This is a stunningly careful way to enter a fragile room without knocking anything over, the framing is tender without being precious, incisive without turning cruel. Tamara, you manage to talk about decay without turning it into either a fetish or a sermon, which is rare in a culture that can only integrate softness if it’s inspirational or profitable.
Your essay also exposes that our fear of decay isn’t really about aging or death. Witnesses is the key word here. Modern society doesn’t mind deterioration so long as it happens off-camera. What we cannot tolerate is unmanaged visibility: decline that refuses to be narrativized, monetized, or framed as “content”. We haven’t lost reverence for withering. We’ve lost patience for anything that won’t cooperate with the audience’s appetite.
There’s an unspoken social contract now, you may suffer but only if your suffering remains legible and productive. Grief must teach. Exhaustion must optimize. Aging must explain itself. Decay that doesn’t resolve into meaning is treated like a technical error. No wonder irrelevance feels like a threat.
We’ve confused being unseen with being erased.
And here’s the dark joke of it all: we call this progress!!!
We replaced vanitas with wellness, skulls with serums, mortality with maintenance. The memento mori used to humble the powerful, now it just sells them another product.
Death didn’t disappear, it got outsourced to logistics and euphemisms, while rot itself became impolite.
Your grandmother’s roses feel like the real heresy here. “They don’t ask anything of me anymore” is practically an anti-capitalist manifesto in a vase. In a world that extracts value from every expression, every feeling, every wrinkle, the idea of companionship without demand feels extraordinary. A dying flower, like an aging woman uninterested in legibility, refuses the economy entirely.
The wit of your essay is that it doesn’t beg us to admire decay. You remove the camera and let it exist. And that absence of performance is exactly what makes it unsettling. Because once beauty stops auditioning, we’re forced to ask why we needed the audition in the first place.
This is not about flowers. It’s a critique of a society that panics when nothing is being sold, recalibrated, explained, or improved.
How much depth and complexity in an essay that looks so simple. Brava!
We’ve turned exposure into a moral obligation so quickly. Visibility as proof of legitimacy. If something isn’t shown, explained, contextualised, it’s treated as suspicious or unfinished, as though existence itself now requires a caption. That’s a relatively new anxiety, and a deeply toxic one if you ask me.
What troubles me the most is how this demand rewires our inner lives. We fear being unseen by others, then we start distrusting experiences that cannot be translated at all. Moments that resist articulation begin to feel wasted. Pain that doesn’t educate anyone else feels indulgent. Even tenderness is pressured to justify itself. Interior life gets thinned out through compulsory usefulness.
The older I get, the more I suspect that what we call reverence was never related to ritual or symbolism, but to restraint. Knowing when not to intervene, knowing when to leave something alone in order to change on its own terms. We’ve lost that patience. We rush in with meaning, fixes, narratives, angles, and then congratulate ourselves for engagement.
What my grandmother understood instinctively was that companionship without extraction is a form of sanity. To be with something or someone without asking it to perform coherence or improvement is disciplined, requiring tolerating ambiguity, decay, silence, even boredom. Those are muscles most of us were never encouraged to develop.
And perhaps that’s why non-performing presence feels unsettling now. It exposes how much of our supposed sensitivity is still transactional. When nothing is offered back, basically no lesson, no uplift, no return on attention, we don’t know how to stay.
Thank you, Clara, for reading my essay with such acuity and generosity, your comment is astonishing!
It's tempting to mention algorithms and social media with its gild-covered rot, but I suspect that the root of this is far older. If you're in the industrialized west, you're the product of generations of people who have mostly gone their whole lives without confronting decay and death directly. We have sewage systems to dispose of waste, armies of men in trucks to dispose of refuse; people rarely die in the streets, and most will go their entire lives rarely coming into contact with a dead body or even a dead animal.
As an extension of this, we don't perform proper autopsies of success or failure. Most failures are obscured and quickly discarded like rotting carcasses; success is lionized and immortalized, as if success itself is a separate entity from failure. The obscured truth is that failure is a necessary condition for success, and is constituted as such; additionally, success has its sunset; it's not a permanent state.
We no longer honor the elderly; we don't thank the dead flowers for fulfilling their purpose and dying honorably; instead we pathologize age and hide decay, to convince ourselves that progress is linear and growth is infinite. It's pretty difficult to get people to worship money, beauty, youth and success by assessing those things honestly as being temporary in nature. Instead, it's a binary; you either ARE or you AREN'T. Wrinkled faces and dead flowers are an inconvenient reminder that you can't buy time, that beauty and health aren't forever, that success isn't always earned, that hard work isn't always rewarded, and that an audience, no matter how big, can't save you from irrelevance.
How fitting that this piece cuts and illuminates without lingering. Brief, beautiful, and retiring with dignity. It's one thing to write well, but it's another to use the structure of the work itself to embody the thesis. This is a kind of artistry that most won't recognize, but they'll feel. Well done, Tamara. This one haunts.
I agree that the problem predates screens by centuries, and I’d go even further… industrial modernity didn’t remove death itself, but gradual contact. We didn’t just outsource waste and dying; we eliminated apprenticeship in limits. Earlier cultures learned finitude the way one learns a craft, by proximity, repetition, inconvenience. You saw bodies fail, crops rot, elders slow. You absorbed temporality through the senses, not as an idea but as some sort of weather. What we inherited instead is a clean abstraction: time as a resource, progress as a line, value as something you either possess or forfeit.
That binary you name, you are or you aren’t, is sooo precisely because it collapses process, leaving no ethical space for transition, for partial usefulness, for dignity without productivity. And once success and failure are severed from one another, both become distortions: success turns theatrical, failure turns shameful. Neither can teach much because neither is allowed to be fully examined. We skip the autopsy because it would reveal contingency, luck, decay, and dependence, all inconvenient to systems built on perpetual ascent.
What unsettles people about wrinkles and dead flowers is far from nostalgia or fear alone, because it send them to implication. They testify that no amount of effort guarantees permanence. That merit doesn’t suspend entropy. That applause doesn’t alter biology. And once you really register that, the altars of money, youth, and recognition start to look unstable. That’s a dangerous realisation for any culture that needs belief in endless return.
As for my essay itself, I was intentionally resistant to lingering. Decay doesn’t plead. It arrives, alters the room, and then recedes. To overexplain would have been to perform the very anxiety I question, the need to extract maximum meaning before disappearance. Some things earn their force by not staying to be admired.
Thank you, Andrew, for reading me like few can, and for articulating these layers with your proverbial clarity!
This notion of success has been autopsized very well in Goodhart's The Road To Somewhere, where he's using every statistical measure available to articulate the division between the Anywheres and the Somewheres. Where failure in this regard is depicted through the eyes of the policy-making achievers and their intergenerational elite tanglehold at the top of the tree of status, wealth and power.
It's a slow read, fraught with massive statistical surveys from top to bottom and throughout, with a modest number of pages, but he picks the bone clean to show us the state of things up to 2017, mostly in Britain and the US, and Europe, but now gone global, of course, as he brings in all of the key issues at play.
I love the way you name the dignity in disinterest, the sacredness in being “used up” without apology. It reminded me of how often we confuse aliveness with constant bloom, as though anything past its peak becomes a kind of social inconvenience.
Reading your essay, I kept thinking about the Japanese concept of “mottainai”, the idea that nothing should be wasted, not even the moments that don’t glitter. My grandmother (another keeper of dying flowers) used to dry orange peels on the radiator and tuck them into drawers long after they lost their scent. “Even what’s past its use still holds a story”, she’d say. I never understood that until I saw, in adulthood, how much of myself I kept trying to prune to remain acceptable.
Your line about performance following you into solitude felt uncomfortably familiar. I remember catching myself once practicing a “neutral” face in the bathroom mirror before a Zoom call, even though no one was going to see me until I clicked “join meeting”. The rehearsal had become reflex. Your essay makes me realize how many of us are living in dress rehearsals for moments that might never come or worse, moments that come and demand nothing of the scripts we spent years perfecting.
One idea I’d add is how decay can serve as a kind of archive of what has been lost, but also of what survived the losing. When a flower withers, the shape of its collapse often mirrors the shape of its growth; the stem bends along the same lines that once held it upright. In people, too, the places where we crack often reveal the architecture that held us together. The fall isn’t the opposite of the flourish. I see it as the continuation of it. A different chapter of the same story.
Your exploration of authenticity made me think of how we’ve aestheticized vulnerability to the point that even confession must come with contouring. The digital gaze is relentless. Yet there’s a radical defiance in existing unoptimized, in letting your voice tremble without adjusting the microphone, in wearing the same face in public that you wear when you’re alone. Not performative rawness, but uncurated presence. That’s a kind of courage I wish we talked about more.
And perhaps the most subversive thing you suggest is that decay is not the opposite of life but a form of truth-telling. In nature, decomposition is generative: soil is richest where things have fallen apart. Forest floors teach a lesson our culture refuses to learn: that endings are ecosystems.
Your essay reminds me of the Roman god Janus, the keeper of thresholds, always shown with two faces: one looking to the past, one to the future. But what people forget is that Janus was also the god of transitions, of the moment between identities. Decay is that threshold. Not the death of the self, not the rebirth, but the moment when we stop pretending we were ever static to begin with.
Tamara, I have to thank you for writing something that doesn’t ask to be inspirational. That in itself is a kindness. It leaves space for the reader to breathe, to sag a little, to stop holding themselves upright for the sake of the room. Your work glows slowly, like embers. And that kind of light is honest. It stays. Until it doesn’t :)
What I keep noticing, as I sit with responses like yours, is how deeply trained we are to treat continuity as virtue. To believe that staying recognisable or consistent is evidence of integrity. And yet so much of what actually sustains a life happens precisely when that continuity loosens, when habits fall apart, when the old posture no longer holds, when we’re briefly unrecognisable even to ourselves. That in-between state is usually framed as a problem to solve, not a phase to inhabit. Which is a shame because it’s often where the most accurate information lives.
The rehearsal you describe, the face adjusted before there’s even an audience, is something I recognise as muscle memory. It’s what happens when being readable has been rewarded for too long. Over time, we perform to reassure ourselves that we still exist in a form that can be received. Undoing that reflex is awkward.
I’m also drawn to what you say about decay as record rather than loss. Not as a lesson, not as redemption, but as evidence. The body, the psyche, the life reveal their history differently. What bends is often what once bore the most weight. That makes the collapse precise. And precision, to me, is far more respectful than consolation.
I didn’t want the essay to offer courage as a banner people could wave. Courage has become too loud a word. I wanted to make room for permission to stop holding shape when the shape is no longer serving the organism inside it, to let the moment between identities remain unnamed and unproductive, and therefore intact.
Thank you, Céline, for reading with such attentiveness, and for bringing your own images, memories, and thinking into the space! It’s a gift to be met at that level of care.
This is an absolutely stunning piece of writing. It strips away the layers that we want to hold on to, the attempts to stay pretty (whether man or woman, though more is expected from women). We are addicted to facades even when we have a good idea what lies underneath. And how much do these games suck life from the present, all for the purpose of status and adoration? We each and all of us end. The beauty of the corpse can't change that. But what might we learn by simply showing the universe our true face?
I think that the insistence on keeping the façade intact is related to fear of interruption. A polished surface allows life to move efficiently, without stopping to ask anything of us. The moment the mask slips, time thickens. Conversations slow. People don’t know where to look. And that discomfort is precisely the point we’ve trained ourselves to avoid.
Showing one’s true face doesn’t teach the universe anything. Ok the contrary it teaches us how little approval actually sustains us. When you stop performing coherence and you become harder to manipulate, less distractible, less willing to barter your inner life for recognition, then something emerges.
What we might learn, then, is how to live without the exhausting labour of being impressive. That honesty doesn’t elevate you socially, but it does return your energy. And that, in a culture built on constant display, is a form of freedom most people never taste.
You're very welcome. I really enjoy not only your writing style but also the ways it makes me think. And "interruption" is a great way to name what you're talking about. We're encouraged to make of our lives a smooth, beautiful, rising curve that leaves in its wake a glowing image. But existence doesn't give a damn how we look. What matters is the kind of people we've been.
The problem arises from sloppy species overlapping. A blooming flower is nature's harbinger of a plant in heat, not as a symbol of sexuality, but surely as an engorged expression of actual fertility. A bud is prepubescent; a wilted blossom, botanical menopause. In a culture terrified by uncertainty, and in denial of its own mortality, and consequently obsessed with youth and the promise of immortality through progeny, (don't make me mention the Epstein Files!) only one phase of a flower's life holds value: the bloom. Yes, the analog maps onto the human species, but only roughly; nature receives the passing fertility with much greater grace than the modern human race does.
Edgar Allen Poe's epigraph to the Gothic story, The Fall of the House of Usher reads as follows:
Son coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitot qu'on le touche il resonne.
– De Beranger
To me, this speaks directly to that failure of grace in our species. Usher is cursed with a too sensitive heart in an unnaturally industrializing world which deprives him of his Erotic right to personal blossoming. Suspended in that tension, taut for virile contact, he is too much isolated and spiritually infertile. So maddening is the heat within him that he even tries to "plant" the only flower at his disposal, his sister. Usher, as metaphor for modern culture, is so fallen from his affinity with nature, horror is inevitable and is broadly normalized. Foundations crack and sanity shrieks into oblivion.
A flower in bloom naturally gives full expression to its inner drives. It opens its being fully to the world, without shame, courts the birds and the bees, and fulfills its life unapologetically. It maintains that erotic grace as it withers. Not as performance, but as presence through time and space. Flowering is simply a beautiful phase. What we too often forget is that budding and withering are no less so. Thank you, Tamara, for the deliberately graceful reminder!
Your refusal to sentimentalise biology while still allowing it dignity is compelling. You’re right, the bloom isn’t a metaphor invented by poets, it’s a charged, time-bound, purposeful physiological event. The trouble begins when humans mistake that single phase for the definition of value rather than one expression among many. We admire fertility and we enthrone it. And then we panic when it moves on, as it always must.
Modern culture demands that everything behave like a bloom. Productivity must look fertile. Desire must remain visible. Even wisdom is expected to present itself as vitality. That’s where the real distortion happens, when phases that were once sequential are forced into simultaneity. Be young and authoritative. Be weathered but desirable. Be spent but still radiant. Biology knows better; culture pretends not to.
Your reading of “The Fall of the House of Usher” is incisive because Usher’s tragedy isn’t excess sensitivity alone, but disembodiment. He’s all vibration, no circulation. Cut off from natural rhythms, his intensity turns inward, then pathological. When eros has no season, no outlet, no decay allowed, it mutates. Horror isn’t an aberration there; it’s the logical outcome of stalled life.
Flowers demonstrate that completion doesn’t require permanence. They don’t cling to the bloom as identity, they don’t mourn the bud once opened, nor apologise for the wilt. Presence continues, differently textured, differently scented, until it doesn’t.
Thank you, Andrew, for bringing such a sharp, unsentimental intelligence to this exchange! Your reading honours the essay by refusing to soften it.
Sometimes your writing hits me like a withered rose. Beauty with a spike or two. Rarely do I read anyones work more than twice. The layers within your style encourage me to question what do you mean and deeply question a paradox in my own view of the Universe. To be able to see grace in withering is a rare commodity. Deepest gratitude.
Marry, I’m glad you mentioned the spike because I don’t trust beauty that only soothes. If something is truly alive, it usually resists a little. It interrupts your certainty, not your peace. Writing that can be reread without changing the reader is decorative; writing that sends you back into your own assumptions with new pressure points has done its work. I am grateful mine does the latter.
What matters to me is that the idea of withering unsettles the reflex to rank experiences by brightness or reward. Once that hierarchy loosens, you start noticing how many forms of intelligence exist outside momentum: slowness, fatigue, retreat, even doubt. Those are different instruments for seeing.
If my essay invited you to question a paradox rather than resolve it, that’s exactly where I wanted it to land. Paradox keeps the mind awake without demanding allegiance. It allows grace to appear without insisting on agreement.
Thank you for reading so carefully, and for staying with the thorns as well as the petals! :)
One idea you might fold in is the role of art conservation as an institutional refusal of decay.
Museums are built around the fantasy of arrested time. Conservation departments exist to stabilise, restore, and visually “correct” objects back toward an imagined moment of peak coherence. Cracks are filled, pigments are revived, varnish is reapplied. The stated goal is preservation, but the implicit one is legibility: keeping the artwork readable and fit for display. What gets erased is the object’s lived history: touch, exposure, fatigue, entropy. Then conservation mirrors the cultural demand placed on bodies (especially women’s bodies): age, but don’t show it; change, but don’t register the cost.
This supports your thesis because it shows that the rejection of decay is structural. Even when art is allowed to age, it must do so under supervision, corrected back into acceptability. Untreated deterioration is framed as neglect or failure, not truth. By contrast, works that openly incorporate entropy, unrestored frescoes, unmaintained land art, performance pieces that refuse documentation become threatening precisely because they deny the viewer the comfort of a stable image.
Your argument about dignity emerging from disinterest aligns here, decay becomes intolerable at the moment it stops serving interpretation. Conservation, like self-curation, is all about control. And what you’re gesturing toward is a radical counter-position, allowing things to change without rescuing them into meaning.
What a monumental piece you’ve written! And I’m sure you’re not even aware of this. Simply amazing.
I’ve thought about this often, and what unsettles me is not conservation itself but the moral hierarchy embedded in it. Preservation is framed as care, but it’s also a choice about which moment deserves to survive. We select a preferred version of the object, usually the one that best aligns with coherence, mastery, recognisability, and treat everything that came after as damage rather than experience. Time becomes a contaminant instead of a collaborator.
What this reveals is a deeper discomfort with ambiguity. An artwork that visibly carries its fatigue asks something inconvenient of the viewer: patience, humility, a willingness to encounter instability without resolution. That’s hard to sustain inside institutions designed for circulation, education, reassurance. So we stabilise the surface and call it respect. But what’s really being protected is legibility , the ease with which meaning can be extracted and displayed.
I’m especially interested in works that resist that rescue operation because they force a different relationship with attention. You can’t skim a fading fresco or a performance that leaves no artefact. You either stay with it as it is, or you miss it. That refusal to be held still exposes how much of our reverence is conditional on control.
Where this intersects with bodies, particularly women’s bodies, is painfully obvious. Change is tolerated only if it remains discreet, explainable, correctable. Wear must be edited into elegance. History mustn’t show. The parallel is procedural. The same impulse governs both.
What I wanted to gesture toward in my essay is precisely that counter-position you name…. allowing change without intervention, without repair narratives, without the urgency to redeem because decay is accurate, and accuracy, even when it’s inconvenient, deserves its own form of respect.
Thank you, Alexander, for bringing this lens into the conversation, sharpening the argument in a way that feels both precise and generous!
As you may know, Tamara, I have a certain reverence for death. Well, my good friends rot and decay are its entourage and I couldn’t be happier for them to get a bit of reverence themselves!
And the word withering! How stunningly deployed (though I tend to like the word wilting when it come to rot and decay, poetic preference I guess :)) as I think of this concept is fundamental when I think of life and beauty in particular. I am so pleased to read a voice who wants to recenter the natural flow of life’s experience — even as it descends — rather than fixating on moment at the peak of a crescendo. That fixation on a clearly delineated event is immensely addling. Because nothing in our experience ever looks like that… nothing is so fixed, we trick ourselves and the monetize the moments where reality tries to disabuse of us of our illusion. Which is why rot and decay —imbued with my favourite tense: present perfect continuous — is such a needed salve for our minds that are stuck and stagnant trying to paw at and grasp a twisted, impossible perfection. These processes start, are felt, and continue. Even if you don’t want them to. And I appreciate their honesty on this account.
The way your biology includes the garden and human dynamics, best exemplified in the heading as grace, is a beautiful image to invoke. And particularly as a framing device to remind us all of one of those iron-clad laws that people are desperately trying to forget: entropy :).
Rot and decay are adherents to the cult of entropy. And, mercifully they thrive in stagnant conditions—and if I would be so bold, I think we might be in agreement that the current societal madness around performing perfection is a kind of stagnation. I see these two characters - rot and decay — and their devotion to entropy, as fundamental balancing agents to this stagnation. They will not be tricked into remaining stagnant and if you only tilt your head a little the beauty is uplifting.
The way you have articulated grace in withering is a return to reverence towards rot and decay, not as you said for performative nods to impermanence but a real bone-deep interrogation of entropy and impermanence’s key fundamental premise: if life and death are the same spectrum, then the up and the down should be considered part of the same organic process and appreciated in its totality. Rot and decay—with grace (read, without performance or ignorance)—are part of this beautiful flow of existence. And now, watching the decay of your gallery of flowers in this piece I again have a clear visual and symbolic examples to bring to mind as I too attempt to do away with stagnant performance and (somewhat counter-intuitively) re-centre the realism of the beauty of loss as a wilting a flower holding as much significance as an upstanding peony and its resplendent height.
You also know that I appreciate how you approach death, and by extension rot and decay, because you don’t treat them as abstractions or moral punctuation marks. They are not metaphors you deploy; they are conditions you keep company with. That already places you outside most contemporary conversations, which either sanitise death into euphemism or dramatise it into spectacle. Reverence, in the older sense, isn’t awe or fear but attentiveness without hurry. And that’s exactly what rot requires if it’s going to be seen at all.
Your instinct about process feels crucial. We have become obsessed with moments because moments photograph well, narrate cleanly, and can be pointed to as proof. But lived experience moves. It accrues, loosens, drifts, repeats itself imperfectly. That fixation on crescendos fractures our sense of continuity. It trains us to miss the long middle, the ongoingness where most truth actually resides.
I’m also fascinated by how you frame entropy as circulation correcting stagnation. When everything is forced to remain taut, bright, resolved, life clogs. What rot does, unceremoniously, without asking permission I would say, is reintroduce movement. It doesn’t negotiate with ideals, it resumes the flow.
What I wanted to get at with grace was alignment, and I think you figured this out right away, knowing me. When résistance drops, when we stop demanding exemption from natural laws, something settles. Withering, or wilting, if that’s the word that sings for you, is participation, the refusal to pretend that vitality only counts when it’s upright and impressive.
Thank you, Adam, for reading me with your incredible philosophical intimacy and for bringing your own rigour and imagination into the conversation!
A piece of writing that sounds a quiet but essential depth charge in the psyche. I am reminded of a conversation in comments sometime back last year with you of the whisky making business and the diminishment process therein. An invisible disappearance of liquid as shares for both Devil and Angel alike that lessens the cask contents by volume but deepens the spirit therein. Perhaps there is a way for us to age in such a way that we might be appreciated as our diminished, wrinkled and bright eyed selves.
That image is impactful for the same reason decay is, because it refuses panic about loss. The whisky doesn’t become valuable despite the disappearance, it becomes itself through it. What evaporates is the condition that allows concentration, patience, character. Nothing is rushed to prove usefulness while it’s happening.
What I find interesting in that comparison is the absence of spectators. The cask doesn’t perform its diminishing. No one applauds the waiting. The deepening happens out of sight, without commentary, without an audience insisting on visible progress. That type of time is almost extinct in human terms, and yet it’s the only one that produces substance rather than surface.
Aging, if it’s to be more than managed decline, might need a similar privacy. Not secrecy, but insulation from constant assessment. Wrinkles, brightness, a certain distilled presence are residues of what was allowed to burn off. What remains tends to be sharper, more honest. Less volume, more weight.
I like the idea that appreciation might shift accordingly toward recognition of concentration. Toward people who have lost what was loud and gained what holds. That kind of appreciation can’t be mass-produced, but when it appears, it’s unmistakable.
Thank you, Paul, for bringing that memory back into the conversation!
“Beauty, finally, is just biology relaxing.” If only we let this thought sink deep beneath our skin! So beautiful! I also keep flowers for a very long time and I like that smell; I inhale their passing and I continue to love them regardless.
You’ll smile, but what moves me in what you say is the word “regardless”. Loving something without renegotiating its worth as it changes is not a small act, it goes against most of what we are trained to do. We are taught to withdraw affection once vibrancy fades, as if love were contingent on freshness. Staying with the smell of passing, breathing it in rather than recoiling, is a form of attentiveness most people rush past.
Thank you, Otilia, for letting that line travel beneath your skin, and for meeting my essay with tenderness!
Perhaps the most powerful moment in my life, was when my Mother, days short of 95, lay in hospital, dying. She was always beautiful, in body, mind & soul. And she was beautiful then.
When I was called by the hospital hours later, she’d died, only minutes earlier. I shed a tear as I write this.
The nurse closed her eyes. I waited till she’d left, then opened them. I could see her as if she was alive, & its seemed she saw me, but did not speak. Her eyes were still the eyes she always had: they hadn’t changed.
Whilst her heart & breathing had stopped, I’m sure she could see me, as in a dream. Silently. Gently. The brain continuing its function of perception, involuntarily. She may even have heard me.
Why do people insist on closing the eyes of those just deceased? Are they afraid of something? I do not understand why.
I like that you touch on the difference between function ending and presence withdrawing. We are very clumsy with that interval. We rush to tidy it, to seal it, to make it behave properly as if stillness without instruction were intolerable.
I don’t think the closing of the eyes is about the deceased at all. I think it’s for the living. Open eyes unsettle us because they refuse finality. They suggest continuity without dialogue, perception without response. That ambiguity frightens people trained to need clear endings. We prefer a visual cue that says: it’s over, you’re safe now, nothing more is happening. But of course, something is happening…. just not in a language we can manage.
What fascinates me the most in your memory is the recognition. You didn’t need proof that she saw you. You knew her eyes. That knowing doesn’t rely on biology alone. It’s relational, accumulated, and so intimate. Love builds a literacy that doesn’t vanish just because the body changes state.
Moments like the one you describe feel precious because they are unmediated. No performance, no correction, no instruction on how to behave, only presence meeting presence, briefly ungoverned by protocol. That kind of encounter leaves a mark precisely because it isn’t explainable.
Thank you, Russell, for trusting my little salon with something so tender!
I’ll start with where your response ends, Tamara: your “little salon” invites comment such as mine, because it is an intimate readership & ‘thoughtfulness-ship’: I’ve not told this to anyone before.
And how typically perceptive of you that you understand the “difference between function ending & presence withdrawing”.
I didn’t notice the same presence when my sister died in 1990, nor my father in 2006. In fact no one else, ever.
This was unique. I do believe she saw, & heard, in those minutes after heart death. She could not respond, of course, but was not brain dead, but paralysed, rather like someone in a coma. The expression on her face was utter peace, utter resignation to a kind of eternity. Some call it heaven.
In the first few minutes after heart death, sensation continues, but cannot of course be responded to. Too few talk about this. The medical profession has scant interest. But our ancient ancestors knew this as the time the spirit left the body, & ascended to heaven. At its root, heaven simply means that which is lifted, or heaved, up, so as to be heaven up. As opposed to the body, which stays down. Worthy of thought I believe.
Thankyou for continuing the discussion. I’ll end by referring to when my mother & I visited our aging cocker spaniel, who’d been kept overnight at a Melbourne veterinary surgery for tests. At 14, he was by then blind. Close to death, he wagged his tail & tried to stand in the joyous reassurance of our returned presence.
By his sense of smell & hearing alone could he know we were there, but know he did. He died minutes later. That was of course very sad for us.
The olfactory sense is the most primitive & powerful in most mammals. It’s reasonable to expect that my mother, of who’s body I was once part, was, in her unconscious but nevertheless passively sense-receiving state, at least partly capable of smelling my presence. As her son, I was in essence part of her.
I’m not interested in proving this: the mutual sensing of each other, silently, was obvious to me.
This lives in a register that medicine rarely knows how to hold maybe because it isn’t operational. It can’t be measured, timed, or acted upon, so it falls outside professional curiosity. Yet that doesn’t make it marginal to lived experience. Some of the most decisive human knowledge arrives precisely when response is no longer possible.
I’m struck by how consistently scent appears in moments of threshold. Smell bypasses story and goes straight to familiarity. That’s why it remains when other senses falter. In both moments you describe, your dog and your mother, what mattered wasn’t proof of perception but continuity of relation. Knowing without exchange. Presence without reciprocity. That’s a demanding kind of witnessing because it asks the living to stay when nothing comes back.
The idea that sensation continues briefly after what we call death unsettles people because it resists our desire for clean borders. We like endings that click shut. But that interval you describe is deeply human. It mirrors so much of what love already asks of us: to feel without control, to recognise without confirmation, to remain even when language is gone.
Ancient cosmologies (a field I am very fond of) didn’t treat that moment as an error or a glitch. They treated it as a passage…. just movement. Something lifting away, something settling. We lost that literacy when we insisted that only what can be verified deserves attention.
You’re right, Russell, it is worthy of thought. Not to turn it into belief, but to allow room for experiences that don’t require proof to be true.
I should add, finally, that what I experienced with my mother, I didn’t with my sister or father, or anyone else. In each of the three cases, the hospital called me immediately they died, & I was there in a few minutes. I wasn’t at the hospital continually, because I didn’t expect any of them to die so soon.
I loved them all equally much.
Why then this unique experience with post mortal communication?
Because my mother was the only person I was ever physically part of, albeit prior to birth.
Your thoughtful feedback has helped me understand the experience better, one I’d never considered telling anyone else, until I read you initial essay in this thread.
I love this. I keep the dead flowers too. Same as you, because I forget to get rid of them. But then I also pick out the ones that I just can't part with for one reason or another and hit them with hairspray. I have a small collection in a container that once upon a time held a candle that I lit when I said my prayers each day. Some of those flowers have lasted a long time, not in the double digit years yet but they're getting there.
I was recently working through an idea for an article in my journal. I was thinking about how in the years I was chronically online I always heard the idea thrown around that women over 35 or so secretly mourn their past desirability. That they don't get the perks of beauty or free drinks at the bar. That they become "invisible".
Well, I spent the bulk of my thirties haunting one bar or the other and I can say with confidence I felt no such thing. The realization dawned on me at some point when I was in public but didn't have to glare at people to be given space. I had always wanted to be alone around others when I was drinking and writing and suddenly I had my wish.
It was marvelous. And similar to you as well, the unprettiness and messy is where I always want my writing to be. I know I've experienced both, being beautiful and the complete collapse into decay and it's funny how people can selectively see some parts of you and block out the truth of what is going on (a lesson I learned well as a drunk).
Anyways, thank you for sharing this and sorry for a ramble. I just get excited when I recognize a kindred spirit.
I like the tender intelligence of selective keeping. Not preservation for display, not nostalgia embalmed, but a decision to let certain things stay because they’ve earned their place through proximity. Hairspray as companionship. Lovely! A way of saying: you can continue, altered, without being rushed out of the room.
The idea that women mourn desirability after a certain age has always struck me as projection dressed up as sociology. It assumes attention is nourishment, when for many of us it’s been more like static. The relief of no longer having to manage other people’s proximity is something I’ve heard only in whispers, usually followed by laughter, as if admitting it might revoke the privilege. Space, it turns out, is one of the most underrated luxuries of aging.
And you’re right about how people see in fragments. They register the surface that fits their expectation and edit out the rest, the exhaustion, the intelligence, the disarray, the will. That selective blindness can feel cruel, but it also reveals how little of us was ever actually available to them. Which is clarifying, I think.
There’s no need to apologise for excitement, Cappy! Recognition is energising, especially when it doesn’t ask you to perform gratitude or polish the edges. Thank you for sharing your flowers, your bars, your relief, and for reading me with such warmth and honesty!
The grotesque could appear, but only if it knew how to pose. Only if it had good hair, good lighting, and the decency to die on cue.
Particularly fond of this observation
When I lived in an assisted living facility to be near my terminally ill wife two years back, the aging process was all around me. I watched Peggy become almost unrecognizable from the lovely person I had known for over thirty years. Life doesn’t dress up for the final act. It just folds like your flowers and you have to learn to know differently than before. When I started a new phase of life in a new home I recognized loss but it was a pose. Over the past couple of years I notice how easy it is to become forgetful as if decay is hiding behind a mask of good luck. Tom
The phrase learning to know differently feels truer to the experience than any language of acceptance or resilience. When someone you love changes beyond recognition, the mind can’t rely on continuity anymore. Familiar cues fail. Affection has to find new routes. It’s not sentiment that carries you through that, but attention, the slow, unglamorous recalibration of how you see, how you stay.
What struck me when writing that line about “dying on cue” is how little our culture prepares us for that kind of witnessing. We are taught to recognise people through coherence: their face, their voice, their habits, their narrative arc. When those dissolve, we feel disoriented, as if love itself has lost its object. But what you describe shows the opposite: love doesn’t vanish, it simply becomes less legible. It stops posing.
The way you speak about forgetfulness is fascinating. We like to frame it as benign fortune, aging without drama, decline without disturbance, but it’s often just decay slipping under the radar. Not merciful, not tragic. Silent. And silent changes ask something different of us than crises do. They require patience rather than bravery, presence rather than action.
Thank you, Tom, for trusting my space with something so personal, and for reading my essay through your lived experience rather than theory!
What matters more than the hairstyle is the discernment underneath it, knowing which efforts still feel alive and which ones only exist out of habit or social inertia. Keeping what gives you pleasure while silently shedding what drains you is a sign of intelligence in my opinion. Elegance often arrives through removing unnecessary résistance, one small choice at a time.
This is a stunningly careful way to enter a fragile room without knocking anything over, the framing is tender without being precious, incisive without turning cruel. Tamara, you manage to talk about decay without turning it into either a fetish or a sermon, which is rare in a culture that can only integrate softness if it’s inspirational or profitable.
Your essay also exposes that our fear of decay isn’t really about aging or death. Witnesses is the key word here. Modern society doesn’t mind deterioration so long as it happens off-camera. What we cannot tolerate is unmanaged visibility: decline that refuses to be narrativized, monetized, or framed as “content”. We haven’t lost reverence for withering. We’ve lost patience for anything that won’t cooperate with the audience’s appetite.
There’s an unspoken social contract now, you may suffer but only if your suffering remains legible and productive. Grief must teach. Exhaustion must optimize. Aging must explain itself. Decay that doesn’t resolve into meaning is treated like a technical error. No wonder irrelevance feels like a threat.
We’ve confused being unseen with being erased.
And here’s the dark joke of it all: we call this progress!!!
We replaced vanitas with wellness, skulls with serums, mortality with maintenance. The memento mori used to humble the powerful, now it just sells them another product.
Death didn’t disappear, it got outsourced to logistics and euphemisms, while rot itself became impolite.
Your grandmother’s roses feel like the real heresy here. “They don’t ask anything of me anymore” is practically an anti-capitalist manifesto in a vase. In a world that extracts value from every expression, every feeling, every wrinkle, the idea of companionship without demand feels extraordinary. A dying flower, like an aging woman uninterested in legibility, refuses the economy entirely.
The wit of your essay is that it doesn’t beg us to admire decay. You remove the camera and let it exist. And that absence of performance is exactly what makes it unsettling. Because once beauty stops auditioning, we’re forced to ask why we needed the audition in the first place.
This is not about flowers. It’s a critique of a society that panics when nothing is being sold, recalibrated, explained, or improved.
How much depth and complexity in an essay that looks so simple. Brava!
We’ve turned exposure into a moral obligation so quickly. Visibility as proof of legitimacy. If something isn’t shown, explained, contextualised, it’s treated as suspicious or unfinished, as though existence itself now requires a caption. That’s a relatively new anxiety, and a deeply toxic one if you ask me.
What troubles me the most is how this demand rewires our inner lives. We fear being unseen by others, then we start distrusting experiences that cannot be translated at all. Moments that resist articulation begin to feel wasted. Pain that doesn’t educate anyone else feels indulgent. Even tenderness is pressured to justify itself. Interior life gets thinned out through compulsory usefulness.
The older I get, the more I suspect that what we call reverence was never related to ritual or symbolism, but to restraint. Knowing when not to intervene, knowing when to leave something alone in order to change on its own terms. We’ve lost that patience. We rush in with meaning, fixes, narratives, angles, and then congratulate ourselves for engagement.
What my grandmother understood instinctively was that companionship without extraction is a form of sanity. To be with something or someone without asking it to perform coherence or improvement is disciplined, requiring tolerating ambiguity, decay, silence, even boredom. Those are muscles most of us were never encouraged to develop.
And perhaps that’s why non-performing presence feels unsettling now. It exposes how much of our supposed sensitivity is still transactional. When nothing is offered back, basically no lesson, no uplift, no return on attention, we don’t know how to stay.
Thank you, Clara, for reading my essay with such acuity and generosity, your comment is astonishing!
Writing about decay is also a kind of lite denial of decay- the significance of the aesthetics of writing should not be …
It's tempting to mention algorithms and social media with its gild-covered rot, but I suspect that the root of this is far older. If you're in the industrialized west, you're the product of generations of people who have mostly gone their whole lives without confronting decay and death directly. We have sewage systems to dispose of waste, armies of men in trucks to dispose of refuse; people rarely die in the streets, and most will go their entire lives rarely coming into contact with a dead body or even a dead animal.
As an extension of this, we don't perform proper autopsies of success or failure. Most failures are obscured and quickly discarded like rotting carcasses; success is lionized and immortalized, as if success itself is a separate entity from failure. The obscured truth is that failure is a necessary condition for success, and is constituted as such; additionally, success has its sunset; it's not a permanent state.
We no longer honor the elderly; we don't thank the dead flowers for fulfilling their purpose and dying honorably; instead we pathologize age and hide decay, to convince ourselves that progress is linear and growth is infinite. It's pretty difficult to get people to worship money, beauty, youth and success by assessing those things honestly as being temporary in nature. Instead, it's a binary; you either ARE or you AREN'T. Wrinkled faces and dead flowers are an inconvenient reminder that you can't buy time, that beauty and health aren't forever, that success isn't always earned, that hard work isn't always rewarded, and that an audience, no matter how big, can't save you from irrelevance.
How fitting that this piece cuts and illuminates without lingering. Brief, beautiful, and retiring with dignity. It's one thing to write well, but it's another to use the structure of the work itself to embody the thesis. This is a kind of artistry that most won't recognize, but they'll feel. Well done, Tamara. This one haunts.
I agree that the problem predates screens by centuries, and I’d go even further… industrial modernity didn’t remove death itself, but gradual contact. We didn’t just outsource waste and dying; we eliminated apprenticeship in limits. Earlier cultures learned finitude the way one learns a craft, by proximity, repetition, inconvenience. You saw bodies fail, crops rot, elders slow. You absorbed temporality through the senses, not as an idea but as some sort of weather. What we inherited instead is a clean abstraction: time as a resource, progress as a line, value as something you either possess or forfeit.
That binary you name, you are or you aren’t, is sooo precisely because it collapses process, leaving no ethical space for transition, for partial usefulness, for dignity without productivity. And once success and failure are severed from one another, both become distortions: success turns theatrical, failure turns shameful. Neither can teach much because neither is allowed to be fully examined. We skip the autopsy because it would reveal contingency, luck, decay, and dependence, all inconvenient to systems built on perpetual ascent.
What unsettles people about wrinkles and dead flowers is far from nostalgia or fear alone, because it send them to implication. They testify that no amount of effort guarantees permanence. That merit doesn’t suspend entropy. That applause doesn’t alter biology. And once you really register that, the altars of money, youth, and recognition start to look unstable. That’s a dangerous realisation for any culture that needs belief in endless return.
As for my essay itself, I was intentionally resistant to lingering. Decay doesn’t plead. It arrives, alters the room, and then recedes. To overexplain would have been to perform the very anxiety I question, the need to extract maximum meaning before disappearance. Some things earn their force by not staying to be admired.
Thank you, Andrew, for reading me like few can, and for articulating these layers with your proverbial clarity!
This notion of success has been autopsized very well in Goodhart's The Road To Somewhere, where he's using every statistical measure available to articulate the division between the Anywheres and the Somewheres. Where failure in this regard is depicted through the eyes of the policy-making achievers and their intergenerational elite tanglehold at the top of the tree of status, wealth and power.
It's a slow read, fraught with massive statistical surveys from top to bottom and throughout, with a modest number of pages, but he picks the bone clean to show us the state of things up to 2017, mostly in Britain and the US, and Europe, but now gone global, of course, as he brings in all of the key issues at play.
You always inspire me, Michael! Thank you!
I love the way you name the dignity in disinterest, the sacredness in being “used up” without apology. It reminded me of how often we confuse aliveness with constant bloom, as though anything past its peak becomes a kind of social inconvenience.
Reading your essay, I kept thinking about the Japanese concept of “mottainai”, the idea that nothing should be wasted, not even the moments that don’t glitter. My grandmother (another keeper of dying flowers) used to dry orange peels on the radiator and tuck them into drawers long after they lost their scent. “Even what’s past its use still holds a story”, she’d say. I never understood that until I saw, in adulthood, how much of myself I kept trying to prune to remain acceptable.
Your line about performance following you into solitude felt uncomfortably familiar. I remember catching myself once practicing a “neutral” face in the bathroom mirror before a Zoom call, even though no one was going to see me until I clicked “join meeting”. The rehearsal had become reflex. Your essay makes me realize how many of us are living in dress rehearsals for moments that might never come or worse, moments that come and demand nothing of the scripts we spent years perfecting.
One idea I’d add is how decay can serve as a kind of archive of what has been lost, but also of what survived the losing. When a flower withers, the shape of its collapse often mirrors the shape of its growth; the stem bends along the same lines that once held it upright. In people, too, the places where we crack often reveal the architecture that held us together. The fall isn’t the opposite of the flourish. I see it as the continuation of it. A different chapter of the same story.
Your exploration of authenticity made me think of how we’ve aestheticized vulnerability to the point that even confession must come with contouring. The digital gaze is relentless. Yet there’s a radical defiance in existing unoptimized, in letting your voice tremble without adjusting the microphone, in wearing the same face in public that you wear when you’re alone. Not performative rawness, but uncurated presence. That’s a kind of courage I wish we talked about more.
And perhaps the most subversive thing you suggest is that decay is not the opposite of life but a form of truth-telling. In nature, decomposition is generative: soil is richest where things have fallen apart. Forest floors teach a lesson our culture refuses to learn: that endings are ecosystems.
Your essay reminds me of the Roman god Janus, the keeper of thresholds, always shown with two faces: one looking to the past, one to the future. But what people forget is that Janus was also the god of transitions, of the moment between identities. Decay is that threshold. Not the death of the self, not the rebirth, but the moment when we stop pretending we were ever static to begin with.
Tamara, I have to thank you for writing something that doesn’t ask to be inspirational. That in itself is a kindness. It leaves space for the reader to breathe, to sag a little, to stop holding themselves upright for the sake of the room. Your work glows slowly, like embers. And that kind of light is honest. It stays. Until it doesn’t :)
What I keep noticing, as I sit with responses like yours, is how deeply trained we are to treat continuity as virtue. To believe that staying recognisable or consistent is evidence of integrity. And yet so much of what actually sustains a life happens precisely when that continuity loosens, when habits fall apart, when the old posture no longer holds, when we’re briefly unrecognisable even to ourselves. That in-between state is usually framed as a problem to solve, not a phase to inhabit. Which is a shame because it’s often where the most accurate information lives.
The rehearsal you describe, the face adjusted before there’s even an audience, is something I recognise as muscle memory. It’s what happens when being readable has been rewarded for too long. Over time, we perform to reassure ourselves that we still exist in a form that can be received. Undoing that reflex is awkward.
I’m also drawn to what you say about decay as record rather than loss. Not as a lesson, not as redemption, but as evidence. The body, the psyche, the life reveal their history differently. What bends is often what once bore the most weight. That makes the collapse precise. And precision, to me, is far more respectful than consolation.
I didn’t want the essay to offer courage as a banner people could wave. Courage has become too loud a word. I wanted to make room for permission to stop holding shape when the shape is no longer serving the organism inside it, to let the moment between identities remain unnamed and unproductive, and therefore intact.
Thank you, Céline, for reading with such attentiveness, and for bringing your own images, memories, and thinking into the space! It’s a gift to be met at that level of care.
This is an absolutely stunning piece of writing. It strips away the layers that we want to hold on to, the attempts to stay pretty (whether man or woman, though more is expected from women). We are addicted to facades even when we have a good idea what lies underneath. And how much do these games suck life from the present, all for the purpose of status and adoration? We each and all of us end. The beauty of the corpse can't change that. But what might we learn by simply showing the universe our true face?
I think that the insistence on keeping the façade intact is related to fear of interruption. A polished surface allows life to move efficiently, without stopping to ask anything of us. The moment the mask slips, time thickens. Conversations slow. People don’t know where to look. And that discomfort is precisely the point we’ve trained ourselves to avoid.
Showing one’s true face doesn’t teach the universe anything. Ok the contrary it teaches us how little approval actually sustains us. When you stop performing coherence and you become harder to manipulate, less distractible, less willing to barter your inner life for recognition, then something emerges.
What we might learn, then, is how to live without the exhausting labour of being impressive. That honesty doesn’t elevate you socially, but it does return your energy. And that, in a culture built on constant display, is a form of freedom most people never taste.
Thank you, Miguel, for reading me with such care!
You're very welcome. I really enjoy not only your writing style but also the ways it makes me think. And "interruption" is a great way to name what you're talking about. We're encouraged to make of our lives a smooth, beautiful, rising curve that leaves in its wake a glowing image. But existence doesn't give a damn how we look. What matters is the kind of people we've been.
So true!!!
The problem arises from sloppy species overlapping. A blooming flower is nature's harbinger of a plant in heat, not as a symbol of sexuality, but surely as an engorged expression of actual fertility. A bud is prepubescent; a wilted blossom, botanical menopause. In a culture terrified by uncertainty, and in denial of its own mortality, and consequently obsessed with youth and the promise of immortality through progeny, (don't make me mention the Epstein Files!) only one phase of a flower's life holds value: the bloom. Yes, the analog maps onto the human species, but only roughly; nature receives the passing fertility with much greater grace than the modern human race does.
Edgar Allen Poe's epigraph to the Gothic story, The Fall of the House of Usher reads as follows:
Son coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitot qu'on le touche il resonne.
– De Beranger
To me, this speaks directly to that failure of grace in our species. Usher is cursed with a too sensitive heart in an unnaturally industrializing world which deprives him of his Erotic right to personal blossoming. Suspended in that tension, taut for virile contact, he is too much isolated and spiritually infertile. So maddening is the heat within him that he even tries to "plant" the only flower at his disposal, his sister. Usher, as metaphor for modern culture, is so fallen from his affinity with nature, horror is inevitable and is broadly normalized. Foundations crack and sanity shrieks into oblivion.
A flower in bloom naturally gives full expression to its inner drives. It opens its being fully to the world, without shame, courts the birds and the bees, and fulfills its life unapologetically. It maintains that erotic grace as it withers. Not as performance, but as presence through time and space. Flowering is simply a beautiful phase. What we too often forget is that budding and withering are no less so. Thank you, Tamara, for the deliberately graceful reminder!
Your refusal to sentimentalise biology while still allowing it dignity is compelling. You’re right, the bloom isn’t a metaphor invented by poets, it’s a charged, time-bound, purposeful physiological event. The trouble begins when humans mistake that single phase for the definition of value rather than one expression among many. We admire fertility and we enthrone it. And then we panic when it moves on, as it always must.
Modern culture demands that everything behave like a bloom. Productivity must look fertile. Desire must remain visible. Even wisdom is expected to present itself as vitality. That’s where the real distortion happens, when phases that were once sequential are forced into simultaneity. Be young and authoritative. Be weathered but desirable. Be spent but still radiant. Biology knows better; culture pretends not to.
Your reading of “The Fall of the House of Usher” is incisive because Usher’s tragedy isn’t excess sensitivity alone, but disembodiment. He’s all vibration, no circulation. Cut off from natural rhythms, his intensity turns inward, then pathological. When eros has no season, no outlet, no decay allowed, it mutates. Horror isn’t an aberration there; it’s the logical outcome of stalled life.
Flowers demonstrate that completion doesn’t require permanence. They don’t cling to the bloom as identity, they don’t mourn the bud once opened, nor apologise for the wilt. Presence continues, differently textured, differently scented, until it doesn’t.
Thank you, Andrew, for bringing such a sharp, unsentimental intelligence to this exchange! Your reading honours the essay by refusing to soften it.
Thank you🙏.
Sometimes your writing hits me like a withered rose. Beauty with a spike or two. Rarely do I read anyones work more than twice. The layers within your style encourage me to question what do you mean and deeply question a paradox in my own view of the Universe. To be able to see grace in withering is a rare commodity. Deepest gratitude.
✨🙏♾️.
Marry, I’m glad you mentioned the spike because I don’t trust beauty that only soothes. If something is truly alive, it usually resists a little. It interrupts your certainty, not your peace. Writing that can be reread without changing the reader is decorative; writing that sends you back into your own assumptions with new pressure points has done its work. I am grateful mine does the latter.
What matters to me is that the idea of withering unsettles the reflex to rank experiences by brightness or reward. Once that hierarchy loosens, you start noticing how many forms of intelligence exist outside momentum: slowness, fatigue, retreat, even doubt. Those are different instruments for seeing.
If my essay invited you to question a paradox rather than resolve it, that’s exactly where I wanted it to land. Paradox keeps the mind awake without demanding allegiance. It allows grace to appear without insisting on agreement.
Thank you for reading so carefully, and for staying with the thorns as well as the petals! :)
Thank you T🌹.
Your reply on a reply is invariably even more profound than the original article.
I am deeply grateful for both your precious time and considered response.
✨🙏🔅.
One idea you might fold in is the role of art conservation as an institutional refusal of decay.
Museums are built around the fantasy of arrested time. Conservation departments exist to stabilise, restore, and visually “correct” objects back toward an imagined moment of peak coherence. Cracks are filled, pigments are revived, varnish is reapplied. The stated goal is preservation, but the implicit one is legibility: keeping the artwork readable and fit for display. What gets erased is the object’s lived history: touch, exposure, fatigue, entropy. Then conservation mirrors the cultural demand placed on bodies (especially women’s bodies): age, but don’t show it; change, but don’t register the cost.
This supports your thesis because it shows that the rejection of decay is structural. Even when art is allowed to age, it must do so under supervision, corrected back into acceptability. Untreated deterioration is framed as neglect or failure, not truth. By contrast, works that openly incorporate entropy, unrestored frescoes, unmaintained land art, performance pieces that refuse documentation become threatening precisely because they deny the viewer the comfort of a stable image.
Your argument about dignity emerging from disinterest aligns here, decay becomes intolerable at the moment it stops serving interpretation. Conservation, like self-curation, is all about control. And what you’re gesturing toward is a radical counter-position, allowing things to change without rescuing them into meaning.
What a monumental piece you’ve written! And I’m sure you’re not even aware of this. Simply amazing.
I’ve thought about this often, and what unsettles me is not conservation itself but the moral hierarchy embedded in it. Preservation is framed as care, but it’s also a choice about which moment deserves to survive. We select a preferred version of the object, usually the one that best aligns with coherence, mastery, recognisability, and treat everything that came after as damage rather than experience. Time becomes a contaminant instead of a collaborator.
What this reveals is a deeper discomfort with ambiguity. An artwork that visibly carries its fatigue asks something inconvenient of the viewer: patience, humility, a willingness to encounter instability without resolution. That’s hard to sustain inside institutions designed for circulation, education, reassurance. So we stabilise the surface and call it respect. But what’s really being protected is legibility , the ease with which meaning can be extracted and displayed.
I’m especially interested in works that resist that rescue operation because they force a different relationship with attention. You can’t skim a fading fresco or a performance that leaves no artefact. You either stay with it as it is, or you miss it. That refusal to be held still exposes how much of our reverence is conditional on control.
Where this intersects with bodies, particularly women’s bodies, is painfully obvious. Change is tolerated only if it remains discreet, explainable, correctable. Wear must be edited into elegance. History mustn’t show. The parallel is procedural. The same impulse governs both.
What I wanted to gesture toward in my essay is precisely that counter-position you name…. allowing change without intervention, without repair narratives, without the urgency to redeem because decay is accurate, and accuracy, even when it’s inconvenient, deserves its own form of respect.
Thank you, Alexander, for bringing this lens into the conversation, sharpening the argument in a way that feels both precise and generous!
You are always an inspiration. If you were the only writer on Substack, I’d still be here to read you and support our art.
Ohhh thank you so much!
As you may know, Tamara, I have a certain reverence for death. Well, my good friends rot and decay are its entourage and I couldn’t be happier for them to get a bit of reverence themselves!
And the word withering! How stunningly deployed (though I tend to like the word wilting when it come to rot and decay, poetic preference I guess :)) as I think of this concept is fundamental when I think of life and beauty in particular. I am so pleased to read a voice who wants to recenter the natural flow of life’s experience — even as it descends — rather than fixating on moment at the peak of a crescendo. That fixation on a clearly delineated event is immensely addling. Because nothing in our experience ever looks like that… nothing is so fixed, we trick ourselves and the monetize the moments where reality tries to disabuse of us of our illusion. Which is why rot and decay —imbued with my favourite tense: present perfect continuous — is such a needed salve for our minds that are stuck and stagnant trying to paw at and grasp a twisted, impossible perfection. These processes start, are felt, and continue. Even if you don’t want them to. And I appreciate their honesty on this account.
The way your biology includes the garden and human dynamics, best exemplified in the heading as grace, is a beautiful image to invoke. And particularly as a framing device to remind us all of one of those iron-clad laws that people are desperately trying to forget: entropy :).
Rot and decay are adherents to the cult of entropy. And, mercifully they thrive in stagnant conditions—and if I would be so bold, I think we might be in agreement that the current societal madness around performing perfection is a kind of stagnation. I see these two characters - rot and decay — and their devotion to entropy, as fundamental balancing agents to this stagnation. They will not be tricked into remaining stagnant and if you only tilt your head a little the beauty is uplifting.
The way you have articulated grace in withering is a return to reverence towards rot and decay, not as you said for performative nods to impermanence but a real bone-deep interrogation of entropy and impermanence’s key fundamental premise: if life and death are the same spectrum, then the up and the down should be considered part of the same organic process and appreciated in its totality. Rot and decay—with grace (read, without performance or ignorance)—are part of this beautiful flow of existence. And now, watching the decay of your gallery of flowers in this piece I again have a clear visual and symbolic examples to bring to mind as I too attempt to do away with stagnant performance and (somewhat counter-intuitively) re-centre the realism of the beauty of loss as a wilting a flower holding as much significance as an upstanding peony and its resplendent height.
Bravo!
You also know that I appreciate how you approach death, and by extension rot and decay, because you don’t treat them as abstractions or moral punctuation marks. They are not metaphors you deploy; they are conditions you keep company with. That already places you outside most contemporary conversations, which either sanitise death into euphemism or dramatise it into spectacle. Reverence, in the older sense, isn’t awe or fear but attentiveness without hurry. And that’s exactly what rot requires if it’s going to be seen at all.
Your instinct about process feels crucial. We have become obsessed with moments because moments photograph well, narrate cleanly, and can be pointed to as proof. But lived experience moves. It accrues, loosens, drifts, repeats itself imperfectly. That fixation on crescendos fractures our sense of continuity. It trains us to miss the long middle, the ongoingness where most truth actually resides.
I’m also fascinated by how you frame entropy as circulation correcting stagnation. When everything is forced to remain taut, bright, resolved, life clogs. What rot does, unceremoniously, without asking permission I would say, is reintroduce movement. It doesn’t negotiate with ideals, it resumes the flow.
What I wanted to get at with grace was alignment, and I think you figured this out right away, knowing me. When résistance drops, when we stop demanding exemption from natural laws, something settles. Withering, or wilting, if that’s the word that sings for you, is participation, the refusal to pretend that vitality only counts when it’s upright and impressive.
Thank you, Adam, for reading me with your incredible philosophical intimacy and for bringing your own rigour and imagination into the conversation!
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
E. Dowson
Thank you, Leif, for this beautiful poem!
A piece of writing that sounds a quiet but essential depth charge in the psyche. I am reminded of a conversation in comments sometime back last year with you of the whisky making business and the diminishment process therein. An invisible disappearance of liquid as shares for both Devil and Angel alike that lessens the cask contents by volume but deepens the spirit therein. Perhaps there is a way for us to age in such a way that we might be appreciated as our diminished, wrinkled and bright eyed selves.
That image is impactful for the same reason decay is, because it refuses panic about loss. The whisky doesn’t become valuable despite the disappearance, it becomes itself through it. What evaporates is the condition that allows concentration, patience, character. Nothing is rushed to prove usefulness while it’s happening.
What I find interesting in that comparison is the absence of spectators. The cask doesn’t perform its diminishing. No one applauds the waiting. The deepening happens out of sight, without commentary, without an audience insisting on visible progress. That type of time is almost extinct in human terms, and yet it’s the only one that produces substance rather than surface.
Aging, if it’s to be more than managed decline, might need a similar privacy. Not secrecy, but insulation from constant assessment. Wrinkles, brightness, a certain distilled presence are residues of what was allowed to burn off. What remains tends to be sharper, more honest. Less volume, more weight.
I like the idea that appreciation might shift accordingly toward recognition of concentration. Toward people who have lost what was loud and gained what holds. That kind of appreciation can’t be mass-produced, but when it appears, it’s unmistakable.
Thank you, Paul, for bringing that memory back into the conversation!
“Beauty, finally, is just biology relaxing.” If only we let this thought sink deep beneath our skin! So beautiful! I also keep flowers for a very long time and I like that smell; I inhale their passing and I continue to love them regardless.
You’ll smile, but what moves me in what you say is the word “regardless”. Loving something without renegotiating its worth as it changes is not a small act, it goes against most of what we are trained to do. We are taught to withdraw affection once vibrancy fades, as if love were contingent on freshness. Staying with the smell of passing, breathing it in rather than recoiling, is a form of attentiveness most people rush past.
Thank you, Otilia, for letting that line travel beneath your skin, and for meeting my essay with tenderness!
Perhaps the most powerful moment in my life, was when my Mother, days short of 95, lay in hospital, dying. She was always beautiful, in body, mind & soul. And she was beautiful then.
When I was called by the hospital hours later, she’d died, only minutes earlier. I shed a tear as I write this.
The nurse closed her eyes. I waited till she’d left, then opened them. I could see her as if she was alive, & its seemed she saw me, but did not speak. Her eyes were still the eyes she always had: they hadn’t changed.
Whilst her heart & breathing had stopped, I’m sure she could see me, as in a dream. Silently. Gently. The brain continuing its function of perception, involuntarily. She may even have heard me.
Why do people insist on closing the eyes of those just deceased? Are they afraid of something? I do not understand why.
That’s the most precious moment of all.
I like that you touch on the difference between function ending and presence withdrawing. We are very clumsy with that interval. We rush to tidy it, to seal it, to make it behave properly as if stillness without instruction were intolerable.
I don’t think the closing of the eyes is about the deceased at all. I think it’s for the living. Open eyes unsettle us because they refuse finality. They suggest continuity without dialogue, perception without response. That ambiguity frightens people trained to need clear endings. We prefer a visual cue that says: it’s over, you’re safe now, nothing more is happening. But of course, something is happening…. just not in a language we can manage.
What fascinates me the most in your memory is the recognition. You didn’t need proof that she saw you. You knew her eyes. That knowing doesn’t rely on biology alone. It’s relational, accumulated, and so intimate. Love builds a literacy that doesn’t vanish just because the body changes state.
Moments like the one you describe feel precious because they are unmediated. No performance, no correction, no instruction on how to behave, only presence meeting presence, briefly ungoverned by protocol. That kind of encounter leaves a mark precisely because it isn’t explainable.
Thank you, Russell, for trusting my little salon with something so tender!
I’ll start with where your response ends, Tamara: your “little salon” invites comment such as mine, because it is an intimate readership & ‘thoughtfulness-ship’: I’ve not told this to anyone before.
And how typically perceptive of you that you understand the “difference between function ending & presence withdrawing”.
I didn’t notice the same presence when my sister died in 1990, nor my father in 2006. In fact no one else, ever.
This was unique. I do believe she saw, & heard, in those minutes after heart death. She could not respond, of course, but was not brain dead, but paralysed, rather like someone in a coma. The expression on her face was utter peace, utter resignation to a kind of eternity. Some call it heaven.
What an incredible story, it gives me goosebumps!
In the first few minutes after heart death, sensation continues, but cannot of course be responded to. Too few talk about this. The medical profession has scant interest. But our ancient ancestors knew this as the time the spirit left the body, & ascended to heaven. At its root, heaven simply means that which is lifted, or heaved, up, so as to be heaven up. As opposed to the body, which stays down. Worthy of thought I believe.
Thankyou for continuing the discussion. I’ll end by referring to when my mother & I visited our aging cocker spaniel, who’d been kept overnight at a Melbourne veterinary surgery for tests. At 14, he was by then blind. Close to death, he wagged his tail & tried to stand in the joyous reassurance of our returned presence.
By his sense of smell & hearing alone could he know we were there, but know he did. He died minutes later. That was of course very sad for us.
The olfactory sense is the most primitive & powerful in most mammals. It’s reasonable to expect that my mother, of who’s body I was once part, was, in her unconscious but nevertheless passively sense-receiving state, at least partly capable of smelling my presence. As her son, I was in essence part of her.
I’m not interested in proving this: the mutual sensing of each other, silently, was obvious to me.
This lives in a register that medicine rarely knows how to hold maybe because it isn’t operational. It can’t be measured, timed, or acted upon, so it falls outside professional curiosity. Yet that doesn’t make it marginal to lived experience. Some of the most decisive human knowledge arrives precisely when response is no longer possible.
I’m struck by how consistently scent appears in moments of threshold. Smell bypasses story and goes straight to familiarity. That’s why it remains when other senses falter. In both moments you describe, your dog and your mother, what mattered wasn’t proof of perception but continuity of relation. Knowing without exchange. Presence without reciprocity. That’s a demanding kind of witnessing because it asks the living to stay when nothing comes back.
The idea that sensation continues briefly after what we call death unsettles people because it resists our desire for clean borders. We like endings that click shut. But that interval you describe is deeply human. It mirrors so much of what love already asks of us: to feel without control, to recognise without confirmation, to remain even when language is gone.
Ancient cosmologies (a field I am very fond of) didn’t treat that moment as an error or a glitch. They treated it as a passage…. just movement. Something lifting away, something settling. We lost that literacy when we insisted that only what can be verified deserves attention.
You’re right, Russell, it is worthy of thought. Not to turn it into belief, but to allow room for experiences that don’t require proof to be true.
So well understood, Tamara. Sincere thanks.
I should add, finally, that what I experienced with my mother, I didn’t with my sister or father, or anyone else. In each of the three cases, the hospital called me immediately they died, & I was there in a few minutes. I wasn’t at the hospital continually, because I didn’t expect any of them to die so soon.
I loved them all equally much.
Why then this unique experience with post mortal communication?
Because my mother was the only person I was ever physically part of, albeit prior to birth.
Your thoughtful feedback has helped me understand the experience better, one I’d never considered telling anyone else, until I read you initial essay in this thread.
I am glad I made a difference.
I love this. I keep the dead flowers too. Same as you, because I forget to get rid of them. But then I also pick out the ones that I just can't part with for one reason or another and hit them with hairspray. I have a small collection in a container that once upon a time held a candle that I lit when I said my prayers each day. Some of those flowers have lasted a long time, not in the double digit years yet but they're getting there.
I was recently working through an idea for an article in my journal. I was thinking about how in the years I was chronically online I always heard the idea thrown around that women over 35 or so secretly mourn their past desirability. That they don't get the perks of beauty or free drinks at the bar. That they become "invisible".
Well, I spent the bulk of my thirties haunting one bar or the other and I can say with confidence I felt no such thing. The realization dawned on me at some point when I was in public but didn't have to glare at people to be given space. I had always wanted to be alone around others when I was drinking and writing and suddenly I had my wish.
It was marvelous. And similar to you as well, the unprettiness and messy is where I always want my writing to be. I know I've experienced both, being beautiful and the complete collapse into decay and it's funny how people can selectively see some parts of you and block out the truth of what is going on (a lesson I learned well as a drunk).
Anyways, thank you for sharing this and sorry for a ramble. I just get excited when I recognize a kindred spirit.
I like the tender intelligence of selective keeping. Not preservation for display, not nostalgia embalmed, but a decision to let certain things stay because they’ve earned their place through proximity. Hairspray as companionship. Lovely! A way of saying: you can continue, altered, without being rushed out of the room.
The idea that women mourn desirability after a certain age has always struck me as projection dressed up as sociology. It assumes attention is nourishment, when for many of us it’s been more like static. The relief of no longer having to manage other people’s proximity is something I’ve heard only in whispers, usually followed by laughter, as if admitting it might revoke the privilege. Space, it turns out, is one of the most underrated luxuries of aging.
And you’re right about how people see in fragments. They register the surface that fits their expectation and edit out the rest, the exhaustion, the intelligence, the disarray, the will. That selective blindness can feel cruel, but it also reveals how little of us was ever actually available to them. Which is clarifying, I think.
There’s no need to apologise for excitement, Cappy! Recognition is energising, especially when it doesn’t ask you to perform gratitude or polish the edges. Thank you for sharing your flowers, your bars, your relief, and for reading me with such warmth and honesty!
The grotesque could appear, but only if it knew how to pose. Only if it had good hair, good lighting, and the decency to die on cue.
Particularly fond of this observation
When I lived in an assisted living facility to be near my terminally ill wife two years back, the aging process was all around me. I watched Peggy become almost unrecognizable from the lovely person I had known for over thirty years. Life doesn’t dress up for the final act. It just folds like your flowers and you have to learn to know differently than before. When I started a new phase of life in a new home I recognized loss but it was a pose. Over the past couple of years I notice how easy it is to become forgetful as if decay is hiding behind a mask of good luck. Tom
The phrase learning to know differently feels truer to the experience than any language of acceptance or resilience. When someone you love changes beyond recognition, the mind can’t rely on continuity anymore. Familiar cues fail. Affection has to find new routes. It’s not sentiment that carries you through that, but attention, the slow, unglamorous recalibration of how you see, how you stay.
What struck me when writing that line about “dying on cue” is how little our culture prepares us for that kind of witnessing. We are taught to recognise people through coherence: their face, their voice, their habits, their narrative arc. When those dissolve, we feel disoriented, as if love itself has lost its object. But what you describe shows the opposite: love doesn’t vanish, it simply becomes less legible. It stops posing.
The way you speak about forgetfulness is fascinating. We like to frame it as benign fortune, aging without drama, decline without disturbance, but it’s often just decay slipping under the radar. Not merciful, not tragic. Silent. And silent changes ask something different of us than crises do. They require patience rather than bravery, presence rather than action.
Thank you, Tom, for trusting my space with something so personal, and for reading my essay through your lived experience rather than theory!
Just magnificent! Decay is beautiful! Thank you!
Thank you too, Sheila!
I'm there. Recently decided.
(But still keeping my hair long because it's somewhat youthful looking.)
Optimizing by reducing friction... that's my 2026 goal . Very insightful essay.
What matters more than the hairstyle is the discernment underneath it, knowing which efforts still feel alive and which ones only exist out of habit or social inertia. Keeping what gives you pleasure while silently shedding what drains you is a sign of intelligence in my opinion. Elegance often arrives through removing unnecessary résistance, one small choice at a time.
Thank you for reading me so attentively!