Onions and Absinthe: 2013

“No, ’tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church-door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.

Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man...
A plague a’ both your houses! They have made worms’meat of me.”
Mercutio, from William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

As an icon of our fear of death, the grave haunts, soothes, adulates, and remembers. Graves are for both the dead and the living. They entomb the prospect of contagion, our fear of unknown, our frustration with impermanency and human frailty, our atrophied emotional attachment, and our deep desire to master death.

I’ve always found it fascinating that the reincarnating Metaphysicals tend to have been an ancient royal or notable figure in a past life. But this shouldn’t be so surprising since we are all recycled bits of matter. As Bill Bryson puts it;

“Because they are so long lived, atoms really get around...We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms – up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested – probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Kahn and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. (The personages have to be historical, apparently, as it takes the atoms some decades to become thoroughly redistributed; however, much you may wish it, you are not yet one with Elvis Presley.)”

The difficultly lies in the transfer of memory through those subatomic particles. But no matter…reincarnation is about connection to the past – it just attempts to bind us to the past in some more essential way than the boneyard does.

Graves lead us down the trail to our past one way or another. Death records and graves are our genealogical history in most cases, because our less illustrious ancestors remain anonymous – they weren’t enshrined, entombed or otherwise memorialized, due to untoward circumstances or simply a lack of funds. Of course our ‘worm’s meat’ still holds the genetic markers of our absolute ancestry – back to the paramecium no doubt, if we can find the keys to break the code. But our very existence exemplifies the ongoing and ancient lineage of successful reproduction that began with the first spark of life on earth.

So it seems a great tragedy when a fine spark is snuffed. What do we do with all the love and devotion we had to that life? We put it in a treasure box, bury it deep in the earth, erect a marker to honor it so that others can find the trail, and we hold a sort of death party or feast to mark their passing.

Graveyards and graveyard etiquette are designed to invite contemplation...
As Hamlet’s world is going to pieces around him where does he go? To the graveyard. In his famous lines, Hamlet addresses a skull he finds in the soil the grave diggers have unearthed;

“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorr’d in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss’d I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning-quite chop-fall’n.”

Shakespeare’s entire treatment of death in the Churchyard scene at the end of Hamlet plays with the macabre. To begin, the grave diggers are cast as ‘Clown I, II & III,’ and the scene contains a series of puns and jests—not unlike Mercutio's death speech—which is typical of Shakespeare’s handling of death. He understood that wit counterbalances gravity. Hamlet’s speech is so well remembered precisely because it captures the longing we feel for what is lost, but also distracts from the pain of that loss—it captures the essence of our duel relationship with the dead.

Graveyards, tombs and catacombs evoke fear—of ghosts, spirits, the undead—a whole panoply of horrors that we love to terrorize ourselves with.

I visited a chapel in Evora, Portugal in which the walls and columns are decorated entirely with human bones—the Bone Chapel. Not only are the dead disturbed, they are disassembled, and used as macabre adornment.

In the Monastery of San Francisco in Lima, Peru I observed a similar geometric design in the catacombs of the cathedral, made from hundreds of human bones.

Both are artistic, yet gruesome. But the bones decorate a religious space.

However peculiar our burial rites, we have a reverence for the dead and their resting places. Thousands of years ago the Egyptians embalmed their dead and entombed them with all the treasures and luxuries that they had in life. And we still dress our dead in their finest clothes, glorify them with memorials, and carve their names on markers so that there is a permanent trail to follow.

But we also celebrate the dead—join the ‘dance of death’ as it were—perhaps to flip our fear on its head and use it as a source of condolence or almost hysteric therapy. If we can’t laugh, we must cry? There has always been a curious revelry inherent to death celebrations that borders on carnival. So it seems apt that the word ‘carnival’ actually derives from the Latin ‘carne vale’—farewell to the flesh—one meaning of which is to bid this dear old earth adieu. Over time, it appears that a festive atmosphere developed around these celebrations for the dead.

Bernt Notke: Surmatants (Totentanz) in St. Nicholas' Church, Tallinn.

In the middle ages there is the ‘Dance of Death’—the Danse Macabre (French), Danza Macabra (Italian), Dansul Morţii (Romanian), Danza de la Muerte (Spanish), Dansa de la Mort (Catalan), Dança Macabra (Portuguese), Totentanz (German), Dodendans (Dutch), Surmatants (Estonian)—a peculiarly juxtaposed concept of ‘dance’ and ‘death’ depicted in Medieval imagery.

"Danse macabre" (1493) by Michael Wolgemut, from the Liber chronicarum by Hartmann Schedel.

These images seemed to emerge during the sweep of the plague through Europe. The human toll was inconceivable, and interestingly, our response was to metaphorically dance in the ashes of civilization.

The wake—a party for the living to celebrate the dead—also has Medieval roots. Wakes began as ‘vigils for the dead’—during which the living kept watch over the dead to ward away evil. Subsequently, variations of the wake developed, in which feasting and drinking became common.

‘Day of the Dead’ celebrations are held in many cultures. They developed out of the same tradition as the Hallowmasses: All Hallows' Eve, All Saints' Day, All Souls' Day, and of course, eventually, Halloween—all of which are celebrated with festively macabre iconography.

Then there is the clown as perennially popular Halloween fare - a curiously comic, yet uncanny image - somehow a morphing of the jester and grim reaper.

I don’t know if Freud ever wrote on this topic, but it’s clear there is a morbid, yet carnival-like observance of death rituals that humans embrace.

We even market death and the macabre for our children’s consumption through ghost stories, Trick-or-Treating, and entertainment such as Tim Burton’s Nightmare before Christmas and Corpse Bride, (which I am thoroughly charmed by), Disney's Coco, which utilizes the Day of the Dead as its central theme, or the classic Night on Bald Mountain segment of Disney’s Fantasia, which incorporates images of skeletal humans, beasts, and other demons in a frenetic dance of death that captures many aspects of the 'Hallowmass' legends. These legends express our human need to revel in death—in defiance of the deep loss every death represents. We are obsessed with, fascinated by, and dare I say terrified of life's bitter end. The dead depart, but we—the living—are those who must bear the torch of memory.

While there is nothing more sobering or heart wrenching than the death of a loved one, death seems to fill us with ambiguity. We want to weep into our beer, toast the departed, revel in our most haunting specters of memory, and dance a while with death—even in our darkest hours.

While traveling in Ireland – actually, let me more specific – while driving a stick-shift rental car with the wrong hand, on the wrong side of the car, on the wrong side of the road for the first time from Dublin to the west coast of Ireland in one day, I came round a curve that said something like ‘Warning! Black Spot Ahead!’ And sure enough, around the bend on a rock face we were approaching was a giant black spot! We were flummoxed. We knew the highway engineers probably weren’t kidding when they posted that sign, but for the average American, having never heard of Black Spots and the dangers they pose, it was initially puzzling, then a source of bemusement.

After discussing it for a few minutes we decided it must be the equivalent of the American ‘Blind Curve/ Dangerous Curve,’ or something similar to crosses erected on the side of the road in the southwestern U.S., where people have been killed. Hardly funny once understood, but for the uninitiated, 'Black Spots' conjure up any number of associations that have nothing to do with what they actually represent.

Some signs are just something one never encounters in the western USA in everyday life, so they can catch you by surprise. For example:

(Well, duh!)

(You're kidding...right?)

We passed this sign along the west coast of the south island in New Zealand. I even took the trouble to ask at the visitor's center in Greymouth if penguins really cross the road along there, since I had always thought penguins only lived much further south and was not sure if this was just some joke. Yes, they do cross there - mostly at night I was assured.

In the U.S. we have ‘Slow, Children at play’ signs, but we seem to expect the elderly to walk quickly and watch out for themselves. To their credit, in Scotland they yield the road.

In America, 'Humps for 350 yards' would be a bit perplexing...

...but I was tempted to hang about for a while in Edinburgh for a glimpse of a humped zebra.

In Sydney, they take special precautions for the babies...

Ok, I'll admit that bollards are something we might have a few of in the U.S., but I don't personally think I've ever seen the word used on a warning sign. At first glance in York, I couldn't even think of what a bollard might be (since it was out of view at the time), but they had me convinced it was dire...

Of course other signs just make you pause for a moment, like in Amsterdam where they advise drivers to stop occasionally to moisten their eyes...or in Buxton, England where 'Slow' is not even slow enough.