I SHALL BE WITH YOU ON YOUR WEDDING NIGHT

AN ETHNOGRAPHY-NOVEL ON DEATH

Yawen Tan, I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding Night, 2018, color photograph

I met Jamie only once. Sitting on a dead trunk by a coastal desert staring owlishly at the incurable, murky, and vacant townhomes with some dignity and some wasted minds, much like those found in Hitchcock’s films, she was formidable to behold. The moment I pressed the shutter, the scene was fringed with treacherous silence and burning solitude. Yes, I could feel her. The wedding, the vows, the sound of camellia, petals whispering before nightfall, strings murmuring, wreath chanting, dresses belling – all these were so saturated and attuned in her mind, though she appeared the image of bleak and unwavering melancholia, with her face and arms painted lavishly blue, her bridal veil blown asunder, colored like a piece of cloth ripped off from a dining table with chicken fat, onion soup, and candy wrappers crawling still, so that I, watching her holding warily a white cup like a sculpture, began to imagine that the liquid inside was perhaps her tears, impeccably blue and pure.

“I shall be with you on your wedding night,” she turned to the plateful of blue water behind her and said, “this is how I was threatened by a monster.” She could not help trembling, her eyes moved like a sluggish stream, flowing from the island, distant, misty, in the middle of the sea, towards the unbearably lucid sky, which always seemed to be washed out by the innocent ocean, uninhabited of a crack. What she said was true. It must be true. Every woman I ran into on this coast told me about the ghost; for reasons they could not explain, for the hidden secret being so penetratingly ingrained, for the fact that they repressively desired this dimension of uncanniness, a disastrous irruption of the lack of lack, on the brink of jouissance and thunderclap; finally for a craving to enter the paradoxical realm between the living and the dead, somewhere delusive, dreamlike, phantasmagoric, thick and black.

It happened three months before her wedding, Jamie said. Never did anything look more formidable than the monster, not even Frankenstein. Wrinkled and ghoulish, lurching and groaning in the darkness, seemingly unstable, unfeeling, cold-blooded, it nevertheless desired to be adored, to be recognized and remembered, and to perhaps evade fate itself. For some reason she believed that he was human. All too human. “It was not my dream, nor hallucination. He was real!” It was too real, for she had spoken to him, for she had struck his head, realizing, even during the daytime, his eyes responding to her thirst and request, and some curious putting together of his personality, as if he wished to stay for a longer time. After being enchanted by the ghostly undead, all her sanity, all the blessedness in her mind, fantasying the splendor of her otherwise bachelor’s life, kaleidoscopic as the last sunset on earth, had been shattered, ruined. With despair in her eyes and tears in her hands, with the decay of fuchsia and bougainvillea on the horizon – why did the monster choose her?

Mendocino, California, early January, sometime around the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, few months after the two Boeing 767 sliced into the World Trade Center in New York City. I came here as an anthropologist fascinated by death. No, not the kind of death that anthropologists in the Twentieth Century had been writing about - funerary rites, wars, mourning, putrescence, burial, bones, commemoration, sovereignty, the symbolic imaginaries of how life conquered death, or, even worse, death as a matter of paperwork, something instructive and pornographic. Death of this kind is a redundancy. Death has been substituted with everything that is observable about death. Ethnography like this never truly confronts death face to face. It is counterfeit death. “Authentic death” has been subdued, masked, averted, and silenced in modern times. “The dead have never been modern,” anthropologist Stuart McLean said. He was equally sick of modernity’s increasing unwillingness to extend any sort of collective recognition to death: with its social upheavals, armed conflicts, military technologies, and mass media, the modern world allowed no more than the spectacle of death. Yet with the sequestered spaces of hospital wards, hospices, mortuaries, and memorials, it precisely rendered the presence of death invisible.

How could one study “authentic death” as an ethnographer, without all the redundancies, as a participant-observer? If, as Jeanne Favret-Saada cautions us, one could not participate and observe at the same time – since if you participate, your personal adventure will threaten your scientific project, but if you observe, keep a distance, there would be nothing left for you to observe – if, to gain access to a world, the ethnographer has no choice but to get “caught” in that world first, letting go of empirically verifiable knowledge, bombarded by the world’s intensities, affected by its meaningless flows, bewitched by its waves, splashes, Ursprung, wrecks, its preceding concession, flaring serenity, sedimental eruptions, or upstream fallings, then perhaps I had no choice but to accept being “caught” in authentic death.

But how is it even possible? To be “caught” in authentic death?

Perhaps I could be “caught” in the authentic death of others? After all, death represents itself to us through the deaths of others, whether as close as a parent, partner, or child or as far as the unknown victim of a distant famine or war. We cannot represent death to ourselves, but we know that we are going to die precisely through the death of others, through an inextricable loss. Our relation to death is not first and foremost my fear for my own demise, but my sense of being undone by the experience of grief and mourning. As someone who has “remained behind,” the death of others might tell us something more than the object of study on funeral rites, interment, or the cult of graves.

However, the “authentic Being-come-to-an-end of the deceased is precisely the sort of thing which we do not experience,” Heidegger answers. Death does indeed reveal itself as a loss, but such a loss is experienced by those who remain. In suffering this loss, nevertheless, we have no way of access to the loss-of-Being as such which the dying man “suffers”. The dying of Others is not something which we experience in a genuine sense. “At most we are always just there alongside.”

The only authentic death is one’s own, Heidegger implies. Experiencing the death of others is not only impossible but also inauthentic. We can only be there with the dying man who suffers, flick the last speck of dust off his lips, lend an ear as he retells the splendor of his insipid and evanescent ego, and watch him leave as the nightingale mourns at the very pinnacle of desire, to cease upon the midnight with no pain. We experience such a loss as a prelude to death, yet we can never access the loss-of-Being in his place, nor can we grasp the loss-of-Being authentically in representation. In ending, and “in Dasein’s Being-a-whole, there is, by its very essence, no representing.”

I came to Mendocino bringing all these intricacies and paradoxes with me. Mendocino was a “suicide village.” I read news about several women who committed suicide after claiming their encounters with a monster. Detectives came and left with clandestine reports, journalists came and left with rumors and death stories. To read about their death is to read of smells, alongside the overabundance and volatilities of flesh and bone assuming a recalcitrant presence. I could not resist it, the enchantment of dead bodies and the efflorescence of scent.

At the crack of winter dawn I came. Where did anything begin? In the middle of the lone cypress, perhaps? Built on a cliff, the entire village sit in the arms of this monstrously gigantic cypress, who stretched its tentacles into the air, to the ocean, to the desert, to the cliff. I was walking toward the lone cypress, every pebble lying under my feet greeting me with recklessness, every sea gull hovering over my head laughing at my ignorance. I walked over the dilapidated cottages, over the long-forgotten lighthouse, and stood there under the tree. The cypress, referred to by ancient Greeks and Romans as the “mournful tree,” has been a potent reminder of life and death. It is the one of the oldest symbols of mourning. Mourning for what? For one’s inextricable decease, yet not in a way explicitly representing death, but rather figuratively mirroring immortality and hope. It reminds us of death in the curious disguise of a turn-away from death: historically, adherents of Christianity and Islam planted cypress near burial sites and cemeteries to protect against evil spirits that might kill human beings; it is also sacred to some practitioners of Christianity who believe that the cypress was the source of wood for the crucifixion – for a rebirth after merciless death! For some reason I understood this as the most hypocritical moment for human beings. The cypress dies slowly, but still it is doomed to die! It can never be a true protection, an escape, a resurrection. I wondered how Heidegger, who writes that death is the “possibility of impossibility,” would think of the cypress as a wish for immortality. If immortality exists, if impossibility is no longer possible, what would existence become? The presence of death makes existence an extension between “already” and “not yet”; there’s no way of trumping it. It outstrips all the possibilities that one’s power of freedom possesses. But those who worshiped cypress did not seem to understand. Thoughts of this kind were in my head as I stood in front of this monstrously gigantic cypress. As I looked back, the entire village was saturated with a surrealist juxtaposition of sunset and moonlight. There I met Jamie.

Yawen Tan, Lone cypress off the cliff, 2018, color photograph

III

It was almost dusk. The story began. The park was converted into a fairyland. A huge Shamiana erected on one end with a path, lighted and wreathed with peonies and garden roses, filmy with thick white and reddish carpets, canopy, and curtains, a towering gate set up on another. The fragrance of the flowers was everywhere. Musicians sat on one side with shehnai and its accompaniments, tuning softly as a waxing crescent climbed on the mountain peak. Everything was just ready, more and more guests arrived. Jokes, smiles, blessings, laughing, agonies, ironies, drumbeats, fortunes, misfortunes, bubbles, balloons, fireworks, bodyworks, and the wedding presenter. A silk-feathered breeze rustled in the atmosphere from the west bringing dreamlike coolness to the wedding’s guests as each took a seat on the gazebo walk on either side. The bridegroom was escorted to the throne-like seat on a raised platform, followed by the bride in a starry dress, sparkling, chanting, playing. They marched in a slow and doll-like pace, streamers and balloons fluttering in enclosed railings with vibrant ruby-red, springy lime, and oaked blue scorching throughout the space.

Suddenly the weather began to change. The temperature dropped, and a thick fog rolled down from the distant horizon. No one was prepared for the fremd cold and the drastically reduced visibility, neither for the subsequent sense of disorientation. As the Shamiana tents and their surrounding structure disappeared, the mist, soaked in spicy cardinal, turquoise, and aquamarine, began to take the place. At the very moment, the silhouette of a human-like, male figure, as tall as a cypress tree, as floating as a balloon, as intangible as a breeze, appeared through the mist. He pressed close to the bride, step by step.

“Hold on – do you mean as tall as the huge cypress on that cliff?”

Jamie did not seem to hear me. She kept on telling her wedding that took place a week ago. “He was there. I knew. The monster came with the mist.” Yes, she knew she must do something, but at present she was trembling and weeping. Screening her face she sobbed more fearfully than she had yet done, her shoulders rising and falling without any digestive uniformity. It was, unsurprisingly demonizing, this same figure she began to see three months before her wedding, who promised to be with her on her wedding night. But what was he going to do? Take her life away? Threaten her to death? Or simply ruin one of the most important events of her life? The monster came up to her, laid his hands on her shoulder, “Dearest,” His voice was supplicating, as if he was the one who begged for mercy. “Destroy this beautiful place and come with me. I’ll show you what extreme beauty is.”

She shut her face away from him, as much as to say, “You can’t possibly understand. I don’t need to see that kind of beauty.” But then as the monster burst out laughing, his skin blistering, body heat haloing, she suddenly felt enchanted. Yes, “enchanted,” Jamie told me. Something was germinating in her mind, her heart, her spirit, her ears, her breasts, her fingers, her toes, something unknown yet telling her to come closer. The surrounding wedding cars, more like butt crack rocks on mars than terrestrial objects, the dreamside maroon carpets, the jingling wind chimes, the tawny coastal desert, and the pallid wine glasses, made her think about the world she lived in –

“No – no – no – no! – the WEB! – I lived in!”

“Web. Web. Web. It must be the golden spiral orb web I bumped into when I was seven. No it should not have been terrestrial. The web was too forestial, visceral, golden yellow, blindingly bright, conspicuously silk, jeopardisingly zig-zag, at times criss-crossing, a stabilimenta of silk, detritus, and egg sacs. The artist – a orb-web spider – symmetrized herself on this optical disc of creativity and unanimity, resting with her eyes open wide, her hairs stretching, snug and stern, like if you touch them those spun threads will relish you, liquidize you, anneal you, intrude on your repose, her abdomen brimming over with apocalyptic gold and sonic sunglow tattooed with dark sentences:

我是琥珀

进入我的身体

为我舔净血液

让我流出金黄色的

毛线编织的河流

And fear faded away from there. It occurred to me that for the first twenty-seven years of my life I had been a prey on this web. It threatened me, enjailed me, fed on me, trained me, disciplined me, punished me. To survive, the shield I put up for my sanity stripped me off the possibility of pain, and thus the possibility of beauty.”

These utterances from Jamie bombarded me with a Bergmanian epiphany. She is me and I am her. She is my persona and all I feel is sublimity.

“So I thought to myself, I wanted to see what extreme beauty is.”

“I knew my brother the smoker must had a lighter in his pocket. I quickly ran over to him and grabbed his lighter, rolled its spark wheel down, and threw the flame into the mist – and strangely everything in the mist suddenly caught fire! Like a tsunami swallowing villages, the fire swept over tables, peonies, roses, carpets, strings, breathes, healings, controls, pills, housecat, tongues, lures, flightless birds, and mountain streams. Everything was on fire. As for the cypress which stood innocently at the end of the park, I only felt at this moment how little it had done to make me love it, although twenty of my thirty years had been spent witnessing its presence. Shouting! Shouting! Everywhere people were crying. People were begging. They began to run away, running out of the gate. I knew how to read the people who were passing me; there were the rich who were running to live for their wealth; there were the poor who were running to bargain with life for a penny; there were moms and dads who were running to save the life of their kids; there were lovers who were running apart and never turned back. And there was me, who stood still and watched the lovely wedding on fire. It was perilously alluring.”

For a while I didn’t know who to blame. I didn’t know exactly what was so alluring, or whether Jamie would consider such an allurement “an extreme beauty.” But still, when one gave up seeing the beauty that clothed things, there was something more than skeleton beneath. To me fire is indeed beautiful. It is passion, purification, anger, destruction, desire, passion, rebirth, resurrection, as well as hope, death, and infinite presentness. It destroys the false ego, unlearns relationships and one’s association to time. It unlearns the concocted delusion of separateness. It sees one, not two. If only I were there, experiencing such a near-certain death.

Jamie glared at me, for the first and last time. She glared at me without seeming to see me. Her eyes, glazed with terror, brazen with unbounded brutality, met mine for a second, and escaped on the verge of recognition, unlike the ocean in front of us, with its deepest aquamarine, its wounds that healed in a flash, solitude that embraced a river’s death, which was neither rhapsody, nor affection, nor illumination, nor conviction, nor peace, nor darkling pain.

I decided to follow her back home. She lived on a small island on the Pacific Ocean, somewhere dimly visible from the mainland coast, but the journey to it felt unbearably long. When we were on the boat, some sea gulls were circling celebratedly with us, plunging into the ocean and rushing out to the sky, with flesh and blood in their mouths – they were catching the fish! My camera was still on. Through the mechanical eyes, juddering, swaying, beguiling, disorienting, splanchnic bleeding, with my lens swimming and flying in and out of the water, I saw this moment of crowded, fleshy, crimson, damp, oceanic – bodies – of fish, gulls, ocean, air, iron, and human beings alike, this moment of revelry, death, and piscine/avian/hydro/atmospheric/metallic/anthropic agony, albeit with rhythmic, visceral, elephantine beauty. I had an epiphany that I might discover some true rhythms of authentic death for my journey.

As night soaked in twilight, we arrived at her place, a warehouse where she lived, displayed like those artist studios in the 18th Century. In the middle of the space there was a huge painting in progress, showing a Japanese temple lavishly covered in gold foil. She is an artist! – then everything I experienced on the coast was nothing but a performance? I could not bear to think of such a possibility! I am an anthropologist – not a novelist, not an artist, not … at least this was how I was trained and taught! But for some reason I believe in everything about Jamie. What is wrong with me? This feels so wrong! I was panic, but I walked closer to the canvas and couldn’t resist asking, “What’s the painting about?” With eyes closed, Jamie began to tell me the story. The temple on canvas was the Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Once upon a time there was a Buddhist acolyte named Mizoguchi. Growing up Mizoguchi was told by his father that the Golden Pavilion is the most beautiful thing in the world. Even though his first encounter with temple was ugly and disappointing, the idea of the temple was his absolute obsession. Amid the wind and the sunlight, amid the nightingales of the night, amid the lake harboring the pavilion with its restful ripple of tenderness, amid the shrouded silhouette of the moon, amid the architectural body that emerged dazzling golden out of the surrounding darkness of earth - amid all this, he was intoxicated by the lust of the Golden Pavilion. He envied its beauty, cursed on its destruction, and dreamed of burning it down to the ground.

“How could one envy an object?”

“When you love something so deeply, anything, but know that you’ll never possess it, until you destroy it, since only in ruin you two become one.”

Yet how strange a thing is the deathly, devastating envy of a temple’s beauty! As if when people get obsessed with the idea of beauty, they are confronted with the darkest realm of life. Beauty should have been the perfect sublimity and creation of life itself; it is certain never to be equivalent to death. But is there a higher beauty? I don’t know.

“So, he envied the temple and wanted to set it on fire. Did he succeed?”

One summer afternoon, after the outbreak of the Korean war, after the temple’s fire alarm broke down and the repairman failed to keep his word, Mizoguchi knew it was time. Early that night, he sneaked into the pavilion and placed three straw bales in corners of the ground floor. He went outside to collect more flammables scattered around the lake, but on turning back to the temple he found himself caught by his childhood imaginations of its beauty, and he was suddenly stuck in uncertainty.

“It was like a Grim Reaper carrying a scythe, going to reap the soul of his loved one. And there he hesitated.”

“Like a Grim Reaper?”

I was caught in this imagery. What are you, figure of the Grim Reaper who threatens to collect a person’s soul and summon one away? Nothing, if not the presence of affliction and fear as a prelude to human being’s finitude that from morning to morning reminds us of our ultimate demise. Death reveals itself as the most intangible, nonrepresentational, insurmountable possibility. To live is not a matter of making human life into a reprieve. It is a matter of elucidating the limits and the darkness surrounding presence, teasing the source of boundedness and agony out of concealment, and withdrawing them again and again into ambiguity.

“But finally he resolved to go ahead with his plan.”

He ran upstairs and tried to enter the Kukkyōchō, to consecrate his body to the temple with sweetness, lies, and heavenly sin, but the door was locked. Suddenly feeling that his glorious death has been refused, he ran back downstairs and out of the temple. There he gazed at the night sky for the last time. The birds soared over the branches of the red pines, singing a eulogy with a plaintive whine. Carefully striking a match, he set the bales on fire.

“Just like this.”

She set her painting on fire!

The fire started from the bottom of the canvas, from the forest of slender pillars, from the tranquil lake of water, giving forth the brilliant color of the pavilion, spreading minutely in all directions. The sun dipping low, rays brilliant and bold, the sky ablaze with flames of brass, the red rushes in, as if painted in blood, looking like a fiery flood. As the smoke rose into the air, fueled our room, the flames suddenly sprang up, climbing through the curtain onto the roof, filling the entire room with the color of flesh and blood. The smoke swirled toward my back. As I coughed, I unexpectedly felt as if everything around me had suddenly become alive.

The kind of beauty I had never experienced before.

This moment sent adrenaline to my heart, expedited my breath, and froze my steps. Like fires they blind you with heat, no, like a scintilla of doubt it chokes you across the larynx. Rules, wisdom, beauty, desire, love – they all choke you. Cough. Laugh. A spineless laugh. After it happened I was at a loss for words. Isn’t the story of the painting a story of herself? And now she wants me to witness her death, or, to join her?

I glared at Jamie, for the first and last time. I glared at her as she created a dainty show of freedom on the brink of her own death. What kind of freedom do we possess in life? If the presence of death makes human life into a reprieve; if, à la Lacan, once man falls into language he receives all the determination from the signifiers coming from the domain of names, codes, and imperatives that turn his unconscious into the discourse of the Other; or, à la Derrida, we are thrown into a world like ours where naming and classifying is the very origin of violence. Would it be better if we just forget the sufferings that herald our inevitable end, the object of desire displaced by the wall-like letters that dictate our destiny, and all the violence in the history of humanity? Yet the very irony and playfulness is that we repeat them instead of forgetting. Jamie repeats, whether involuntarily or not, her encounter with the deadly threat; her fatal play with flames. I should better conceive her in the Deleuzian theatre of humor, where it is the knight of faith that should be played. The faith of what? Perhaps the faith of unity, positivity, and systematic harmony that life is supposed to possess. To play it with a sense of humor, which is nevertheless an affirmation of suffering, of lack, of loss, of absence, and of a death that awaits us. This repetitive play of absence and presence, of awareness and blindness, is perhaps man’s fate. What other freedom do we possess in life except play?

This is not suicide, nor sacrifice, both of which are still self-fulfilling actions that aim at meaningfulness – man dies for something, if he dies at all. But from where Jamie disappeared, out of a meaningless play, I discern an overwhelming beauty of freedom. Death, something that is never present in our life but whose specter never ceases to haunt us, becomes the very thing that drives us to take all these circuitous paths – to detour, to play – the very thing that affirms the freedom in our life. It is only in such being-towards-death that I become passionately aware of my freedom. I realize that I am free, that the death I have gone through has liberated me; the terror of death and the movement of selection or freedom in life is inseparable from each other. If the presence of death threatens us, it also heals us, saves us, grants us the possibility of experience, and makes us a part of creation where we begin to live. And this is ultimate creativity. What hope do we have in life except for being creative? We play with humor, without an audience, without a purpose, we play in the face of absolute loss or death, laugh and dance in the face of an irreparable loss of presence. With play, there will be no unique name of Being. We put on different masks in our life, prolong other’s life in playing the game of awareness and blindness, and take all the circuitous journey to defer secret hierarchies and violence, in individual life and in the history of humanity. Such play is nevertheless pure, without security, without fault, without loss. It is the play of the Philosopher Dionysus.

I was caught. Almost caught in death.

For long I have been desiring a “caught” in authentic death, only to realize that perhaps death is the only thing in which an ethnographer cannot have the full experience of “getting caught.” Or when you experience it, you cannot get back. For ethnographer-writers, “getting caught” always already presupposes a delayed retreat: you get caught, you retreat, you write, you represent. But how do you engage in the intensities of death? How do you get caught in death, escape observation and representation, and then retreat? Yes, the moment you get caught in death you reach a totality outside of the symbolic. But it is already too late. Death is absolute. There is no turning back. It is precisely, nevertheless, the distance between me and my “authentic caught in death” that an aesthetic of freedom is possible. If I proceed, I will understand death genuinely. If I retreat, perhaps I will be free.

The sea of fire was tumbling towards me, waves of flickering flames lapping at my feet, rubbing against my dry skin. In smoldering beauty, with this solid-state of lust, everything was returning to its original states, reduced to ashes. My skin started burning, my eyes steeped in madder, as if being entombed in volcanic lava. But in such a liminal space, there was no fear. Looking back, I realized that life consists of nothing but a negotiation with our ultimate demise, but in all our days on earth we perhaps know one single moment that the fear of death is genuinely absent.

Should I retreat?

Inspirations

/ All forms of writing in random orders: music, sound, film, novel, poem, performance, photography, philosophy, ethnography, travel, dream, memory

Exit Music (1997) by Radiohead

Fictionalizing Anthropology (2017) by Stuart McLean

Andata (2017) by Ryuichi Sakamoto

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956) by Yukio Mishima

Mendocino (2018)

Half Moon Bay (2018)

Leviathan (2014) by Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel

Deadly Worlds (1980) by Jeanne Favret-Saada

I Shall Be with You on Your Wedding-Night: Lacan and the Uncanny (1991) by Mladen Dolar

Being and Time (1927) by Martin Heidegger

Ecrits (1966) by Jacques Lacan

Difference and Repetition (1968) by Gilles Deleuze

The Birth of Tragedy (1872) by Friedrich-Nietzsche

Spiders and webs (2000-2022) in my memory

Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, Leviathan (2014)