the coffin

by Aodán McCardle

The Mexican lady spent the day online looking at coffins. It was for herself. She knew she was dying and she wanted to be in control, to know that death is coming and to be ready. Like making food just right. Just the right temperature and time, baking, that moment of testing and you know because you’ve done it before that it’s just the right time to take it out of the oven because you know this oven and you know this cake, you’ve made this cake again and again, its plain, not too rich, it’s a classic, the sort of thing that goes perfectly with tea and you know that this is the time to take it out, 45 mins, not the hour it says in the book, and the temperature 150, not the 170 it says in the book, because you’ve done this before and you know the routine, the wire rack at the ready, leave the cake to cool in the tin for a few minutes, then it’ll turn out easily into the palm with hardly a nudge and roll it off the palm onto the wire and let it sit again to cool before wrapping in grease proof paper and even the wrapping you know, you know how to measure the paper, tear and place the cake on it, pull up the paper on each side and fold both bits down, crease and fold back then back again lattice back and forth so the paper locks itself in place and tuck under neatly. It looks crafted, like the cake, and craft is about knowing, about doing and having done, and people buy the eating of a cake from having eaten, it looks the taste, it holds itself into its own future eating. And here, coffins, how to die in peace, to know how to die in peace or to promise comfort in that moment, that ongoing. This looking, this promise, this having done it before, you know how to do it again and the customer can grasp the future peace and comfort in this moment of looking.

She isn’t Mexican though. She just thinks the whole Day of the Dead thing has process built into it. Call it ritual but then and yes making a cake is ritual, any craft is ritual, it demands its slow careful steps, this is the way to deal with dying and the after dying, the Day of the Dead, that’s how to deal with it but there was that article about ghosts appearing in Japan in the time after the nuclear leak, the shrines abandoned by the families as they ran from the disaster, the ghosts of those honoured dead, wandering now, looking for their loved ones, so one needs someone to maintain this cycle, to maintain the ritual to remember. But, there is no one to remember her, no one to care, to visit a grave site, to maintain a shrine, to keep it alive in the home. This is it, the ending place, death after all will lack memory, the comfort must be sought now, here, near the end but before the end, the beginning of the end will be comfort, will be reassurance, the Mexican woman, who is not, will seek and create that comfort for herself, that is what she determines today here, in front of this screen, looking at coffins, to find the one, that one coffin and then to find the process by which she will be remembered and there she thinks is the business idea she has always been looking for. Always she has seen the weakness in every plan, every business idea has lacked conviction but here at last in dying she thinks, here is conviction, that one day you will die, that families are not what they were, that friends exist as much in the mind as in any reality, in the mind of the machine here there are more friends than in any reality, here friends can remain friends even after death. An app, the app to end all apps, an app that is a ritual, an app that is a remembering, an app that is a shrine. You promise to remember someone and they promise to remember you and someone else can promise to remember you as well and on and on, a great flowering circle of remembrance, so each day with the sun rising or setting, with birthdays and festive days and seasons, at equinoxes and full moons you visit the app and complete the ritual, press the like button and remember and you will be remembered, and the app will remind you to remember and in case you forget the app will remember for you and let you know that it has remembered for you so you will remember and be remembered and this app will be called Solace and the Mexican lady who is not will make a lot of money from it, after all it costs almost nothing, it takes next to no time, and it will last forever, like dying.

No, like death. Dying doesn’t last forever, it only appears to. That’s the problem here, time. Time lasts forever. Every moment of it lasts forever. If any moment would simply end then it would be over but no, every moment becomes the next moment and the next moment and when you are dying the moments just cling to each other and all you want is some other moment not this moment that goes on and on, no, you want a different moment, even if it’s the moment where you’re buying a coffin, or creating an app, or baking a cake which needs exacting attention to do it right just so this moment, this moment of dying will not go on forever.

Then she thinks, I know, I’ll make a cake which is a coffin, with velvet lining made from vanilla sponge, or it could be a Japanese flag, food colouring for the sun’s rays, natural dye of course, needs to be healthy, or it could look like an app, it could look like her app, the one she’s making all this money from, the one with all the followers, every day more and more sign up to remember and be remembered, every day people are dying to be remembered, she thinks that could be a slogan, she thinks, that’s an awful slogan, she thinks awful slogans are all there is, she thinks I could make a cake of that slogan she thinks this could be a blog, a vlog, making cakes, making moments so that other moments don’t get to be moments.

Sleep. Death can’t be like sleep. They say you use more of your brain to sleep than you do when you’re awake so no, death can’t be like sleep so what, what’s death like? Dying could be a craft, it could be crafted, it could be done in just the right way, carefully, with care, understood and measured but death, death is not a crafted thing, or is it, is it the most crafted thing ever? What would it mean if death is crafted? Except everyone is equally good at it, I mean no one comes back, at least not to life, maybe as ghosts, the Japanese ghosts and in the Day of the Dead, the dead can die again, can be forgotten, or those mummified dead people keep in the loft in South America, but perhaps none of that is dead, is the craft of death, the other part, the being dead part, what if that’s the best cake ever, who’s doing the baking, who is so good at baking that they never get it wrong, it never sinks, it never rises too much overflowing the rim, death is always cooked just so, all the way through and there was that other article or was it on the radio, that scientist, when asked about death she said there is a finite amount of matter, nothing disappears completely or is made anew, there are this amount of atoms, starlight, stardust, and billions of human hearts beating. When the heart stops beating it generates a different rhythmic pulse, a different pulse of life as the body transforms itself through a different set of energies, at the cellular level new transitions take place, cells enact their own engagement with each other, follow a different set of commands, a different trajectory of life, towards a goal directed by something outside or inside this body, something as connected to the stars as it is to any human heart. The body itself it seems knows where it is going and what it is doing and what it is for. Its unfoldingness is a crafted thing, a complexity of movement, a dance not of undoing but of reformation. This she thinks is the craft of death, a rearrangement of carbon atoms, a cosmic game of musical chairs at the wake. In a billion billion years out to the stars and back. It seems it’s not a coffin that’s needed at all, perhaps a tree, a piece of ground, a patch of sunlight to let the flies feast, the beetles and bugs, small warm bodied burrowers and bigger snuffling foragers, gifts of warmth and energy shared, passed on, an other becoming.

So that’s the body, she thinks, but what about me, who am I, what am I beyond this body which is going to die, or is going to transform. I’m preparing me for this, not my body, my body can go do its own thing but what about me she thinks and when did my body and me become separate things, when in the last little while did that happen and she thinks was it while looking for coffins, she thinks was it making the cakes, she thinks was it while watching the app’s success grow and grow but there doesn’t seem to be a moment to grasp, there doesn’t seem to be an epiphany except that here now it seems that she is okay with the idea that her body will go on, will be okay, will do what bodies do, what cells do, what atoms do but, she thinks, what is this thinking thing in this body, this set of feelings and thoughts and memories, if a memory is an electrical pulse in the brain fine but what is the difference between this memory of eating early on a Sunday morning as sunlight drifts in the window and all the time and space gathered around it and this other memory of her mother dying suddenly and the crushedness of all around that, are these both just electrical pulses, in the midst of all these stars, in the culmination of all this energy, if nothing disappears or is made anew then this, then these, memories, are not matter, this her, this she, this life is not matter but something else. When a flower opens it is within the finite matter of things but when someone sees a flower open or remembers seeing a flower open then, then.

We, she thinks, are a question, we are an asking, we are a why rather than a what, an ongoing why with parts of how and when and who as supporting actors, she thinks, she thinks, she thinks, she thinks of all the memories that are moments that are her, of all the dawns and all the evenings, of all the joy and all the sadness and all the nothing moments in between, of all the footsteps, of sitting watching other people go by while waiting for a bus, of wondering about their lives, of all the lives that are not her, of all the lives that ever were, of all the moments that are not matter but are all, all that matters.

***Stay tuned for Aodán McCardle next monthly installment on July 12, 2025***

Photo of Aodán McCardle

BIO: Aodán’s current practice is improvised performance/writing/drawing. His PhD is on ‘Action as Articulation of the Contemporary Poem’ though physicality and doubt are the site of meaning and the stance respectively where the action operates. He opened the Performance Month at Beton7, Athens 2015, and the Performance Philosophy Centre Uni. of Surrey Sep 2016. He was a member of the anti-performance group LUC, London Under Construction and the Collaborative/Improvisational Performance group Cuislí.

Three books of poetry, Shuddered and ISing from Veer Books and most recently just out Small Increments from Beirbua Press plus an online chapbook LllOoVvee, Smithereens Press. New book of long poems/scores for performance that lean into the concrete and sonic elements of language coming this summer from Veer Books, based around issues of censorship and power structures. Recent critical work in A Line of Tiny Zeros in the Fabric on the poetry of Maurice Scully, Shearsman 2020, and in Hilson Hilson, Crater Press, on the Organ Music poems of Jeff Hilson. What Happens If A Poem is About Nothing? On the poetry of William Rowe, Esla (English Studies in Latin America; A Journal of Cultural and Literary Criticism, No.28 January 2025 https://ojs.uc.cl/index.php/esla/issue/view/3820

663 Reasons Why; What Might Seem Extreme on the poetry of Stephen Mooney. Enclave Review No 18, Contemporary and Modern Art Magazine, Ireland, Eds. Fergal Gaynor and Ed Krĉma, 2024

Current Project is a series of paintings and a series of etchings using dynamics from within Performance, improvisation as a mode of investigation and immersion in a subject and environment, and considering ‘experience’ in Twombly’s terms as our most intimate form of commonality. The works are a residue of these performances rather than simply an object of desire.