Wheels within wheels.
My flatmate let me borrow her copy of Robert Macfarlane’s Underland this morning, and I started reading it immediately. It reminds me of the things we learnt during my undergraduate degree, about how language moulds our world and our world moulds us. Except, the way Macfarlane writes is far more accessible and far more poetic. There are a couple of passages that have really stuck with me, and I’d like to share a thought about one of them. Funnily enough, the passage I am going to focus on briefly is actually one that Macfarlane himself picked out from Robert Pogue Harrison’s The Dominion of the Dead. There truly are wheels within wheels.
“For the first time in millennia, most of us don’t know where we will be buried, assuming we will be buried at all. The likelihood that it will be among our progenitors becomes increasingly remote. From a historical or sociological point of view, this is astounding. Uncertainty as to one’s posthumous abode would have been unthinkable to the vast majority of people a few generations ago”.
When I joke with my friends about wanting to be buried in the starfish position, legs and arms akimbo, their automatic response is first, one of uproarious laughter. Immediately after they have caught their breath at my hilarious whimsy — and how could you blame them? — they ask ‘so you want to be buried?’ and I have to qualify my preceding statement by saying that actually, no I don’t think I do want to be buried at all. Afterwards, each of them agrees, saying ‘no I don’t think I’ll be buried either, I’d much rather be cremated. The idea of being buried is actually rather creepy’.
I had never really thought about this being a strange conversation — save for the fact that a bunch of twenty-somethings are sitting around discussing funeral arrangements — until I read that passage in Macfarlane’s book. He is completely right. It is no longer a given that a body will be buried in a coffin in a graveyard after death. Even my grandmother was not buried, but rather cremated and scattered in the churchyard where my grandfather who I never met was scattered too. I have spent a while pondering why. I don’t know if I have an answer per se, but I can take a stab at it.
I guess it must be related to the decline of the importance of religion in English-speaking countries. In religion, everything is made physical somehow. Religion is full of rituals about the prominence of the body — the symbology of it, whether you be taking the sacrament, getting married, or indeed, dying. This is somewhat ironic considering religion is also predicated, Abrahamic religion at least, on the existence of an intangible being. But I suppose the body is an emblem of one’s difference from God.
In Macfarlane’s book, he talks about ‘traces’ of things — the trace of humans, animals, all things that have lived or not lived — hidden beneath the earth. In fact, the earth itself is made up traces of things that used to be. All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again, to quote Ecclesiastes. A body is a trace of a whole human — mind, body, and soul — and I suppose we feel that the traces of our loved ones must be protected for as long as we can help it. We look to the ground because we see it as solid and unyielding whereas in the sky, all that is solid melts into air, to quote Marx. Perhaps we perceive the air as more volatile — it moves, it bends, it disrupts our lives. Macfarlane tells us that actually, the ground is far more unstable than we give it credit for; but still, our perception of it in the realm of popular thought does not change. And popular perception is often more important than actual fact.
In the past, we have often seen ourselves as belonging to the ground. After all, we are corporeal and it is corporeal too. We can see it and we can see ourselves. In contrast, the air, the wind, the clouds, all lack a body. In much the same way as God does, I guess. In this way, we can relate to the ground a lot more. But as we move further from religious rites and rituals, we actually seem to have become more aware of everything about us which is intangible; our thoughts, our consciousness, our sub-consciousness. As a result, the body is no longer the star of the show. We see ourselves, not as a sum of our physical parts, but as something more than that. Our being exists in our mind, our personality. Whether or not our body is preserved after death is neither here nor there because what matters when we determine our personhood is our mind. And that is already gone. Even those who are religious are now more likely to accept that some of the old rituals are not binding physically but rather, metaphorically. It is ironic that as we have become less spiritual we have become more focused on that which we cannot see.