Finale Fanpost

Hendrik Rost



Final Fanpost
 

And time did what it always does,
It rushed by. Yes, scold it if you will.
Joseph Brodsky

I
Of course the Rolling Stones are part of my biography. Just like the Shell logo is, or the station ID in the top left-hand corner of German television screens. A world without these things is hard to imagine. There’s no 
getting away from them, neither from my biography nor the Stones.
The logos are a omnipresent reminder that I’m still alive because somebody is trying to attract my attention, that I and everyone else belong to the perceiving masses and that the simplest way of denying one’s own gradual vanishing is to deny it. More or less every song is about exactly that. In the case of the Stones, however, there is a subtle difference: when I listen to their music, I can claim that it was my decision to give them a place in my life.

II
There was always somebody – in my class at school, at college, at work – who wore a sticker with the Jagger lips. Lips as full and vulgar as can be, insistently offering a message of sheer physicality.
As I child, I remember that I blushed easily. Later it got so bad that I hardly dared to open my mouth. Then it stopped. As if suddenly I was no longer inclined to offer people a surface view of my feelings. But let nobody say that to get older is to get better.

III
The challenge art poses here is not to uncover traces of time in faces, but to make out faces beneath all the traces. What I mean by faces is that part of the body that cannot conceal its condition, although layer-by-layer it is being covered over by that state in which, in time, it will find itself to be. 
The cosmetic repairs are then futile. The most discreet thing I ever saw was a reliquary in which skulls were put on display. Their faces were turned inward, the heads wrapped almost entirely in fabric. Only an area of about a centimetre remained uncovered, and to be seen was the weathered white of the bone. Without knowing exactly what was being worshipped, I felt an unimagined reverence for this alien ensemble that turned away its face from life, conserved in death.

IV
The pornographic thing about life is how at almost any given moment somebody is being captured close-up by somebody else. Every wrinkle and bulge of the body caught in incessant decay fills up the screen or page. 

After the show, the pressure drops when the cameras turn away for a moment. At some point after the 
umpteenth all-round refreshers, what remains is the bare supporting material common to us all – the white rim that for so long kept everything rolling and, above all, the certainty that alongside the Stones, rock n roll and rebellion against reality one is part of one’s own biography.
It is liberating to start describing decay at last instead of persisting in admiring endurance. Before our faces themselves look like crumpled pieces of paper, before the onset of the final denying that art alone can 
countermand.
That is something otherwise demonstrated only in that strangely smiling expression on death masks, a 
countenance that makes you feel at once shocked and mellow because somebody has been allowed to look the way he always wanted.