But Who Will Be Famous, When We Are Dead?
digital video with sound, 2016
voiceover text:
consider, here, the constellations. a meting out of sky, eighty-eight pictures for all the observable to fall within. I give each one a piano key. we write pop songs. there is a film I’ve seen a hundred times or more, with a scene I persistently misremember. I imagine this means something. I hear in my head James Earl Jones’ booming voice intoning “remember me, remember me, remember me,” as he fades into the darkness above Simba’s head. I think of the ghost of Hamlet’s father, moaning from the earth underneath our prince and his companions. a deep rumble demands “swear, swear, swear.” but I am wrong about the lion. the gigantic image in the stars is saying something similar, but not the same. “remember who you are.” to remember the past you must participate in the present. to be a passive observer is not to be. a Hamlet sort of trouble. yet without an audience, who is there to gesture upward and say look, there, see the lion, or the huntsman, or the princess who was beautiful and kind. Krotos, son of Pan, is the originator of applause. clapping his hands together in delight at the work of the Muses, all those pretty girls he grow up with. and they loved him, because he fed them with his praises. so they fixed him in the sky to be remembered always. to chase fame, in a sense, is to run from death. but for a constellation to exist there must be one who stands on earth, gazing up. for the dead to live forever, there must be some survivors left. to be remembered is a dance that outlives the dancer. it seems survivors are necessary for tragedy, spectators for a spectacle. for something to be sad, someone must be watching. a live camera feed of my body disintegrating. deep in my mausoleum of dead links, a skeleton with ever-increasing subscriber counts. the sudden urge to check the myspace profiles of my dead friends. the longstanding wish to clean house. the terror of not knowing what a legacy would even look like. I want to be famous for my own survival, because the more people know I’m alive, the more it feels like it might be true. I consult the oracle and wonder, if the web is a net, what is it designed to catch? if the net is a web, what it is designed to hold? what is a Hamlet without his Horatio? O good Horatio, what a wounded name, things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me! If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain— but who will be famous, when we are dead?