Savannah - Salt, Sex & Death
I want to die in Savannah. I want to be a 19th century ghost.
An open-ended graveyard sits wishfully by the police station. Grave robbers don’t go there anymore. There is nothing left from the mausoleums and carcass-fed flowerbeds to extract except for the tombstones themselves. But cemeteries too wish for patrons and there is no shortage of bodies in Savannah. Fresh flowers on youthful graves lay boastfully next to hardened moss covered crypts. Wind and rain has withered much of these decrepit stones. Some have been washed to the bone, leaving only a date or a partial name, a forgotten epitaph or the story of a child lost to cholera. Even in death, we grow old.
A sweet sea breeze drifts down the boulevards and avenues, lamenting the past and serenading the present. Savannah itself is a crypt of memory – Civil War treaties, Southern generals, murdered mistresses, cotton colonies, abandoned slaves, abandoned wives, the whorehouses… the dead have memories and they dance and drink on their graves at midnight to remember.
Savannah was once the dollhouse for the old and the rich – the Belle Époque. Now their kids have grown up and turned it into their playground. The introduction of the Savannah College of Art and Design has brought a youthful zealousness to this culture of death. Youth is the great antidote for death, as death is but the great intoxication of youth.
It is a sensual town. The duality of sex and death flavours the air – a mixture of salt water and aged moss. All that curved and ancient stone: mighty monuments to the memory of the South. One always hears the “click-clock” of a nearby horseshoe echoing from the oyster shell pavements. One imagines parades of fornicating bodies perched on benches, clawing behind/beneath tombstones, lining dim avenues and thumping rickety awnings.
They call Savannah the ‘Garden of Good and Evil’, as if the two were absolutely singular to one another. However man is naturally an organism infused with seeds of both – irrevocably bonded to the twin forces of nature. The human mind is a twisting well of caverns, forms and shadows trying to resurface all that was lost and forgotten. However at midnight the latter gene takes prominence above all. The haunting ghosts of a blemished life take hold. Strange things happen in Savannah at midnight. “Not gonna lie”, says Leigh.
An open-ended graveyard sits wishfully by the police station. Grave robbers don’t go there anymore. There is nothing left from the mausoleums and carcass-fed flowerbeds to extract except for the tombstones themselves. But cemeteries too wish for patrons and there is no shortage of bodies in Savannah. Fresh flowers on youthful graves lay boastfully next to hardened moss covered crypts. Wind and rain has withered much of these decrepit stones. Some have been washed to the bone, leaving only a date or a partial name, a forgotten epitaph or the story of a child lost to cholera. Even in death, we grow old.
A sweet sea breeze drifts down the boulevards and avenues, lamenting the past and serenading the present. Savannah itself is a crypt of memory – Civil War treaties, Southern generals, murdered mistresses, cotton colonies, abandoned slaves, abandoned wives, the whorehouses… the dead have memories and they dance and drink on their graves at midnight to remember.
Savannah was once the dollhouse for the old and the rich – the Belle Époque. Now their kids have grown up and turned it into their playground. The introduction of the Savannah College of Art and Design has brought a youthful zealousness to this culture of death. Youth is the great antidote for death, as death is but the great intoxication of youth.
It is a sensual town. The duality of sex and death flavours the air – a mixture of salt water and aged moss. All that curved and ancient stone: mighty monuments to the memory of the South. One always hears the “click-clock” of a nearby horseshoe echoing from the oyster shell pavements. One imagines parades of fornicating bodies perched on benches, clawing behind/beneath tombstones, lining dim avenues and thumping rickety awnings.
They call Savannah the ‘Garden of Good and Evil’, as if the two were absolutely singular to one another. However man is naturally an organism infused with seeds of both – irrevocably bonded to the twin forces of nature. The human mind is a twisting well of caverns, forms and shadows trying to resurface all that was lost and forgotten. However at midnight the latter gene takes prominence above all. The haunting ghosts of a blemished life take hold. Strange things happen in Savannah at midnight. “Not gonna lie”, says Leigh.
posted by Daniel Grove at
4:53 AM
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