Death, beauty and other paradoxes

Mark Krueger

Recently, at my cabin in Central Wisconsin, on a sunny day, while wading in shallow water, I read Janet Newbury’s masters thesis. Her defense at the University of Victoria School of Child and Youth Care would be that afternoon. I would participate via teleconference. She had done a study of loss and written a powerful account of the stories and feelings of her subjects, who she had asked to look back in reflection on a loss that had occurred many years ago when they were young children. Captivated by her work, the depth of her insight, and the rich stories her study revealed, I got lost in time.

The day before I read her work, it just so happened, I had been reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1999 translation). At one point he referred to a story by Thomas Mann that spoke to the phenomenon of “death/beauty.”

” “Like a golden ring falling into a silver basin.” After first acknowledging that the small acoustical detail could be inconsequential, I think Thomas Mann sounded that faint, clear, metallic tone to create silence. He needed that silence to make beauty audible (because the beauty he was speaking of was death beauty).” Death beauty is a phenomenon of the innocence of youth, which is lost in the hardening and noise of life (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1999 edition, p. 143).

Janet’s thesis and my reading of this passage by Kundera got me to thinking about paradoxes like death beauty and their meaning in our work with youth. It struck me that this is not talked about much. Death, mortality, angst, and suicidal thoughts are, of course, discussed at length in the literatures in several fields. But it seems as if we really do not have much discussion about how our daily work with children and youth is full and rich with these feelings and thoughts. Death beauty, in particular, it seems is often “lost in the hardening and noise,” or skirted around or ignored as a part of life that is often at the edge of our consciousness. Or rather than talk about it as part of the lived experience we tend to talk about how to cope with and get over loss, or to look at it in hindsight, or as an inevitable part of the future rather than as part of the present.

In e-mail correspondence, Marie Hoskins, professor at U of Vic, told me in her work with girls with eating disorders, they often “play with” this notion of death beauty. I like that idea of “play with.” Play not meaning “play” to me in the literal sense, but rather (without minimizing the severity of these feelings and thoughts) that they mess around in their heads with and sometimes act on or test perhaps these feelings as part of their daily existence. This is serious stuff in many cases, but it is also to a lesser or greater degree simply part of youth and being in youth.

When I was a child I remember dropping a replica of the Statue of Liberty into the ocean. My parents and I were on the ferryboat back to the mainland after visiting and climbing up into the real statue. Only a few moments earlier I had pleaded and begged for the replica until my mother gave in. Then as we were riding back to shore I began to think about how bad I would feel if it dropped into the water. It was as if once the thought entered I had to experience the feeling of loss.

To be in youth work with youth it is important to understand and experience these paradoxes with youth as part of life, and by doing so we (youth and youth worker) actually become more alive in our work. It begins, of course, with our own experience. When I read Kundera’s passage, for example, I knew exactly what he was talking about. In my youth I used to place myself, not necessarily with conscious awareness, in states of death beauty. There was a certain quality of numbness or nothingness to these states that seemed at times both comforting and scary. I was called to and compelled from the stillness. What was life like without me, what was it like to be dead, would people like me more if I were dead, and was I really alive? were questions I might have been toying with in those moments. Sometimes I would repeat a word like “conundrum” over and over again until it and I lost meaning, to get a sense of what it might be like. My sense is that feelings something like these are not uncommon undercurrents in the motion and action of youth work, and that part of our role is to acknowledge or manifest this as part of our presence in the moment?

Suzanne Vandeboom, whose drawings are shown here, told me in a phone conversation, that since she was a child she wakes up almost every day thinking about death and its role in her life as a woman and artist. I see this as a very powerful part of what makes her and her work so alive.

Kundera (1999) was saying that the innocence and beauty of these deep and profound feelings we have as children seem to get lost in the busyness of moving on with our lives. We forget, or leave behind, the very parts of us that are important to stay in touch with.

In his Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera shows forgetting as a way of ignoring the history we wish to preserve, and laughter as a way of covering the sadness and joy we can not stand. To know these paradoxes, it seems, might be another way to improve our ability to be with youth. Also if more child and youth worker workers learn to write about death and other important phenomena with introspection, and curiosity, the way Janet did, our work, I think, will become more alive as part of our field's discussion.

(See Janet’s writing in Relational Child and Youth Care Practice and look for more in the future. I think you will really enjoy it as I did on a sunny day when I got lost in my lived experience of youth again.)

These black and white drawings are by Suzanne Vandeboom, an accomplished painter. You can see her work at www.suzannevandeboom.com She lets me select these sketches from her many sketchbooks. In my work in recent years I have been juxtaposing the drawings with my written sketches and fragment poems, which I call works, or oeuvres. Usually when I combine these methods of reflexivity, it helps me see something new. If you are interested you can read more about how I do this in my latest book, Sketching Youth, Self, and Youth Work, which is published by Sense Publishers in Rotterdam.