On Death

I have struggled to write about last week at the adventure playground.  I walked the dog in the cemetery before I went to work and bumped into two armed police officers.   They were looking for someone, there had been a shooting the night before.  As I walked around a company were renovating a grave.  Among the headstones that had tumbled in to the spaces left by decaying coffins, fresh cleaned white marble and new flowers, the fresh stone chippings raked like a small zen garden in a world of old decay.

When I saw the grave it reminded me of  Steve Mcqueen artwork 'Ashes' which I saw in 2015.
Macqueen says-

" The only doctrine as an artist is not to allow the dust of the past to settle."

 The work is a screen with two sides on the first is a short film with audio interviews documenting the death and re-burial of the Ashes a beautiful young Grenadian man. The other side shows Ashes sat in the front of a fishing boat, captured on flickering super eight footage in 2002.  Ashes is ultimately himself, individual, vital and alive he is also every young man who dies in violence.

We meet at the playground with Kate and John Diamond and each of us tells our story of the nature of where we are.  The person shot in 96 and taken to hospital.  The death of Venom at the Nottingham cliff park, the armed police sweeping across the bank and all our children bunkered inside the adventure playground castle.  This is our narrative and our counter narrative but when I think about it now I just see dead boys and grieving parents and waste.  I have heard and told these stories many times but I'm not sure what purpose it serves, certainly not a humanising cautionary tale for the victims and the perpetrators of these crimes seem to occupying a parallel world that like a river on a chalk down can vanish for years and flow underground emerging occasionally to remind us that the dust of the past never really gets washed away. 

"I know Ashes as a friend. All of us were young, man. We grew up in one neighborhood. So, it's like we used to live in a ghetto. You understand. All of us dive together. Going fishing, diving, you know, everything. But you know, Ashes is a good guy, a brilliant guy in the ocean. You understand. But with this thing with the drugs thing there, I don't know where he found the drugs. I didn't know. He come out from the island, I just came from school in the evening, cleaning the house. And he came and he walk into the house with all the wet clothes on him, all the sand on his feet, and I ask him 'Ashes, I say what kind of thing is that? Don't you see I am cleaning and you just walk in like that?' He say 'right now, I am rich, I can do anything'. So I turn to him and my next friend turns to him and asks him 'well what?'. He turns and says, 'we found something on the island and we can't spend the money now'. So Kevin turned to him and says 'well just give it back'. We never knew he had found the drugs. You understand. But we go out as normal. And until we, till we hear other talk that they were camping in Isle de Ronde, you understand so they were going below the land, to behind, for the fish and they saw some drugs on the beach, so they saw it and nobody was there so they took it. And then things, some guys came investigating, finding out who is Ashes, who is this, who is that, you understand, who are the other guys. Then they kidnap one guy, I think the one guy say they beat him. So he had to talk for his life. So he talk and he sell out them others. And then they keep one guy, go with him in the van, they drive him around and they ask him to show them who is Ashes. So then the guy shows them who is Ashes. The night we sat down by the bus terminal and somebody came in and say 'Ashes, I just pass some guys in a car asking for you, you know' and Kevin says 'well if so, Ashes you better come out on the road now'. He says 'Man I don't really care you know'. When they came for him they said 'come let's go.' He says, 'I'm not going anywhere with all of you if you have to kill me, kill me here in me people's presence for them to see, I'm not going anywhere' and then they shoot him in the hand for him to let go of what he was holding. And when they shoot him in the hand, he let go but he tried to run and then they shoot him in the back and when he fell one of them guys went over to him and shoot him up around his belly and his legs and thing. And that was about it."