IV.

There is a famous song recorded at the edge of death: a band performs in a nightclub, and midway through the performance the bandleader begins to address the audience. He speaks a few words in a foreign language, which are followed by a bandmember’s solo; he speaks another few words, and another member performs a solo, and so on through all the instruments, the audience applauding after each performance. Listening to the song for the first time, one commonly assumes that the man is introducing each of the bandmembers by name and that they are performing by way of introduction. However, the more one listens, the more clearly one picks out the sounds that the man is making: they are words of no recognizable language, a dark gibberish, more like guttural noise than human speech. Each word is long, and clotted, and it becomes impossible to believe that he is introducing the bandmembers by name. Replaying the song and focusing just on the man’s cadence, a listener might announce, He is describing an apocalypse in a dead tongue, or, He is pronouncing an ancient curse. And it is true that the wash of white noise at the end of the recording—that hiss of static, itself like a final solo—sounds so much like a tide bearing forth a curse.

V.

There is a famous film recorded at the edge of death: the camera frames the back of a chair, which is situated at the end of a semi-darkened room. Draped over the chair is a black shirt, which in the distance and the dark, as well as the graininess of the film stock, looks like the long black hair of a man, sitting in the chair with his back to the viewer. Indeed, for the first few moments viewers tend to mistake the shirt for a man’s hair. What is he doing? they ask one another. He’s just sitting there. The video, a static shot of this chair, lasts more than ten minutes: the shirt does not move, no one enters the frame, the camera is neither repositioned nor adjusted. When it becomes clear that the black length draped over the chair, perfectly still and quiet, is only a shirt, viewers assume for a while that a character, the shirt’s owner, will soon be introduced to claim it. They wait for the moment when a human being will walk into frame and grab the shirt off the chair. Why are we watching this shirt? they ask. Or: Is this all that is going to happen? Of course nothing does happen. Except that in the last seconds, before the video cuts off, the room appears to lighten slightly. It even becomes possible, in this improved lighting, to see why the shirt had been mistaken for hair in the first place—for yes, it is textured somewhat like hair and tapers at the end like hair. Occasionally viewers laugh outright: Just like the long black hair of a man! or If I didn’t already know that that was a shirt… Then, slowly, the long-haired man begins to turn in his chair, revealing a face that is like the nightmare of a face.