A human skull is a powerful thing: it signposts an existential paradox -pointing at once to life and a lack thereof, with an unparalleled universal immediacy. No wonder, then, that we are fascinated by the foreboding hinterland a skull describes.
Words by Will Self
Some time in the spring of 2007 I went together with the artist, Damien Hirst, and his former Goldsmiths art tutor, Michael Craig-Martin, to see Hirst’s latest controversial work of art-a platinum cast of a human skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds, including a large pink stone in the centre of the forehead which has come to be known as the ‘Skull Star Diamond’.
It was a blowy grey day in London -this much I remember: one of those days when sweet wrappers and leaves form spindrifts suggestive of the decay of all things. The diamond skull was being kept at Bentley and Skinner, the upmarket jewellers who’d collaborated in its production. I expect you can imagine the drill as we were admitted to the vault-a curious combination of the fustily degage and the manically correct, as men in suits gave us the once-over and men in peaked caps spun the combination dials. I thought the diamond skull was interest· ing-howcould it not be, given its rich trove of powerful psychic associations: death, money, idolatry etc, etc … Yet what engaged me far more were Hirst and Craig-Martin’s responses. It was as if the pair of them had huffed on a mixture of helium and nitrous oxide, such was the high-pitched hilarity that ensued as they fondled the artefact and passed it between us.
I envied them – envy them still. I know what it was that so excited them: the bizarre juxtaposition between the cerebral hunk of carbon they held in their hands and the £5om Hirst believed he could realise from its sale. I’m not old now -and was younger still, then -but as the world-renowned art· ist and his mentor giggled, I felt only the skull beneath my own skin. Hirst’s case for his vulgar bauble was the same as the one he deploys for much of his later work: ‘For the Love of God’ is only an instantiation of greed, desire, fear-and all the other powerful emotions we negotiate through the rit· ual which is money. If so, why does such an inherently speculative practise take the form of a decorative skull, which in all cultures is deemed a memento mori: an object the true purpose of which is to remind us of life’s greatest certainty?
Death, which closes in on me now, is perhaps to be feared less than the excesses of the contemporary art market-yet fear it we all do. “Mistah Kurtz, he dead!” cries the unnamed Congolese native, once the dark heart which stirs the lifeblood of Joseph Conrad’s novella has been stilled – cries with awe as much as regret, since the erst· while ivory trader has decorated the pali· sades of his fence with severed heads which have long since rotted. When Marlow, the tale’s narrator, first sees these objets from the deck of his paddle steamer, he thinks they might be knobs, or some other deco· rative embellishment. Perhaps what Conrad was flaying at here is our own wilful refusal to apprehend the skull that’s staring us in the face -the skull which is our own faces.
We set them atop spears and spikes and fence posts -we stack them in catacombs and ossuaries; people we know and like say things such as, “I love skulls”, while pret· tily shaking their pretty heads so their sil· ver skull earrings tinkle-jangle. When I was a child I was fixated by a trompe l’ oeil image on a book cover which seemed to simultaneously be a skull and two cute kiddies reading by candlelight.
Anamorphosis is the term for a distorted image which can only be properly viewed from a certain angle – the most famous example is probably the strange smear across the mid-section of Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’, which, on nearing the canvas and squinting, resolves into the any· old-ivoriness of a skull. Our forefathers and mothers – particularly mothers – understood only too well that in the midst of life we’re all dead men walking; for them a memento mori played a significant psychotherapeutic role, ever recalling to them the oddest fact about human nature: we all know we may die at any minute, yet we all behave as if we’ll live … forever.
The flesh pit ofBaba Yaga and the frozen wastes along the Kolyma River -these are the 20th century Golgothas; for, just as murdering was industrialised, so was the production of memento moris. By the time Pol Pot declared Year Zero we were already long accustomed to seeing them piled up into freestanding columbariums. But how can death mean anything to us when we treat its remembrance so statistically and with such little poetry? We need to apprehend the skull anew-we need to feel its weight, caress it, allow a finger to fill a fontanel and consider whether or not judicious trepanning is called for. I sit here in the Reception Area of life itself, waiting for a plasticised name badge which may very well never be issued. I lean my elbow on the table scattered with copies ofGood Housekeepin.9 and Vogue Interiors -I rest my head on my hand, feel its weight and allow my fingers to caress glabella and supraorbital foramen, stroke lacrimal and zygomatic bones.
These familiar motions – so common· place they’re usually quite unconscious-are the ones I perform to relieve sinus pain: that sense of mounting pressure and tension, as if some fiendish gremlin were tightening a complex mechanism inside of me, the cogs, screws and levers of which were carved out of my own bones. Yet I’m not in pain -I simply feel the weight of this skull, this bony cru· cible within which I’ve been concocting my identity for years now. Pressure of hand-on· head -weight of skull in hand; pressure of hand-on-head -weight of skull in hand; I flip back and forth between the two awarenesses. You can try this at home for yourselves if you like, so long as you’re prepared for the strange and nauseous sensation of simultaneously feeling live fingers caress you and the deadweight of your dead head.
