Culture Art Death

In 1994 I received an advertisement for a funeral home in my home mailbox. It read something about getting to know my "quiet neighbours" and informed me about their burial and cremation services and how to pre-arrange my disposal upon my untimely demise, as not to put an unnecessary financial burden on those I leave behind. I was somewhat shocked, in my own naiveté (or ignorance), that something that would have been considered tasteless to say the least, down right morbid to say the most, has become acceptable, even commonplace. I have since received enough of these pamphlets in my mailbox from various funeral homes that I no longer react to them and just toss them in the recycling bin with the rest of the junk mail.

In much the same fashion I, along with thousands of other movie viewers, am no longer stirred by scenes of death and violence in films and videos. Tarrantino uses violence to carry his stories and get a laugh. Swarzenegger and Stalone are unintentionally comical in their over the top machismo violent portrayals. Van Damme, Seagal, and all the other lesser known stars of revenge type flicks that have very little in the way of plot line in their movies but lot's of violence and big death, perpetuate this genre to the tune multi-millions of dollars return on formula based pulp. The home video market has, no pun intended, blown this genre wide open with many titles being released straight to video. On television I see this same desensitizing aimed at kids; "Extreme times call for an extreme hero. New G.I.Joe Extreme." Our culture is plainly obsessed with death. Even in the analyzing of these violent flicks we can't escape the violent over tones. The movies made by the Stalone's and Swarzenegger's, et al, of the movie industry are analyzed and criticized by using a system of measurement known as the "Kill Ratio". Parents spend thousands to buy the latest, most up-to-date computer so their kids can play the latest "kill 'em all" arcade type game now available for the home PC or Mac. These same games have various levels to them with names like; Non lethal, Brutal Violence, Ultra Violence. All describing how bad the player's avatar can hurt other's in the game or can get hurt itself. Novice, intermediate, advanced just doesn't cut it any more. Billions are spent by the advertising industry offering images laden with death to sell everything from food to food processors to air travel to cars. An early 80's edition of Rolling Stone magazine featured Jim Morrison on the cover with the caption "He's hot, He's sexy, He's dead".

It was with these thoughts in mind that I sat down with tape rolling and had a discussion with Toronto based artist/sculptor/painter Mark Adair. Mark's work is itself full of violent imagery beautifully rendered in wood, bone, lead or any other material he comes across in his travels. His work is a dichotomy that leaves a lasting impression. After seeing his work in a collaborative show entitled Torontoniesis, a friend commented; "It must be art, it disturbs me." Toronto Life's March 1996 issue referred to his piece entitled Choker as "...powerful symbolism: autoerotic asphyxiation as a metaphor for the dark side of the pleasure principle." I wanted to find out from Mark, as a purveyor and reflector of popular culture, why he thought our culture was so obsessed with death. Here is our conversation.

Neil MacKay: Is the death imagery conscious in your work?

Mark Adair: First thing I want to say is that I don't think my work is so much about death as I think that it's about trying to resolve all those problems that arouse in my mind around the early eighties when the nuclear fear was at its worse. Why would you get into a situation where you created a world like that? It's something like, we were all surrounded by this craziness so I said to myself well, why is it we're doing this?

I did Toronto Bank Robbery at that time and that is the first work where I took a look at constructing passions to fight that. You know, like how do you...if you're living in a culture that's doing something wrong...you know this new Joni Mitchell song How do you Stop?, the first time I heard it I interpreted it in much the same way. If you're in this culture, you're in this society and the society is doing certain things, how do get that society to stop? So the work, my work, wasn't so much concerned with death as it was trying to avoid it.

NM: I heard Ian Brown on CBC [radio] this past weekend talking about how himself and some of his friends have this almost cold war nostalgia. I'm assuming he's about the same age as you. He says they grew up fearing those same fears you mentioned of nuclear obliteration and what is this world doing, but now they're saying the unknown fear, talks of black market sales of Russian plutonium, etc., is worse than what the known fear was.

MA: Maybe he must be a little younger because that's a strange idea. Of course I grew up before the worst of it. [A friend] remembers the Berlin crisis of 1950's. She remembers when they were in Germany [living on a Canadian military base], having to keep [packed] suitcases by the door and they had to be ready to go at any instant and they all these drills all the time. So you'd get up in the middle of the night and of course you wouldn't know if it was real, because it was the army. And the effect this would have on the children...terrifying.

I remember various periods, there was the Cuban missile crisis. I would have been very young then, and then there was a lull. I guess if you were on the inside maybe there wouldn't have been a lull, but I think maybe there would have been. But you know what was the worse thing for me was when, and not too many people discuss this, I don't know whether people have forgotten, but the whole thing about automated response, and that's when I got active. It's like ah well, we're handing it over to computers. That's crazy.

The other reason I mention this in relation to Ian Brown, is that I don't see that anything has changed. I don't have any kind of nostalgia because I don't see that anything is any different. It's just like one of these hydras and one of the heads is atomic weapons and another head would be, for example, population/overpopulation another example would be global warming and another head would be pollution and how we can't stop. We just keep doing it. Like the people in the third world, of course they want cars, of course they want all the luxuries and now to me it's just the same society misbehaving itself. So I don't think that anything's changed. I don't see that there's any standing down.

Other than that, is the death imagery conscious in my work? Well, yeah it is. It's not the thrust of my work but it's a kind of polemic for me because even though it's the positive I'm interested in, I think it's necessary to state, I don't know if necessary for everybody, but I just put the two of them up there. Like in this piece here (Chaise Longue), the whole point of this piece is to put a very small image of death into a huge context. So what this piece is about, it's about linguistic patterns. How we have formulated the image of the tree. The actual [piece] is made out of wood. That is black walnut. That is the thing itself and if you look at it here and there you can actually see it, how rough it is, although there's no piece with the actual bark on it. And then there's the pictures of the trees [carved into the base]. And then you finally go up to the top and you see the medieval pattern of the tree, the roots and the branches. At the top at the back all you really have is the abstract patterning. What I was trying to do, to get at, is how in societies, and this is something other people have talked about, as the society becomes more developed and this might go in cycles, it can become more and more distant from where it came from. So you start as an agriculture society and then a few hundred years down the road you become this highly technological society. Even though the society and it's myths are the same, it's visual imagery becomes distant from its, well in this case [Chaise Longue] literally, from its roots and it can become disconnected and when things become disconnected you have a problem. Because things get forgotten. They get abstracted to the point where there's no meaning. And when you're in a position then when you have myths and mythical references and you don't understand them. Then you can be wandering around with no clear understanding apriories.

NM: I've been reading about the notion of God, or [of how] our previous notion of God is dead and [how] God is now becoming a Theology of Technology. Where technology is becoming God. People are using mystical, religious, and quasi spiritual terminology when referring to computers and their possible functions.

MA: I heard an interview with a guy who was saying that we shouldn't be afraid of technology. We should really start moving toward technological implants. Not bio-implants but technological implants even to the point of having our brains...

NM: Downloaded into computers?

MA: (nods) He actually gave an example that if you had a car accident and became a total amnesiac , if you ever regained your health, you could have all that information uploaded and then you wouldn't lose it.

NM: There's also a movement of that mode of thought where they say the flesh is obsolete, it's just meat . I'm reading a book right now by Mark Dery, who's a current writer/commentator on that whole phenomena. The book is called Escape Velocity. He's using the term in regards to humanity being able to become one with technology and that whole movement of people who want to just forget the body and download themselves into the computer and live in the net. They want escape velocity.

MA: I don't have any problem with it. I don't know what it means. I'd have to know what it meant to have a problem with it. One of the things I was talking to [an acquaintance] about is that he [has a friend] who works as a social worker with families where someone is dying of cancer... Death is stupid. Stupid. I mean it's a stupid thing to watch. I can understand people wanting to avoid it. Decay is stupid. I don't want to decay.

NM: Death is stupid and it's brutal and it's hard, but I also think it's very necessary.

MA: Oh yeah, so do I. I mean that's...that's not...that's a very difficult question isn't it? It doesn't really matter, I mean it's a given. These techno-guys, they're saying well let's op the eight, get rid of it, let's circumvent death.

NM: My problem with those "techno-guys" who propose that theory is that I see technology as a means, not an end. It's a tool. It's not a lifestyle or a religion.

MA: Well, William Gibson, that book of his I read that you leant me [Neuromancer], that was a pretty exciting idea. It's had a new twist and the new twist is that you could inject yourself though technology, not into maybe a different awareness, but awareness of a different thing and that's exciting. I mean awareness of a different thing.

NM: Is the fixation on death in your pieces an attempt of working out your own personal dark side? An attempt at examining your own apocalypse?

MA: This is a very interesting question to me because just very, very recently its come to me that I have a dark side. I never actually thought of myself as having a dark side. It's only the last two months or three months where I thought... Before that I thought that I was just like everyone else.

NM: Wow, from an outsider witnessing your work for the last ten years, seeing Twister and Toronto Bank Robbery right up to your current stuff, I thought you were really in touch with your dark side.

MA: Well I think I'm so in touch with it, that's the point, I don't see it as a dark side. Now I'm starting to see it as a handicap. I'm starting to wonder... On a professional level, if I do very well on the grant system, but I don't do very well on the commercial side...You know that's necessary now in the nineties to start moving that way. I know it just can't be...I know the work can't be all bad or I wouldn't get the grants because it's a jury of peers. The work can't be all bad. There is a time when you have to say to yourself am I on the right track, maybe I'm on the wrong track, maybe my work's no good? And I can't say that. I can't justify that remark in my own mind.

NM: The only thing I could say about your work is...if anything it's too dark for mainstream.

MA: Yeah. Yeah... it's disturbing me for the first time. I genuinely never thought of it as a dark side but now I'm starting to understand that people of my generation are rapidly moving towards a very middle class style. And I should be too, but I can't.

NM: Well, it's not who you are.

MA: It's not who I am. But you see, it's not a dark side... it's all dark. There's no light side and dark side, it's like I'm only, I'm all lopped sided, you see there's only a dark side. There's no light side.

NM: I think there is definitely a light side but it manifests itself in other areas.

MA: Right. But not in the art. Now water colours... there's a certain objectivity. Oh I sold a couple last week. There's just objectivity...you know, that's just objectivity and incidentally, on the water colours I work on the same series of problems. Like when I go out camping and I'm sitting there, I'm saying well, what is our problem here? I think one of our problems is that we don't really like the way, in the west, we don't like the world the way it is. This is no mystery to you, you know about all this. We're at war with the world the way it is. When I go out into the...camping and I see the world, that natural world, because this is the natural world too. I just want to see it I don't want to improve it.

But yeah, that's very interesting, that was an interesting question. So I would have to say no I wasn't working out my personal dark side, I was saying that it's just all dark. When I do sculpture that is the only... those are the problems I work on. That is what I think about.

NM: Back at York [university] in art school has it always from day one...

MA: Yes. Yeah, I can remember work that I did in right high school that was the same. And people thought that maybe I was being melodramatic or something but I wasn't. It's just what I was interested in and even since I've been accused of the same things. I used to know a guy in politics who said that people did various things in politics for various reasons but really he thought it was all because of personality. So I wouldn't say that my work is an intellectual decision. I would say that it's just my job. It's who I am. I go about doing my job but no I'm not exploring my dark side. My dark side is actually much darker than this. I don't want to go down there. I mean I've been there and it's very bleak. Like I thought this book about Kali [Song of Kali by Dan Simmons], at some point I thought the guy really blew it. He showed really how shallow he is. He has no real wells of despair. Because if he did...

NM: Not like...talking about Song of Kali to tie in to what you mean, what I think you mean, if you go back and read Nightshift...You said to me along time ago, that collection of short stories by Stephen King...

MA: Oh right.

NM: ...that these were just plain, simple nasty for the sake of being nasty.

MA: Very disturbing.

NM: I remember reading some of those when I was home sick and I had to put the book down for a while because they were just like, there's just no redeeming factors. It's just here is just plain, simple rottenness, read it.

MA: Yeah, that's right. He went all the way down.

NM: They're not fun to read.

MA: No. They're scary. Very disturbing. Especially the one about the war criminal and his relations with the suburban boy. I can't remember the story line. I can remember the effect it had on me and the nature of the subject matter and the...

Anyways that brought my, brought me to focus when the whole...when all these atrocities happened in Bosnia. No problems relating to that. I know what was going on there. I don't know what was going on there but I have a very good idea what I think was going on there. Yeah, I guess my work addresses some of that but no...

NM: You're not exploring it.

MA: I know what's going on there, I don't need to explore it.

NM: Have you had much personal experience with death?

MA: No. Other than my father dying and watching other people's pet's die. I've had to do that. It's doesn't bother me, well it does bother me but it doesn't bother me as much it bothers them.

NM: Are you afraid of death?

MA: No.

NM: Is death within the art cathartic for the artist or the audience or both?

MA: I don't know. I didn't really think until recently much about catharsis but [a friend of mine] went to see a play and she said that she wanted scream at [her husband]. Just before they went in to see the play he said something that pissed her off and she said to me that she really wanted to SCREAM. She said to [her husband] "I want to scream", and he cringes because he figures she's going to scream right there in the theatre. She says "but don't worry I won't scream here". And then the play was about the same thing and during the play this woman [in the play] does that. She screams BLAAAAA, and [this friend] said she felt better instantly.

I don't think people want to think about death at all. I don't think you'd see much catharsis. I think people think a lot about killing but I don't think people really think very much about dying.

I think about mythology and some of the myths I know have a greater attention to the subject and its fine points than anything like... Mark Rothko the painter, he apparently was concerned with death. Was it Mozart who was apparently obsessed with death? Mark Rothko did the big black canvases. And they're contemplative and I think that's very real attention the subject. You know that whole quiet... I don't know about catharsis. I don't know anything about that.

NM: That's interesting. Does all artwork contain or emerge from a notion of death?

MA: No, but some of it sure does.

NM: Do you think the image of death is more prevalent in art in the nineties than in the past?

MA: This is that subject of the millennium...

NM: Yeah, that ties in with something else I was thinking about. Obviously I'm not an art historian, but to me the most recorded death scene is the crucifixion. Its also become the most eroticised...

MA: I'm not an art historian but if I was an art historian I would be able to say to you that Christian imagery is pretty small potatoes. And even though I wouldn't argue what you just said, it's like the Indian movie industry is huge and then if you take that and put the Hong Kong movie industry on it and one thing and another it starts to leave the Christian movie industry far behind in terms of production. And you just take, just the shear volume of production and their concerns, well you've got to do the same thing then with the history of art. And the death imagery. Yeah, a lot of people talked about that and I think you're absolutely right in terms of the crucifixion. Though I think that the crucifixion does say something about western attitudes towards the spirit and I think for me the feminist argument that the crucifixion has so much to do with blood and usurping the feminine role in creation. I think they're right in saying that by usurping that you also get into a kind of strange contamination because it's a preposterous notion. The bleeding wound being male. It's a preposterous notion to try and take the feminine away from women and take it into men, take it all that onto yourself. It can't work. And you enter into a kind of cultural sickness.

I think that in that sense there's a real damning history of death imagery but it's the worse sense too because it can't even be positive, it can't be you know, you say cathartic, because it's primarily fucked up. It's sick. It's a killing imagery. It's a lie. Right, that's what my piece Daphne and Apollo was all about. Apollo had this great bleeding wound. It's like if you try to construct a whole history of imagery on a false notion then you're constructing a building on a bad foundation and it will fall down. More to the point, you take a culture and you base that culture on a whole series of ideas and some of them are fundamentally flawed, you've got a mess. No matter how many of the rest of those ideas are good...

NM: That's pretty much the whole history of western society. Or any major society based on religion.

MA: I don't know about other societies. But I do know that some societies have escaped that. But you know, it is pretty universally true. You're quite right that there is this negative attitude towards the feminine.

NM: What are your views of contemporary popular art and or artists and the death symbolism used within the mass media? As an example; the Gulf war became a video game. The more death imagery they can get without actually showing bloody bodies...there's just this detachment. They want to show death and destruction but they don't want to show babies and women slaughtered in the streets lying in pools of blood.

MA: I think that goes back to this other question too; is it cathartic for the artist and the audience? Well that was death within art and I took that question earlier very specifically and that is Death as in personal death. I think now violence in film or video games, I don't know much about catharsis again, but I know that it serves a purpose something like that. Like I don't think that we are meant to live the lives we live. I mean we're mammals and one thing and another and I don't think we live at our optimum and I think a lot of these things serve to release a lot of that stuff that has to be released.

Nietzsche in the Anti-Christ argues against Christian culture. He says that Christian culture is dumbifying. He argues in favour of the older European Celtic Hero culture where it was through great deeds and great exertion that you got ahead and that was laudable. He had said that was what we should return to. We were stronger. We were more vital. And see the Nazi's would pick up on that and they did. Unfortunately they did because it takes that whole argument and puts a kind of negative spin on it. And of course the Americans still believe it. They have a very strong Nietzschean side. Deerhunter, well he turns on it. He turns on his own Nietzschean side [but it's] a spiritual thing, that's a little different.

But yeah, what you're talking about interests me because what happens when you have a culture that 's fundamentally screwed up? Why is it screwed up? This is just another aspect of it. Why not strive for excellence? It's almost like we refuse, and I know people, Christians, who believe there is nothing wrong. There's no global warming. There's no over pollution. There's no problems. God's in control. People have actually said to me God would not have let us come up with pollution if he wasn't certain we were going to have the tools to fix it.

NM: All part of the big plan...

MA: People believe that.

NM: It just doesn't make sense.

MA: Well in this particular example she can argue it because the same technology that created the mess is also available for us to clean up the mess if we have the political will to do so.

NM: I always take arguments like that down to the strictly personal level. Like pollution wouldn't be there unless there was a reason God would do it. Well OK, would God let your twelve year old daughter be raped and tortured? I guess it's OK with God for that to happen. If you accept one, you've got to accept both but when it comes down [to that] most people don't accept it that way.

MA: It's funny, that question came up very recently. I heard somebody ask, somebody who had been at a disaster sight, the shooting down in Australia and the shooting in Scotland. These two ministers were talking on As It Happens. And the one minister said it's very strange to [him] that [his] parishioners did not come to [him] and say why did God let this happen? That they didn't. The parishioners didn't do that. They felt that they would seek solace in God but not that God was responsible. Of course that's Anglican. I guess in Scotland it would be Presbyterian which is another Protestant religion but it's not the born again.

The Born again religion's a different kind of animal all together. Now I don't think that I have too much understanding about [it] but that it's a positive movement. For these people it's a positive movement. But when I look at it what I'm interested in is that particular twist. Like, yeah but how does that get me? It gets me because these people say let's go on driving eight cylinder cars. The same people, you know it, we all know it, the same people that say this stuff also say...and the guy I work for, he's got a great sense of humour about it. If we get on this subject, if we're in his big suburban four wheel drive and he's going down the street in two wheel drive and I were to bring up a subject like that he'll slam it directly into four wheel drive and say uuuuuggggg, let's buy gas shares!!!

(laughter)

NM: Have to give him credit for a sense of humour. Do you think it's healthy or detrimental to society as a whole for our popular culture to be so obsessed with death?

MA: Absolutely! I think if you take popular culture, I don't think that the mass popular culture is, but you take things like heavy metal music which is pop culture. Excellent. Because I see [it] primarily as a youth culture. And I think they're right. They're right to be scared. I think they're on the right track but...

NM: At the same time you've got people like Tarrantino, and other people before me have said this, using, like in Pulp Fiction, the notion of someone getting their head blown off when a car hits a bump to get guffaws. It's funny. Have you seen that movie?

MA: Yeah. I remember these Christians in New York I was talking to, actually he has a friend, and we were on this subject about Tarrantino and Oliver Stone. It's almost like the absorption of this death imagery has become nihilist in intent. It's like at a certain period in American, at certain periods in American film, because its happened before that the Americans have had very serious films that dealt with death and rape and things like that. But there are other times when you can't touch it, like Forest Gump. But it's interesting that Forest Gump and Pulp Fiction were made roughly at the same time. But it's almost like these guys are saying America is now ready for raw nihilism. They will pay to reward their own sense of nihilism. I think when that happens, and the first time I'd heard of this [Pulp Fiction] I wouldn't see it. I wouldn't pay to see it. I waited until it came out on video. It was because I felt that having seen Reservoir Dogs, which really offended me, I felt that it's a trivialization of, it was like people could say "yeah, well I've seen that now. I don't have to deal with it..." or something like that. Or it's this push it off into a corner; "oh yeah, we know what that's all about. We've done that and now we can move onto something else...let's go back to what we doing. Driving our eight cylinder truck or something like that."

But that aside, the mass popular culture, I think that the heavy metal and things like that, this kind of street cultural obsession, I think it's really healthy. These kids really do see in a personal way the way the economy is going to affect them. And they do see a kind of global economic collapse coming in as much as it won't be wealth for all anymore. It's only going to be wealth for a few and the rest of us are going to starve to death.

NM: I see a lot more and I hear a lot more hopelessness in the kids today than what there was when I was a teenager.

MA: You're right. Yes.

NM: A lot more...a lot more severe. I think that ties in directly with, even here in Toronto, the amount of teenagers you see carrying knives and guns. When I was a teenager you got into fist fights that was it.

MA: I think when I was a teenager there was this kind of rebel thing. And I think that that's a...there is a healthy side to that romantic - there's also a very negative side - to that romantic image. But now these kids really have a real cause to be violently opposed. So if they come up with this death imagery, I think that's great. I think that, I can't remember the name of the artist who did that video you lent me a video with these big mechanical monsters.

NM: Survival Research Laboratories. Mark Pauline.

MA: Yeah. I think that he's tapping into and reinforcing something there that should be, should be worked with. I'm not doing that. But I think it's great. In a way I'm something peripheral. I think it's great. I think it's too bad, I don't think that it's a good thing that this should happen, that kids should be put in this position, but they are in this position so I think it's great [their coping mechanisms].

NM: It's almost inevitable the way it's going.

MA: Yeah, but this is also a healthy positive reaction. It's like rage, you know, like, what the fuck are you doing?!? You're doing it, we're going to pay. And they're right because we're doing to them and we know we're doing it to them and we don't care. It's this kind of...but it's always been there, people have abused other people. Christian culture or not.

NM: This is kind of a humourous question for you; what do you think of serial killer trading cards?

MA: Well, um... I just saw the tail end of the Unforgiven the other night. Do you remember the comic book writer character? There's a guy who comes in and first he studies with Gene Hackman... Anyways in the movie there's this guy from the east who writes comic books. He works with Little Bill, the Gene Hackman character, building up this Little Bill cowboy character, well obviously what I'm getting at is there has always been serial killer trading cards in different formats. I think it's great. I have a suspicion it's more to do with the old Nietzschean hero. That whole Celtic and um, he uses the word hyperborium. The wild western...I mean the native people refer to us as the Celts still now. We're this footloose tribe that can't get our shit together. We have to keep going, it's almost like we're cursed, right. I think it's part of that. I don't think the Christian culture has been able to map over us sufficiently. Catholics have tried to do it. They've tried to map Christ right over the cowboy so that Christ was the great adventurer. He's the cool guy. He's the...I don't want to argue the point but there's this...He might be a cool guy. He may be a great adventurer but it's not at all the same

It's a very different kind of animal. I think that's what that's about. And I don't think you can get rid of it. I think the more we try to destroy that in our culture the more we're doing ourselves a disservice. Because, and I really mean this, I think that the Celtic culture, and this is why I make so much medieval art and I'm actually more interested now in going back even further. We don't know that much about the Celts, at least I don't. I've done some reading. But their imagery really does reinforce this notion of being in the world. I mean being in the world. And if you admit you're in the world you're not going to do stupid things. You're going to accept the rules whereas Christian they accept rules that are from out of the world. So yeah, I think that's a relevant question. Serial killers.

NM: Have you seen the movie Seven?

MA: Yeah. I think Brad Pit was fantastic in Legends of the Fall.

NM: I haven't seen that movie but [a friend] has and she it should be Legends of the Misogynist. She just hated that movie. The only thing women were good for was having babies and wrecking brother's relationships.

MA: Well, there's a lot of truth in that [description of the movie] but whether or not it's misogynist or misanthropist I thought he was also very good in A River Runs Through It.

NM: I haven't seen that one. I'm not a big fan a Brad Pit. I thought he was...

MA: Do you actively dislike him?

NM: My first exposure to him was Kalifornia and I thought he was perfect. I thought he was great. Then I saw him in True Romance. I thought he was really good. And then this [Seven], I thought putting him beside Morgan Freeman, who in my opinion is one of these best actors in Hollywood -

MA: Me too. I agree.

NM: - that it just...especially the ending when he looked in the box, it just showed how pitiful of an actor he is.

MA: Oh, I think he's a pitiful actor but the reason I brought it up is because he always plays the same character. And it's most obvious in Legend of the Fall where he plays this wanderer, the Celtic wanderer, a killer. The great blonde stud, killer, hero, natural phenomenon. Well the fact of the matter is that was the substance of the Celtic hero. That was a big part of the substance. You had to be a genetic superstar because that was, it was the world. We wanted our men to be this way. They had to go out and kill the enemy. They had to go out and kill the bears. They had to go out there and do all these heroic deeds for survival. And Christians are in opposition to that great hero role. Or it would seem so. If you talk to certain Christians they say no not at all. Be careful.

NM: You're talking about the one's who want their own state.

MA: Right. Yes and this is where, it's very important -

NM: - they've got their M-16's stock piled.

MA: - A lot of those people are born again's and they go back to the text of the bible. And they say this is what the bible says. And they all say so much of this about the meek and the humble has got to do with Catholicism. Then it's mediated Christianity. So the Christian culture is very different from this great hero culture. Generally but I can't warn you enough off thinking that two are the same. Because boy, it is very interesting talking to these born again's because they say you show me one place in the bible where it says you've got to be a knocked-kneed flibber-dee-jibit. You show one place where it says you've got to be some kind of geek. No, no.

They're saying just show us one place where it, now there's this business about the meek but that's a quote and I don't know the bible and it could be taken out of context. So I just want to steer clear of it. I don't want to go one way or the other.

But the whole serial killer thing, that's what that's about. The great hero worship.

NM: We've been talking about the attraction, obsession with death but then all of our medical science and all of our popular culture is also obsessed with youth and beauty and immortality.

MA: Well, they're the two great questions. They're the Yin and the Yang. Sex and death, sex and violence in the movies. I think in our society, again so much of the mass popular culture is trivialized them and made them into callow representations of question. I think the attraction, obsession of immortality and youth are appropriate. I think that's natural. I think that in terms of you mentioned [a friend's] concerns about misogyny. I think that women's' attraction to Brad Pitt is misanthropic.

NM: How so?

MA: Because he's gorgeous. He's a trivialization of the male. He's not very smart but he's gorgeous. Women like to look a Brad Pitt but they don't want us to look at some feminine equivalent. It's a hypocrisy. A vicious hypocrisy. They can argue that until the cows come home, they're wrong. They're wrong. You can talk to women who are a little older in their forties. They're perfectly clear exactly in what's going on. You know, he's fuckable material. He's gorgeous, [they] want to look at him. You might want to look at some female equivalent. Go ahead do it. Just don't talk to me about it. It makes me feel insecure because I can't look like that.

But I think there some very serious...in our attempts to liberalize our politics, I think there has been some very serious problems introduced into our understanding of sex. I don't think skinny beautiful as we understand it is necessarily the way to. But as I once said to a fat woman when she was saying that a skinny woman was anorexic and she was hurting herself, I said to her well, yeah, in the days when fat women were in fashion she was saying the same thing about fat women. And it goes for men too. You can say it's not as important and it's true, we don't suffer as much but... it's changing rapidly. I think that's a good thing. I think it's good for everybody. I think that's universal, this immortality, youthful...

NM: Is the obsession with death universal?

MA: Yeah. Sure it is. To the best of my knowledge. I have a book here someplace and it has the most magnificent metaphor for immortality that I've ever read. He argues that in the Inuit, you know Inuit prints? They'll show the fish within the loon and the then within the...he argues that consciousness is essentially reincarnated. So that one lifetime you're born as a caribou and you remember your previous life as a woman. He argues that this woman remembers herself as a caribou and actually preferred her life as a caribou. That the Inuit, there was this immortality but it wasn't within...it was amongst species. It wasn't just within one species. This is a very good book.

NM: Except nowadays if this woman did remember her life as a caribou, she'd have a whole bunch of followers...

(Laughter)

MA: That's right...

NM: She'd be working out of [a new age] bookstore.

MA: Now I would say that these people weren't obsessed with death. I mean , this is a poetic metaphor [the book], but let's say it was not a poetic metaphor, let's say it was analogous to experience. In fact this is what happened. The other thing that is so exciting about this is it's completely obvious. When somebody says it to you and you look at that, the Inuit art, you go (claps hands).

NM: It so obvious you missed it the first time.

MA: Of course. You live in this world and that's why they called the animals their brothers. You eat me, I eat you. I can't live if you're dead. You can't live if I'm dead. We live off each other. Very...it's just boom! Now it's very interesting, whether or not they even had any concept of death equivalent [to our notions]. I've been thinking about this quite a bit now and I was reading my own grant proposal. I talked about [how] with Christianity and Christian culture, [there's] this concentration on the next world. Like when we die were do we go? Well, as I just said with the Inuit, you don't go anywhere. Or they didn't think you go anywhere. You stay right here. There is this great continuity but when you break that continuity and you say there is here and then there's there, then you do get this notion of discontinuity and death. Because if there is no there and you don't stay here, you don't go anywhere.

NM: Food for worms.

MA: Food for worms. No, but I mean for Christians there is no food for worms. One of these Christians said to me you will never be on the tree of life, compost maybe. But they don't believe in the world. Christians do not believe in the world.

NM: So why are they here?

MA: Because God put them here. But the world is an illusion. Reality is heaven and this how Christians can justify polluting the world. Driving cars with eight cylinder engines. Because this is an illusion. If God does not forbid you from driving an eight cylinder vehicle then it's all right to do so. The bible's very clear. You do this, you don't do that. That's what they argue. I've been trying to talk to [these] people and it's very interesting, the effect that talking to people who have a radically different world view than yours has. It's makes you become more and more crystalline in your understanding of yourself if nothing else.

NM: It must very hard talking to people like that.

MA: Well I've been down there [in New York] for four or five years now. Stephen's a reasonable guy and he might think I'm full of shit but we still go out drinking together. Drinking now, not a light beer. We go out drinking. A few nights we've gone home drunk. He's very jealous of my lifestyle. Now, so talking to these people, if they don't believe in this world and I do...and then I can get back into some of the things I get thinking about like Descartes and the Cartesian duality. The mind and then the body and then that whole Christian thing about the spirit. And then the real world versus this illusory world. In my grant proposal I was [asking] what is our problem with the world as it is? When we go outside why don't go outside and be in the world? And even when we're in our places why don't we just be, and I'm sure you are with your children. I'm sure you're focus is entirely there. I understand parents are like this.

NM: Sometimes...

MA: Yeah, I mean they're so into their kids. like they actually become aware of their kids.

NM: I would agree to that for me personally because I find if I forget myself and just get totally into my kids, just from their outlook I start to absorb and see things their way and learn so much. What you and I take for granted as adults, everything just in this world, I mean I'd love to have the consciousness or a two or three month old. It must be an acid trip.

MA: It must almost be pure consciousness.

NM: Just like a gazillion things going on you don't know anything about and you're stuck in the middle of this kaleidoscope. That would just be...hysterical.

MA: I was driving north on Landsdown on my way to work one morning and I had a split second of what you're talking about. It was almost like people had pulled the shit off of my eyes and I just saw it [reality] for what it was. It was like...yeah that's what there.

NM: How do you think the world will end?

MA: I don't think it matters to me anymore. I've been on this millennium theme for a few years. It might happen in [your children's] lifetime. There's a really good chance it will definitely start to happen, I mean the real end, will start to happen in [their] lifetime. I think the end is happening now. People say this time all the time though, right. I heard this discussion on the millennium here the other day on the radio and this guy said don't forget everyday is the end of another millennium.

NM: I don't tie it in so much with the millennium. I see the end of the world, when you say [my children] , I think you're right. I think humanity is going to reach such a technological point that the technology is going to be the eventual downfall. You just get to such a technological point that there's nowhere else to go. We're killing this planet with everything we do. No one seems to think that these resources are not renewable. Through our desires and our technologies we're just going to reach a point where we reach...escape velocity. And then the planet cools for a while and something else starts. I was reading in a kind of fringe book called Secret and Suppressed and one "conspiracist" was saying that technologies and civilizations go in a cycle and you can trace certain five thousand, ten thousand year old hieroglyphics. You can put it all into a one kind of frame work that it's warnings from an elder race that reached a technological pivot point and vanished. This was their warning [to us] saying what happened when -

MA: You get to certain point.

NM: You get to a certain point and the cycle starts again. It's something like everything thirteen thousand years. You reach escape velocity and your system [culture] stops. Something else starts up.

MA: I've no problem with that. I think our culture now is almost too diverse though. You hear about these cultures where they apparently just stopped. Like on Tuesday morning. And I don't know how we would do that on a planetary scale.

NM: I think a few more years of evaporating ozone and we're having a big bar-b-que and we're lunch man...

(Laughter)

MA: Yeah, I see it.

NM: A few sunny days and there goes Florida, California...

MA: I don't want to experience it but I feel it is likely. I hope I don't have to experience it in my lifetime. I have this hope that I'll die before I have to see that.

NM: Me too.