A healthy fear.

Watching everyone dress up on Halloween day and, later on in the evening, trot door to door to knock for candy, I can't help but think of how our culture of candy and costumes has consumed the rituals and lessons the dead used to share with us in more immediacy.

Today we are told to accept death, to fear not, to be joyful for the life we have and accepting of the mortal fate slowly snaking its way toward us. But there is something missing from this view, and it comes with the ignoring of the dead, and what dead really means. Corpses used to be an intimate part of many societies; places were set one last time at the table where cold bodies limped in their chairs and stared with sagging eyes at plates of food; pyres were built, and whole families gathered to watch and sing as they added fuel to the very flames which simmered the flesh off the bones of their loved ones, and boiled their organs one by one into ash; holes were dug out for still cadavers by hand, their bodies lowered stiffly at night, and fires lit, and dances danced, rituals full of agony and pain with masks and costumes to communicate to spirits, and smooth riverstones wept onto the ground as symbols for their immortal sadness. The dead were right there, the worms in their mouth, with their split stomachs, their roiling smells, their jaundiced eyes. The actions of grief from their relatives reflected this uncontrollable force; they tore out their hair, split their knuckles on stones, and cut open their bodies, as if out of desperation to know that they were still alive.

Not so today. Today, we have spotless crematoria which burn bodies behind walls of brick; the mouths of our graves are backhoe-dug, clean-cut and uniform; the bodies of our dead are placed into caskets, dressed up in fine clothes and embalmed against the maggots of decay before being sealed behind mahogany and lowered into the earth. We dab at the tears of our grief with powdered handkerchiefs.

So what have we lost? A healthy fear. How can we be afraid of the idea of the death if we've dressed ourselves up to reflect it in costumes of whimsy? And, if we can not be afraid of the dead, how can we listen to what they whisper to us just behind our ears?
The immediacy of death tells us continually that we are mortal; the fear of death makes us hold on to and suck out of life every last breath of morning air. As death fades away into something perfumed and well-dressed, our lives bend, too, toward apathetic room temperature. We need the extremes on both sides to remind us that death is very present, and, thus, that life is as well.

A found list/poem.

After discussing lists so extensively in class Tuesday, finding this one just off the sidewalk on my way to work this morning seemed...well...downright mythological. 

No repetitions, but what a set of verses it makes nonetheless! I mean, let's be honest: Have you ever read a poem with a more searing conclusion than 'Cabot cheddar'? 

Of cellars, tunnels, catacombs, and crypts...

There are things in us that crave the deaths of old.

In ancient cultures, death and the spaces and rituals reserved for them held high precedence in society. Catacombs and crypts threaded their way beneath cities, and villages had holy rivers for anointing the dead, or communal pyres for the incineration of corpses.Today, such spaces are boarded up, or roped off with placards explaining their long-outdated histories. The general view from society is one of smug relief; we are glad we have moved away from such rituals to more civilized, sensible things.

In his short story 'Beneath the Cellars of Our Town', Stephen Millhauser writes of a mythical town ordinary in every way, except that beneath it spans a endless network of tunnels. These tunnels are entirely empty, paved with bricks and lit by the warm flicker of lamplight. They go nowhere, and serve no outward purpose; they burst up through manholes, through hidden trapdoors in cellars, behind bushes in parks… They obviously require extensive upkeep, and are not without their hazards. Because of both these and less tangible reasons, the people of this town are well used to the constant ridicule and harangues of their neighbors; what ungrounded foolishness, these neighbors ask, would possibly compel a town to keep such a network of unmappable corridors maintained and lantern-lit?
But the people of this town take the scoffing without expression, and dust it off their shoulders. They're well aware of the pointlessness of their tunnels, but therein lies their reason.
The people of this town are always turning off their sidewalks and roads to walk down stairs or to climb down ladders into the tunnels for no other reason than to wander there in the dim beneath the light of the earth. The corridors are so expansive and layered the probability of meeting another soul, or even another moving shape save the lanterns, is slim. Their breadth and depth means one could wander unimpeded for any length of time without a destination. The point, as the narrator says, is what the tunnels give to them; nothing more than a dark place rich in mystery to sink down into, to be alone, for a time, without reason or direction. The fact that there is no logic to the ritual is irrelevant. There is some deep and pulsing need fulfilled by the vanishing into the unplumbed dark of the world around us, as well as within us.

We become those neighboring towns laughing and cringing at foolish tribes in isolated jungles, or lonely villages on distant tundras, clinging yet to ancient acts and rituals of pain, humiliation, and death. We decry the pointlessness of such horrible deeds, and rejoice in our own abolition of such mindless savagery. But perhaps these villagers are the ones who should be smiling. In maintaining these seemingly pointless burdens, in keeping such dark passages of their society lit, however dimly, they keep alive what we dwellers-of-the-surface can only guess at.

In 'The Poetics of Space' by Gaston Bachelard, he famously writes of the spaces in our dwellings mirroring those of our beings. He claims in men, as in their buildings, the attic and the cellar each serve a valuable purpose. The attic is a place of rationality and clear vantage. Its windows pour forth golden light, the air is warm and dry, and the creatures residing there--birds and bats and shimmering insects--are things of air and open space.The cellar, on the other hand, is an irrational place. Both in human beings and their houses, it is where dark things crawl through the slime on their bellies. Twisted nails burst down from the low ceilings, and all is dark and damp. In modern society, we have fought back against this irrationality; we string electric lights from the floor joists to beat back the gloom, or we nestle sump pumps in corners to spit out the ceaselessly rising water. 

Deep down, however, as Bachelard writes, we know better than to think it is either sensible or beneficial to civilize the basement. "The subconcious," writes he, "Will not be civilized. It carries a candle when it goes into the cellar."

This, I believe, is the epitome of the value of ancient rituals. Like tunnels, or cellars, they remind us of the unplumbed depths in ourselves, and thus the world. Non-sensible and distasteful though they seem, the things they impart are as essential as grain or honey. 
Often, however, it isn't until we lie in bed and realize, upon hearing a creaking in the cellar, just how grateful we are for it.