Notes from the North: Think of Death 2

fredagen den 9:e september 2011

Think of Death 2—Forget About It

Just a few days after the artists installed it, the ‘Think of Death’ sign above the tunnel to Gothenburg's largest shopping center was taken down by the municipal authority Parks and Environmental Management.

Citizens and the shopping center's representatives had complained. They've said death has no place there, obviously serving the assumption that a memento mori would impede mindless profiteering and the mechanization of public space.

Like good cultural soldiers, municipal employees took the sign down. The official statement is they thought vandals had simply erected a joke. And yet, if our society could truly come to joke about death, I suspect we wouldn't purge the public sphere of its every trace.

I ran into a Christian discussing with someone who found the sign morbid. The Christian thought that death should not be pushed away, which I agreed to. However they then went off into wishful thinking, saying 'death is a result of sin, but if you're good Jesus will let you live forever.' In other words, the Christian is in on the right path, but not willing to follow it to its end. Instead he finds a wacky, self-contradictory solution to his death anxiety and quotes John 8:51: "whoever obeys my word will never see death."

First conclusions about Gothenburg's memento mori drama:

1. Reality was upset (i.e. reality broke through our lies). Ideology demanded action: remove the disturbance, return things to ‘normal’ (i.e. falsify reality).

2. Municipal representative Stanley Jonsson said: "Had we known that there was a permit for the sign, we wouldn't have taken it down." In other words, they took it down because they felt they're supposed to maintain order, not act as mindful citizens. In the words of my friend who commented on the this: "The most important thing is the permit, not the content."

3. Like I wrote in a post on Death in November 2009, a memento mori is an excellent way to make people not think of death.

4. Swedish author Harry Martinson wrote: "Nearness is death's deepest name." In a society of alienated, suppressed people, the "logical" choice is to push death away. Tänk inte på döden. Non memento mori.