The Death Suite 7: The Enemy Within
Covers June-August 2025, following the news that I now had measurable tumours, but uncertainty remained regarding how fast they would develop. They were my 'enemy within'.
Images to be provided by the artists shown in red by June 1, 2026. Inserted as received.
* indicates there is a relevant artist statement in the notes at the end. I may add notes of my own at a later stage.
1 Emma Cousin
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If life is
just a waiting room
that must mean the main event
is yet to come.
The doctor will see us now…
2 Anne Howeson
Death goes
on
the same as life,
the only difference being
unavoidability.
Anne Howeson: A Still Small Voice, 2024 – gouache crayon conté,
35 x 45 cm *
3 Katarina Rankovic
People say I’m stoic
but I’ve hardly suffered yet
-
and am happy to wait
to find out if it’s true.
4 Blinky Bellas
Health is
the priority
and yet
if life is just about staying alive,
you might as well not.
Blinky Bellas: Bitumen and Blossom diagram, 2024 - pencil on watercolour paper, 30 x 21 cm *
5 Alex Baraitser
Yes, you
can kill time
at least for a while.
But when time kills you,
I reckon it’s for good.
Alexandra Baraitser: Upstairs Downstairs, 2023 - Oil on board, 33.5 x 23.5 cm
6 Andy Harper
is yet to come:
too bad I won't be able
to report on it.
7 Sam Jackson
The benefit of death
is plain:
there’s no need to
be afraid
of dying any more.
Sam Jackson: Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 2021- Oil, spray paint, ink and pencil on board, 32 x 22.5cm *
8 Jonny Briggs
I guess that’s a
question:
would you – if you had to –
have death
In the
event of my demise
'I told you so'
will hardly scratch the surface
of the years of expectation...
Alastair Gordon: Memento Mori, 2022 - oil and acrylic on paper, 30 x 40cm *
10 Berend Strik
Now’s the time
that should-be-dones
might fall away undone -
which is why Steph’s keen that I get
on with them!
11 Cedric Christie
A poem for
the end of time
sounds rather ambitious,
whereas a poem for the end of my time
sounds as humdrum as all the others.
Cedric Christie: Poem for the end of time, 2026 - Aluminium tube, scaffold fixings, 170 cm x 20cm x 8cm
12 Peter Peri
How would
I feel
if ‘sentenced to death’
meant ‘sentenced to life
in eternity’?
Peter Peri: 10, 000 deaths, 2014 - mixed media on canvas, 335 x 119 cm *
13 Sophy Rickett
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Having said which
life after death could be an enviable state
like solid air
or marble in full spate.
14 Sarah Pager
I’m not sure that immortality
would be good news…
But being immortal for now
will suit me fine.
Sarah Pager: suspended animation, 2025, mixed media installation 2 x 1.8 x 2 m
15 Aideen Barry
In what we
must take as a post-dualist world
does an afterlife make any sense?
If not, I'll have none of it:
I'm not indulging in an illogical practice.
16 Wanda Koop
According
to Bernard Williams
life would be terminally boring had it no termination.
Wouldn’t it be interesting
to find out if that’s true?
Wanda Koop: Flowers for Sonny Boy, 2023 - Acrylic on Canvas, 122 x 122 cm *
17 Anna Frijstein
I’m having
trouble sleeping
but ‘I don’t think I’m going to get back to sleep’
was the last thing I thought
before I went back to sleep last night.
Anna Frijstein: Your wings are growing, babe, 2026 - Ink and acrylic on found framed picture, 34 x 29 cm
18 Helena Parada Kim
I like to know the time.
Am I subconsciously worrying
about the timeless world beyond?
Helena Parada Kim: The Mourner, 2016 - oil on linen, 180 x 120 cm *
19 Gunther Herbst
Sleep in
the world
sleep out of the world…
Is the difference
really worth the fuss?
20 Koushna Navabi
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People keep telling me
I look much better
than the last time
they saw me.
Last time, though,
they said that I looked well
Koushna Navabi: Paisleys/Reflections, 2012 - Vintage Persian textile, clay, Vintage English 19th century mirror, 60 x 50 x 10 cm *
21 Tereza Buskova
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Mum complains
that her friends are all dead.
Add that to the list
of displeasures to be denied me.
22 Nadege Meriau
‘Now and
again’
according to Anne Carson,
‘you want to make a poem about death.’
What would she say about all the time?
Nadège Meriau: Les Filles de l’Air, 2024 - C-type, 48x60cm
23 Vicky Wright
Cancer? No problem
It gets me a lot of sympathy.
But symptoms?
I just can’t see the benefit.
24 Liv Fontaine
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It isn’t
that I want to be compliant:
necessity is the mother
of acceptance.
Liv Fontaine: The Pain Business, 2026 - pen and pencil on paper, 21cmx30cm
25 Chantal Powell
I'm not
quite ready
to go to a place
that doesn't exist –
and not just because it doesn't.
Chantal Powell, Night Journey, 2020 - bitumen, plaster, straw, hay, wire, 37 × 110 × 26 cm *
26
black or white, straight or gay?
How come the tide that’s turned against binaries
hasn’t got as far as life and death?
27 Lea Rose Kara
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Addiction
to life
is hardly a problem –
but that doesn’t mean
withdrawal won’t be tough.
Lea Rose Kara: Goblin's Rock (close-up), 2026 - mixed media with resin and 30 handmade pigments derived from toxic mushrooms and poisonous flowers, 28 x 25 x 16.5 cm *
28 Alex Hudson
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Gimme an
L!
Gimme an I!
Well, OK then, if you insist…
Gimme a D.
29 Hermione Allsopp
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You think I’m macabre?
Victor Hugo kept one bedroom aside
ready to occupy
only when he was dying.
30 Mary Yacoob
‘Maybe
next year’
has become a commitment I'm happy to make,
chances being I won’t be around
to have to follow through.
31 Susie Hamilton
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My bowels
control me
not because all my cancer is bowel cancer,
so much as that its movements
determine the nature of my day.
Susie Hamilton: Moorgate, 2025 - acrylic and charcoal on canvas, 183x170cm *
32 DJ Roberts
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Given that
death
will have his day,
I see no harm
in making him wait.
DJ Roberts: ‘Gridlock’, 2026 - Graphite on paper, 12 x 18cm *
33 Sam Owen Hull
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People say
I’m brave
but bravery is a choice,
and I haven’t had
any choices to make.
Sam Owen Hull: Maquette for a painting 0804, 2026 - Acrylic, embroidery, wood and staples, 40cm x 40cm
34 Lana Locke
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My new
regime
is stomach ache and sleep.
I can’t think why
I’m following it.
35 Andrea V Wright
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Pain is
how
you know you’re alive
when you’re wondering if
you might be better dead.
Andrea V Wright: Cradle, 2025/26 - Pigmented Latex, Cherry Blossom Limb *
36 Julie Cockburn
I love
life and
if I change my mind
under cancer’s persuasions
don’t let that count for anything.
Julie Cockburn: Blossom and Peat, 2021 - Hand embroidery and spray paint on collaged found photographs *
37 Nicky Deeley
I’m told
it’s a matter
of ‘when’, not ‘if’ –
something I share with everyone alive
and everyone yet to come…
Nicky Deeley: Seeing and holding, 2021 - Watercolour and dye on paper, 21 x 28 cm *
38 Gretchen Andrew
All I
really know of death
is how to live without it
and I'm not sure that's going to prove
of value for very much longer.
Gretchen Andrew: For Paul, 2025 - Oil on canvas, 152 x 152 cm *
39 Theo Ellison
‘Why me?’
is an illogical question:
my asking it ensures
it could be no-one else.
Theo Ellison: Aquascutum, 2022 - detail from single-channel video, 5 min 11 sec
40 Robyn Lichfield
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What do
you call
the dead’s own territory,
now that there’s no heaven or hell?
Is the dead zone simply the cosmos?
Robyn Litchfield: Spectral Lure, 2023 - oil on linen, 120 x 95 cm
41 Sarah Roberts
Steph is
feeling bad today
and that’s not good:
she ought to leave that
kind of thing
to me.
42 Hannah Knox
I guess
there’s nothing else to do
but go on waiting for the miracle
that it would take
for me to believe in miracles.
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Can I go
on
living this way?
Of course I can:
it’s how I mean to die.
44 Blue Curry
‘Fuck cancer!’
is a sentiment I’ve seen around, and
share.
But has any body worked out
how to do it?
45 Jana Emburey
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This is my
twist
on a very old saw:
it must be good that life is going
to leave me wanting more.
46 Fay Ballard
There's
more to life
than dying.
That said, it is an interest
that absolutely everybody holds.
47 Emma Witter
It’s said that death
puts life in context,
but does it? I reckon
it’s the other way around.
Emma Witter: This Is All We Have, 2024 - Vintage mirror, brass, chicken feet bone, pig teeth, 30 x 50 x 10cm
48 Dominic Shepherd
Death is the essence
You can refuse to drink,
to eat, to breathe, even to live -
but you can't refuse to die.
49 Holly Stevenson
It's bad
enough feeling
like death warmed up
without it being your body's way
of warming up for death.
50 Marcelle Hanselaar
According to the ludicrous Wilhelm Reich
cancer is caused by sexual inhibition.
Would I dismiss that so readily, though,
were it not too late for an intense campaign to reverse it?
Marcelle Hanselaar: Memento Mori, The invitation, 2025 - etching/aquatint, 20x25 cm plate, 38x43 cm paper, ed. 30. *
51 EJ Major
with the fact of death.
It’s only the timing and the manner
I might like to adjust…
EJ Major: from a distance, 2007 - Giclée print from the 50 image series based on William Faulkner’s novel 'As I lay Dying', each 13 x 21cm. *
52 Claudia Carr
I eat, yet
still feel desperately hungry
The doctor says the tumour’s press
is mixing up my signals.
I’d like to give it signals of my own.
53 Ruth Fuller
People
think I’ve suffered
I haven’t, much, and here’s the proof:
I’d happily live
the last three years again.
Ruth Fuller: Chatter Chatter, 2025 - oil on board,18cm x 13cm *
54 Wojciech Antoni Sobczynski
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‘Bring on the agony!
That’s an experience
I need to respond to…’
is not what I’m tempted to say.
| Wojciech Antoni Sobczynski: Ash Variations I, 2026 – ash, ash on canvas, 45 x 64 x 24 cm * |
55 Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva
the same thing as colon cancer?
If so, I’d sooner avoid the bowel:
for something comes after a colon.
56 Kristian Evju
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It’s only
just occurred to me
that ‘nothing lasts for ever’
describes the state of death
with some exactness.
57 Liz Elton
Time to
move on
as I’m reaching the stage
at which chemo seems unlikely
to make me feel worse than I’m feeling already.
Liz Elton: Plants for Paul, 2026 - Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, Edition of 5, 25x33 cm, *
58 Sadie Hennessy
It seems
six months
of palliative chemo
will extend my life by about six months.
Let’s hope it’s not the same six months.
Sadie Hennessy: Evening Jacket, 2024 - Mixed Media, 70 x 50 x 20 cm *
59 Troika
even though it
causes death.
I wouldn't be
without it
for any other
reason.
60 Sara Rossberg
There’s so
much stuff
I want to get done
I'm seriously thinking of being awkward
and simply refusing to go.
61 John Peter Askew
I thank my
tumours
for the chance to engage at a sensible pace
with the coming of death. Just think:
I could have been hit by a bus, and ended none the wiser.
John Peter Askew: Exit, 2025 [2008], photograph, 10 x 15cm *
62 Dagmara Genda
This dying
business
turns out to be pretty long-winded:
it’s almost as bad
as living.
63 Liane Lang
Death may be
the end of thought,
but it’s given me plenty
to think about.
64 Alison Gill
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Of
course I want to be there
when it happens –
why miss out on a one-off experience?
–
but now, it seems, I'll have to wait a
while.
65 Dillwyn Smith
So much speculation
so little substance…
Is it time
I killed my death stuff off?
66 Laura Santamaria
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If this is going to be
my last line, I’d better hang on
until the end of the
quatrain
if this is going to
be.
Notes
These poems cover June-August 2025,
following the news that I now had measurable tumours in three places –
mesentery, abdominal wall, and right lung - with suspicions of a fourth in the
bowel. I was having some symptoms – tiredness, stomach aches, back ache,
bowel irregularities – which the doctors said were consistent with the tumour
developments. The tumours were small (in the 1-2 cm range) and not currently
showing signs of rapid growth – when they do, palliative chemotherapy will be
set up. So the tumours were my ‘enemy within’. By the end of this period, they were starting to grow faster.
Steph, I should explain, is my wonderfully supportive wife.
'The main event' - thanks to Anne Howeson
‘Is bowel cancer’ - Punctuation puns
aside, my primary cancer is of the colon, but my doctors always refer to it as ‘bowel
cancer’. That’s a broad term referring to cancer in the large bowel, which
includes both the colon and the rectum. Essentially, colon cancer is a
type of bowel cancer. Secondary cancers arising from it are all 'bowel cancer', and treated as such.
Notes from artists on their images:
Hermione Allsopp: As part of a sculptural practice I make collages using photographs of my sculptures. These are often combined with interior spaces, to create a dialogue between presence and absence. In this instance I have used Nadar’s ‘Image of Victor Hugo on his deathbed. May 22, 1885.’
'Je vois une lumière noire.' - Victor Hugo
Gretchen Andrew, known for her conceptually-driven practice, comments that this 'is part of what I do outside of my public career. I'm a very traditional painter at heart and I think (lol of course I think) quite a lot about how intellectual and white collar art making, broadly and my own included, has become. These works are private in a way and therefore feel right for this context. Because I don't make these works for exhibition or assertion into the art world, it didn't have a name until now.'
John Peter Askew: In my end is my beginning T.S. Eliot, ‘Four Quartets’
This is from my series Chasing All the Circles in the World where each of the 88 photographs has a different circle motif. The series embodies the existential sense of going round and round, which is what we are all doing inside every moment/ day/ year. And on a cosmic level too.
Exit is the final image in the series.
Fay Ballard: There’s more to life than dying, but death is always present in life. The Dock holds life and death in its taproot; as life grows so does death. I dug up the Dock with a forked spade in the rain and drew from life, keeping it alive in a bucket of water between sittings. A race against time towards its own demise. A plant recognised for its medicinal properties as a liver tonic, laxative and treatment for anemia, its drawing becomes an expression of grief for my mother who died in 1964. Impossible to part with, the watercolour holds my own mortality.
Jonny Briggs: When my grandma passed, I was helping to clear her home. I was struck by the notepad next to her chair. Although there was no ink on it, you could still see a palimpsest of impressions from past pages. I had so much to do, yet in that moment I stopped - I was impacted in particular by the indentation of a full stop, and kept looking at it. I think of the silence to the full stop, the wordlessness. Although often thought of as an ending, I like to think of the full stop as a moment of transition, between the words. Between an ending and a beginning. I like how something so small looks like a large impact - almost like a crater. The indentation is on the page beneath where it was actually written, so is a trace. The title is a nod to the other side of the paper, yet also references the term for when we pass.
Claudia Carr: It was just a painting of twigs and a couple of white gourds, but after I'd finished it it felt more like the turmoil of an open sea. And then when I read the poem the painting suddenly took on for me the turmoil of a more internal ocean.
Julie Cockburn: I source old photographs, postcards, and second-hand books from the internet or car boot fairs – found images that I alter using traditional techniques such as hand embroidery, painting, inlay, and screen printing. Here there’s a circularity, if that’s the right word, to both poem and image.
Emma Cousin: I recently installed an artwork in a medical institution and became a wall in the rhythm of the place. The waiting, circular pacing and the sounds of time passing as fractious layers. I became one of the watching and being watched. It was always too hot and aesthetically bare, reinforcing a need for a state of patience, to bear it and bare with it. The heating system was mounted on the ceiling, that literally held the atmosphere down from above and pressed on it oppressively. Bodies seemed to move whilst not getting anywhere, looping back on themselves in a routine of mapping without momentum. The arenas that hold this space are a frame for the human experience. The squat proportions of the ward, the TV as exterior window as well as commentary on what’s going on inside, a sort of tension-measuring device, the actual windows that don’t open, the open- plan reinforcement of disconnectedness and the humour involved in the marking of time, in all its guises. Walking round and round, making tea, staring at nothing at all. Waiting to be seen.
Anna Frijstein: The Angel Wings series came about while going through a long period of broken nights with back pain. Bones hurting. While I lie there awake, I fantasise about having wings. It seems that more sleepless souls share my thoughts online, as one of the memes says, “No babe, that back pain is definitely not because of your posture. Your wings are growing in, you angel. Your wings are growing, babe”.
Ruth Fuller: This miniature painting is actually four. Chatter Chatter is the visible work, underneath which are three figurative paintings, like strata, existing unseen. Memories and imaginings, a collapse of thought to invisibility. A search, in painting, for a reflection of something greater.
Alison Gill is currently studying the MFA Creative Practice -
Dance Professional at Trinity Laban and Independent Dance in London. She
explains that ‘In the 1990s, I regularly exhibited sculpture and other works in
Brussels at Sabine Watchers Fine Arts. Now I am here, working with my body as
source material. Returning felt both strange and familiar, embarking on a
week-long workshop with choreographer Meg Stuart / Damaged Goods at Tictac Art Centre,
opening new creative possibilities in live art. Crude Saturdays was an
opportunity, why not? It didn't go as planned. This fits with the context of
improvisation. Music was to act as a stabilising force amid uncertainty, but
the tracks I had chosen ended up in a random shuffle. Surprise! Embracing the
unpredictability of what followed is a practice in itself. At this stage, I
tune into my body's responses and pause, being in
a state of 'knowing and not knowing’. This is how I found the poem ‘Of course,
I want to be there’, assertively resonant, rich in curiosity, desire and wry
humour, embodying the ambiguity of life.'
Alastair Gordon: This was one of a series I made several years ago after the death of our unborn daughter. Something of a meditation on mortality, which seemed to match.
Susie Hamilton: This painting is from my ‘Underground’ series of drawings made on the London Tube. It is called ‘Moorgate’ since its ashen, ghostly nature alludes to the 1975 disaster at the station. I chose it to go with quatrain 31 because the reference to bowels suggested the diluted acrylic paint of the lower body of this figure. The unconfined fluidity of the paint and the quatrain itself also recall Psalm 22: ‘I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: My heart is like wax; It is melted in the midst of my bowels.’
Andy Harper: Part of a series of paintings inspired by J.G. Ballard's 1962 science fiction novel 'The Drowned World'. The story portrays a post-apocalyptic and unrecognisable London submerged by water and tropical temperatures. The few characters in the book are isolated in the city, while the rest of humanity has chosen refuge at the cooler poles.
Sadie Hennessy: One night, when the time comes I'll slip into the sea in a gold dress and an evening jacket. Rosemary for Remembrance. Vodka for courage. Nytol for oblivion. Feathers for glamour. Stones for Virginia Woolf... In line with the sense of humorous despair in my chosen stanza.
Anne Howeson: The night my mother died, I dreamt of a figure floating in a white dress. My mother loved flowers, she grew roses and azaleas in a half moon shaped flower bed. The week before my mother died, there was a flood in our village. She held her skirt up above the flowing water. The Temptation of Eve by Gislebertus at Autun and Carpaccio’s dreaming figure of St Ursula in Venice were on my mind.
Alex Hudson: I think, paired with this painting, the 'devil may care' tone of the poem folds in on itself due to the weight of the words... And indeed the weight of the lid too.
Sam Owen Hull: On looking though Volume I of 'The Death Suite', I felt familiarity with some of the images, realising these were of Southampton General Hospital. I have deeply rooted connections with that building. I grew up in Southampton, my Mum worked there as a neonatal nurse for many years; I had taken a photo of the same staircase you also photographed during one of many visits to my Mum at the end of her life. At that time, I felt some resonance as I went up and down it, remembering the same staircase with its curvy handrail from my own run-ins with that hospital as a child. It seemed to say something about the ups and downs of existence, the layering and interlinking of experiences over time, the inevitability of some outcomes.
Maquette for a painting 0804 takes a form that reverses the usual roles of paint and thread - rebalancing the usual hierarchies of fine art and craft - with the 'ground' constructed from sparsely woven paintskin strips, and the 'image' stitched through the structure of the weave. Due to the openness of the weave, the stitched image would have to form where it was able to, making the end result somewhat unpredictable. In relation to your poem, I thought this process of making reflected the lack of choice, working with what is there. The final result reminds me of tree trunks swallowing fences (edaphoecotropism), with the tension of the thread distorting the weave of the paint.
Lea Rose Kara: Taking on a more literal interpretation of this poem, I wanted to respond to the idea of addiction and withdrawal when it came to taking substances, but with a twist from Nature, as is the case with my artworks. Plants and fungi provide the foundational core structures for a massive portion of the pharmaceutical industry, with some medically approved painkillers, such as opiates, deriving from the opium poppy flower, which, of course, also produces opium, one of the world’s oldest recreational drugs. Or it can be modified to make heroin, a class A drug. Humanity has been taking drugs (derived from nature) for as long as we have existed as a form of escapism, seeking truth or entering a higher level of human consciousness via psychedelic plants and mushrooms in spiritual settings and rituals. Whilst this can be self-inflicted, poisonous plants and mushrooms make up much of British mythology and folklore, from the mystical stories of goblins to witches to real-life records of scorned lovers, family members and royalty using nature’s poison to get rid of their lovers or enemies. My ‘Goblin’s Rock’ sculpture specifically explores the lore of the forest goblins in mythology and contains 30 different toxic and poisonous (if ingested in large quantities) plants and mushrooms. Some of the plants used were: poppy, foxglove, narcissus, violet and bluebells.
Helena Parada Kim: The image shows a man wearing the traditional Korean mourning attire, worn upon the death of a parent. The eldest son held the role of chief mourner and often wore the garment for an extended period. Made of coarse hemp or linen, the clothing symbolized austerity and filial piety. In public, the mourner might partially cover his face and wear a large hat that shielded him from his surroundings. This is an expression of the Confucian influence in Korea. Today, this attire is rarely worn, but it remains an important cultural symbol.
Wanda Koop: Canadian painter Wanda Koop is best known for spaciously minimalist landscapes, but this is from a series which strikes a deeply personal chord, reflecting on the artist’s family history. Her gallery, Blouin Division, explains that Koop’s parents and grandparents were expelled from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, so ‘there’s a sense of history repeated as Ukrainians once again suffer the indignities of war and displacement…. Ordinary flowers are imbued with a cosmic resonance symbolic of hope and harmony. At once still-lives and ethereal constellations, Koop’s vibrant windows of subtly shifting colour frame as a floating garden the fragile cycle of life’.
Robyn Litchfield: My paintings are representations of sublime encounters with pristine and untouched landscapes, based on my own travel and photography. Drawing from archival material and personal documents relating to the early exploration and colonisation of New Zealand, I aim to reimagine and examine the experience of forays into a hitherto unknown space. Through the idea of wilderness and the unknown as a terrain of the mind, landscape becomes a template for exploring personal history, cultural identity, alienation and a sense of belonging. ‘Spectral Lure’ (image: Benjamin Deakin) focuses on the lowland forests and wetlands of New Zealand, which once extended to almost all of New Zealand’s shoreline: less than 15% of this complex ecosystem remains. The fertile swampland was drained to form productive farmland in the name of civilisation leaving a fragmented forest at threat from weed invasion and pollutants. As the seminal New Zealand poet James K Baxter put it in ‘Haast Pass’, 1944: ‘In the dense bush, all leaves and bark exude / The odour of mortality; for plants / Accept their death like stones / Rooted forever in time’s torrent bed.’
EJ Major:
Peter Peri: The title is kind of an amalgamation of two quotes:
First this famous one from the Tao Te Ching: 'The Tao gives birth to the One. The One gives birth to the Two. The Two give birth to the Three. The Three give birth to the ten thousand things. The ten thousand things are bolstered by Yin and wield Yang. Together they harmonize as Breath.'
Sarah Roberts links her work to a poem referring to my wife, who has a passion for horses:
Holly Stevenson: By the term sticky libido I mean to articulate a sense of hellish confusion, a sort of clinging on to everything and anything in an attempt to make sense/right the self in to a clearer perspective…
References
'Having said which' - I had in mind Edmund Spenser: 'Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, / Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please' from 'The Faerie Queene' (Book I, Canto IX), 1590.
‘Given that death’ refers to
Shakespeare’s ‘The Life and Death of King Richard the Second’, Act III, Scene 2
from 1595: ‘Cry woe, destruction, ruin, and decay: The worst is death, and
death will have his day’. It is thought likely – though it isn’t what happens
in the play – that Richard II (1367-1400) was starved to death in captivity
after being deposed by the future Henry IV in 1399. If so, not the way to go…
‘You think I’m macabre?’ The bedroom –
including skull-themed décor and a rather splendid bed - is in Hauteville
House, St Peter Port, Guernsey where Hugo lived (but did not die), from 1856 to
1870.
‘A poem for the end of time’ echoes
Olivier Messiaen’s ‘Quartet for the End of Time’, 1941
‘According to the ludicrous
Wilhelm Reich’ cites the theory set out in ‘The Discovery of the Orgone, Volume
II - The Cancer Biopathy’, 1948.
‘Death is the essence’ –
according to Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) ‘Death is the essence of
life. Life is an approaching death.’
‘All I really know of death’ - love and death are often connected:
Karen Carpenter sang in ‘Goodbye to Love’ (1972), that all she know of love was
how to live without it.
‘According to Bernard Williams’ – in ‘The Makropulos Case:
Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality’, 1973
‘Of course I want to be there’ – Woody Allen’s 1975 play ‘Death’
contains the line ‘It's not that I'm afraid to die, I just don't want to be
there when it happens’.
‘I guess there’s nothing else to do’ refers to
Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Waiting for the Miracle’, 1992 - ‘Nothing left to do
/ When you've got to go on waiting / Waiting for the miracle to come’.
‘Now and again’ - Anne Carson: ‘Martha Going’, 2024.
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