Text Club 004: Dying Matters
Towers of Silence (99% Invisible podcast), 4 films, 1 essay and more
Good morning to you! I hope this email finds you in touch with yourself.
We’re back with another Text Club session. This time we’ll be discussing death in two weekends, the first on grief and the second on life cycles and the material that death offers us.
Register here: https://tinyurl.com/sstextclub
Our main text is Towers of Silence, reported by Lasha Madan (72 minutes). (Transcript)
“The Towers of Silence are part of a death ritual carried out by Parsis, a small but prosperous community in India. Parsis practice Zoroastrianism, a monotheistic religion originally from Iran. Zoroastrians in Iran were persecuted in the 7th century during the rise of the Islamic Empire, and Muslim armies gave surviving Zoroastrians a choice: conversion or exile. Eventually, a small group of Zoroastrians fled Iran for the shores of Western India, bringing with them any surviving fragments of tradition.
According to the faith, as soon as we die, our bodies become contaminated with evil. And this evil must not, under any circumstance, make contact with the sacred elements of fire, water, and earth. Instead, the corpse bearers will place the body atop one of these Towers. Then, they will wait for the vultures to come.”
When I listened to this last month, I was blown away by the many things it brought to my mind at once. Feeding their dead to vultures was an idea I found soothing in a way I may not have if I hadn’t yet read The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly. The real koko—and something I’ve been sitting with since I listened—is how diclofenac killed 99% of India’s Gyps vultures in the 1990s and what peril this brought upon the Parsi community. No alternative solution compared to the efficiency, cleanliness, and theological alignment of the vultures. We really are all in the circle of life. What happens when a people cannot die properly?
First Saturday (July 13): Grief
And so for the first Saturday, I’d like to open up a grief healing circle. In the podcast, we meet a Dhan Baria, whose and rage propelled the Parsi community into a new level of reckoning. To accompany the podcast this week, I’ve included three moving short films by young British-NIgerian/Nigerian-British filmmakers and a personal essay, all on losing someone near and dear, and being left on this side. What do you do with your survival? Come to discuss the texts or to share your grief.
Films
Losing Joy (15 minutes) by Juliana Kasumu
Appreciation (15 minutes) by Tomisin Adepeju
Survivor’s Guilt (8 minutes) by Caleb Femi (Here’s an accompanying song, same name)
Essay
The Fire in My Memory by Immaculata Abba
Second Saturday (July 20): Life Cycles
For the second Saturday, I’d like for us to get into the matter, the physical substance, of death. In an interview, the poet Stephen Levine gives a definition I find useful for this session: “Dying is a process of shaking loose of the body. Death is a process of being no longer obstructed by a body.”
Accompanying Towers of Silence as the main text for this are the following supplementary texts:
The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly (short novel, 144 small pages) by Sun-mi Hwang (Read online here)
I wrote about this book in our 2023 Favourites list here: “Sun-mi Hwang’s most popular book packs a lifetime of wisdom about life, love and death. The main character, Sprout, is a hen who—like all of us—once had a dream. The dream changes, spirits change bodies, life transmutes, and love remains the one force that sustains whatever it touches.”
Cleaning Up After Death Is His Business (short film, 9 mins) by Louise Monlau (YouTube link here)
Death is Donovan Tavera’s business. For nearly 20 years, Tavera has been a forensic cleaner in Mexico City, providing families of the deceased with the solace of a clean home. For mourning families, his services become integral to their healing process. The short documentary above, filmed before the pandemic, considers what it means to wash away what’s left after someone dies.
adrienne maree brown - On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life, On Being with Krista Tipett, particularly 24:47 - 28:45 which includes the quotes below:
“So mushrooms, I feel like they’re our great detoxer. They’re the ones who understand that nothing needs to be wasted; that everything can be used in some way, we just have to understand what it is. And I often think about this when it comes to our abolition conversations and our justice conversations — that mushrooms are like, this is food if we can find a way to use it. This could be nourishment. And when something breaks down in our communities, it’s actually a moment, usually, when something needs nourishing or when something is dead, when something is done, it’s complete, and it needs to be processed back into the whole.”
“All the richness, all that fecundity, all that beautiful miracle of life; it happens because we live in cycles, not perpetuity.”
Dead Capital https://www.jstor.org/stable/26996330?seq=4 , https://www.quora.com/What-is-dead-capital
There is something to be said here about how high-energy modernity and capitalism view land as capital. I haven’t fleshed out these thoughts as much as I would like to. Hopefully, someone at the meeting brings this up.
Restful: On Giving Up (1-hour radio show)
In On Giving Up, acclaimed British psychoanalyst/psychotherapist/essayist, Adam Phillips illuminates both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up, and helps us to address the central question: what must we give up to feel more alive?
“That life is worth living doesn’t tend to present itself to us as a belief; we are more likely to just go on living as if it is true. So when we begin to question it as though it were a belief, we have to all intents and purposes asked ourselves: what is worth surviving for? Darwin’s answer—somewhere between a riddle and a joke—is that survival is worth surviving for (survival entailing reproduction ad infinitum). Freud’s answer, more commonsensical and just as disturbing, is that pleasure is worth surviving for. Marx’s answer is social justice, non-exploitative social relations. Each of us, of course, may want or need to have our own answers, while also wondering why good reasons—or indeed any reasons at all—are required to go on living, when no other animal seems to need them. Reasons, of course, are made with language.” p.16-17
Reading the parts of this book that discuss suicide and the question ‘What is worth surviving for?’ reminded me of Simon Critchley’s Notes on Suicide which at the time I read it back in 2019, I left thinking, “Okay, it doesn’t have to be by my hands cos at the end of the day, the day will end for sure.” (If you care for more, here’s a review that did not like the book.)
Phillips’s book is about a lot more than suicide: “I want to suggest that we are, or may be, unduly terrorised and intimidated by the wish to give up, and that the daunting association of giving up with suicide has stopped us being able to think about the milder, more instructive, more promising givings-up.” Reflecting on Adam Phillips’s new book and all the life-giving givings-up of my past year, I put together this episode for Studio Styles’s Restful show on Oroko radio.
Engage with any one or engage with all of them. Don’t forget to sign up via the usual link: https://tinyurl.com/sstextclub.
See you on Saturday!
- Immaculata
Brilliant !!!