The Best American Essays 2018

by Hilton Als

  It would all seem like self-mythologizing and lyrical excess of the kind that makes for great performance, but does not withstand close lyrical scrutiny. And yet notwithstanding this simulation of urgency Cave has made plangent and memorable remarks about the Lazarus of Bethany: “Ever since I can remember hearing the Lazarus story, when I was a kid, you know, back in church, I was disturbed and worried by it. Traumatized, actually. We are all, of course, in awe of the greatest of Christ’s miracles—raising a man from the dead—but I couldn’t help but wonder how Lazarus felt about it. As a child it gave me the creeps, to be honest.”8 “Traumatizing” is a perfect word for the Lazarus story, and the “actually” that comes after it here gives that beleaguered adverb, “actually,” a force that it doesn’t ordinarily have.

  And so it becomes clear why there are three exclamation points in the title of Nick Cave’s Lazarus song, when one would clearly do the job reliably: they are Trinitarian.

  The other way that Cave gives us access to the Lazarus story is through Cave’s son, Arthur. His son, as is well known now, fell to his death in Brighton, England, in 2015, and on Skeleton Tree, his recent album of compositions mostly written before Arthur’s passing, but recorded after, you can feel the haunting of Arthur everywhere. (The jacket of Skeleton Tree is the same color as Zeffirelli’s black screen.) “Jesus Alone,” the first track on Skeleton Key, is where you feel acutely the Jesus of Nazareth who weeps over Lazarus’s grave.9 Jesus wept. Jesus wept. Jesus began to cry. Jesus started crying. Jesus wept. And Jesus wept. Jesus cried. Jesus wept. And at this Jesus wept. Jesus burst into tears. Jesus wept. Jesus wept. Jesus wept.

  “With my voice I am calling you”10 is the refrain of “Jesus Alone,” and it’s both Cave trying to call to Arthur across the trauma of loss, and it’s Jesus alone, without the comfort of the divine, in dread of the human part of his mission, aggrieved by the loss of Lazarus, in the grief of a loss of a beloved friend, in the dread of knowing the numinous, in the knowledge of what comes next, his own sacrifice, when, after the dinner with the resurrected Lazarus of Bethany, he must enter the city of Jerusalem and proceed, well, to Golgotha.

  “Evidently, this was needed,”11 Franz Wright says of Lazarus, in a sort of a free translation of a poem by Rilke, “The Raising of Lazarus,” perhaps a rehabilitation of a fragment of Rilke, a fragment that could not be completed to anyone’s satisfaction, because looking accurately upon Lazarus is to be “traumatized,” as Cave says, into fragmentation and silence, into failure. To know what Lazarus knew is to be traumatized. The antecedent of “this” in Wright’s “Evidently, this was needed” is purposefully vague. The passivity of the sentence is exactly the kind of German abstraction that one associates with Rilke, and the use of “evidently” is funny and sly, because in Wright’s bloodcurdling rendering of Rilke’s Lazarus, it’s all about proof, all evidentiary. As in the next line: “Because people need / to be screamed at with proof.”

  Wright’s account of the story is long on the horrors of the scene, garish physical details, and all from the vantage point of the Nazarene. Mary is a prostitute (evidently Wright is from Provence, where all the Marys and all the Lazaruses are one), and all who gather for the miracle are “Breughelian grotesques.” It’s an “ontological horrorshow,” and we feel acutely Jesus preparing for his doom (and glory), as he raises Lazarus, and removes the burial garb. But what we don’t get is much of Lazarus himself. He’s “the one young man”12 who stoops at the entrance of the grave, coming forth. The fact of the poem, its reiteration of Rilke, its apparent long journey to completion, the sense of teetering on compositional unworthiness, is an indication that it’s Lazarus we’re dealing with. Lazarus is about the telling of Lazarus, where the dread and completion shimmer just out of reach.

  Or, evidently, what is needed is a transit across a dialectical pairing, a Hegelian opposition, life and death, a way to render the longing of the one for the other, and: I wrote these lines after spending time by the deathbed of a loved one, an ebbing out of life, and what I found in the five days before and the two days after that shimmering just out of reach, that marriage of particle and wave, was not a dialectical pairing, a Hegelian opposition, but rather an incremental development, in which self is pitted, mottled, interstitial, but breath continues, and then, after breath, a hovering of presence in the absence, as if the other who was no longer was there again, and as I write these lines I can feel her with me, inscribed in my inscriptions. I write these lines for her. A death and not-death in language, a dissemination of fragments, a broadcasting of residuary self, a hovering into this draft. There are some ten minutes after medical death when the brain is still responsive to stimuli, in a lavender-hued journey back and forth across the entranceway to the next place of the black screen.

  Caravaggio’s Raising of Lazarus, which is in Sicily, where it was painted by Caravaggio after fleeing Malta because of legal problems, has stories orbiting around it nearly as fanciful as those orbiting around Lazarus himself: for example, that he had a body exhumed in order to paint Lazarus himself, and that there was a prior version of the painting, which Caravaggio himself destroyed owing to criticism that he did not like. He got an enormous commission for the painting, but some of it may have been finished by assistants nonetheless, and it wants for the intense drama of other paintings by the master of high contrast. The arrangement of characters is powerful, though, with the women gathered around Lazarus’s head. Almost exactly like a deposition. Christ looks extremely commanding, not the doubter that he would perhaps have been about the miracle of Lazarus. And though he looks commanding, Christ as depicted is just a backward version of a drawing Caravaggio previously used in The Calling of St. Matthew. As if one of the aspects of the story of Lazarus is that it features, among its reiterations, auto-plagiarism.

  Rembrandt’s Raising of Lazarus, from just fifteen or twenty years after Caravaggio’s, is quite a bit more unsettling. I can’t tell if it’s because I have already gazed at length on Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), which has a cadaver in it, and which has so much intensity. (They only permitted one dissection a year in Amsterdam, and it was always a criminal, in this case it was Aris Kindt, a thief who had been executed the day before, a Barabbas character, if you like, and this you would know if you were to read The Rings of Saturn by Sebald, which discusses with great urgency this anatomy painting.) The arms seem to be on backward on the cadaver’s body, and there’s a shadow over the cadaver’s face, which is the shadow of death, I believe, and there’s something very claustrophobic about the whole. The mystery of death, the moment in which the soul flickers out of the body, is on display here.

  Should it be impossible or unlikely that Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp could somehow have influenced his Raising of Lazarus, which was painted before the image of Tulp? In the uncanny event horizon of Lazarus, apparently it’s not impossible at all, because failure, plagiary, repetition compulsion, and nonlinear time could all easily be coincident with a raising from the dead. Rembrandt’s Lazarus trembles with unearthly lantern light from the left-hand margin, which shrouds Martha’s face, and Lazarus, truly ghostly in white and gray, is given the vast majority of the pictorial space to be climbing up and out of the tomb, like an emissary from the underworld. It’s as if the lessons of death, the way death is both absent and present, and most present when most absent, are catalyzed here for Rembrandt, and he keeps going back to them with the later anatomy lessons, such that his interpretation of Lazarus is affected by his later collision with Aris Kindt.

  Both Giotto and Duccio painted Lazarus in their pre-perspectival, medieval way. (The bleached, nearly cubist backdrop of Duccio suggests the landscape of Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth.)

  I am so pained by “Lady Lazarus,” by Plath, that I don’t really know how to include it here, while giving over to it the confessional intensity that it has, the legacy of it, the importance of it to poetry by women and men. There are things about this
poem that I find impossible to describe now, even as I admire it, and that is because everything about “Lady Lazarus” hurts so lastingly that it is hard to reread. It’s a raw, lacerating disquiet that hovers about the poem. It is nearly vengeful, or perhaps “nearly” is unwarranted here. The threats of self-slaughter in its initial lines were ultimately successful, we all know, and that makes it seem less boastful and more the occasion for woe, and sympathy, and dread. Which is how we know that its allegorical appropriation of Lazarus is just. I dread turning the recto and arriving at this poem. And yet Plath, the suicide, the one-woman mystery cult of self-sacrifice, is raised again in the popularity of Ariel. In the literary sense, she is raised again, ever victorious in the matter of eternal repose.

  Perfectly articulated, with respect to Lazarus, are these lines from Evie Shockley’s poem about Barack Obama’s (first) inauguration:

  ask lazarus about miracles:

  the hard part comes afterwards.

  Ben Okri’s memorable, singular, highly original novel The Famished Road is narrated by a character named Azaro—or at least that is the name he goes by, though his parents originally named him Lazarus. Azaro is an abiku, a spirit child, and the long, wonderful opening of The Famished Road concerns the many times the spirit world refuses to allow Azaro to be completely born. Thereafter, in the years of his childhood, he continually fends off spirit manifestations around the compound where he lives, and especially in the bar of his neighbor Madame Koto.

  Okri’s novel is often compared to Latin American magical realism, but in no way does this work feel reducible to this well-traveled subgeneric distinction. On the contrary, The Famished Road teems with its African spirits, even as, as Ben Okri has noted, it has some Western forbears as well. Azaro himself has Lazarus hovering albatross-like over his head, Lazarus’s time in the underworld, and when Azaro goes walking, impulsively, in the Nigerian bush, as he does to his parents’ chagrin, unfailingly mixing it up with the menace of the spirit realm, we can feel the incarnation of Lazarus in him, the Pan-African Lazarus.

  Of course, there are many other improvisations upon the story and person of Lazarus. I haven’t mentioned Van Gogh, or Chagall, or the episode of Dr. Who that alludes to Lazarus, or some software program named after him, or the prog-rock anthem by Porcupine Tree. I haven’t mentioned Aleksandar Hemon’s Lazarus Project, a novel that means to treat of a Jewish immigrant (Lazarus Averbuch) killed in Chicago in 1908, but which then goes further back to speak of the Lazarus of Bethany we are discussing here. I haven’t mentioned a really astonishing sculpture of him by Sir Jacob Epstein, at New College, Oxford. There are more profane examples of our inability to stop talking about him. This is not an exhaustive list.

  Yet I cannot stop adding to the list about Lazarus, which I have been keeping for over a year now, as though the intention to write about Lazarus is an analogy of his rebirth, and whenever I say I’m not going to write about a certain author or artist or filmmaker who has alluded to Lazarus I find myself going back and doing exactly that, and somehow adding this previously suppressed citation to the list. Lazarus calls to me and I answer his call.

  And, so: David Bowie’s “Lazarus,” from Blackstar, his last album, combines different strata of meaning about Lazarus, and fuses them together. The song “Lazarus” is stately and slow-moving, it is the development of change, with fragments of melody on sax and guitar emerging out of a dirge of bass and drums. The first verse is narrated by a Lazarus-like figure from heaven and indicates some of the contradictions of a heavenly repose (“Look up here, I’m in heaven / I’ve got scars that can’t be seen”).13 But the second verse seems to frame “up here” more as a place of isolation, perhaps the address of fame, and of danger (“I’m so high it makes my brain whirl”), which, in the significantly heartrending video for the song, is the space of the clinic, the space of illness, the place of physical destitution, like Lazarus’s grave.

  Then the song flowers into some sort of chorus/bridge, which only occurs once (for such a rhythmically straightforward song it is structurally rather odd and fragmentary), of the kind, in the Bowie catalog, that invites biographical speculation. It’s never clear whether this song is actually autobiographical, or just has the veneer thereof. What does “Then I used up all my money / I was looking for your ass”14 mean? The easiest interpretation of Bowie’s “Lazarus” would be that it articulates Bowie’s feelings after his onstage heart attack of 2004. He did brush up against mortality then. But the video for “Lazarus,” with its hospital imagery, seems more to describe the mortality of Bowie’s later battle with cancer. It transcends illness by celebrating illness, by speaking openly from within the clinic.15

  You could also argue that the song has a much deeper purpose. You could argue that its purpose is simply to describe in modern parlance Lazarus, the guy who died and who was raised from the dead, in all his complexity, in his death and nondeath, with all the mixed emotions, the awe and confusion and dread and trauma, that attend upon the Lazarus story. The “Lazarus” video is rich with irony, and the “I’ll be free” out-chorus of the song seems especially ironic, and meant to convey just the opposite sentiment. Freedom and nonbeing drawing near to one another.

  In Bowie’s portrayal of Lazarus, he’s the character who occasions irony, as if irony is a thing that is best understood by those who have experienced death, as if irony is the inevitable style of those who have been to the other side, those who have come back to tell of it, like Virgil and Dante. (I’m betting Tiresias understood irony, having been both woman and man.)

  David Constantine’s remarkable poetical sequence “Lazarus to Christ, Christ to Lazarus” goes to similar lengths in seeing into Lazarus’s complex impressions of his heroic journey. I admit that I also really love the voice of Christ here, but I also feel I know that Christly dramatic reconstruction—full of anxiety about his own resurrection, given to complaint about being abandoned by the apostles. I can get to that impersonation of Jesus, but Lazarus’s voice is more complex, because more surprising:

  What I mutter in nightmare

  I believe you lie awake to overhear.

  This beautiful perception gets us much closer to the fearsome mystery of Lazarus and nonbeing. Why is it that we need a redeemer, you ask? What is it about this trudge through the abattoir of the contemporary, with its stringy fibers of gristle dangling everywhere, that so leads the human heart to need a redeemer? It’s what Lazarus said, it’s what he mutters in nightmare, it’s the black screen from the Zeffirelli, it’s nonbeing.

  Jesus of Nazareth is supposed to have descended into Hell, or to have harrowed Hell, during the period between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, weeks after Lazarus was raised, but there’s almost no scriptural support for the trip. There are sermons about it from the second century, and there are epistles that mention it or allude to it, during the period of the early church, but there is no real scriptural support. Why did he have to do it? Because all humans have to do it, experience death and the afterlife and irony and trauma, death and not-death, the black screen. Jesus of Nazareth was, lest we forget, one of us, and so he experienced what we experience.

  Did Jesus know what Lazarus knew? Did Lazarus tell him about it at their dinner? And what does Lazarus tell us about death, in the end? If he could talk to us now, in our tongue, what would he say? That death is not the end, that life is not the end, that life is in the oneiric realm, full of deaths and endings that are commuted into beginnings, and beginnings that become endings, and that the feelings one has about all of this are of loss, and trauma, and regret, and humility? About what Lazarus knew, one can only weep.

  Or: Lazarus didn’t smile, and got decapitated for this and for other crimes, scourged, for the traces of his story, for the retelling of his story, for the implications of his story, for being a bystander to Christ’s ministry. And in his bearing witness, again and again he is reborn for us to retell.

  Notes

  1. Here’s a good list of transla
tions of John 11:35: https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/John%2011:35. The International Standard Version gives “Jesus burst into tears.”

  2. Ibid., KJ, John 12:2.

  3. Ibid., John 12:8.

  4. Terry Callier, TimePeace (1998, Talkin’ Loud Classics).

  5. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/10/hens/307670/.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Mute Records, 2008.

  8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dig,_Lazarus,_Dig!!! (italics mine).

  9. And maybe there is a mystery cult aspect to Arthur’s death, as well, as it is said in the press that he may have taken LSD before his fall. “Jesus Alone,” therefore, really conjures this reading of Jesus, bereft and uncomprehending, at the advent of Lazarus’s death.

  10. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Skeleton Key (Mute Records, 2016).

  11. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/58345.

  12. The word choice here is powerful, because “young man” (neaniskos, in Greek) is used in the Gospel of Mark, and, elsewhere, in the forged or Gnostic Secret Gospel of Mark to indicate a character, not named Lazarus, raised from the dead by Jesus, and with whom Jesus may be in love. They even, it seems, spend a night together. “Jesus wept,” in this case, would have much deeper implications. This thoroughly Gnostic Lazarus might be even more revolutionary than the canonical one.