philosophy in the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she focused on phenomenology and twentieth century philosophy. Then she got lost in the sea of possibilities. She lived in Medellin, Colombia, where she wrote and took part in a punk-rock band. Now she lives in Düsseldorf, Germany, where she writes and studies German. Whatever the wind blows, she writes.