Charnel Houses

It was an uncharacteristically hot summer in Connecticut about ten years ago, and I was meeting friends for work at a coffee shop. As I crossed the common area towards where we were meeting, I noticed a small bird in clear distress. It was panting in a strange way, and the heat hard clearly taken its toll on this small creature. I could have left it, but something compelled me to ask the coffee shop for a box so I could bring it in from the heat and see if it would recover. It did not, and I had to dispose of the bird in a dumpster after our meeting.

Once on Cape Cod, my sister and I found a dead gull, and we buried it in the sand near a jetty. My oldest daughter inherited the same concern for the living and the dead, and buried a bird of of her own some years later. I sincerely feel our fascination and reverence for life is one of the things that dignifies us and those for which we project care.

I wrote about death poems in my last essay, but while those are a way for the individual to remember their own life, the way others remember us through various rituals point to a collective practice that honors life and death. No one forgets the burial of a pet, or of a wild creature at a young age.

The Catholics signify their debates over the selection of a new pope by alerting the public with smoke. In the conclave, black smoke shows that deliberations continue, and white smoke shows the process is at an end. In lion packs, a new leader will kill the young. History is rewritten quickly once power is established. The new order pays homage to the dead, like Thomas Becket’s veneration, but the dead are inconvenient for the future. Notably, Henry VIII destroyed a shine to Beckett as part of his Dissolution of Monastaries. He also destroyed Becket’s bones and ordered all mention of his name obliterated. Obviously this didn’t work. Other folk heroes like Ned Ludd persist despite the secrecy behind their legacy.

Some things must be remembered. Our collective remembering and honoring of lives that speak to the best of us is worth the ceremony, the stones and memorials. But not every life can be remembered, and ways of being in the past have locked us into a future where we can see our steps descending to a hotter, darker, more precarious reality. I remember the bird I disposed of in a dumpster, despite the unceremonious nature of its passing, every exceptionally hot day where I wonder how the world without air conditioning gets by.

What I don’t remember is how we got here. And I wonder how much those who do remember can do about it. I wonder about the next great burning of Alexandrea, which books and materials will survive, and what kind of world people will build in our absence. I hope I at least get some kind of proper burial. Land, sea, fire or sky, it makes little difference to me, but it means the world to those who might remember us. The earth is a charnel house and my dust and bones will stay, even if my words don’t. Will we be myths? Will the world before the next eschaton be something glimpsed in fragments like the Nag Hammadi library? Or will this reality dictate the future until the end of all humanity?

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