Last week, I set up a project that I have been working on for what turned out to be 96 total hours of work over the last month. The project, which I titled “Empty Tables” is a visual representation of the scale of violence that has been inflicted on the Palestinian people for the last 11 months. 6500 names were written on six 110”x60” table cloths, laid over tables each set with four table settings (knives, forks, and a plate). During the showing, volunteers and I continued writing names on the plates themselves to symbolize the ongoing nature of the conflict, which is now entering its twelfth month. Each name was followed by five tally marks, which represent individuals who have been killed, but have either not been identified or were killed after the infrastructure of Gaza fell apart entirely, making it impossible to keep records at all. Together, the names and tallies add up to 39,000 total dead, which is approximately the number of men, women, children, and babies who have been killed since October 7, 2023. Each sheet took approximately 16 hours of writing time and used 48 Sharpie pens to complete.
The title is a reference to the song “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” from the musical Les Miserables. In this song, which takes place near the end of the second act after a failed revolutionary uprising, the character Marius confronts the loss of his friends in a public house where they used to eat and drink and dream. In a musical full of sweeping, epic numbers, “Empty Chairs” is the emotional nadir. The lyrics are:
There's a grief that can't be spoken
There's a pain goes on and on
Empty chairs at empty tables
Now my friends are dead and gone
Here they talked of revolution
Here it was they lit the flame
Here they sang about tomorrow
And tomorrow never came
From the table in the corner
They could see a world reborn
And they rose with voices ringing
And I can hear them now
The very words that they had sung
Became their last communion
On the lonely barricade at dawn
Oh, my friends, my friends, forgive me
That I live and you are gone
There's a grief that can't be spoken
There's a pain goes on and on
Phantom faces at the window
Phantom shadows on the floor
Empty chairs at empty tables
Where my friends will meet no more
Oh, my friends, my friends, don't ask me
What your sacrifice was for
Empty chairs at empty tables
Where my friends will sing no more
How do you represent an absence? In the history of our species we have sought ways to aesthetically represent the loss of loved ones. Tombstones and monuments are perhaps the most obvious ways that we make absence present. But through these tools, the point is not so much to represent absence, but rather to make what remains present more visible. Although a monument or tombstone certainly exists in the absence of the person or people that they represent, they act more as a substitution or amplification of our own memory than a marker of loss. They preserve what remains rather than mark what is gone. A monument is a means of reminding us that some element of the person or people they symbolize is still with us. Gravestones are supposed to mark the places that those they represent actually lie, somewhere several feet below our feet. These techniques of remembrance, in other words, only secondarily mark an absence. The person is not there, and yet we posit their presence with a gravestone. The point of these markers, in other words, is not to symbolize a loss, but instead posit the presence of something that only appears to be gone. This is quite different than aesthetically presenting a nothingness. Loss is the experience of no longer having something before us in any form. Absence is the absolute difference of something that exists. It is, in its essence, the thing that is not.
In “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables”, Marius confronts something essentially different than a grave or monument. The empty table does not preserve the being of his friends, but rather signals their ongoing absence. The gravestone or monument adds something to the world, while the chair does not. It is only a subtraction. The empty chair is a potent symbol of loss that appears time and time again in literature and film. Think of Tiny Tim’s empty seat at Bob Crachit’s supper table. Father Zosima’s chair in The Brothers Karamazov signals the moral and spiritual void left when the elder dies. Úrsula Iguarán's rocking chair in One Hundred Days of Solitude similarly marks the loss of the previous generation. Ellie’s chair, seen in the first scenes of Pixar’s Up is another striking example, since we barely know the character and yet feel her absence like a brick. More lonesome than a gravestone, more poignant than a memorial, the empty chair serves as an image of the nothingness that death leaves in the world unlike any other. But why? What is it about an empty chair that creates such a powerful feeling of loss?
Perhaps it has to do with the table at which it often sits. The dining table is, first and foremost, the place where we maintain our ongoing existence on a daily basis. It is at the table that we take the matter of the world and transform it into our own body. On Earth, living means being nourished. When we eat, we participate in an alchemical power that staves off our inevitable death for at least a few more hours. It is a magic act where life and death are negotiated in the great cosmic drama of existence. Without food, the entropic laws of the universe break our bodies apart and disperse everything we think of as us into space. By eating, we transform the material universe into a living thing with spirit.
We can eat anywhere, of course, but our dining table is the altar at which we perform this existential thaumaturgy. When a person is not at the table, when they cannot be at the table, they cannot participate in this ongoing ritual. Their absence from the table is a reminder of this. It is not just that they are gone, but that this nutritive conjuration that we practice in the act of eating is entirely beyond their reach. It is, as it were, a compounded absence, an absence that cannot be made present again. At a gravesite, we know that the person cannot return, but at the table this incapacity is made explicit. They cannot be here because they cannot perform the ritual that metamorphoses matter into life. It is like when a true believer is at the temple of their god and knows their loved one will not, cannot be saved. In the presence of the living power that sustains them it is all more apparent that the one they have lost is truly beyond all reach.
But further, the empty dining chair is a powerful symbol because of the very fact it is not a church or gravestone or epic monument. It isn’t something that we build to put a living presence in the world. It is the most mundane place in the entire world. Precisely because of the ongoing nature of nourishment, we often forget the dining table even exists. In many homes, it sits forgotten under a pile of junk mail and other homely detritus. Because of the nature of our culture, we believe that life itself is elsewhere. In the office, at the gym, the bar, the woods, the city center. These are the places that we go to truly live. Because we must eat so often, we often look at the dining table as the place we leave out from on our way back to living. It is, more often than not, itself forgotten in the rush of other places where we carry out the important things in life, the things that act as markers in the progress of our lives. We forget the dining table the same way we forget about breathing. Until our attention is brought to it, it is taken for granted, despite its vital importance. And death brings our attention to the table in profound ways.
The most everyday tools and equipment which we use for practical purposes, such as tables and hammers, are profoundly important for our relationship to the world. Through their use, we engage with the cosmos and weave ourselves into the fabric of reality. When we encounter something broken or unusable (or outright missing), however, we discover its unusability not by looking at it and contemplating it, but rather by noticing all of the shattered relationships with other things that such a problem creates. That is, we notice all of the things we are no longer able to do with the broken or unusable tool, all the projects left undone, all the damaged relations that one unusable tool carries with it. In other words, when our dealings with the world are interrupted by a damaged or missing part, everything else around that void in the world begins to lose its usefulness and meaning as well. One broken tool has the power to shatter the meaning and significance of everything else which was connected to it. Such an experience lights up the world, shines a light on the implicit relations that the missing thing had with our everyday life.
An empty chair is like a broken tool, a missing link in the chains of meaning that constitute our lives. Without the person who is supposed to sit there, the chair is damaged, cracked somewhere deep down in its being. All of the conversations that we should be having with them, all of the meals that we will no longer share with them, all that they will no longer be able to do, from now until the end of time, are illuminated by their absence. In an empty chair we truly see the absence that a person’s death leaves behind. More than a monument or gravestone, which is added to the world to make the person remain with us in some form or another, an empty dining chair signals nothing but brokenness, absence, loss. This is all to say that it is precisely because of the everydayness of our dinner table that it serves as such a potent locus of negative meaning. Because sitting down to eat is such a common, repeated, everyday experience, when the altar at which we commune is shattered, it sends cracks out into the entire world. While a broken hammer or lost keys might cause a momentary inconvenience, the empty chair presents us with an ongoing, negative illumination of our world. It shows us more deeply than a headstone that our world is irrevocably broken.
Ninety-six hours is a very long time to write anything, let alone a list made up largely of dead children, some that were so young they had not yet been given a name. For about half of the time, I listened to an audiobook of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of the Iliad, as well as a podcast by Jeff Wright that included stories before and after the rage of Achilles as well as an in-depth commentary on the culture, stories, and politics of the world in which the story took place. I initially chose the Iliad because I wanted to listen to something that I was already very familiar with, which would allow me to continue to focus on the difficult task of keeping track of the names I had written. As I got deeper into the stories, however, I realized that it was a fitting accompaniment to the naming of the Gazan dead. In the Iliad, a large, well-armed military force from the West traps a Middle Eastern population in an enclosed area, cutting off their food, attacking its civilian population, destroying their religious buildings, and eventually burning their city to the ground. The central theme of the text, introduced in the famous first line, is μῆνις (mênis), translated alternatively as rage, anger, wrath, fury, and vengeance. The poem begins with the fury of two men and one god: Achilles, Agamemnon, and Apollo. It does not end until the fury of Achilles is assuaged through the improbable peace that is struck between Achilles and Priam, a peace that flies in the face of all expectations and possibility. Vengeance is also perhaps the central theme of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with each side pointing to the violence of the other as justification for their actions. Rage, it seems, is a god that has accompanied mankind from its earliest days, and acts as the backdrop against which the stories of individuals play out, a figure as integral to the story of humanity as the landscape in which we live. Both sides of the conflict worship the same gods, and yet have extremely different interpretations of their wills. They both share a common culture and yet cannot be more different from one another because of the role that μῆνις plays in their lives.
In the Iliad, repetition and lists are integral to the telling of the story. Originally an oral tale, the poem uses epithets, memes, and repetition of entire strophes to emphasize the repetitive nature of the actions carried out by the characters. More importantly, it relies heavily on lists in order to communicate the scale of the conflict. In Book 2, lines 494–759, often called the “Catalogue of Ships”, Homer gives the names of approximately two hundred and fifty commanders bringing a total of 1,186 ships across the Aegean Sea in 8 total pages. It is an exhaustive and exhausting enumeration of people involved in the conflict and is often skimmed through by readers because of the repetitive nature of the passage. The passage reads like a drone, a seemingly unending inventory that through its very nature seems to stretch out into time and space. Like Whitman’s lists in Leaves of Grass, we feel we are approaching the infinite through the finite, like we are experiencing even more than the literal amount given through the iterative “and…and” structure of the text. Similarly, in many of the battle scenes, we are told the names of hundreds of men that are killed that has a similar effect to the ‘Catalogue’ of book 2. In Books 5, 16, 20, and 21, we are told of the aristea of Diomedes, Patroclus, and Achilles which shows the scale of death they inflict on the Trojans. We should note that the names communicated are only the commanders and princes that each warrior kills, and our mind is left to its own devices to fill in the numberless, unnamed foot soldiers that the rosters imply.
While the central focus of the Iliad are soldiers and war, the other special actors who allow for the account to exist in the first place are the bards and poets that record them. Art (and in the case of the Iliad, poetry and song in particular) is an integral part of the historical process insofar as it acts as a repository of human memory. In James Redfield’s Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector, the author argues that while the klea (or ‘glory’) of warriors is one of the most essential causes of our history (i.e. without deeds there would be nothing to talk about), the actions of heroes would not simply exist without the work of artists. It is as if, he writes, deeds are carried out for the sake of being sung about, rather than the other way around. Historians can communicate the facts of a conflict, and good historians can contextualize these facts in a way that accurately and even passionately conveys the nature of that conflict, but it is only in art that the humanity of its subjects can be illuminated. Art acts as an aesthetic presentation of the meaning of conflict, loss, absence, death, love, in a way that creates living memory.
Like “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” in Les Miserables, the music of the Iliad is as transitory as the lives that are lost within them. Temporal, tending towards an end, a measurement of time and a reminder of the brevity of life that arcs toward its own extinguishing. “Empty Tables” is likewise an attempt to express the scale of loss through a transitory art form. In the Iliad, the absence of Patroclus and Hector disrupts social and family bonds, and drives the plot of the story to its improbable conclusion. In the poem, rage acts as the motor that drives the story forward. It is only when Priam, rather audaciously and foolishly, comes to the tent of Achilles to beg for the body of his son, Hector, that the cycle of rage and vengeance is broken. It is a reminder that the absence of death, and the act of confronting that absence, is the cause for sober reflection on the acts of violence that accompany the human drama.
I also spent stretches of time writing in silence, in order to experience the scale of death that this war has inflicted on a largely civilian population. The Sharpie’s scratch across the fabric in a kind of rhythmic perpetuity, punctuated by the silence of my hand hovering between the names. Silence had a strange part in the project as a whole. On one hand, the whole project is centered around silence. An empty dinner table, or an empty chair at a table, is one where the absent diner is silent. Not only can they not participate in the ritual of nourishment that preserves our material form, but neither can they take part in the spiritual activity of a gathering, the conversation that binds us soul to soul as we discuss the events of our day, tell stories to one another, and fill our minds with accounts of the internal lives of our friends and family. It is as much the deafening silence of a missing dinner guest as their physical absence that signals their absence. These are people who can no longer speak, so each of their names is a silence. Especially the ones whose names we do not even know.
On the other hand, the project is an attempt at the obverse of silence. It is intended as an articulation of the names of those can no longer speak for themselves. In the United States, we have been told to remain silent on the crisis in Gaza. People have lost friends, family, positions, jobs, and relationships for speaking openly about the atrocities that are happening there. In May of this year, the House of Representatives passed the “Awareness of Antisemitism” act in a 320-91 vote which would expand the definition of Antisemitism outlined by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act, which has yet to be taken up by the Senate where it faces a more difficult vote, would put any criticism of the political state of Israel on equal footing with denying the Holocaust, bombing places of worship, and physical assault of people of Jewish descent. The bill was crafted in response to widespread campus protests against the state of Israel’s campaign in Gaza and their continued colonial encroachment on Palestinian land. Such an act would actively suppress criticism of military and political decisions, and is intended to create silence instead of grief-filled speech. Speaking the names of those who have been killed is, in this way, an act of resistance against a culture of silence.
“Empty Tables” is intended to work between these two extremes. On one hand, it does not explicitly articulate an overt criticism of the violence that is taking place in Gaza. By placing the tables within a grove of trees at a park, the work allows silence and absence to take center stage, relying on the void left by the dead to communicate the immensity of loss that has occurred (and continues to occur) over the course of the last 70 years, and in the last 12 months in particular. By relying on the associations we have with empty dinner tables, the work allows viewers to come to their own conclusions about the events occurring in Palestine. On the other hand, it is intended to refuse the culture of silence that the political systems of the United States have attempted to impose. By silently speaking the names of the dead, the work reminds viewers of the tens of thousands of men, women, children, and babies that have died by way of bombing, guns, and the systematic dismantling of medical and food systems in the region. The silence, in other words, hopes to speak volumes.
As a last note, if you would like to set up ‘Empty Tables’ at your event, protest, film screening, etc. send me a message and I will be happy to send the sheets and plates to you.