I know it’s spring, or near enough, and spring’s a time when “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love” but I am not a young man, nor was Tennyson when he wrote those words in Locksley Hall; and in any case, young men do not stay young forever. Whatever springs we have seen, however often we feel or felt that “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ drives my green age” (Thomas), sooner or later we come to see spring as the Recycler, “breeding lilacs out of the dead land” –a bit of magic Eliot thought cruel but one surely we grow to embrace as we embrace all cycles given to us as the terms of our existence. Not so much dust to dust as it is dust to lilacs – a process Thomas also captures (if somewhat obliquely):
I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn. . .
This is, largely, the way things go and have gone for centuries. We die and are returned to the earth. Yet fairly recently, and in the West (particularly), most everything about our way of death aims to prevent or at least impede this cosmic recycling. We infuse our dead with formaldehyde or formalin (at least since the 19th century—prior to that it was arsenic, or alcohol), seal them away in stone or metal, and cache them underground in vaults of concrete. Once such drastic and ultimately futile measures to preserve our remains from the erosion of time were reserved for the very rich who lavished such attention on their dead that we trek in our millions to see the results—think of the pyramids of Giza, Tamerlaine’s tomb in Samarkand, the Taj Mahal. Yet these monuments don’t so much defy death as enshrine its effects. And clearly we’d run out of space if everyone had the means to erect such memorials; the Great Pyramid of Giza is roughly two and a half million cubic metres. Even so, we now routinely construct miniature versions of these mausolea and tuck them beneath the sod.
Several years ago when our boys were young we took them through the Catacombs of Paris—vast underground limestone quarries whose galleries have been partially filled with remains—mostly just the larger bones—dug from the city’s overcrowded cemeteries in the 18th and 19th centuries to make room for new arrivals. Miles of aisles lined with bones of the unmemorialized, chapels (yes, you can be married, or even baptised in front of thousands of silent witnesses) in 30-foot high vaults walled floor to ceiling with slowly mouldering skulls. Naturally it’s a little gloomy at first walking along dripping and dimly lit tunnels, and the motto at the entrance isn’t particularly inviting: ‘ARRETE! C’EST ICI L’EMPIRE DE LA MORT’ [literally, Stop! Here is the Empire of Death—but on you go—you can’t turn around here anymore than you can in life. We’ve now entered the metaphor. . .] and things don’t improve much, at least so far as the words of encouragement—Horace makes an appearance with his ‘ OMNE CREDE DIEM TIBI DILUXISSE SUPREMUM’ [‘Believe every day to be your last’ but of course we may not heed his advice—and certainly not with that other inevitable eventuality approaching on 15 April]. Yet somehow things do lighten up—we are, after all, only looking at the future. Our sons slowly warmed to this meeting and soon were showing postcards of the Eiffel Tower to the eyeless heads, explaining that because these Parisians had died long before their city’s most famous icon had been built, revealing what was once the future to what is still the past was a form of enlightenment. In any case, there was an engagement with these bones that would not have been possible had they been cached away in steel or stone. It’s the same sense of engagement with the dead we see in George Herbert’s brilliant poem “Church-Monuments” where the speaker tours a country church, absorbing the lessons of impermanence from its tombs:
I gladly trust
My body to this school, that it may learn
To spell his elements, and find his birth
Written in dusty heraldry and lines:
Which dissolution sure doth best discern,
Comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth.
These laugh at Jet and Marble put for signs,
To sever the good fellowship of dust. . . .
Maybe it’s time to let dust return to dust, as it will, more easily. Let the earth be monument enough. Recently I’ve been approached by members of our community to explore the idea of Green Burial on Greenbelt land. You can find the general information about this practice on-line [greenburialcouncil.org for example] but the general idea is to honour the process of returning the body as easily as possible to the elements it will, assuredly, become. And leaving as little as possible of the steel, stone, concrete and synthetics underground as mute witness to the life they never really contained. We’re all fans of the Taj Mahal, but what we bury, while unseen, is not unnoticed by the ground around it. Especially for those of us who cherish this earth, our parting gift should resonate with the lives we led upon it.
If you have thoughts on the idea of green burial, I would be grateful to hear them. You can contact me at the Greenbelt Land Trust or leave a comment on this blog.
