This is a wonderful essay, @jfmartel. Some of my favorite lines:
…the social media sphere that rose up in early twenty-first century is recast as a necropolis of chattering skulls. To exist in this virtual otherworld is quite literally to haunt the world. Spectral fragments of our selves are sent to float around the lives of others, begging for attention.
Sadly, hauntingly, frighteningly true. Our platforms are but writhing mausoleums…
The dead are with us now. They are present in our language, our beliefs, our social structures, our architecture, our memories, our dreams, our DNA, our art.
Yet we relegate them to some notion of an afterlife or underworld or nothingness…
Art, as a shamanic act, is communion with the dead. The dead live again in art.
YES.
Even the living, who were already dead, come to life in art.
And, while allusions to the ocean or the sea in the history of art are legion, Part IV of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” particularly comes to mind:
IV. Death by Water
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
As well, from Yeats’s “Under Ben Bulben”:
II
Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man dies in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-diggers’ toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscle strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.