Pacitti Company

LIVING BUT KNOWING

by Dr. Andrea Phillips

The clock strikes eleven
FAU: Ah, Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bear hour to live,
And then thou must be damn'd perpetually.
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul.¹

'The staff of a hospital withdraws from the dying man: "the syndrome of withdrawal on the part of doctors and nurses." This distancing is accompanied by orders in a vocabulary that treats the patient as though he were already dead: "He needs to rest... let him sleep." It is necessary that the dying man remain calm and rest. Beyond the care and the sedatives required by the sick man, this order appeals to the staff's inability to bear the uttering of anguish, despair, or pain: it must not be said...

If the forbidden word were to be pronounced, it would betray the struggle that mobilizes the hospital staff and that, assuming that to care for means to cure, does not want to recognize failure; and that would be blasphemy... More than that, as a dead man on reprieve, the dying man falls outside the thinkable...'²

How might we cope now that Faustus's contract with Lucifer seems invalid? When Marlowe wrote the tragic history of his protagonist certain principles dictated a strongly located heaven and hell, a metaphysics that embraced geography as well as philosophy. Theatre architecture reflected this conflation of practice and theory (even now we have 'the Gods' as a cheap seating option under the eaves of the building) neatly binding artifice with the real world. But now, the abyss into which Faustus plunges - the one that divides heaven from hell as a series of props might keep up a star-painted canopy - is all. An archangel does not fall from white to black, from up to down. Elevation has been consigned to the realm of mere stage trickery. Faustus at least had an initial choice of place - the tragedy of Dr Faustus is a tragedy of choice. His heaven and hell represent an either/or to be gained through the practice of life.

Now we think of death as placeless. We forsake the possibility of reconciliation - any type of last minute 'change of heart' or 'death-bed conversion' - for a more profound and difficult imaginative space. We rely on the hope that, in the abyss, nothing exists and we will, thus, become nothing. But despite the fact that this 'nothing' is without dividend, we still find ways to imagine the moment at which we enter it. A moment of physical transition; an ending rather than a beginning.

What is it that fascinates us about this 'moment'? This is the question asked by Robert Pacitti in Evidence of Life After Death and in doing so he suggests that to imagine a 'moment' of death is to partake in a self-blinding similar in some ways to Faustus. For, just as Faustus achieves in his choice a knowing, so we seek certainty. Certainty's blind trail has inevitably led to ignorance. In our ignoring, we have entered another complicitous pact that frames our death tidily and links it back to our social lives. Challenging this, Pacitti suggests that there is no particular 'moment' of death; that death goes on for months and even years; and that we might have to examine the way we think about death to know how we might die.

In his long period of research for Evidence, Pacitti spent time in morgues, in anatomical museums, with medical professionals and those involved in palliative care, attempting to find the length of time between the moment at which social mores dictate a body has died and the moment at which a life can said to be 'gone'. A long time. For, as he articulates clearly in the work, a life is, on one level, never gone and, at the same time, always gone - gone already from the moment of birth (a loss that Jacques Lacan detects in the first instances of sexual desire, of need, of love and of language). A life is never gone because it returns immediately disguised as memory (returning 'before the body is cold'). Memory 'presences' life in a strange upheaval. Life lived in the shadow of the knowledge of death.

The theatre-maker's problem, then, in this case, is to make images out of a territory that is, at most, mapped by out-of-body experiences and raisings-from-the-dead only. For there are few of us that feel able to talk about an encounter with death adequately, even if we might have seen it in friends, parents, children, and even though we understand heartbreak. Even though we understand the absolute terror of 'I miss you'. For us, death is about us continuing to live in loss. But Pacitti's starting points in the scientific classifications and documentations of both cellular and somatic death lead him away from a more nostalgic work about that loss in order to look, initially in a clinical sense, at absences: the absence of breath; the absence of language; the absence of neurological activity.

Evidence of Life After Death is constructed from images that articulate these absences - or potential absences - finding both a romance and a sardonic humour in the contradiction of representation here: for no death is representable, a fact about which Pacitti is sure. Instead, theatre, as a tool for manipulating transgressive artifice, conjures with potential, shows the transparency of the trickery; that which can't be shown. Unthinkable. (Tim Etchells, Director of Forced Entertainment, once said 'all those who play dead know the giddying contradictions of their game - first that death can never be played because the heart and lungs move regardless of our will, second that playing dead takes us precariously close to the edges of gaming itself; close to sleeping or simply waiting, close to leaving the play or the game.' ³)

But, as might be expected, there are no 'stage deaths' here. No staggering about the stage in the last throes of speech. This work is about the social and biological process of cellular and somatic death rather than the blood and guts of the car crash or the red velvet drapery of the Victorian funeral scene. Rather than the sublimity of a death described in the thrall and suspense of the novel or film, Evidence attempts to describe a much more open - and ironically painful - relationship to the raw material: breath running out, decomposition setting in, new growths and temperature changes. And, along with this, a liberatory sense of coming out from underneath all that is accumulated socially in regard to the rituals of death: the constructed (and paid for) gestures of despair; the 'tradition' of the family and it's heterosexual identity; the prejudiced hush around certain diseases; the normalisation of difference 'for the sake of the relatives'. A shedding of social skin in order to contemplate death more evenly.

Pacitti says that Evidence is the most difficult work he has yet made on two accounts. Firstly the work is contemplative, focusing on individual facts and images and their eventualities but also pursuing the violence of emotion that lies beneath the surface of the medical. And secondly because the work is so private and yet so public. This relationship between public and private is evident in previous works, although it has been clearly modified. In He was A Scary Baby (1992/3), a solo work for stage or gallery space, the overt and radical contemplation of sexual difference was made explicit through costume and movement. In it, Pacitti wore a series of masks which both bound him and projected his image as a new type of 'animal'. This appeal to and for a space of alterity was repeated in Geek (1994/5), a work for four performers including Pacitti, in which such transgressive space was actualised on stage, a camp, explicit and perverted heterotopia constructed as part of a queer declamation. (As a direct result of this claim Geek was banned from performance in Nottingham, joining an honourable list of live works whose vision has proved too much for the city council). In Civil (1997), a solo work made after a group show of the same name, Pacitti began what can be seen as a seed of the present work, using The Naked Civil Servant and combining it on stage with live and recorded songs and film footage of conversations with an aging Quentin Crisp in New York.

In Civil the scene resembles an architectural blueprint, a tentative map of a possible building. The stage is dominated by a large white bed and a long white film wall which spans the space. Light divides and connects scene frames as Pacitti sings and performs quiet rituals, de- and reconstructing both himself and Crisp out of slips of narrative. The work stages intimate self-exploration and, at the same time, suggests the love of a community and the way in which a community might help itself. That community is both us, watching, and a longed-for one. Pacitti seems to be attempting to enact a series of miracles; suspensions of disbelief.

Pacitti trained as a painter and is drawn to the stage for the sense of process - both literal and metaphorical - that he finds there. In Civil, Self-Elimination (1998) and Evidence of Life After Death there has been a developing theme in which the process of physical and psychical metamorphosis is linked to the process of image construction. What the performer knows, in an exquisite but painful way that the painter only half-knows, is that the image lasts only from moment to moment. As long as a life, perhaps. What the performer also knows is the contradictory sense of artifice that the theatre provides, as if at the moment of fading the work is also constructing itself mendaciously, in order to trick and fool: to pass for, to pass over, to pass through. To act as if, to act up.

Throughout Evidence, a visceral undercurrent reminds us of the link between desire and death. How might sex contribute to change? From the everyday shedding of cells of skin to the petit mort, the relationship between dying and wanting is evident. Pacitti turns the body inside out, exposing weakness and vulnerability. In this way, like a renaissance painting that may be read in code and as figuration, he constructs images that reveal literal and metaphysical truths, living reliquaries. In public Pacitti has cited both Joseph Beuys and Pina Bausch as influences on his work: opposite extremes reaching an ideological and aesthetic cross-roads in his work. Simplicity and repetition mark both artists out, though used in very different ways, as does an attachment to the display of process. These methods are developed in Pacitti's work.

Unthinkable. In the publication that illustrates and extends the Evidence project, Pacitti writes about the process of coming to know his body and its potential end. A strange and brave act in the most provocative sense. Pacitti does this, finally, to convince us to open out the map of death. We might take him to heart.

¹ Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus scene xix [Methuen, London, 1965] p147
² Michel De Certeau, 'The Unnamable' in The Practice of Everyday Life [UCP, Berkeley, 1984] p190
³ Tim Etchells, Hybrid issue 4 [August/September 1993] p39

Dr Andrea Phillips is the Assistant Director of the MA Curating course at Goldsmiths College, London. Living but Knowing was commissioned in 1999 by Pacitti Company for the Evidence of Life After Death publication, published to coincide with the tour of a live work also titled Evidence of Life After Death.

Living but Knowing � Andrea Phillips 1999

Living but Knowing is reproduced here by kind permission of Dr. Phillips