MEMENTO MORI
Notes Toward an Obituary
-
Self-Portrait, 2024
Publicity photograph, chromogenic (digital silver halide) print on paper
20.32 × 25.4 cm (8 × 10 in.)
Master printA self-portrait of Jono Borden taken by him in 2024. The alpha, or flagship, primary, specimen of his self-portraits for that year.
Printed 2024.Accession Number CP.2024.Α
Copyright © 2024 Jonathan Borden
Collectio Photographica, Bibliotheca Ionathani Bordenii, Halifax -
Jono Borden, Poet and Provocateur Who Relished the Rupture, Dies at [Age]
A Conclusion He’s Written for Himself
Jono Borden, a Canadian polymath whose body of work—spanning poetry, film, and a sprawling independent empire of artistic subversion—served as a systematic dismantling of contemporary convention, died on [Date] in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He was [Age].
A figure of self-styled contradictions, Mr. Borden was as comfortable in the high ceremonial arts as he was in the role of the æsthetic vandal. Born into a lineage that reads like a survey of the Canadian establishment, Mr. Borden counted among his cousins the nation’s eighth prime minister, Sir Robert Borden, and the former Minister of Militia and Defence, Sir Frederick Borden. Yet, the family tree also held darker, more cinematic threads: he was cousin to the Hollywood silent-film star Olive Borden—the first to receive a star on the Walk of Fame—and, by family lore, the alleged axe-murderess Lizzie Borden. Perhaps most pivotally, he was the great-grandson of Wilkie Borden, the first licensed film projectionist in Nova Scotia, who managed and operated several cinemas across the province. Mr. Borden famously embraced this eclectic heritage, noting that while he shared the blood of prime ministers and tycoons, he felt a far greater kinship with the hatchet-wielder and the projectionist. He spent his life systematically turning this “respected” inheritance into the raw material for his own subversive artistic agenda, preferring to swing what he called his “ancestral hatchet” at the polite boundaries of literature and film.
Mr. Borden’s intellectual foundations were laid at the University of King’s College and Dalhousie University, where he refined the academic discipline that would later underpin his sprawling, occult archives. Yet, his artistic trajectory was defined as much by searing personal experience as it was by scholarly rigor. The murder of his father when Mr. Borden was 22 served as a foundational rupture; it crystallized a sensibility already inclined toward the transgressive and propelled the melancholic, often violent urgency that characterized his work.
“What he makes deviates; what he touches ruptures,” Mr. Borden once wrote of his own project, a mission he pursued with a prolific, at times overwhelming, intensity. His bibliography, which included the verse novel Isaac & Iskandar (2015), the polemic Bullets in the Temple (2025), and the late-career New Pornographies: A Backward Path to Heaven (2027), was intended to corrode what he viewed as the sterile surface of modern life. An openly gay artist and a fiercely committed individualist, Mr. Borden occupied a singular space in the Canadian literary landscape, utilizing his position at the margins to challenge the conventions of the mainstream.
Mr. Borden’s professional life was as unorthodox as his prose. He operated not through traditional publishing or distribution channels, but through a constellation of entities he designed and architected himself, among them Jono Borden Publishers, Inc. and Ritualistic Pictures, Inc. By serving as his own publisher, record label, and spiritual service provider, he maintained a fierce, often polarizing autonomy.
-
Persistence of the Person With a Persona
“He is set to rise from obscurity,” the poet George Elliott Clarke once remarked, placing Mr. Borden in a tradition of iconoclasts from Byron and Blake to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. Mr. Clarke identified in him a “great, rock songsmith” with the necessary fortitude to stare into the abyss—a quality Mr. Borden cultivated with deliberate, sphinx-like intensity in his private life.
Whether through his cinematic incursions, such as The Obsidian Mirror Trilogy (2026), or his jagged, avant-garde verse, Mr. Borden remained committed to the role of “Disturber-of-Shit.” He viewed his own life as a canvas for high-ceremonial architecture, often noting that he found the path of least resistance to be a destination for the hollow.
In keeping with his penchant for the ceremonial, Mr. Borden left explicit instructions for a Victorian-style funeral, mandating the strict observance of traditional mourning rituals—a final æsthetic gesture intended to underscore the gravity of the void he leaves behind. True to his lifelong defense of the unfettered voice, his estate has been directed to the support of civil rights organizations dedicated to the preservation of freedom of expression and the protection of animal welfare, causes he championed as the necessary counterparts to human civilization.
His survivors include [List of family members].
In his final years, working from his home in Halifax, Mr. Borden continued to map what he called “the geometry of ruin,” a pursuit that defined his public and private efforts until his final days. He left behind no blueprints for how his legacy might be softened or sanitized, preferring that the work continue to rupture on its own terms, unaltered and uncensored.
