Life is in its own way a series of little deaths, and shedding these skins/releasing older versions of ourselves is what makes it possible for us to change and grow. I'm not the same person I was fifteen years ago, or even five years ago—and that's the way things should be.
What was your main inspiration to write “Skull with Laurel, 1832”? What sparked the initial idea?
I had shared with a friend that I was writing a different poem about the waiting mortuaries of mid-nineteenth-century Germany—places where the dead were kept until they visibly began to decay to assuage fears of being buried alive—and they asked if I had ever seen the ossuary in Hallstatt, Austria. Due to limited burial space in Hallstatt, in the eighteenth century the town began exhuming its dead after a decade or two, cleaning the bones, and painting them before adding them to its ossuary (the most recent addition was made in 1995!). I was very taken with the images I saw. There was something intimate and romantic about the idea of being transformed into a piece of art after death, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The poem came quickly after that. As a different friend said when I shared it with him later, “Imagine being loved enough that someone paints your skull. That’s tenderness.”
In some cultures, the idea of dying and death itself is a concept that one is supposed to contemplate, something to sit with at the end of the day. Are there any moments that you draw from your day-to-day life or culture that you find working themselves into your poetry, even subconsciously?
A few years ago, while I was working on my master’s degree, I took a seminar on literature of the Black Death. I loved that class—it was like nothing else I’d studied before, and it imparted on me a deep and lasting love of medieval poetry, particularly of the memento mori variety (shout out to “Disputation Betwixt the Body and Worms” by Anonymous, and “Saint Erkenwald” by the Pearl poet). The macabre themes and symbolism bled into the Romantic and Gothic works that were my primary area of study, and these came to color my poetry. I guess in a way this is a literary case of “you are what you eat.”
In “Skull with Laurel, 1832”, you use the phrase tempora mutantur. If we consider the concept of change as a type of “little death”, would you say this is something you consciously layered into the piece?
Perhaps not consciously, but this is a theme that crops up frequently in my work. Life is in its own way a series of little deaths, and shedding these skins/releasing older versions of ourselves is what makes it possible for us to change and grow. I’m not the same person I was fifteen years ago, or even five years ago—and that’s the way things should be.
When I chose this phrase, I was thinking about the way that death has become something very concealed and sanitized in modern Western culture. The idea of being displayed like the residents of the Hallstatt ossuary would be repugnant to many, but death is an inherent part of the human experience. Where I grew up, it’s not uncommon to see a family’s burial plot set just steps away from their house’s back door. Bone-picking ceremonies are held after cremations in Japan, during which the deceased’s relatives collect bone fragments from the ashes with chopsticks and place them into an urn. Both of these things would be unthinkable to many people I know. All of which is to say that when we distance ourselves from the fact of death we are giving up more than we might realize. Times change, and we change with them.
What do you hope readers take away from this piece?
In the final lines, I imagine reconstructing the face of the person the skull belonged to, as with forensic clay, and then invert the imagery to reveal the paintings on my own. Due to the nature of the things I like to write, I’ve spent a lot of time researching topics like forensic anthropology, unusual burial customs, and bog bodies. The last of these in particular really drove home how little separates remains you might see displayed in a charnel house or museum from you or me. Tollund Man is painfully human. So are the people in the Hallstatt ossuary, whose skulls are carefully marked with their names and beautiful wreaths and flowers. They loved, and were loved in turn. Which is a long-winded way of saying memento mori, I suppose.
A couple more questions just for fun! Do you have any particular writing rituals?
I’m a bit inconsistent in this regard, but any writing session requires a fun beverage (I’m partial to a London fog or lavender iced coffee) and some kind of evocative music (usually provided by a YouTube playlist that matches the vibes of whatever I’m working on).
Lastly . . . what scares you?
I’m a big fan of the abject and uncanny in horror—that skin-crawling realization that something is just a little bit off from the way it’s supposed to be. I found the S.O.S. scene in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves to be infinitely more frightening than the average monster or jumpscare. I think this kind of horror is so effective because it overlaps so significantly with the real world. There’s no real suspension of disbelief to act as a buffer. It really gets under your skin.
And spiders. I am very much not a fan of spiders.
RJ Aurand is a southern Appalachian writer, poet, and lover of the bizarre whose work has appeared in Blanket Gravity Magazine, Small Wonders, Solstitia, The Deadlands, and others. Connect on Bluesky @rjaurand.bsky.social or at rjaurand.com.
