AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

Syllabus available upon request. :)

The course statement and a reading list:

If a man has learned to think, no matter what he may be thinking about
he is always also thinking of his own death.
Tolstoy

The fact is, those who apply themselves correctly to philosophy are simply and solely practicing dying and preparing for death.
Socrates (Plato)

I'm not afraid of death. It's the stake one puts up in order to play the game of life.
Jean Giraudoux, Amphitryon, 1929

For death begins with life's first breath, and life begins at touch of death.
John Oxenham

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.
Hermann Hesse

Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.
George Carlin

We live in a society conditioned to deny death - to relate to it indirectly, in terms of hope and fear: hope in our survivorship, that we can postpone or avoid death, and fear that we will not. However, we are rarely encouraged to face death. This is a culturally specific attitude towards death, which becomes increasingly evident when examined in a sociocultural context. How a society conceives of and treats death also deeply reflects how it conceives of life. With this in mind, we will investigate the following questions:

What are our attitudes toward “my own death,” how and why are these prescriptions supported and maintained, and what social functions do they serve? What is the history of our ideas about and attitudes towards death, how and why have they developed, and where do they seem to be going? What is the relationship between one’s idea of death and one’s idea of oneself, between awareness of mortality and awareness of identity? What are the ways that we make sense of death - culturally, medically, spiritually, philosophically? How have death-related behaviors, such as mourning customs and burial rites, changed historically? What do our attitudes about death and dying reflect about the ways in which our lives are arranged and explained? What specific social conditions tend to heighten the awareness of death, and how are these changing? (thanks to Bernard McGrane for inspiration and some of these words)

recommended reading list:
Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Thomas Lynch, Bodies in Motion and at Rest
Thomas Lynch, The Undertaking
Stephen Levine, Who Dies?
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying
Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death, revised edition
Tom Shroder, Old Souls
John W. James and Russell Friedman, The Grief Recovery Handbook
Michael M. Baden, M.D., Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner
Lynne Ann DeSpelder and Albert Lee Strickland, The Last Dance: Encountering Death and Dying
COLORS #24: Death (January-February 1998)
Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Sue Coe, Dead Meat
Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death
Norbert Elias, The Loneliness of Dying
Marc Etkind, ...Or Not to Be: A Collection of Suicide Notes
R. Kastenbaum, Death, Society and Human Experience: Is There Life After Death
Richard Selzer, Mortal Lessons
Audrey Gordon, They Need to Know: How to Teach Children About Death
Philip Kapleau, The Wheel of Death
Da Free John, Easy Death
Trungpa and Freemantle, The Tibetan Book of the Dead
Herman Feifel, The Meaning of Death
Edwin Schneidman, Voices of Death
George Bataille, Death and Sensuality
Colin Wilson, Afterlife
Avery Weisman, The Coping Capacity
Joel Whitton, Life Between Life
Stephen Levine, Healing Into Life and Death
John Robbins, Diet for a New America
P. Sargent & I. Watson, Afterlives
Marie-Louise von Franz, On Dreams and Death
Robert Bosnak, A Little Course in Dreams
Nigel Barley, Grave Matters