THWARTING
We thwart all our jokes
On the way to death.
We sing a new life.
We plant while we hence.
Life is so small
Who knows where to go
They don’t like the way
Each day we speak, they blow
To thwart all our jokes
On the way to death
We were in love,
The game came with fame,
But now are in a hurry
To break the chain.
We thwart all our jokes
On the way to death
We are out and feel
For the truth to be told.
And listen to the speech
They sermonize on religion
To thwart all our jokes
On the way to death
They speak it, we listen.
On the path of righteousness
To thwart our all jokes
On the way to death.
Danse Macabre [detail] -- Bernt Notke
"Between August 1424 and Lent 1425, an unknown artist, likely responding to a now-obscure theatrical tradition, painted the first known Danse Macabre mural on the outer wall of the Cemetery of the Innocents, facing the Rue de la Ferronerie, at the thriving heart of medieval Paris. Though now lost (the Cemetery was destroyed in 1786), the painting depicted decaying corpses dancing amidst typological representations of late Medieval society: a Pope, an Emperor, a Bishop, a King, a Monk, a Minstrel, and many more, 30 figures in all, ambling diffidently while the corpses frolic and mock them with jeering expressions, piercing remarks and aping grotesque movements of their bodies, beautifully baroque and accentuated by shark contrasts of flesh and painted costume. The form stunningly reverses the valence of the communities of the living and the dead: the dead rejoice in an active life – playing musical instruments, dancing, making conversation – while the living grow stiff, as their bodies rigidify and they lose their corporal identity. The alternation between dead and living creatures creates a rhythm of animation and stillness, of white and colour, a visual rhythm evocative of human culture itself. A new sense of community is achieved in and through the form, as the living face up to the dead, through whom they come to know concretely the abstraction of death. The social body is depicted in many of the murals as fluid and continuous, bound together by a common destiny that is re-enforced by the imagery of dance."
ReplyDelete--Ashby Kinch, "Imago Mortis: Mediating Images of Death in Late Medieval Culture"