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Funeral ceremonies
Dariusz Czaja
We know nothing about death. And this is our whole knowledge on the matter. Nothing can be
said about death. The dead might say something about death to us, but the problem is that they
are no longer among us. They are not alive anymore, so they do not speak, cannot tell or call
things. They are unable to reveal what death actually is. No one returned from “there” and those
who returned – like Lazarus – remembered nothing. Death is an enigma for us, an empty place
with zero semantics. That is why so much can be said about it – just like everything can be said
when there is nothing to say.
Speaking about death is a human, only human, arch-human characteristic. As far as we know,
animals do not discuss death. Neither before, nor after. They die in silence, leaving only bones
behind. Like people. But unlike most animals (by the way, what do we know about it?), people are
aware of it. People do not accept death; they argue with it, debate on it, leave visible traces and
signs of encounters with death. They try to describe and present it.
Museums are good places to think about death. You only need to listen to live the language.
Common semantics do not lie. The word „museum” denotes a convenient and clear
metaphor of the world of the deceased, devoid of life. „Musealisation” – this sounds almost
like mummification, putting to death, nailing in a coffin. There is no huge difference between
„museum” and „mausoleum”. Just a few letters... Doesn’t the museum smell of death and
corpses? Isn’t a museum a slightly „dressed up and made-up” version of a cemetery?
Nevertheless, the museum looks good with death matters.
No one knows what happens with museum exhibits when the lights go out and the doors are
closed after the last visitor. Do they continue sleeping calmly in their showcases? Or maybe there
is still some life in these aseptic, polished rooms that resemble hospital wards. Let’s take a closer
look at a dozen or so exhibits, but not in the ordinary way. Let’s give up taxonomies, attributions,
contexts, sciences and methods. Let’s use our imagination. We will see what the artefacts
collected in museums will tell us about death.
I would like to invite you on a peculiar trip to a museum, the trip during which objects that
probably would never had an opportunity of encounter will meet in a surreal manner. These
meetings are strange and beautiful, as “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of
a sewing machine and an umbrella!”1. We will see if the curious and thought-provoking afterlife
begins here...
Cradle
National Museum in Krakow (Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie)
“O Lord, give each person his own personal death. A thing that moves out of the same life he
lived.”2 Just two lines and two lapses. Each death is deeply personal and it cannot be any other
way, so there is no need to ask anyone for it. And it is not so – as the poet wants – that death
comes naturally out of life. Yet the philosopher is probably right: “There is no reason to cease the
existence of what is. The end of life is not included in the very concept of existence.”3. What is,
what has not emerged from non-existence, does not implicate one’s own death in any way. Yet
we die. We get the foretaste of death almost since we are born. A cradle made of wooden planks
reminds us of a coffin with its shape. So our life moves from a box to a box. Whether we know
1
Leautréamont, The Songs of Maldoror.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comte_de_Lautr%C3%A9amont access on 6 June 2013.
2
R.M. Rilke, The Book of Hours. The Book of Poverty and Death.
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/search?q=rilke+on+death access on 6 June 2013.
3
V. Jankelevitsch, To, co nieuchronne. Rozmowy o śmierci, translated by M. Kwaterko, Warsaw 2005. (Translated into
English on the basis of the Polish text)
www.muzea.malopolska.pl
it or not, our earthly existence is stretched “on the strings between the cradle and the coffin.”4
The Saxon cradle does not resemble a coffin; it is rather a sophisticated trinket. A stylish piece
of carpentry crafted with specially selected timber, veneer, inlay. For little Henryk von Jauch, this
cradle became an elegant coffin.
Children At Their School Desks
Sculpture/stage object from Tadeusz Kantor’s play Umarła klasa (The Dead Class)
Cricoteka
Death at school? At school desks? Only the poetic genius could see what no one had noticed
before.
“THE YEAR 1971 OR 1972. BY THE SEASIDE. IN A SMALL TOWN.
ALMOST A VILLAGE. ONE STREET. SMALL POOR ONE-STOREY
HOUSES. AND ONE WHICH PROBABLY LOOKS THE POOREST: THE SCHOOL.
IT WAS THE SUMMER AND THE HOLIDAYS. THE SCHOOL WAS EMPTY AND DESOLATE.
IT HAD ONLY ONE CLASSROOM. IT WAS POSSIBLE TO WATCH IT
THROUGH THE DUSTED PANES OF TWO SMALL WRETCHED WINDOWS,
PLACED LOW, JUST OVER THE PAVEMENT. THIS MADE
AN IMPRESSION OF THE SCHOOL FALLING BELOW STREET LEVEL.
I PRESSED MY HEAD AGAINST THE WINDOWS. IT TOOK ME A LONG TIME TO LOOK
INSIDE THE DARK AND TURBID DEPTH OF MY MEMORY.”5
We are witnessing a source experience. By this common window in a provincial school in
Pomorze, something important happened. Kantor makes a huge cognitive discovery: that of a
creative role of recollection, a creative and myth-producing function of memory. Later, The Dead
Class is born of this accidental glance. In the photograph, children-mannequins dressed in black
are sitting, crowding around desks, with sad faces. They are like immovable figures, as if already
devoured by the element of death. Next to them, the dead will sit down; they will sit close to
themselves, the people they used to be. This will in a way confirm the statement that “in Kantor’s
theatre the living are the look-alikes of the mannequins.”6
Andrzej Wróblewski, Son And His Killed Mother
Painting. National Museum in Krakow (Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie)
Wojciech Tochman gave the title, Dzisiaj narysujemy śmierć (Today we will draw death)7 to his
last book that documents the traces of genocide in Rwanda. Easy to say. But can one draw or
even paint death? Is it possible to close a multi-dimensional and mysterious reality of death on
a two-dimensional canvas? From its modern beginnings (so in the form known today), European
paintings did attempt to record the impossible. At first, more or less realistically, later with the
use of a conventional set of symbols, and in the 20th century it started to use a sharp symbol,
abbreviation, metaphor – as if it was aware of the poorness of the means used earlier. With his
death painting, Wróblewski is situated somewhere i n b e t w e e n . In the first impulse, we seem
to have a classical figuration before our eyes. To some extent, but nothing is in the right place
here, nothing is as it should be. The child is standing with its back turned towards us, tightly
pressed against the mother’s body, holding her with its arms. Wróblewski’s frame is not a purely
technical operation; it has its meaning. The child has no legs and the mother has no head. The
4
B. Hrabal, Legend Played on Strings Stretched Between the Cradle and the Coffin,
http://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/o.o.i.s?id=12683&postid=20974 access on 6 June 2013.
5
T. Kantor, Klasa szkolna (The Dead Class), [in:] ibidem, Pisma. Teatr śmierci. Teksty z lat 1975–1984 (The Theatre of Death.
Texts from the years 1975-1984), vol. 2, Wrocław 2004 (all caps from the original text preserved in the quotation).
(Translated into English on the basis of the Polish text)
6
J. Kott, Kadysz. Strony o Tadeuszu Kantorze, Gdańsk 2005. (Translated into English on the basis of the Polish text)
7
W. Tochman, Dzisiaj narysujemy śmierć, Wołowiec 2011. (Translated into English on the basis of the Polish text)
www.muzea.malopolska.pl
kid dressed in a colourful striped T-shirt is still on this side of life while the mother, wearing a
one-colour dress of ethereal blue colour, with a bluish body, is already on “the other side.” The
boy, unaware of this, is holding death in his arms. The body of his dead mother goes away from
a realistic portrait to change into a symbol. We can feel his cold touch on our bodies. Wróblewski
painted death. Perhaps it is time to go beyond the customary historical and political context
in the descriptions of his paintings. It is high time to view him as the “avatar of Orpheus” or
“ferryman of dead souls.”8
Photo camera/invention of Mr Daguerre
Sculpture/stage object from Tadeusz Kantor’s play, Wielopole, Wielopole
Cricoteka
Does photography animate its object or rather put it to death? Does it save it, or rather mummify
it? Reactions to the invention of Louis Daguerre (1839) were quite unequivocal: “There were
complaints that the images are stiff, marble-like, the tone is dull and there is dead silence, instead
of the depiction of squares and streets with their characteristic hustle and bustle.”9 Photography
as a metaphor of death recurs in the works of analysts investigating the essence of photographic
images many times. “All photographs are memento mori.”10 “All young photographers who
are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are
agents of Death.”11 There is no real photography in Kantor’s play, Wielopole, Wielopole. But
there is a specially built machine, like a combination of a photo camera with a machinegun
from the time of WWI. The photographer is a messenger of death here. Recruits posing for this
commemorative photo are actually shot. And the execution scene is repeated a few times. So
photography both saves and annihilates. Kantor dramatises death on stage. Also his own death.
This is what he said about death in his personal statement: “I would like to die in a spectacular
way. Perhaps this dramatisation would help me bear the moment. The spectacularity does not
exclude the fact that a man dies like a rat, being lonely in the very last minute of life.”12
Lady macbeth’s costume
Actress Jadwiga Mrozowska’s costume for the role of Lady Macbeth
National Museum in Krakow (Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie)
Kantor’s theatre of death. Shakespeare’s theatre of death. “In Shakespeare, there is everything.
And the theatre of essence. In the second scene of Act I of Macbeth, a messenger arrives from
the battlefield. «What bloody man is that? He can report,/ As seemeth by his plight, of the
revolt/ The newest state.». [...] This half-naked messenger, all covered in blood, is an unknown
soldier without a name, the very essence of history. I see this essence in Kantor’s theatre.”13 In
Shakespeare’s universe, dead bodies are piling up everywhere. You must kill in order to stay
alive. Macbeth is a story of fate in its modern version. The story of temptation and seduction. The
story of mad desire for power and the consequences of this fatal disease. Macbeth lost when
he believed in the prophecies of the three witches from a heath. Macbeth is not evil; it is only
because of his weakness that he becomes evil. But Lady Macbeth has evil inside, as if genetically
inherent. She was an evil woman. “[…] fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty!
8
9
J. Michalski, Chłopiec na żółtym tle. Teksty o Andrzeju Wróblewskim (Boy against a Yellow Background. Texts about
Andrzej Wróblewski), Krakow 2009. (Free translation into English on the basis of the Polish text)
B. Stiegler, Obrazy fotografii. Album metafor fotograficznych (Images of Photography. The album of Photographic
Metaphors), Krakow 2009. (Translated into English on the basis of the Polish text)
10
S. Sontag, On Photography. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7445-all-photographs-are-memento-mori-to-take-aphotograph-is access on 6 June 2013.
11
R. Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. http://www.photoquotes.com/showquotes.aspx?id=78 access
on 6 June 2013.
12
A. Sapija, Próby, tylko próby. Fragmenty z zapisu prób spektaklu „Dziś są moje urodziny” (Rehearsals, rehearsals only.
Fragments of the transcript of rehearsals for “Today is my Birthday” play), Cricoteka 1999 (film) (Translated into English
on the basis of the Polish text)
13
J. Kott, Kadysz. Strony o Tadeuszu Kantorze (Kaddish. Pages about Tadeusz Kantor), Gdańsk 2005.
www.muzea.malopolska.pl
Make thick my blood; / Stop up the access and passage to remorse, / That no compunctious
visitings of nature / Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between / The effect and it!”14. Lady
Macbeth’s costume prepared by the Italian company, Carramba (its name sounds like a spooky
joke!) looks extraordinary. Dark pink, gold, ivory lining, cloak in the colours of terracotta... Are
these Shakespeare’s colours of death? And blood, where is the blood on this dress? Where is the
blood that Lady Death tried to wash off her hands so obsessively? In vain, albeit.
Witold wojtkiewicz, meditations
Painting
National Museum in Krakow (Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie)
It is a painting, but you get the impression that we are still at the theatre. The whole late cycle of
Wojtkiewicz’s paintings entitled Ceremonie (Ceremonies) borrows from an oneiric and grotesque
performance. At first sight, these images seem to be only anecdotal, “literary”. But over time, after
going beyond the theme layer, their subtle, unique painting dimension comes out. The subdued
colour range; the deadly coolness emitted by them. They look as if powdered with white dust:
“Colour, always deep and glowing, is extracted with difficulty from the dry, scorched and as if
extinguished surface of limestone, seemingly devoid of any shine. Each colour chord is almost
excessively muffled, piercing everywhere through the light, delicate curtain of white and greyish
dust, almost invisible at times, whose persistent and latent presence creates the impression of a
strange numbness of often greyed pigments in half-conscious experiences.”15 In the decorative
Baroque space of Meditations there is a peculiar custom of throwing ashes on heads (an
alternative title of the painting is Popielec [Ash Wednesday]). But there is nothing of the routine
Church service here. In the middle, as a dark purple axis of symmetry clothed in a rich gown,
there is a priestess in this strange ceremony. White hands, empty eyes that look as if they do not
see. On the left, those (still) alive, on the right those (already) dead, but looking as if they were
alive, yet in a different state of matter. A thin, invisible line that separates them. And between
them there is “a milliner, Madame Lamort”16, as an exclamation mark, a dark sign, memento mori.
Memento mori
Painting
Nowy Sącz District Museum (Muzeum Okręgowe w Nowym Sączu)
The theatre of conventional death. Why conventional? Because this whole complicated painting
made of three scenes consists of the multiple use of conventional elements. The unknown
painter processed the Baroque lesson of the symbols of death well. Still life with elements of
vanitas was particularly engaging for painters of the mid-17th century until the end of the Thirty
Years’ War. The ephemereality of everything on earth – these convictions have become part of
common thought. Still lifes from that period reflected that disturbing state of mind well. “The
cultural pattern was officially introduced, thanks to which the motif of death was perceived as a
creation of neurotic suffering which makes the unblemished joy of death no longer possible.”17
In the upper part, the painting from Nowy Sącz tells the biblical story of creation, fall and
redemption. But the lower part is perhaps more interesting; it is a classic example of vanitas
still life. The painter bravely took the topic of vanitas, using a standard set of instruments (skull,
candle, clock, coffin, cards, dice, soap bubbles, withered flowers) to depict it. Yet he did it
impetuously, in his own way, with a slight aura of horror (a snake crawling out of an eye socket!).
Perhaps this morality was once scary, but today this vision of a symbolical unreal death no longer
grabs you by the throat. But it is still a story of dying, somehow moving with its naivety and
14
W. Shakespeare, Macbeth. http://www.shakespeare-navigators.com/macbeth/T15.html#40 access on 6 June 2013.
15
W. Juszczak, Wojtkiewicz i nowa sztuka (Wojtkiewicz and new art.), edition II, Krakow 2000.
16
R.M. Rilke, Duino Elegies: The Fifth Elegy. http://poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/Rilke.htm#_Toc509812219,
access on 6 June 2013.
17
N. Schneider, The Art of Still Life. Still Life Painting in the Early Modern Period, Köln 1990 (Translation into English based
on the Polish text).
www.muzea.malopolska.pl
almost comic-like painting vision.
Charon’s Boat
Sculpture/stage object from Tadeusz Kantor’s play, Nigdy tu już nie powrócę (I Shall Never
Return) Cricoteka
Symbols of death, emblems of death. Kantor’s imagination was immersed in archaic layers of
culture. Perhaps the visionary power of the images of his Theatre of Death comes from the
animation of, as it seems, anachronistic prompts. Charon’s boat already appears in Umarła klasa
(The Dead Class). While the priest names the dead for whom prayers are requested on All Souls’
Day, the dead appear and an unusual metamorphosis takes place: “Everyone walks in, one by
one, as if entering a cemetery. They move slowly and solemnly, as if walking behind a coffin. They
sit by their school desks. The desks slowly change into Charon’s boat that sails on the S t y x River
of the Night to the «other side»”18. Kantor’s thanatic imagination is connected with water. For him,
death will always be related to an archaic journey through water: “We now understand that for
such infinite dreams all souls, no matter what the nature of their funeral, must enter C h a r o n ’ s
b o at. A strange image if we look at it with a sober eye of mind. An image extremely close to
our hearts if only we could turn to our dreams for knowledge.”19 In I Shall Never Return, which
was Kantor’s farewell to his theatre, in one of the scenes he reads a fragment from Wyspiański’s
Powrót Odysa (Return of Odysseus): “Ithaca is there! [...] / There is my homeland / There is my
song of life complete / No one who is alive returns to the country of youth again.”20 A visual
illustration of the “Greek” fragment is a poor version of Charon’s boat: a metal tub on wheels.
This boat is going to the land of the dead. It is overcrowded. It has taken aboard all the souls,
characters-ghosts from the performance. Kantor as a ferryman of souls.
Shroud
Fabric
Archaeological Museum of Krakow (Muzeum Archeologiczne w Krakowie)
Distant figures, strange signs. I wonder how the old Egyptian ancient world, especially the one
connected with death, would function in the contemporary imagination. It is hard not to notice
that the Egyptian world was penetrated by death and how it gave death a strong and positive
valorisation. And this makes us very distant from the contemporaneity relegating death in
the areas of ignorance and oblivion. Are Egyptian hieroglyphs just poetic images (version for
agnostics), or not very credible religious representations (version for Christians)? This narrow
piece of a death shroud comes to us from a totally different state of mental reality. At first sight,
it seems so distant from our Christian vision of death. Are the visible iconographic rebuses on
it just a riddle for archaeologists, or can this modest fragment of ragged matter somehow still
engage us mentally? Perhaps, but only if the figure of Osiris, “the dead among the living and the
alive among the dead”21, would not be an emblem of dead book mythology for us. When we do
not deepen the gap between Egyptian and Christian thanatology artificially, when we try to think
about Christian symbols of ascension, rebirth and resurrection in the light of Egyptian depictions,
we will then understand that the “symbol of «resurrection» emerged from the previous vision of
«ascension» nowhere else but in ancient Egypt.”22 Contrary to the common belief, the furnishing
18
19
T. Kantor, Umarła klasa [Partytura] (The Dead Class [Script]), [in:] ibidem, Pisma. Teatr śmierci. Teksty z lat 1975–1984
(Writings. The Theatre of Death. Texts from the years 1975-1984), vol. 2, Krakow 2004.
G. Bachelard, Kompleks Charona i kompleks Ofelii (The Charon Complex, the Ophelia Complex), [in:] ibidem,
Wyobraźnia poetycka. Wybór pism (On Poetic Imagination and Reveries), translated by H. Chudak, A. Tatarkiewicz,
Warsaw 1975. (Translated into English on the basis of the Polish text)
20
S. Wyspiański, Achilles. Powrót Odysa (Achilles, Return of Odysseus), Wrocław 1984. (Free translation into English)
21
J.L. Lima, Wazy orfickie (Introduction to Orphic Vases), translated by R. Kalicki, Krakow 1977. (Translation into English
based on the Polish text).
22
E. Drewerman, Zstępuję na Barkę Słońca. Medytacje o śmierci i zmartwychwstaniu (I descend to the Barge of the Sun.
Meditations on death and resurrection), translated by M.L. Kalinowski, Gdynia 2000. (Translation into English based on
the Polish text).
www.muzea.malopolska.pl
of the Christian imagination did not fall from heaven, but has strong cultural roots. Symbols and
images really provoke us to think...
Tomb stele from Ginari Tafah
Bas-relief
Archaeological Museum of Krakow (Muzeum Archeologiczne w Krakowie)
Still Egypt, but this time Christian. The tombstone covered with Greek (?) letters. An inscription
with a prayer on it. And most importantly the name of the deceased: Elżbieta (was she Polish?
Perhaps the name should be left in its original version?). A dry museum description is usually
restricted to formal matters and makes a closer contact with the exhibit impossible. What is the
prayer in verses 6–9 about and who is it addressed to? Who was Elżbieta? What do we know
about this tombstone, apart from the information of secondary importance about those who
purchased it (by the way, who would suspect such a strong archaeological fondness from the
Carpathian Rifle Division?)? Do we realise at all that here in a Polish museum we are l o o k i n g
at a fragment of a centuries-old Egyptian tomb? That this stone says something else today
than what it once used to say? Is it at all possible to somehow push through the surface of this
sandstone and see Elżbieta once buried by her relative behind this stone? Or will it remain
forever a mute and a banal “museum exhibit”? Who were you, Elżbieta? What did you do? What
did you look like? How did you live? How did you die? Who made this epitaph for you? I say
goodbye to you, Nubian stranger, with this Roman epitaph, in the language that perhaps was
close to you:
“Unfortunate man I am, as all I can do, my dear,
is to be with you in my thoughts, with you entombed, as long as
I am living. I believe you rejoice in the news about us when it
reaches Tartarus.”23
Fayum Portrait
Painting
Archaeological Museum of Krakow (Muzeum Archeologiczne w Krakowie)
These portraits are still hypnotic. It is a great art whose secret cannot be fathomed by any
academic discipline.24 Ancient depictions of Egyptian Fayum present dead people alive. Or
the other way round – but it makes no difference. They were painted with tempera or encaustic
paint; on a board or canvas covered with plaster. The metaphysical realism of Fayum paintings
was highly appreciated by Jerzy Nowosielski. They, along with western Modigliani and eastern
icons, were inspirations for his portrait art. “«Fayum» – came to my memory when I heard that
Jerzy Nowosielski was dead. And a May day immediately appeared in my mind. Was it 40 years
ago? More or less. The sunshine, as heavy as in August, exhausted Zosia and she proposed that
we go to the Kunsthistorisches Museum alone. [...] ‘Jerzy, we’re going to Fayum!’ ‘To Fayum?’ he
mumbled. ‘To Fayum!’ he tapped his forehead. ‘How could I have forgotten!’ [...] It was sweltering
even more and we entered a cool hall of a Kunsthistorisches Museum with relief. We looked at
Fayum portraits one by one, without saying a word. Then we sat down on a marble bench. ‘Great
artists,’ I uttered first. ‘The greatest.’ ‘But not a single name is probably known.’ ‘No,” he shook his
head, ‘but what does it matter?’”25. Our portrait is slightly lame, composed – like a jigsaw puzzle
– of numerous plaster chips. Never mind the purely technical description that depersonalises it:
“almond-like eyes”, “long moustache”, “period of Adrian II’s reign”... This anonymous (for us today)
plaster mask hides somebody who was once real (for someone). Incomplete, glued fractions.
With its almond-like eyes, it looks at us, the ones who are alive. Still alive.
23
24
25
Rzymskie epitafia, zaklęcia i wróżby (Roman epitaphs, spells and predictions), selected and elaborated by L.S.
Mazzolani, translation and preface by S. Kasprzysiak, Warsaw 1990. (Translation into English based on the Polish text).
E. Doxiadis, Mysterious Fayum Portraits. Faces from Ancient Egypt, London 1995.
E. Kuryluk, Malarz z Fajum (Painter from Fayum), „Tygodnik Powszechny” 2011, issue 10. (Free translation)
www.muzea.malopolska.pl
Karol Szymanowski’s posthumous mask
Plaster cast
National Museum in Krakow (Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie)
“Posthumous masks rarely stand in our way. This is more probable of death. One can neither
hide nor ignore the coming of death. Someone ceases to be and their sudden disappearance,
their absence among the living – sometimes so loud and visible – is a sign that Death itself has
come.”26. The time of posthumous masks has gone by as death is no longer a part of life for us.
We pack it in hospitals and push it away from us as something unaesthetic, wrinkled and stinking.
We keep it at a distance as its existence substantially spoils our modern dream of immortality.
The 19th century, the “time of beautiful death”, included the taking off of a posthumous mask in
the routine ritual of dying. Masks of artists were given special attention; thanks to their plaster
faces (Beethoven, Chopin, Hugo, Liszt) they gained an extra-temporal dimension. They were kept
on desks and hung in living rooms of burghers. Karol Szymanowski died on 29 March 1937 in
Lausanne. Ten years after the composer’s death, Anna Iwaszkiewicz wrote about him: “Everyone
who knew Karol Szymanowski says that he was a man of incredible personal charm, but what do
these words mean for the person who – when uttering them – does not remember the slightly
silenced voice, the subtle smile of delicately outlined lips, the intense gaze of narrow, very long,
sapphire blue eyes looking from under too heavy brows, eyes that were inclined to look into
space and which – I would not hesitate to say – would actually be the eyes of a genius-artist.”27
Szymanowski made of plaster has his eyes shut. He is quiet and mute. Deadly pale. Polished.
Stern and dignified in his final petrification.
Ammonite
Fossil
Geological Museum of the Institute of Geological Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences
(Muzeum Geologiczne ING PAN w Krakowie)
What is left of us? The soul (if it exists) flies away after death into its ethereal area. Soft tissue
decays: “the brain becomes a pulpy, sticky, greyish mass; lungs burst in cord grooves and
only soft brownish masses immersed in reddish transudate remain; the liver – spongy and
blackish – covers with putrid vesicles; drilled intestines have reddish walls, while around the
ascending colon and caecum, a greenish colour is predominant; the heart becomes a flabby,
flattened bag. [...] This is the way a human being leaves, by rotting inevitably and according
to physical-chemical reactions.”28 Bones are left after us. “A bone is a remnant of the body, a
present for palaeontologists after several centuries.”29 This is what death looks like from an
anthropocentric perspective. But what if we slightly change this ultra humanistic perspective?
What if we think that a human (does this word still sound proud?) is part of a larger entirety?
An entirety that covers everything that once was and will be alive. Then we will be able to see
not only our relation to the Aurignacian figurine, with cave paintings from Chauvet Cave (this
is a lot!), but we will also see something that has never before come into our minds: closeness
with our brother ammonite. Ammonite which in its name – how lucky – contains the name of the
Egyptian god, Amon. This gesture of kinship may be even easier as the fossil has the Latin-Polish
name: Perisphinctes (Dichotomosphinctes) crotalinus Siemiradzki. While contemplating the
ammonite that has been sleeping for millions of years, we “leave our bodies”, cast off the human
coat of people’s habits, gaining the conviction that the phenomenon of life is not only our share.
In this way, we have a chance to discover that “our brains and spinal cords are encrypted with
traces of far older worlds.”30
26
S. Rosiek, Archiwum martwych twarzy (Archive of dead faces), „Twórczość” 1993, issue 1.
27
A. Iwaszkiewicz, Dzienniki i wspomnienia (Diaries and recollections), Warsaw 2000.
28
L.-V. Thomas, Trup. Od biologii do antropologii, translated by K. Kocjan, Łódź 1991. (Translation into English based on
the Polish text).
29
A. Fioretos, D. Grünbein, Rozmowa o strefie, psie i kościach, translated by A. Kopacki, „Literatura na Świecie” 1998, issue
3. (Translation into English based on the Polish text).
30
J. Gray, Straw Dogs. Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. http://www.amazon.com/Straw-Dogs-Thoughts-Humans-
www.muzea.malopolska.pl
Dariusz Czaja – anthropologist of culture, member of the editorial staff of Konteksty (Contexts)
quarterly (Institute of Art at the Polish Academy of Sciences), essayist, music reviewer; holds a
PhD degree, lecturer at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the Jagiellonian
University. His recent publications: Sygnatura i fragment. Narracje antropologiczne (Signature
and Fragment. Anthropological Narrations) (2004), Anatomia duszy. Figury wyobraźni i gry
językowe (Anatomy of the Soul. Figures of Imagination and Language Games) (2006), Lekcje
ciemności (Lessons of Darkness) (2009 – awarded by TVP Kultura), Gdzieś dalej, gdzie indziej
(Somewhere further, somewhere else) (2010 – The Warszawska Premiera Literacka award;
nominated for the Nike literary award).
Animals/product-reviews/0374270937 access on 6 June 2013.
www.muzea.malopolska.pl