Père Lachaise in Paris, or Montparnasse. Alta Mesa in Palo Alto. These cemeteries tell the truth.
Not the sanitized, Wikipedia version. The real story. Who mattered. Who got forgotten. Who died broke after changing the world. Who lived exactly as they wanted and paid for it.
These aren’t just burial grounds, they’re archives of ambition, failure, genius, and compromise. The people here didn’t play it safe. They made art, started movements, challenged power, loved the wrong people, said the wrong things, lived too hard, died too young.
Some got their flowers while they were alive. Most didn’t. The recognition came later, always too late, still too little, long after they were already in the ground.
For some reason or another, these people were important to me. They influenced me. Changed how I saw things. Changed what I wanted to be, what I wanted others to be. A writer who found beauty in decay. A photographer who saw Paris at night. A playwright who treated an eight-year-old like an actual person. A war photographer who refused to look away. Each in there own unique way showed me what was possible, not the safe version, the real version. The one that costs something.
Visiting these graves? It’s not about saying thanks. It’s about meditating on my own existence. On the meaning of it all, if there is any. On my failures. My successes, such as they are. On what I’ve done and what I haven’t done and what time I have left.
Graveyards make you confront yourself. Honestly. Urgently. You can’t bullshit when you’re standing in front of a tombstone. These people, brilliant, flawed, human, ran out of time. So will you. So will I. What am I doing with the time I have? What matters? What’s just noise?
Standing there with my heroes buried in front of me, I’m really asking: what the fuck am I doing with my life?
They’re inspiration and cautionary tales, both. The ones who changed everything but died broke. The ones who compromised and survived. The ones who refused to bend and paid for it. The ones who burned bright and burned out at 27. The ones who kept going into their eighties. Success and failure, genius and self-destruction, all of it’s here under the stones.
What path do you take? What’s worth the cost? What do you refuse to give up, even if it destroys you?
The graves don’t answer. They just ask the question, over and over…
This is a lifelong project. There are hundreds more graves I want to visit. Hundreds more people who mattered in some way to me, who changed things for me, who deserve to be remembered. I’ll keep going as long as I can.
Because existence is fragile. We’re all temporary. The people buried here, geniuses, revolutionaries, artists, they’re gone. What remains are the works they left behind and these stones marking where they ended up. That’s it. That’s all any of us get.
“For Gerda Taro, who spent one year at the Spanish front – and who stayed on.”
Robert Capa, Death in the Making, 1938.
Perhaps the only misplaced curiosity is that which persists in trying to find out here, on this side of death, what lies beyond the grave.
Colette, Le Pur et l’Impur (The Pure and the Impure), 1932
“Hello father, mother
Hello dear parents,
And of course Céline
Whom my heart so dearly loves”
His father answers:
“But your Céline is dead,
But your Céline is dead
She died calling out to you
Her body is underground
And her soul in heaven”
Then the gentleman goes
To cry on her grave:
“Céline, my Céline
Talk, talk to me!
My heart despairs
Of not seeing you anymore…”
Céline answers him:
“My mouth is filled with earth,
My mouth is filled with earth…
Yours is filled with love!
I still cherish the hope
Of seeing you again someday…”
Edith Piaf
“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
It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before.
Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein
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 savoirYou 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.
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
To seek in nature the fairest forms and to find the movement which expresses the soul of these forms — this is the art of the dancer. It is from nature alone that the dancer must draw his inspirations, in the same manner as the sculptor, with whom he has so many affinities. Rodin has said: “To produce good sculpture it is not necessary to copy the works of antiquity; it is necessary first of all to regard the works of nature, and to see in those of the classics only the method by which they have interpreted nature.” Rodin is right; and in my art I have by no means copied, as has been supposed, the figures of Greek vases, friezes and paintings. From them I have learned to regard nature, and when certain of my movements recall the gestures that are seen in works of art, it is only because, like them, they are drawn from the grand natural source.
My inspiration has been drawn from trees, from waves, from clouds, from the sympathies that exist between passion and the storm, between gentleness and the soft breeze, and the like, and I always endeavour to put into my movements a little of that divine continuity which gives to the whole of nature its beauty and its life.
Isadora Duncan, As quoted in Modern Dancing and Dancers, 1912 by John Ernest Crawford Flitch, p. 105.
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
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
On ne meurt qu’une fois; et c’est pour si longtemps!
We die only once, and for such a long time!
Molière, Le Dépit Amoureux , 1656, Act V, sc. iii
But do not all these miracles [the steam engine, the electric light, the telephone, the phonograph, the radio, bacteriology, anesthesiology, psychophysiology] pale when compared to the most astonishing and disturbing one of all, that one which seems finally to endow man himself with the divine power of creation: the power to give physical form to the insubstantial image that vanishes as soon as it is perceived, leaving no shadow in the mirror, no ripple on the surface of the water? (1900)
Nadar
Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost, 1887
And, curiously, he felt that he was something, somebody, precisely and simply because of that cold threat of death. The terror of the white world had left no doubt in him about his worth; in fact, that white world had guaranteed his worth in the most brutal and dramatic manner. Most surely he was was something, in the eyes of the white world, or it would not have threatened him as it had. That white world, then, threatened as much as it beckoned. Though he did not know it, he was fatally in love with that white world, in love in a way that could never be cured. That white world’s attempt to curb him dangerously and irresponsibly claimed him for its own.
Richard Wright, The Long Dream, 1958
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
My images were surreal simply in the sense that my vision brought out the fantastic dimension of reality. My only aim was to express reality, for there is nothing more surreal than reality itself. If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary.
Brassaï, Brassai, Paris
Bientôt nous plongerons dans les froides ténèbres;
Adieu, vive clarté de nos étés trop courts!Soon we will plunge into the cold darkness;
Farewell, vivid brightness of our too-short summers!
Charles Baudelaire, “Chant d’Automne” (Song of Autumn)
Like everything else I’ve ever done, there was a furious struggle to rise heavenward.
Brâncuși cited in: Finley Eversole, Art and Spiritual Transformation, 2009. p. 329
My work has been essentially a dialogue with death, asking him, “Why? Why?” So only death can silence me. Only death can close my lips.
Eugène Ionesco, The Paris Review interview, 1984
I do not photograph nature.
I photograph my visions.
Man Ray, quoted in PBS episode of American Masters
Ce qui remplit le temps c’est vraiment de le perdre.
The best way to fill time is to waste it.
Marguerite Duras, Wasting Time, from Practicalities, 1987 (trans. 1990)
Pozzo: (suddenly furious). Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Calmer.) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 1952
A curious word, wanderlust. I’m ready to go.
I’ve already gone. Regretfully, exultantly. A prouder lyricism. It’s not Paradise that’s lost.
Advice. Move along, let’s get cracking, don’t hold me down, he travels fastest who travels alone. Let’s get the show on the road. Get up, slugabed. I’m clearing out of here. Get your ass in gear. Sleep faster, we need the pillow.
She’s racing, he’s stalling.
If I go this fast, I won’t see anything. If I slow down —
Everything. — then I won’t have seen everything before it disappears.
Everywhere. I’ve been everywhere. I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
Land’s end. But there’s water, O my heart. And salt on my tongue.
The end of the world. This is not the end of the world.
Susan Sontag, “Unguided Tour”, The New Yorker (October 31st, 1977)
We Dadaists are often told that we are incoherent, but into this word people try to put an insult that it is rather hard for me to fathom. Everything is incoherent… There is no logic… The acts of life have no beginning and no end. Everything happens in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is called Dada. Any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic strikes me as a boring kind of game… Like everything in life, Dada is useless… Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all of the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.
Tristan Tzara, ‘Lecture on Dada’, 1922
His manager said it best: “A kindly man, of simple tastes, who gave much to the public and asked little in return. He really died on the Saturday night when he gave his last performance—and his greatest.”
Don’t make me live in this pain
no longerYou know, I’m gettin’ weaker, not
strongerMy poor heart can’t stand no more
Just can’t keep from talkin’
If you gonna walk out that door,
start walkin’I’ll get back somehow
Maybe not tomorrow, but someday
I know someday I’ll find someone
Who can ease my pain like you once doneb
Everything is changed for you. But it is still the same, too. The loneliness you feel has come to you because you are no longer a child. But the world has always been full of that loneliness.
The Human Comedy
