Untitled graffito
South wall, I‑91 overpass at Chapel near the corner of Franklin Street
There are reminders of how close death can be – memento mori – at almost every turn in this city: a cross of palms where a child was run down, a circle of votive candles at the site of gunfire. We prefer that such reminders be brief – the idea of the monk who goes to sleep every night in his coffin is altogether too much of mortality for our taste. It is inevitable, then, that his chipper, know-it-all skull, evocative of what the German artist Otto Dix saw on a World War I battlefield, will be erased soon enough.
But what we recognize in it will continue to keep us company. One of the most compelling inscriptions I’ve happened across locally was visible some years ago on the opposite wall of this same underpass. Long since painted over, it read: “I had a terrible premonishun [sic].” It would have been the perfect caption for this more recent vandal’s lesson.
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