Hot Death Summer

Peter Hujar & Mark Armijo McKnight

Mark Armijo McKnight, Untitled, 2023

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Months ago, I recommended that anyone passing through NYC this summer should see the Peter Hujar show at the Ukrainian Museum. I’m glad I did, because it has taken me a long time to put together some more substantial thoughts about it, and the show closes on September 1. (Rush to see it if you can.) I’ve kept thinking about Hujar all through the past several, unbelievably hectic weeks. It’s a terrific, interesting show, focusing on Hujar’s early work: the earliest photographs are from the mid-50s, when he was in his early twenties; the latest, a photo of circus doves that is among the most lavishly gorgeous images Hujar made, is from 1973. (Divisions between early and late are distorted by Hujar’s early death, of AIDS, in 1987.)

There are some famous photos in the show—not least “Orgasmic Man,” which Hanya Yanagihara introduced to a very large audience by insisting it be the cover of her A Little Life—and also some famous faces: Susan Sontag, Roberto Rossellini, Janis Joplin, Iggy Pop. But mostly the show focuses on lesser-known work, or lesser-known to me. From 1957 there are wonderful, casual-seeming New York City street scenes: two men talking in a Times Square tourist shop, a line of what look like Halloween masks hanging above them; women in a newspaper kiosk; a solitary man gazing at movie posters; a startled cat perched in a liquor store. Novel-writing is sometimes referred to as “higher gossip”; photos like these are like elevated snapshots, in touch with the vernacular of family albums and vacation shots.

Peter Hujar, Cat on Cash Register, 1957

That’s not true of Hujar’s more formal portraits, or of the zany, kind of wonderful nude self-portraits he made for a master class with Richard Avedon. (“His initial vision, he later said,” the curator Joel Smith reports, “called for a stick of dynamite protruding from his ass.”) (By the way, Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe, whose problematic work I love, famously hated each other; this anecdote suggests the similarities in sensibility that might have been one cause.) (Also by the way, a real limitation of the Ukrainian Museum show is its prudishness; Hujar’s erotic work is amazing, and an important part of how he established his reputation. The only male nudity—the Avedon self-portraits are carefully staged not to show any bits—in the show is a lovely but also very demure, very cutesy photo of an ass.)

A special aspect of Hujar’s genius was his gift for photographing animals. The cat photo I’ve already mentioned is amazing, a little study in buzzing stasis, just-unexpressed movement. Apparently he talked to animals the whole time he photographed; this may account for the extraordinary sense of mind many of those photographs radiate, the weight of self-possession they convey, the sense of intelligence. None of Hujar’s famous goose photos—an inspiration for Yiyun Li’s PEN/Faulkner-winning The Book of Goose—are in the show, alas, but there are gorgeous shots of farm animals. The best photo in the show, for my money, is “Horse, West Virginia,” a portrait of the animal—it fills the frame—against a backdrop of misty hills. The figure of the horse, dark against the faded-out background, feels super-dense with being, as though painted by Rembrandt. It’s astonishing; I looked and looked at it each time I visited the show.

Peter Hujar, Horse, West Virginia, 1969

But those aren’t the photos that have most preoccupied me in the days and weeks since leaving New York. The show really could be a little more imaginatively hung: the photos are largely grouped by genre or subject, missed chances for the juxtapositions Hujar prized in shows during his life. The Ukrainian Museum show is in a single large square room, with a smaller interior chamber in its center. In this smaller space are photos from Hujar’s two trips to Italy. On one, in 1958-59, he took a series of photos of institutionalized children, some of them very beautiful—and also very indebted to Diane Arbus. (So too is another group of photos of children, in the main room, taken at an institution in Connecticut.) This influence didn’t go unremarked. Joel Smith, in his essay introducing the Aperture Hujar monograph (still the best Hujar resource), recounts what happened when he met Arbus at one of Avedon’s classes:

Hujar introduced himself to Arbus after that evening’s session, and years later he still sounded stung by her reply: I know who you are. ‘She thought I was ripping her off …. She had seen some of what I was doing and some photos were much too close …. Which … was very upsetting. It made me do something, try and move someplace else.’

Also in that inner chamber are photos from Hujar’s second trip to Italy, in 1962-63, and these are the ones that haven’t let me go: thirteen photos taken within the Palermo catacombs, which he visited with his sometime lover, the artist Paul Thek. (Thek’s breakthrough works, his “Meat Pieces” or “Technological Reliquaries,” were also inspired by the catacombs.) These aren’t obscure photos: Hujar remained proud of them throughout his career, and they feature prominently in the only book he published in his lifetime, Portraits in Life and Death. (Long out of print, the book is being reissued in October; the photos were also exhibited at the 2024 Venice Biennale.) In this case, the Ukrainian Museum’s choice to hang the pictures as a group reflects Hujar’s own decision not to interleave his photos of living and dead subjects, but instead to quarantine them in separate sections of the book.

These photos are extraordinary. Much of the extraordinariness, at least to American eyes, comes from the place itself. The catacombs were begun at the end of the 16^th century, when the Capuchin monastery in Palermo filled up its cemetery. According to Wikipedia the catacombs were first restricted to monks, but later took in fashionable laypeople; being interred there became a mark of status. Death is the great equalizer, they say, but there’s no equality here. Alongside monks in what look like burlap cassocks, Hujar photographs lavishly arrayed and displayed corpses, in various states of preservation and decay. Some are in glass fronted coffins; others are exposed; there are solitary figures and groups. Many of these figures are posed, and several are upright. As all discussions of Hujar’s book have noted, he photographs several of his living subjects recumbent, so that between the book’s sections the dead and the living seem to imitate each other’s postures. (So much for quarantine.) Historical catastrophe would effect a more devastating blurring: the book was published in 1976, just a few years before AIDS would decimate the downtown New York scene from which Hujar took his living subjects, several of whom would, like Hujar, die of the disease.

Hujar makes remarkably dynamic images out of his unmoving subjects. In a sense, Hujar’s photos are a kind of ekphrasis, art about art: at least it seems to me that the bodies, prepared and arranged, become a kind of artwork; certainly they’re manifestations of one of art’s motivations, the desire to defeat time. They’re also framed, set in their niches or laid out behind glass, and Hujar uses these frames, set within his own, to create angles and planes that generate, in my experience of the photos, a remarkable and paradoxical energy—paradoxical given the stasis of both photography and death.

Peter Hujar, Palermo Catacombs #3 (Man with Skullcap), 1963

Consider the third image of the series. (Most of the photographs are simply numbered, but a few have additional titles, like this one: “Man with Skullcap.”) The first thing I see in this photograph are angles, the various frames: the rectangles traced by the glass and wood, to start with, except that they’re not really rectangles, thanks to the angle of the photograph, but slanter parallelograms. Nothing in the photograph comes off exactly square; our eye knocks everything out of joint. And then the odder, acute angle formed by the wooden object at the top of the image, what I presume is another coffin stacked atop this one. The photos are often hard to read, just in a sense of figuring out what exactly they show. The casket housing the man seems to be raised and set on another surface, maybe a stone slab ( another tomb?). And what is the object on the right, a closed, unwindowed casket? It seems to be somehow embossed, a weird texture that at once creates more, rougher-hewn lines, and also offers a kind of ghost echo of the two buttons barely visible in the man’s coat; it also offers the only curved lines in the world outside the casket. The background in the upper righthand quadrant, is that the wall of the crypt, and are those bricks? I’m not sure, but they create a kind of grid, more lines forming a surface that seems to recede, slanting away from us.

All of these angles and lines create a kind of movement in my experience of the photograph, even if it’s only the movement of my attention, my eye being drawn in multiple directions at once. And, in contrast, almost as if in response, the figure of the man at the photo’s center becomes a repository of stillness; only the embroidery on his skullcap participates in the play of pattern and line. This sense of stillness is heightened by how monochrome the body is, the skin, except where it has darkened around the nose and mouth, almost the same ghostly shade of gray as the man’s coat; he could almost be carved of stone. Except that the image is so expressive, it conveys such a sense of self-possession, which is an absurd thing to say, since death is the great dispossessor, the man is beyond possession; I guess I mean that it conveys an overwhelming dignity. This is amplified by the only impression of softness in the photo, which comes from the pillow under his head—and this too is one of the sources of the photograph’s emotion. Repeatedly, moving from photograph to photograph, I was struck by the signs of care they record, signs that at least plausibly suggest that these bodies were once beloved. (Such signs of care, which are also presumably signs of wealth, aren’t always present; one harrowing photograph shows bodies laid out on what seem to be cramped shelves, a death-larder. A single vertical figure stands in a niche between the stacks, though stands isn’t really the word, since he’s canted over, only held upright by a just-visible wire. His legs appear, grotesquely, to be broken.)

Maybe it’s silly to close-read the photos in this way, treating tiny details as load-bearing, laden with significance. Photos aren’t paintings, after all; Hujar didn’t draw these lines or compose these patterns. If anything, the photos are unusually haphazard, ill-lit, occasionally in imperfect focus. (In photo #2, a headdress of artificial flowers perched, still fresh, atop a bare skull becomes a spectral cloud.) They were made quickly (“in about twenty minutes,” Hujar claimed), and presumably on the sly, without permission; there wasn’t time to get things exactly right. Unless the photos are, as the best of them seem to me, exactly right. I guess it feels meaningful to me to ask what that rightness consists of, what makes the images so compelling; to ask, that is, about the choices Hujar did, however quickly, even instantaneously, make: which bodies caught his eye, which framing of their already framed images appealed to him, which angle to adopt. Reading the photos in this way is an attempt, impossibly, to imagine oneself into the moment of their making; and also, maybe more plausibly (though this is impossible too, really), to unpack our own experience gazing on them.

Peter Hujar, Palermo Catacombs #10, 1963

My favorite of the series is the tenth. This is an older grave, or seems to be; the varnish has worn off the casket’s wood, leaving reptilian patterns, and the glass has cracked (why is this so heartbreaking?); pieces of it are missing. This woman is wearing a fabric headdress, too, beautifully preserved, not flowers here but something like the ruffs in Renaissance paintings. Hauntingly, there are also real flowers in the casket, desiccated but still recognizable: you can just make out leaves, even petals, some of which have detached and litter the bottom of the glass. The woman’s skin hasn’t entirely decomposed, but it’s pretty far along; her eyes are empty sockets. How uncanny, then, that she seems so absolutely to be gazing at us, her face partially obscured by the flowers.

In her mostly superficial, wildly self-serving preface to Portraits in Life and Death (she manages, in this tiny text, to quote from and discuss not one but two of her own novels), Susan Sontag claims, not of Hujar’s work in particular but of photography as a whole (or “the photograph-as-photograph,” whatever that means), that it “shows the sex-appeal of death.” I’m not sure what she’s about with that phrase, but there is, if not sex appeal exactly, at least an extraordinary charisma, an extraordinary glamor about this photograph. The tilt of the woman’s head, the flowers—she could be any Hollywood ingenue, half hiding and so enticing us to pursuit. The image is the more haunting for recalling so intensely the iconic portrait Hujar would make of Candy Darling on her hospital deathbed ten years later. That Darling portrait is powerful for how death-laden it seems—Darling is surrounded by flowers and pallid as a corpse, an emaciated arm laid against a face through which the skull already shows, a skull resting, just like those in the Palermo crypts, on a white pillow. So too this earlier photograph is powerful for how life seems to linger in the woman’s corpse; even the empty sockets chime, almost perfectly, with the dark circles of Darling’s heavily made-up eyes.

Peter Hujar, Lois Adler, 1956

The Candy Darling portrait isn’t in the Ukrainian Museum show. But the very first image in the exhibition, a portrait of Lois Adler from 1956, also resonates, devastatingly, with the tenth Palermo photograph. Adler—no one could more perfectly embody youth, vitality—stands, head fetchingly tilted, holding a sprig of flowers in one hand and, in the other, a single stem, which she has either removed from or is adding to the others. Everything about the photo is elegant, but elegant with vivacity, not stillness; it brims with life. It wasn’t until I had looked at it for several minutes that I noticed the cigarette, heavy with ash, between two of Adler’s fingers, the photo’s memento mori. Maybe that’s what, in combination with the flowers, creates such a line of energy between this photo and the woman in her casket, beginning and end.

For those familiar with Hujar’s life and career, and with his relationship—at once mentorship, romance, and aesthetic collaboration—with David Wojnarowicz, the Palermo photographs also gain in haunted poignancy for the line of energy they forge with another group of images not in the Ukrainian show, the photographs and film Wojnarowicz made of Hujar in the moments after his death. These photographs are almost unbearably painful, especially the most famous, of Hujar’s face, his mouth agape and eyes still open; I’m not sure I know another art photograph that comes so close to death, to the moment when personhood exits flesh. I won’t include that image in this post, just because it’s so painful for me to look at, but you can see it here. Almost as powerful is this very beautiful photograph of Hujar’s hand against the folds of his white bedsheet, his dotted hospital gown just visible beneath, the kind of play of patterns Hujar was drawn to. This too is almost too moving to bear, the hand at once expressive of death (the fingernails are darkened, as if already decomposing) but also of humanness, of artmaking and love, of our connections with the world and with others. All of which death strips from us—unless there’s a reason to place any faith at all, however slight, in that promise art makes, or seems to make, that something of us that matters can outlast our lives. How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Shakespeare asked, and mostly I doubt it can; but sometimes, for moments when I’m looking at art like Hujar’s, like Wojnarowicz’s, doubt almost gives way.

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Peter Hujar), 1989

            *

But beating death isn’t art’s only, even its main, ambition; maybe the greater part of its work is to make us acknowledge death’s dominion: to stop running from it as if we had anywhere to go, to face up to it square. I’ve spent the past many weeks (months, really) working on a long essay on James Baldwin, and this was one of Baldwin’s primary themes. Much of the superficiality of American culture, as he saw it—and not just superficiality, also America’s graver sins of racism, homophobia, sexism—comes from our flight, at once humanly universal and peculiarly American, from death. This idea chimes throughout his career; one of its fullest expositions comes in The Fire Next Time, from 1963—the same year, coincidentally, Hujar was making photos in the Palermo crypts. Baldwin begins by saying that what the white American sees looking at the Black American, what his racism painfully thrusts away, is “reality.” And then, quickly universalizing his claim, Baldwin defines reality as:

…the fact that life is tragic. Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.

Baldwin was dismissive of Sartre (and of French intellectuals generally), but he sounds like an existentialist here: death, and therefore life, is something one earns; the authentic life can only be led in the face of death.

But what does it mean to live in the face of death, “the only fact we have”? I kept thinking, in my dumb American way, as I looked at Hujar’s Palermo photos, that the crypts themselves represent a radically different relationship to death from anything I’ve known. Imagine treating the dead as a neighbor you visit—not as a manicured patch of grass but as a decaying or preserved corpse. If you look closely, you can see a keyhole above the glass in the photo of the man with the skullcap, which means, I presume, that one could open the casket; according to Wikipedia some of the bodies were posed such that family members could hold hands with them. Maybe holding hands with the dead is an instinctive urge. I remember at my first funeral—I was very young, it was an elderly and distant relative—how I reached out and touched the dead woman’s hand, only to be snatched away by my mother, who scrubbed my hand with scalding water. Death as something to be feared, cleaned away, better yet avoided all together—that was the American attitude I learned. I’ve been a long time now unlearning it.

If you’ve read this Substack for any amount of time, you’ve heard me talk about Mark Armijo McKnight, and you’ll be hearing me talk about him more over the next weeks and months. His new solo show, Decreation, just opened at the Whitney Museum; on October 24, I’ll be having a conversation with him there, moderated by the curator Drew Sawyer. Thinking about Hujar and this piece, I’ve been returning to a slightly earlier body of Mark’s work, Posthume, which was the subject of exhibitions in Los Angeles and Brussels, and will make up Mark’s second monograph, forthcoming in 2025. Like much of Mark’s work, Posthume juxtaposes images of human figures with landscape photographs, often in ways that blur the distinction. In his first monograph, Heaven Is a Prison, for which I wrote an essay, the landscape is the high California desert, and the human figures are two men having sex, mostly of a sadomasochistic kind, in that landscape. (The book includes images of fetish play; the filthiest photograph is of a fallen tree.) In Posthume, the landscape photos are all of dead trees—as in Hujar’s crypt photos, some are still upright, others fallen; and the human figures, naked, sometimes single, sometimes in pairs or groups of three, all wear skull masks.

Mark Armijo McKnight, Untitled 2023

No one who knows Mark’s work will be surprised that the pictures are beautiful, by which I mean that they foreground beauty, that generating beauty is one of their aims. Sometimes that beauty has the austerity one might expect of photographs so obsessed with death; the surprise, for me, is how often the pictures revel in lushness. One of my favorite landscapes in the series (I have several) is actually a portrait, its subject a single, blasted, hollowed-out tree trunk rising out of water, or what I take to be water; given the extraordinary, viscous, dense black typical of McKnight’s images (“abyssal black,” I call it in my earlier essay), it might be tar. Really Mark has somehow charged the image beyond literal representation, deepened it to something metaphysical, as though the trunk were rising out of death itself. Behind that solitary remnant of a tree recede other similarly or identically blasted trunks. The nearest rise out of water, out of their own reflections (I find this effect unspeakably beautiful); beyond them more emerge from dry land; beyond those, more water, until finally, at the very top of the image, there is a strip of what seems like dry land again. One can imagine this alternating, strips of water and dry land, forever, a blasted landscape without end.

Mark McKnight, Untitled, 2023

I started that last paragraph by suggesting a separation between austerity and lushness, but as always when I look long enough at Mark’s photographs the dumb dualities I set up to try to understand them collapse. In Mark’s death photos, austerity is lushness is austerity is lushness. This is one sign of what I think is his greatness as an artist (and I do think he’s great, genuinely so, it’s amazing to me I get to count him among my friends): his work generates such a gravitational field, becomes so radically dense, that, as in the thought of the mystics he’s drawn to, apparently ultimate or pure categories crack open or collapse in on themselves, revealing their contraries. (So, in Heaven Is a Prison, the single explicit shot of anal penetration feels radically chaste, with none of the pornographic charge of that torn-open tree trunk.)

The landscape in the photo suggests a narrative, but one I have no access to. What has happened here? Have the trees been harvested? That would explain how utterly denuded the landscape is, the absence of the rest of their bodies, but not the irregularity of the trunks or their hollowness. Has a disease swept the landscape, or fire? Is this a scene of calamity or ecocide? Nothing I can think of makes sense of all the evidence the photo offers. We’re left with the consequence of a story we can’t tell, without any material for moralizing, any lesson to draw; we’re left with grief and wonder.

Mark Armijo McKnight, Untitled

Some of the photos with human figures are set in similarly devastated landscapes—or if not devastated, bare, not easily accommodating of human life—across which the figures move like pilgrims, when they’re not lying or leaning or perched among branches. It’s hard not to wax existential looking at some of these images, a few of which have a kind of epic grandeur. In one breathtaking example, a solitary figure stands, at the dead center of the frame, on an incline of sand or mud; behind him, the little we can see of the sky is blocked out with clouds. (One move typical of Mark’s photos is to deny us a sense of horizon, with its possibility of openness or escape, instead locking us into the photo field.) The image is almost entirely monochrome, with only the narrowest gradations of gray in terrain and clouds. Only the low ridge (is that the word for it?) the man stands on, with its scalloped gradations, breaks the monochrome, a dark trail receding behind the man and extending, widening before him (he really is a pilgrim, but to where, of what?); and also the figure of the man himself, his stance wide, his head bowed, the brightest object on view. Again the photo sets my meaning making apparatus whirring: it can only be an allegory, a lone figure in a bare landscape. But an allegory of what?

How should we read Mark’s death’s-head figures? Are they grim reapers harvesting souls? Are they souls wandering the afterlife? Or are they we ourselves, images of a human life that always, because such is the nature of the beings we are, carries within itself its own death? “Man, that bears about him his own mortality, the witness of his sin,” Augustine writes in the opening of The Confessions (that’s the Pusey translation; “a human hauling deathliness in a circle,” is Sarah Ruden’s very vivid rendering)—though the idea of sin seems foreign to these photos, along with the whole meaning-securing apparatus Augustine brings to his own pilgrimage. It’s this bareness—this metaphysical bareness, I mean—that gives the photos their existential cast. Whatever meaning might be generated in this landscape, these men must make it for themselves.

But this isn’t the only tone of the photos; one of the things I love about them is their suprising variety. Water in the photos is mostly stagnant or salt—again, unsustaining of human life, as we usually think of it—but there’s also what might be a shallow stream (it might also be a puddle), on one side of which a figure gazes into the water, a death’s-head Narcissus, while on the other another looks over his shoulder at us, seductively I think (here’s Sontag’s “sex appeal”), a death’s-head odalisque. And in one breathtaking—I’m sorry to use the word again, it’s the only one that will do—photo, situated inside what seems to be a grotto or cave, there’s a waterfall, gorgeous, falling beside a man standing ankle deep in its pool. I’m not sure what word to use for the tone of this photo, but it isn’t bleak, it isn’t even dire; it’s one of the few photos in which there’s something we might call, in a loose but expansive sense, grace.

Mark Armijo McKnight, Untitled

I often find the tone of the pictures not indeterminate, exactly, but mobile. It refuses to stay still. In what is I think one of my two favorites of the figure photos, three men lie in meager grass on what looks like a rocky field. They lie in a circle, each in a unique posture. As with the photo of the tree trunks, this at once suggests and withholds a narrative. I find myself surprised, every time I look at it, by the way I see different scenarios: now the men are victims of massacre, the angel of death has just swept over; now they’re sleeping; now they’re the Three Graces; and now, somehow—this is a bizarre association, maybe, but I can’t shake it—they’re figures out of Matisse’s Dance. Depending on when and how I look the tone of the photo leaps, from mourning to joy. Now the landscape is bleak—stony, exposed, comfortless; but then I look more closely and realize the men are lying on flowers.

My other favorite photo shows two men walking along a beach. Here we do have a horizon, a full expanse of land, sea, and sky, though the photo still feels locked in. In some of the photos the figures relate to each other in ways that seem affectively charged, even erotic; in one very tender picture one man lays his head in the lap of the other. But here there’s little sense of relation between the men: they walk in the same direction, but keeping their distance; there’s no way to know if the second man is following the first, or if they have a common destination. Or maybe they’re just walking, endlessly, nowhere. (Five footsteps trail the figure in the foreground before the sand is clear again, as though he suddenly materialized mid-stride; there’s no trail at all behind the figure in the background.) In the photo a wave has just receded, another is yet to arrive; the men walk just within the water’s grasp, along a bright boundary where light strikes wet.

Light is the marvel of this photo, the brilliant silver line of sun blazing on the rising wave. Mark works on a 4x5 camera, which is a slow technology, requiring painstaking preparations before you can take a shot. (I had a photoshoot recently with a photographer using this gear; it took five hours, and again and again he lamented the loss of some effect he had hoped to catch.) The light striking the wave just when Mark was ready for it must have seemed a moment of incredible luck. Grace, again. (Writing can feel like that, too, as though if one isn’t in the right place at the right time, in the right frame of mind with one’s finger on the flash, something precious is lost beyond recall.) I don’t know what this photo means, other than that light on the water; I don’t know how to subject it to interpretation. I just know that I like to look and look at it, and that something accrues with my looking; I know that meaning is there, even if I can’t access it; it stinks with meaningfulness. (“I want people to feel the picture and smell it,” Hujar said of his work.) The photo has a quality the only word for which is splendor, a sense that the image is a container overflowing with something; I want to thrust out my cupped palms to catch it. Beauty flows over from it, I want to say; beauty is, for the moments I’m held by the picture, meaningfulness enough.

Mark Armijo McKnight, Untitled

Portraits in death, Hujar called his photos. What would it mean for death to be one’s medium, the substance out of which one makes one’s art, like that black water birthing wrecked tree trunks in Mark’s photo? One of the things I think about in that long Baldwin essay is what it would mean not just to recognize death as the condition of our lives, or as the condition for their meaningfulness, but to assent to that condition, to say Yes to the great negation that is our own mortality. Maybe that’s what I feel Mark does in these photos, and what Hujar does in the Palermo series. Mark’s pictures might be set at the end of the world, an end we sense ever more vertiginously approaching; if so, they assert that the end of the world is a place of human meaning, too, or of the search for it. They claim that we will keep meaning, keep searching for meaning, like his death’s-head pilgrims, upon the final scrap of land on the final shore at the final end of our world. And who knows, why not, somehow, maybe—(posthume)—after.

As always, thank you for reading—

G.