Jamie Lyons

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I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.
Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit, 1944

Whatever one may do, one never realizes anything but a limited work, like existence itself which tries to establish itself through that work and which death also limits. It is the assertion of our finiteness which doubtless gives the doctrine which we have just evoked its austerity and, in some eyes, its sadness. As soon as one considers a system abstractly and theoretically, one puts himself, in effect, on the plane of the universal, thus, of the infinite. … existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men. Taking on its own account Descartes’ revolt against the evil genius, the pride of the thinking reed in the face of the universe which crushes him, it asserts that, despite his limits, through them, it is up to each one to fulfill his existence as an absolute. Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive. There is a very old saying which goes: “Do what you must, come what may.” That amounts to saying in a different way that the result is not external to the good will which fulfills itself in aiming at it. If it came to be that each man did what he must, existence would be saved in each one without there being any need of dreaming of a paradise where all would be reconciled in death.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 1947

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Buried together. Of course they are.

Met in 1929 at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. She placed second in the philosophy exam. He placed first. Barely. Some say she should’ve won. They became inseparable.

Existentialism. “Existence precedes essence.” We’re not born with predetermined meaning, we create it. We’re free, radically free, and that freedom is terrifying because it means we’re responsible for everything we do. No god. No fate. Just choice.

Sartre wrote Being and Nothingness. No Exit: “Hell is other people.” Turned down the Nobel Prize in 1964 because he didn’t want to be turned into an institution. The arrogance. The integrity. Both.

De Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in 1949. Took on gender, womanhood, how society constructs what it means to be female. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Launched second-wave feminism before there was a name for it. Changed everything.

Their relationship. Open. Non-traditional. No marriage. No monogamy. Other lovers, always. They called it “essential” love versus “contingent” love. She was essential. Everyone else was contingent. They wrote each other letters constantly, laid it all out… the affairs, the emotions, the philosophy.

May 1968. Student riots in Paris. Sartre’s out there with them, seventy years old, getting tear-gassed, supporting the revolution.

He died in 1980. Fifty thousand people followed his funeral procession. She died six years later, 1986.

Now they’re here. Together. The philosopher and the feminist who refused every convention except their commitment to each other.

Freedom. Choice. Responsibility. Love on their own terms.

They lived it.

Shot on infrared film in Cimetière du Montparnasse. Signed Limited Edition 11” x17” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.

My friends, I address you all tonight as you truly are; wizards, mermaids, travelers, adventurers, magicians… Come and dream with me
Georges Méliès, filmmaker, A Trip to the Moon

Stage magician. Owned a theater in Paris, made people believe in impossible things. Then 1895, he sees the Lumière brothers’ films and his brain explodes. Gets a camera. Starts making movies. But not boring shit, trains arriving at stations, workers leaving factories. Hell no. He wants magic.

He figures out stop-motion by accident when his camera jams. Realizes he can make things appear and disappear. Multiple exposures. Dissolves. Hand-painted color, frame by goddamn frame. He builds sets that look like fever dreams. Creates entire worlds.

1902: A Trip to the Moon. That rocket hitting the moon in the eye. That’s his. Five hundred films. He invented special effects. Invented cinema as art, as hallucination, as the impossible made possible.

Then the world chewed him up and spit him out.

Feature films. Hollywood. Bigger budgets, different tastes. His theater goes under. His films? Most of them melted down during World War I. For boot heels. For fucking boot heels for soldiers.

By the 1920s he’s running a toy stand in Montparnasse station. The man who showed the world how to dream on film, hawking wind-up toys to commuters who don’t know who he is, don’t care, just want to catch their train.

They rediscovered him in the ’30s. Gave him a medal, some recognition. He died in 1938.

Too little, too late.

It’s always too little… and too late.

Shot on infrared film in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Signed Limited Edition 11” x17” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.

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We have not died in vain
Honoré Daumier, title/caption in Daumier’s print; in the last publication of ‘La Caricature’, 27 August 1835.from: Daumier, the Man and the Artist, Michael Sadleir; Halton and Truscott Smith LTD, London, 1924, p. 9

Honoré Daumier. French printmaker, caricaturist, painter. Born 1808. Died 1879, broke and nearly blind.

Four thousand lithographs over his career. Four thousand. Satirical cartoons ripping apart French politics, the bourgeoisie, the legal system, everyone who had it coming. He drew fat lawyers bilking clients. Politicians as pigs. The king as a bloated monster swallowing the wealth of France.

That last one got him six months in prison. 1832. Drew King Louis-Philippe as Gargantua, literally depicting him as a giant creature eating money and shitting out government favors. They locked him up for it. Six months. Didn’t stop him.

He kept drawing. Kept lampooning. The powerful, the corrupt, the self-satisfied bourgeois assholes who ran everything. He saw what they were and he put it on paper for everyone to see.

You know what he got for it? Not much. Died poor. Went blind at the end. His sight… the thing he needed to do his work… just… gone.

After he died, suddenly everyone realized he was a genius. Museums bought his work. Critics called him a master. Too fucking late. Like all the ones who told the truth, paid for it, and got their flowers when they couldn’t smell them anymore.

That’s how it works.

Shot on infrared film in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Signed Limited Edition 11” x17” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.

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Me voici devant tous un homme plein de sens
Connaissant la vie et de la mort ce qu’un vivant peut connaître
Ayant éprouvé les douleurs et les joies de l’amour
Ayant su quelquefois imposer ses idées
Connaissant plusieurs langages
Ayant pas mal voyagé
Ayant vu la guerre dans l’Artillerie et l’lnfanterie
Blessé à la tête trépané sous le chloroforme
Ayant perdu ses meilleurs amis dans l’effroyable lutte
Je sais d’ancien et de nouveau autant qu’un homme seul pourrait des deux savoir

You see before you a man in his right mind
Worldly-wise and with access to death
Having tested the sorrow of love and its ecstasies
Having sometimes even astonished the professors
Good with languages
Having travelled a great deal
Having seen battle in the Artillery and the Infantry
Wounded in the head trepanned under chloroform
Having lost my best friends in the butchery
As much of antiquity and modernity as can be known I know
Guillaume Apollinaire, “La jolie rousse” (The Pretty Redhead), line 1; p. 133.

Guillaume Apollinaire. Born Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki in 1880. Try saying that three times fast. He didn’t. Changed it to something French, something that rolled off the tongue, something that fit.

Poet. Playwright. Art critic. He was there, in the middle of it all. Paris, early 1900s. Knew Picasso, Gertrude Stein, all of them. He championed Cubism when people thought it was garbage. Defended the avant-garde. Coined the term “surrealism.” He saw where art was going before anyone else did.

His poetry broke rules. Threw out punctuation, experimented with form, made shapes on the page, calligrammes, he called them. Words arranged as pictures. Nobody was doing that.

Then World War I happens. He volunteers. Fights for France even though he wasn’t born French. 1916: shrapnel to the head. He survives the wound, barely.

November 9th, 1918. Two days before the Armistice. Two goddamn days before the war ends. Spanish flu kills him. Thirty-eight years old.

He almost made it. Almost saw the end of the war he volunteered for, almost saw the peace, almost got to keep writing.

Almost.

Apollinaire made something. Then he was gone.

Shot on infrared film in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Signed Limited Edition 11” x17” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.

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If at least, time enough were alloted to me to accomplish my work, I would not fail to mark it with the seal of Time, the idea of which imposed itself upon me with so much force to-day, and I would therein describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space, a place, on the contrary, prolonged immeasurably since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through — between which so many days have ranged themselves — they stand like giants immersed in Time.
Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured, 1927

Marcel Proust. 1871 to 1922. Fifty-one years, most of them spent indoors.

Asthmatic. Sickly. Spent the last years of his life in a cork-lined bedroom in Paris, writing in bed, sleeping during the day, working at night. Obsessed with memory, with time, with how the past lives inside us whether we want it to or not.

In Search of Lost Time. Seven volumes. 3,000 pages, give or take. One of the longest novels ever written. Took him fourteen years. He died before he finished editing it.

Everyone knows the madeleine. The little cake dipped in tea that unlocks his entire childhood. Taste as time machine. Flavor as memory. That moment, that’s Proust. The idea that the past isn’t gone, it’s just waiting for the right taste, the right smell, the right sensation to bring it all flooding back.

He wrote about aristocratic French society, love, jealousy, art, homosexuality… coded, careful, because this was early 1900s France and you couldn’t just say it. He said it anyway, just in a way that required paying attention.

The first volume? Rejected by publishers. André Gide at Gallimard turned it down without reading it. Proust had to self-publish. Later, Gide admitted it was the biggest mistake of his career.

Now it’s considered one of the greatest novels ever written. Modernist masterpiece. Essential. The kind of book people say they’ve read but haven’t.

The sickly kid who barely left his room wrote 3,000 pages about memory and time and everything that matters.

The madeleine. That fucking madeleine. He understood something the rest of us spend our whole lives trying to figure out.

Shot on infrared film in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Signed Limited Edition 11” x17” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.

Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth as raven’s
claws
Jim Morrison, An American Prayer, 1978

The Lizard King. Mr. Mojo Risin. Dead in a Paris bathtub, July 3rd, 1971.

The Doors. Venice Beach. UCLA film school dropout who could write, who could sing, who looked like a Greek god and sounded like he was channeling something ancient and dangerous. Leather pants, no shirt, poetry and rock and roll and sex and death all wrapped up in one beautiful, doomed package.

He wanted to be a poet. A serious artist. Instead he became a rock star, which meant everyone wanted a piece of him and nobody gave a shit about the poetry. The audiences wanted the spectacle, the arrests, the controversy, the chaos.

By the time he got to Paris, he was done. Bloated, bearded, trying to disappear into the city, trying to write, trying to be something other than Jim Morrison, rock god.

July 3rd. Found dead in the bathtub of his apartment at 17 rue Beautreillis. Pam Courson, his girlfriend, found him. She’d be dead three years later. Heroin.

Now his grave is the most visited in the cemetery. Fans leave joints, bottles of whiskey, love notes, graffiti. The neighbors, Chopin, Balzac, Proust, must love that.

Twenty-seven years old. The same age as Pigpen.

The poetry’s still there if anyone wants to read it.

Most people just want the myth.

Shot on infrared film in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Signed Limited Edition 11” x17” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.