Life and Death Matters - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Life and Death Matters

Bonnie Marranca

Where should I begin? It’s been a difficult stretch in the weeks leading

up to completing PAJ 114. Suicide bombings, the Orlando massacre,
refugees floating in the sea, Brexit, police shootings, and the death of
my beloved mother. As I look over the contributions to this issue, I have before
me reflections on the incandescent achievement of Tadeusz Kantor, who wrought
his great work from the shards of World War II and communism; an essay that
finds avant-garde spiritual vanguardism in the act of a Buddhist monk who, en
1963, startled the world with his self-immolation in protest of the Vietnam war;
Aleister Crowley’s fierce anti-fundamentalist play, written against the background
of World War 1; y, closer to our own time, notes on the use of Greek plays
in their healing effects on veterans of Middle East wars complete the historical
touchstones.

If I have emphasized the more overtly political contents of the issue, that is by
no means to neglect the several valuable commentaries on dance, theatre, y
media. Life goes on. In the midst of momentous local and global events, social
transformación, and emotional turmoil there is always the work of art. Artists
struggle with materials, solve internal conflicts, imagine new worlds. We still
acknowledge the importance of human expression and creative spirit in the face
of war, hatred, miedo, grief, pendulum swings of ideologies. Imagination plows
through catastrophe.

Two issues ago, in PAJ 112, I wrote about the inner life of art as a force beyond
the excess of lamentation that pervades the culture:

Artistic experiences that break through the known world bear gifts of
intellectual prowess and wonder and disturbance, reconfiguring the
natural order of sight and speech. They have a reality all their own.

These days I’m preoccupied with contemplating how each work of art has a
breath, a way of breathing generated by the artist that we experience in and

PAJ 114 (2016), páginas. 1–2. 

doi:10.1162/PAJJ _e_00310

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through its rhythm. It is of this world and yet beyond it, in the generosity of its
regard becoming part of the history of our experience. I’ve been thinking a great
deal about breath lately because I spent several days in the stillness of a hospice
watching my mother breathe after her heart attack. Then one day she stopped
breathing. Todavía, the trace of the human heart, the heart of a person, the heart of
a work, always remains within us.

I stopped writing this text for a few hours and took a break with Alberto Manguel’s
luminous History of Reading. After some pages, an image from a recent Facebook
feed showing someone reading Fefu and Her Friends to Maria Irene Fornes at her
assisted living facility came to mind. That led to my recollection of something
Fornes said when I interviewed her in the late seventies for her production of
the play at the American Place Theatre. Referring to Fefu, Fornes observed, “it is
the play that breathes, not the characters.” The sense of a work breathing allows
that every work we encounter becomes part of every other work and part of us.
They all exist outside the realm of the real world and yet belong to it. This is the
melody of civilization.

What I want to celebrate is the breath of the work of art, the beating heart of
its futurity.