necropastoral. murder. nostalgia. symbolism.
Me and a friend once tried to write a book about the Green River killings; we wanted it to be a true-crime book without a criminal (and without heroic policemen). We would focus on the quasi-suburban landscape where the bodies had been found (near a slaughterhouse, near a prison, near an airport). We called the object of our investigation—that landscape—the pastoral abject.
Soon everything seemed to be the pastoral abject, we thought: gruesome counterfeit pastorals like the slaughterhouse (animals were once slaughtered in the marketplace, until 19th century reforms decreed that death should take place elsewhere, in the city’s other); also golf courses, federal prisons, a ghost suburb that the airport had bought up and emptied…
In the end our project overwhelmed us; we wrote only a booklet, a bookini. We felt vindicated and disappointed when, some time after, the traditional true-crime account of Green River came out, and one of the photos of the killer’s bedroom showed that it was completely wallpapered in a giant photomural of a forest.-comment by Cole Anders on ‘Necro, Necro, Necropastoral’ on htmlgiant
I wonder if Cole Anders grew up in my hometown, Auburn, Washington, originally (comically, sinisterly) called ‘Slaughter’ after Lt William Slaughter who “died in a skirmish in 1855” ( Within the same King County borders as Twin Peaks (and Twin Peaks), I am always surprised how bizarre certain parts of my childhood were, and how strange the place continues to be when I visit. Lately, I’ve visited to attend funerals or deathbeds, which might have something to do with it. I lived less than a mile’s walk from the banks of Green River, though far from where any of the murders occurred.
(Forst With Mountain Brook, Ferdinand Hodler, 1902)
In fact, I barely knew about the series of famous murders that took place in the state and which was only solved long after I moved. Watching Lynch’s TV series ten years after it aired, I was stunned by how realistic parts of it seemed to me, probably because my sense of reality was touched by the subjectivity of a 5-year-old’s worldview who hadn’t yet separated dreams (and nightmares) from daily life.
When I think of my childhood and adolescence, the closest thing I can come up with to describe it is symbolic; as in symbolism, symbolists: Arnold Bröckner, Victor Vasnetsov, Carlos Schwabe. For instance, this painting by Bröckner is not dissimilar to any random park in Kent, Wa, minus the sacred procession:
(The Sacred Wood, Ferdinand Böcklin, 1882)
I remember feeling an absolutely abject terror when I saw the moon, which my parents tell me lasted a year. I remember not being able to hear cardinal directions without covering my ears in fear: ‘east’ and ‘west.’ I had dreams that Jesus appeared on a blanket in the spare bedroom and spoke to me in silent words, which freaked me out so much I had to listen to—get this—Christmas music for about two years, with multiple night lights on at all times.
(The Apparition, Gustave Moreau, 1876)
I was also struck with horror when I flipped to the most feared page of my grandparents’ old dictionary (bound in red with alphabetized tabs), where appeared an illustration of ‘Pan,’ an absolutely demonic-looking satyr playing the pipes while dancing with a maniacal smile. I could turn to this page without even trying and, indeed, it seemed that the page was seeking me out through some involuntary bibliomancy. Each time it appeared in front of me a shocking pang of panic hit my stomach (I still get this feeling when I see a spider). I’ve since looked at it again, and it seems innocent enough, only slightly disturbing because of the residue of my old fears.
(Le Faune, Carlos Schwabe, 1923)
This is just to illustrate that things we see as children seems to be perceived especially directly, everything has a certain immediacy, even mundane things like dictionaries and the phases of the moon. A moment of recognition without actual ‘cognition,’ I guess. Which is why symbolist paintings remind me so much of this, because they give me a similar feeling. A mixture of the near photorealistic and the occult, supra-natural supernatural, disconcerting that only dead things preserved to lifelike perfection can be:
(The Questioner of the Sphinx, Elihu Vedder, 1863)
(The Night, Ferdinand Hodler, 1890)
In his book Beauty Raises the Dead, Robert Ziegler notes that “‘the paradoxical stance of symbolist artists with regard to an external world they depicted as situated outside of time, enveloped in fog, or disintegrating into the dust of history.” That is not to say that I had a Benjaminian concept of history, or any concept of it at all as a very young person, but that these violent reactions to the visual at that crucial period when one is unaware of time, “situated outside of time,” are subtle but deeply felt eruptions to the Arcadia of childhood, which turns into the necropastoral (as written about on Montevidayo) in blips, then returns back to paradise again. It is the brief recognition, followed by amnesia, that it is “the corpse alone that art brings to life:” metropolis turns to necropolis in lightning flashes.
Which reminds me of my first encounter with Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, a [necro]pastoral tale of human sacrifice in which a girl dances herself to death. Part I and the finale of Part II appear in the fourth piece of Disney’s Fantasia (1940), providing the soundtrack for the beginnings of life, from amoebae to dinosaurs. Pterodactyls fly from deep red cliffs like Lucifer in Gustave Doré’s Paradise Lost. The beginnings of the earth, a natural-historical “eden,” is depicted as a thick morass of mud and lava, yellow steam and green water. Eventually, the dinosaurs desperately battle one another for resources as they die of starvation and thirst, licking puddles of mud and eating the dirt. They lethargically walk in search of food under the sun in a sort of death march, until a new frame appears, showing the land strewn with bare bones. A flood of water gushes out from the rocks, covering the carcasses, presumably creating our oceans.
