Jason Dodge

Occasionals III, They lifted me into the sun again and packed my empty skull with cinnamon

Text: Becket Flannery
Photography: Gunnar Meier
Graphic Design: Sabo Day, assisted by Augustinas Milkus
Pages: 8 plus cover
Dimensions: 230 x 170 mm
Edition: 300
Publisher: Tlön Projects, 2024
ISBN: 9789079605040

Price: 10 Eu

The publication was issued on the occasion of the exhibition Occasionals III, They lifted me into the sun again and packed my empty skull with cinnamon by Jason Dodge held from 8 to 29 june 2024 at Rongwrong in Amsterdam.

Occasionals is Tlön Projects’ curatorial concept and part of its Satellite Programme — an exhibition series that highlights single art works from the imaginary collection in specific locations.

Why do people lie to one another?

So ends Thomas James’ “Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh”. It is an astonishing line. The poem’s seven stanzas, voiced by the eponymous noblewoman, recount her mummification, a series of bodily violations (or ennoblements) that promise rebirth in some Arcadian land.

A boy will pace among the passionflowers,
His eyes no longer two bruised surfaces.
I’ll know the mouth of my young groom, I’ll touch His hands.

Lady Jemutesonekh looks forward to her reunion in increasingly specific terms: a boy, my young groom, the mouth, his hands. In her final question, however, she moves suddenly to the general, becoming abstract: why do people lie. The phrase does not seem to me to be prompted by a memory of a particular betrayal. It seems more akin to Orpheus’ backward glance as he led Eurydice out of Hades: a moment of fatal doubt. The question, after all, is why.

I take James’ use of “why” quite seriously; I do not see it simply as a lamentation of human nature, our base perfidy. Lady Jemutesonekh’s question is fundamentally one about other people: whether we can ever really know them, and whether words are ever enough to do so. The line is not as stark a break from the poem’s themes as it might first appear. At stake throughout James’ poem is what it means to transcend a particular body, when the anointed corpse will be reborn again into another kind of living flesh. The poem’s ending simply shifts that transit from the divide between life and death to the unknowable distance between individuals.

— Excerpt The question of other people, Becket Flannery