A few years ago I was at an arts festival trying to get back into the groove after a bit of a creative hiatus. It was really more of an existential crises as I was well aware among the early twenty-somethings that I was over 30 now and a lot about the arts scene had changed. But there are always threads of timelessness in these things, as creative types come together to rage against the dying of the light. So I forged ahead, doing my best to hold my own, hoping to strike up an inspiring conversation with an edgy musician or cool queer performance artist or rogue slam poet. At the end of the day, though, the only person I talked with at any length was a bright-eyed 18-year-old Catholic missionary whose group had wandered into the festival because they were staying at the conference center a couple blocks down.
Now, I’m not entirely sure, but I may have been the subject of some sort of homework assignment. The missionaries did seem to be on a bit of a… mission… to talk about pointedly religious topics with us weirdo artists and mine seemed to be following a bit of a script. He was really surprised to find out how old I was (I was 33 at the time). I interpreted the panic in his face as him realizing he should have chosen someone younger if he was going to pass his homework assignment. So I sought out some common ground by sharing that back in the day in early college when I was his age I had wanted to be an interfaith minister. I was genuinely interested and asked about the things he was learning and what he wanted to do with those things.
I knew enough of my religious texts to hold my own, supplemented by a deep enough interest in art history that provided a fair amount of knowledge around the Catholic bits. Ultimately, we ended up bonding over the saints. (My favorites being Saint Teresa of Ávila for her mystic writings and Saint Lucy because, seriously, who doesn’t adore a lady who carries her eyeballs around on a plate?)
I don’t remember what all we talked about, a little bit of God and art and history and people. I had been giving out poems I had written so I chose one that I thought was on the happier end to give to him before we parted, but when he finished it, he just looked sad. He asked if all my poems were about death.
Just the love ones, I said.
You’re in love with death?
Nah, I just like to romance it a little.
I wished him luck with the rest of his mission trip and we went our separate ways.
This story isn’t about who is a weirdo artist or who is a Catholic missionary or what St. Lucy does with her eyeballs. The thing I remember most about this day was the look on his face at the thought that I might be in love with death. Because that sadness, too, is common ground we share.
Though I write about romancing repose, study death history, and have spent many of my living days in cemeteries and graveyards, I am certainly not in love with death. Death makes me achingly sad. Death gives me panic attacks and wakes me up at night. Death feels like the biggest insult love has ever endured.
But death is a part of the human story and as a person interested in getting into the cracks and crevices and glitter amongst the dust of storytelling, death is something I must court from time to time.
The idea for what would become this blog series emerged when I was in my undergraduate degree a million years ago (give or take), and I wanted to write a book exploring how the death of certain writers furthered the romantacization of their works (think Keats and Shelley). As it turns out I never even wrote a paper with this thesis, let alone a whole book, but the idea stuck with me and expanded with different experiences as I learned new things. I started leaning more into history and I found the threads that hold together fantasies, realities, life, and death surpassed just the romantic era poets, or even just storytelling generally. As it has landed now, I cannot define what “Romancing Repose” actually is. It’s a bit far flung and abstract, but to borrow a definition for a different sort of controversial and taboo media… I know it when I see it.
To put it simply, I write posts here that explore the intersection of love and death, prompted when I come across examples in my historical research and my lifelong study in the art of storytelling. Romancing Repose is not a way to cope with death, though much art is made in that endeavor. I’m not even certain I am seeking to make meaning of death in this series, though certain discoveries or flashes of light in these stories have soothed at least a few of my panic attacks at the very least.
Romancing Repose is not being in love with death, nor does it praise death. Romancing Repose is not to seek the splinter of sweet within the bitterness of death. Rather Romancing Repose is to do what so many artists and lovers before me have done, to take history and poetry in my grasp, leverage beauty, and take a strike out against pain, whilst I still have the life to swing.
Thanks for joining me. /&
