(Visiting）The Places of the
Dead
‘Indeed
our modern day culture in its aspect of ‘high’ or art culture appears as the
survival of this memory or rite, performing the same social, community and
identity functions as ancestor worship or family remembrance. Art culture as
our modern day death cult, our ‘High Sublime’, the festival of the dead…’
‘(For)
Travel is either hedonism, or nature worship or ancestor worship’.
*
From
graveyards and memorials to quiet corners, and everything in between… so
separating gardens from parks, reflection space from action space… the sitting
or strolling that allows memory and thought, and the games and movement which
forestalls or elides them… reflection versus escape, embodied in two types of
space. Yet it is not they who are embodied, we are; it is they who embody
us, who conjure our performance of our selves… Ourselves in two modes of identity;
the former linked to the past (the dead) and the later to unthinking being in
action (the joy of the body without thought)… The settling of self through the
contemplation of the past as stillness (‘recollection in tranquility’), the
stilling of the self as in meditation: and the loss of self in movement (our
sense of being in the Eternal Present as flight)… Two forms of self: disguised
as forms of self lost.
From
stillness… (from graveyards to gardens and quiet corners in monumental parks)
noting that all these types of place are relatively closed spaces; enclosed,
frames, framing, framing a space we can enter, set aside, separated, and
deliberately so, or in nature found to be so, felt to be as such, by a
perceiving consciousness (the true genius loci of the ‘place’, ourselves). To
be a ‘room’; constructed or ‘in nature’ – but always in the minds of those who
inhabit the ‘room’, in our feelings, the ‘room in our head’ – awakened by our
presence in the ‘room’ of Nature. An echo of self. A ‘remembering’ of self.
Prompted by place.
From
flight… So to the contrasting pole of open parks, open spaces used for action,
for sport, for the exercise of the body rather than the mind, the flexing of
the muscles as another way of lightening the spirit. Motion too is a kind of
liberation. Liberation from a self, a past self, a ‘heavier’ self – from the
past as burdensome memory, as well as the immediate past.
Two
forms of the ‘death of the self’, the silencing or side-lining of the ego,
perhaps rather a re-configuration in each case, in each case a different
reconfiguration. The latter as movement, like dance… the former as akin to
meditation… through absence, on absence, to absence - to the absence of the
past… From the absence of the past (in our motion in the Eternal Present) to
the absence of the past (its pastness as recollected - as past). Our becoming
conscious of it through its absence.
So
do the enclosed spaces in our lives, the rooms of place in the world, offer a
link to meditation, to memory, to ritual - and to food… to the memorial feast,
to a ritual continuity with the past, to the remembered dead… the dead
memorialised. And we are reminded again that the graveyard or memorial plot may
be the nearest thing to a quiet garden space… to the space put aside for the
dead, all the way from the corner in the house (or under the floor, as with our
ancestors, after the turn of the Neolithic) or somewhere nearby, in a corner of
domestic cultivation, to a secluded spot found in fields, hills or woodlands, a
plot, a place, put aside for burial or disposal rites and a simple memorial
stone, to the country graveyard with attendant church or temple, to the city
cemetery and the modern funeral home set in green fields. Including the private
plot, chapel or mausoleum, not only in public space, the designated space for
the dead, but on private lands or property – usually in the garden or grounds,
but even, as with our ancestors, again ‘under the floor’, in a purpose built
crypt. All coincidence of quiet spaces put aside, might there be some sign of
their co-evolution? The places of ancestor worship appear not only outside of
the work spaces of everyday life, or on the edge or put aside for agricultural
use, but also outside the play spaces of everyday life; in space set aside,
intimate but separate, accessible but hidden, near yet far. Both proximate and
proper… Perhaps evoking a new notion of distance… A new genealogy of memory and
distance… A genealogy of space reflective and (because) evoking the presence of
an absent other; providing a gift to the self and answering a debt to the
Other.
For
we do still visit cemeteries, and not just to see our lost beloved, or the
remains of our ideals once embodied (now deceased, the memory, the ideal, the
model, the statue, headstone or plaque still remaining). As we go to see the
gravestones of the famous (in Vienna, the vast grave park with resplendent
mausoleums, and the quiet one in the hills, looking for Beethoven and Mahler.
Or the Isola Cimertereo, in Venice (looking for Wagner, who is buried in
Verona!). Or in Paris, sparing a moment for Pere Lachaise… and not forgetting
those in one’s home village, or neighbourhood church and graveyard in town or
city… found still to be bearing the marks and the prompts, still holding the ghosts
of childhood, our past apprehension of the places of the dead (and how lucky we
are, or were, if these were, for us, are still, for us, the only places of
death…). Or a visit to Srebrenica, or Auschwitz.
For
this type of visit too has become a form of tourism, these too have become part
of the itinerary, now featured in our travel guides, another kind of travel.
From
graveyards and their gardens, and from gardens as such, to all the forms of
tourism or ‘travel’ that are more than just taking the taking of an economic,
consumerist advantage (paying less for more, finding pleasures and novelties
‘on the cheap’)… Are not all of these ‘higher’ forms, our ‘serious’ pleasures,
at bottom, in the final analysis, just another way of paying homage to the
past? A homage that extends to
wherever the stones of the Other can be found. Whether located in country or in
city, concerning geology and geography or art and architecture: the collected
(and collectable) genius loci of town
and country - our own newer form of Nature worship, our own modern form of
ancestor worship…
For
if we take the path of gardens as reminders, then we find gardens lead us to
the remainders of ancestor worship. The space for this, put aside, the time for
this, an aside to the everyday, is the space/time of the rite of remembrance –
of a space itself taken as a rite (the ritual visit with its mental
associations); a ritual place with its own unique temporality (the precise date
in the narrative of liner time and its ritual repetition, cyclic, evoking an
attitude to the past and future and so a particular sense of self in the now,
in the Eternal Present， so
connoting for us eternity, that something out of time which guarantees our
place in time). The place of the ritual remembrance meal perhaps… (now
surviving in birthdays and public festivals of religious type origin). If
normally we focus on the time of the meal’s recurrence, on ritual time as
repetition, yet it is not the tie of the meal in narrative linear time, the
time of location of the memorial moment, the retying of the knot or memory,
that matters; rather it is its temporality, its effects on our self and our
identity, its space as the place where the Eternal Present is focused on the
past as something mythic, foundational. The special time which combines, a
certain attitude to the past (and perhaps the future, anyway implying a future,
of repetition and renewal recurring into the future) as occurring in our sense
of the moment, the endless moment, the Eternal Present, that in turn transforms
the space into place: a special place, the genius
loci of the garden or tomb or private space in a park or other room in
space, some other container in space (containing us…) aestheticised, sanctified,
personified… But in the dead we already have our necessary personification; the
genius loci is pre-named,
pre-arranged, evoked from our past and by name: not only imagined ‘afresh’, as
in the landscape moment, the clearing, or valley or bend in a river overhung
with trees… Space as ‘pointer’ (the monument, the mountain) or as ‘room’; a
room in nature (or tamed, a shrine-like nature, in the Garden, or the place of
the Garden itself). Whose room? Ours; our new self, projected as genius loci or incorporated as a newly
sanctified self… cleansed by the passing of water, stilled by the enclosing of
space (or the opening to the sky), transported by the presence of stones, of
water, of light…
Not
only do we focus on the place though, this being obvious, this function of
quiet memory space as deferred to graveyards and other spaces set aside for
memorials; but the place as also the place for a meal, allowing, permitting, or
demanding, the rite of a collective meal (and not just the silent laying of
flowers, the sweeping and burning of paper, the moment of attention as gift to
the past, as acknowledgement of debt, of identity with the past). It is the
sense of a celebration that as lacking in this last, in such spaces, in the
modern places of the dead… Part of the separation of death and pleasure… of the
memorial and pleasure, of making memory pleasurable, marking memory as
pleasurable; making a place for the past in the present by means of joy (and so
guaranteeing its future, its survival as a marker of time, of periods of time,
in combination with all the other markers of time, in the future). Yet the
drunken wake still survives as such… A send-off that is also a celebration… a
laughing memory.
At
once, an ecstatic washing away of the taboo elements of the dead; and a ritual
affirmation of their death, unique, occurring but once, at once a symbolic, so
mental, washing of our experience, a ritual hallucinatory punctuation in the
text of our life; and the preservation of a memory, of a life unique, occurring
but once, which we forget and remember - all at once.
Or,
again, if we consider the garden as a place of remembering; a space put aside
for remembering – for other kinds of ritual remembering… A quiet space used for
reflection as a means of ordering the past (for present and future) for making
ones peace with the past – immediate or distant… So linked to the funeral
gardens and parks of today by function and coincidence. Coincidence? We
remember that the placement of funeral urns (for cremated remains) in a quiet
corner, or purpose built shrine, or ‘house’, outside, in gardens, perhaps by
their very presence constituting a ‘garden’ space’; organizing the space around
itself, a space set aside, a space separate from open vistas or action, or
practical utility (farming, fruit or vegetable gardening, the keeping of
animals, the exercising of children). Close kindred to the set aside,
meditative garden space. Places for the remains of the dead, in spaces kept
back for the past, for quiet recollection and reflection… such space, such
places, were and are prevalent in many cultures, today and going back far into
our pasts (as far as 7000 BC in ancient China).
A
telling example would be the recent use of temple garden space, where stones
placed in water are used to represent the dead - their remains being held in an
underground chamber, part of recent Japanese Buddhist burial or funerary
practice. This fascinating innovation does not, however, indicate origins
(rather a suggestive, modern expediency). Potential origins for, the globally
admired and imitated, Chinese and Japanese gardens are suggested as a form of
nature worship with Daoist and Shinto shrines as sites for contemplation,
originating in a genius loci, a sense of the spirit of the place, personified,
to whom a temple of shrine is erected; this sense then incorporated into a
garden, by means of an enclosed courtyard space or other form of taming and
ordering (and framing, if not by a wall than by a hedge or border or path or
waterway). The veneration of Nature in both these religions, together with
their influence on Buddhism, makes of all temples a potential garden – as the
courtyards and forecourts, become the sites of trees, echoes of the ‘sacred
grove’, and the miniature, ‘instant’ moveable garden of the potted plant (down
to miniature mountains, and magical stunted Bonzai trees). In Japanese gardens
walking and contemplation, is further formally spatially differentiated, in
Chinese gardens this feature is also present but with less formal specialisation.
In smaller spaces generally, it is contemplation that seems to be the main
thing! (For example continuity of burial practice with garden type spaces from
the ancient past seems unlikely as purity, pollution and other, spiritual or
physical, hygiene-based, beliefs would have dissuaded. Some ancient cultures
buried their dead beneath their homes or kept their remains in urns in corners
of rooms; again we have a possible origin of the quiet devotional space in the
house or garden. But, in the case of Chinese and Japanese history, this does
not does not necessarily entail even the symbolic presence of the dead as in
sacred space... for remembering, contemplation… the connection is coincidental
and co-implicating, intuitive and generic, rather than a provable connection or
genealogy (thus far anyway…).
Yet
we cannot but help remember… one particular feature in the design of the
Eastern Garden or Park; the importance of the flow of water - the direction of
the flow of water. In theory and often in practice too this is from East to
West and from North to South, a directionality which combines, more often than
not, into an overall clockwise flow (see the section on Ji Cheng and his ‘The
Art of Gardening’ (Yuan Ye/园冶) in my
own book on ‘Chinese Gardens’ for a full and illustrated analysis). A
directionality which, according to the Daoist-influenced schools of Feng Shui
(but repudiated as superstition by Ji Cheng, who nevertheless appears to have
kept the clockwise directionality) is a flow necessary to the cleansing of
space, the removal of impurities… (from the living… and from, or of… the dead;
from the visible, organic world, and from the invisible, spirit world).
Moreover these two co-ordinates are also (and again, more often than not) found
combining together into a clockwise mode of circumambulation, the direction of
the paths around the garden space also follow the clockwise rule, circling the
pool in the prescribed manner – so incorporating into garden topography the
Eastern (and Western) mode of moving around a shrine or sacred object. A ritual
movement. (The isle in the lake. The stone in the water).
As
rites and rituals include symbolic washing so do they too involve eating; even
in symbolically vestigial form, the sacrament at Mass, the consecrated Host, as
well as the full anniversary or festive meal. Eating type rituals are
universal, a matter of periodic repetition, the periodic repetition of the
incorporation of matter; repetition being the matter of memory (the act of
memory itself being a repetition in symbol - as well as symbolic repetition).
Other celebrations may be more intense, or may be accompanied by the presence
of food in an incidental, metonymic way; but the meal with others always
functions as ‘marker’ or symbolic exchange of some sort, and so evoking ritual
force. The expected default manner of marking the past, of re-marking the
calendar of the self, reversing the entropy of memory as the meal reverses the
entropy of the physical self (and as the gesture of a meal with others renews
the relationship, reverses the wear and tear of social entropy). An exchange of
matter and time, in space, for identity. Indeed most big festivals include a
meal, real or symbolic (real and
symbolic), as public and private fuse: the private, family meal to commemorate
a public festival, Christmas, Eid, Passover, the Eastern Spring Festival,
together with their more fluid Hindu and Buddhist equivalents; the public
celebrations, the Chinese CCTV Gala and other televised events (the ‘Christmas
Special’) watched as a family in private. All aspects of the festive
public/private suture.
Whence
the worry over the loss of shared mealtimes in modern life; as the loss of
ritual contact. Remembering that these events also exist as a cure for social
(as well as physical) entropy - to renew relationship bonds (to ‘refresh their
memory) or to create the spring board for new bonds. The social organicist
worries over the progressive loss of ritual to other (‘less profound’) forms of
social repetition… But are not all forms of repetition a form of ritual, no
matter how attenuated, mutated, adapted to modern conditions? We all live in
and though our cycles of repetition, our rituals passing or cyclic, vestigial
or intense. (If Durkheim’s views on Ritual and the Social are taken as the
model for the organic society, then perhaps we no longer live as part of a
totalizing experience, now in an ‘inorganic’ or urban society; yet perhaps it
is quality of the totality that is different – as well as the relation to an
ideal type that probably only existed in tribal societies). So if the quality
may be different, quantitatively we still surround ourselves with repetitions,
for our identities still require their periodic support (from daily, to annual,
to rite of passage). If one kind of religion has passed, ritual repetition
nevertheless lives on… incarnate in other aspects of modernity… decried by some
as ‘archaic’, ‘irrational’: claimed to be the site of modern miracle by others,
as, by both traditionalists and utopians, the gift is appropriated as
redemption, as resistance to the commodified world. Yet modern life is replete
with rituality and the inseparability of the commodity and the gift, as it is
of the experience of identity and expenditure (as the mode of exchange that
generates our identity fuses with our modern forms of the exchange of objects).
Food
and the dead (once, in the past, the dead were eaten, out of respect or
survival or the attempt to abrogate power and vitality, all these reasons and
more have excused this most direct form of the re-placing and re-incorporation
of the dead). More usually we have some kind of celebration of the dead, the
funereal, then the anniversary meal (now the Saint’s days of countries with a
Catholic culture); all functioning as a marker of membership as well as a
memorial. Even the blessing given at the everyday meal, the thanks-given, often
include a reference to the missing, the absent or the dead. The food consumed
here, at these times and places, as with the time and space itself of these
events, also is symbolic; nothing is quite what is appears to be – even the
meal at the grave side, the funereal plot of land or mausoleum symbolises the
time/space of ritual, the crossover into, ore overlap with, mythic,
otherworldly, eternity (consider the symbolic wake to the ‘Last Supper’, the
upper case says it all) the place of the funeral, or anniversary meal…) – and ,
as with role play in ritual itself, we both believe and ‘know better’ playing
along with the ‘public secret’. All becomes imbued with a second meaning, or a
parallel sacred or religious, ‘iconological’ (pointing back to origins) or
‘soteriological’ (pointing forwards to last things) point of reference.
Symbolic food, may even be non-food, something inedible, present only as an
offering, as part of the symbolic meal for the dead or past others (heroes,
saints) albeit with positive present effect (ritual ‘effervescence’) and future
effectiveness, that is a duration, ‘effective’ until ‘next time’…). Real food
of course may be read, may be eaten, as a symbol (in the eating, or as left
behind for others to eat); or may be residual, token, as in the communion host
or wafer (a rather pale version of the blood once demanded, and demanded still
at the ceremonies of syncretic religious cults). Blood once demanded, in the
past, as sacrifice, burnt offerings, often human, in the age of tribal military
aristocracy and economic expansion by enslavement. Food stuffs, offered or
consumed as part of a ritual or just left at the temple door or on the altar
steps; whether consumed, shared, or set aside (or consumed by fire as a kind of
send-off) all perform the same function… The meal, that most fundamental
precious thing, food, is taken as a rite (formalized, sanctified). The meal as
ritual: the ritual as meal (repeated across time, and bearing a symbolic import
that points beyond time). However if we only focus on cleansing as preparation
for ritual activity, or the exchange relation of a rite as with the absent or
dead or eternal, with the food sacrifice as a memorial rite for the dead
(ancestors, savior, guru or prophet), then we miss out the most important
practical function of ritual experience; that, in its actual effects, it is in
the service of, for the, celebration of, the living. For us (here and now, in the
Eternal Present), so for the future and not for the past (as it would appear,
as we like to maintain), and for our
future, a cementing of our identity
as community (with those present, and supported by those gone). Believing we
were honouring the past, remembering our dead, we are temporally extending
ourselves and our connection to others - others of the community of the Same
and not the Other - so promoting the unity that will aid us in the future (and
whence the cynical functionality of the scapegoat, or pogrom, used to unify
those present, both active and in witness - even through the relief of not
being chosen, through the unspoken terror of being next…). For to use
remembrance in the cause of the past is to use the past as remembrance; we
cannot do without the dead in our self–fashioning, our foundation or
spring-board into the future (a foundation itself anchored in eternity, the
absent but necessary foundation of all faith, belief, religion or ideology,
exceptionalism, universalism and rationalism). The overt belief, the public
face of the funeral, memorial rite, with its symbolic sacrifice (of time and
economic produce), its meal (token or real) with its repetition, its
recurrence, its presence as a cycle that points forwards, ‘until next time’. So
not for the past, but for the future: and of course for the present, in the
present (always in the present), in
the Eternal Present as we know, again, exactly who we are. And as the rite, looking backwards looks
forwards, and as the sacrifice of things creates identity, so food, for the
maintenance of the body, turns into mystical substance for the maintenance of
identity, of mutual recognition, of communal belonging (which place in society
is mine, is... me). So again we find this structure, of part assertion, part
denial, is a little like the denial of self (the practices of the denial of the
self) found in multiple religions, when, in practice, what we have is the
construction of a new self, the assertion of a new subjectivity…
And of course we
also travel to eat, part of the hedonism of tourism…
Saving
remains: cleaning impurities. Mental and others… mortal remains. Whence our
ritual spaces of purification… spaces mental and other; saving by purifying,
making safe the object, sanitizing it, removing the taint of real disease, as
well as the symbolic taint of the recently dead. The social body as cleansed
(and renewed if the personage was of some note), and (individually, or with
significant others, family, friends) removing the pain of memory… The settling
of accounts with memory and requirement of personal functioning; between
loyalty and living on… As set in a frame; a portrait of the dead, a photograph
of the absent beloved, made safe, and at the same time unforgotten by the
presence of a frame… Or the cutting out of reality that makes a photographic
record of our travels – our ‘holiday snaps’. The same process that creates art,
the putting aside, framing, cutting out of reality, in the picture frame, or
the frame of the institution, also works for the dead, for the absent – for all
manner of things that are found to be (because they cannot be found) to be)
elsewhere. Like art: perhaps as its origin, one of art’s points of origin -
shadowing ritual… shadowing the otherworldly, the eternal… shadowing death.
(The
gardens of Catholics may today put aside a corner for remembrance, or a shrine
for the dead, their ancestors… with offerings of flowers and other objects,
objects connoting the missing, and so gathering sacred force. Put aside, as they
do for a day; a festive day, with masks and processions and noise and food -
the Day of the Dead. Its Protestant equivalent? Halloween. At once orgy of
popular (half-believed) superstition and commodity festival. Yet, in fact, on
this day too, people visit the graves of their lost dead to lay flowers and say
a few words, to converse a little with the dead. A corner for remembrance. A
corner put aside for the work of memory. A corner marked by objects, a corner
marked by stones…).
And
what is the Still Life, but such an arrangement of objects, often including
food; so that the extra meaning or second meaning, the sacred meaning of an
offering of food, the food sacrifice, is gained. The picture is a memorial, but
also a memorial of a memorial; the originary memory or event being lost or
occluded (perhaps felt to be too particular, personal) so with only the trace,
its essence made up of a backward deixis, a tunnel leading back to the past,
remaining? Accessing the past and its mysteries, but with (or by means of) the
loss of the event – to be past it must be lost (a mystery with only competing
stories remaining – and so an absence filled by creativity). Just like the
black and white photograph: actually like any photograph, but the black and
white means of expression maintains this special sense of the past (whether
with classic distance or of recent grainy urgency), does not deny it. Whereas
the colour image appears to have forgotten this loss, in its claim to reality,
and truthful depiction – after all reality is, as we all know, in ‘colour’. And
so as in the Still Life, as a particular case or inheritance of the Still Life,
as a trace of that which once inspired the gathering of objects whose function
was no longer (overtly) practical… So we have again a special corner here
enframed, there set aside, here prominent it its arrangements, its enticement
of vision, there curtained off, prominent in its veiling, its denial of vision;
but present in life in many homes, and corners, of arranged objects and plants…
The garden as Still Life, as sacred corner, as echo of the tomb space, the
taboo space around the tomb, the space of respect, the memorial, replete with
the peace of the dead… The repulsion of taboo, the attraction of the sacred,
their combined force… our little piece of the dead… remaining (in memory and
stillness…). Is it a case of the
forces of attraction and repulsion canceling each other out, these emotions
reaching equilibrium - neutralisng the force of the dead one? Their body and
memory both, at once a problem; and a source of guilt, as a result of the
perception, the self-awareness of there being a problem; so a compounded
problem, with the exorcism of this problem, of these problems (the body, the
memory, our guilt) itself part of the equation, of the space… the design, of
being set aside… A kind of self-setting, self-framing, a kind of presence (of
the absent, non-presence) so always different to other spaces… Both overcharged
and neutralizing that charge, the mark of this, its trace, or ghost, remaining,
what remains, the haunting of our affect; forgetting as reminder… Once removed:
still present… And so the remains remain, even if only at second remove (so
only further enlarging the function of the symbol or sign, its birth in
absence… and its meaning in ritual, or other, contexts… other contexts of
loss). What remains (of what once was)? Still life; nature mort; dead Nature: Nature tamed…
The
aesthetics of gardens, whether Italian or Chinese, are linked to this, the matter
of the dead. For the dead are like the referent, end of deixis, second meaning
of trope (of prosopopoiea, evoking) an object both of forgetting and
remembering; an active forgetting of the matter, a passive remembering of the
name; an exorcism of the matter, the materialization of the name. And of
transfiguration; as we see more clearly in the role of sculpture, those marble
ghosts that litter classical gardens and the spaces that follow in their wake…
It is in these that we find a link; from the memorials, the copies, reminders,
the images of the dead, the life-size models of the dead… (our link to the lost
remembered). Or parts of the dead; the bust or portrait in stone, the
disembodied hand or headless torso, the relic or fragment of a saint, the ghastly
inhabitants of a reliquary. All in deathly cast, signs of the further reaches:
but also transformed, transfigured, and transfiguring… (as those that see
transfiguration are transfigured - the process is purely mental) the further
recycling of the dead into the living. A unity of extremes then, and the
celebration of life as desire, as death… but not sex and death as in
literature, as modern tragedy; rather that found in ritual in Hindu culture, on
the walls of ancient temples, and in the depictions of the heavens, as we see
in the Etruscans (the heaven on the walls of their tombs depicts a pleasure
garden). And from the death of self in coitus to gardens as quiet spaces,
spaces put aside for the recession of the self, reflection after all is nine parts
memory; our pasts and the pasts of others, as well as the Other, the otherness
of the past, whose time is now passed (the capital indicating what is lost), as
the last place of the dead, as part of the rites of the dead … in modern
culture. Indeed our modern day culture in its aspect of ‘high’ or art culture
appears as the survival of this memory or rite, performing the same social,
community and identity functions as ancestor worship or family remembrance. Art
culture as our modern day death cult, our ‘High Sublime’, the festival of the
dead, equivalent in whatever religion (or whatever ideology), as in the worship
of the Dead Leader elevated to sublime status, or of the syncretic cults
(’Santa Muerte’) as one example of the ‘Low’ Sublime of popular religion. An
art culture, like the dear departed, felt as a personal inheritance, even a
duty, certainly as ‘cultural capital’ (again the rites of memory, the rites and
rituals of the self…). An intertwining of private and public, self and
community, identity and recognition, which includes the hedonistic party of
popular culture and the commodity festivals. Of celebration, saturnalia,
transgression. Real or imagined. With Venetian Carnevale, for example, whatever its past (whatever once passed)
now as collective trance… as a carnival of imagining (as actual Rabelaisian
activity appears limited to the private sphere, in public all are, as if, in a
dream…). So also, and at once, both commercial and ritual; and who can separate
exchange and ritual, gift and self… or the gift to the self that is modern
commercialization and fashion… or the debt of self that is our value giving,
our… priorities. And either way a self which is built upon insistence,
iteration and so repetition.
And
repetition… Of repetition. Making actual, the connection that only comes with
the second appearance, the return, the re-finding, the correlation. The
recognition of such: recognition as such. One is lost; two is a connection,
echo or coincidence; three already a tradition - an identity. Making actual,
either a part of the past, to see and be reminded, or a thing with a name,
famous, persisting from the past, to be seen, made actual, made present, living
up to its name and greeted, after the sacrifice of time and treasure, the
exchange of gifts, the prescribed offering made, and the purification of travel
undergone; the ritual preparation of the self for the witnessing of the sacred
event; the pilgrimage and its hardships, in preparation of a ritual of
evocation and presencing. Of the appearance of the, what it was one only know
through words or images, or in books or in signs: finally at the site;
marveling at the sight: the site now before one; now we before it, in sight
(with the blind still preferring the ‘photo op’, the ‘selfie’… an image they
can understand). A life arranged according to ritual precept, the construct of
a higher self: the true object of travel (with Rabelasian tourism as its
plebian sister…). As sacral sight matches sacral site, and makes sacral self
(immortalized in the selfie…). And for some even participation in the practices
(witnessing a rite, or Mass, or Service or concert or other cultural event),
renowned and now encountered as climax of an arduous quest… building block in
the architecture of the self. The future-self implied by these events that have
become memories.
All
memory, all memories of the past, and the role of space as the means of recall,
the recall of special memories, all partake of ancestor worship, are but death
cults… as too are historical things, from the imagination of past events to the
sense of ‘pastness’, a sense of history; the love of old towns, from ancient
squares to landmark churches and temples; from the fascination with layers of
history represented in a city street to the uniqueness of historical buildings;
and in specialist institutions, galleries and museums, the love of old objects
from paintings to antiques… We revel in the presence of the dead. For these too
bear witness, partake of the same kind of drive or desire, which is as much a
space for reflection as a kind of foundation;, a ‘re-founding’ of foundations
by digging deeper down, by renewing foundations so as to be ready to build
again, onwards, repetition and clearing, cleansing. Precisely a sense of
‘symbolic’ destruction of worn selves for space to build new, the space of
reflection, of stepping back… Just like the ritual brushing aside of the
emptied out forms of prior repetition to make way for a new start… a new
content; a new present, a new self… in a new present… (…but we have returned to
the function of ritual).
And
so a repositioning of the past, of ritual and through ritual, and of repetition
and through repetition, for the continuance of self in the future, a
repositioning of our desires and aims, orientated through the present… (as past
and future must be, anchored, glued in place, by the promises of eternity, as
evoked in ritual). Before returning to the regular and mundane, challenging and
stressful, counted-out hours of wear and tear that make up our ordinary, everyday
life…
Like
a deep pool fed by a spring…
In
a stillness that soothes like death - but from its still depths relaunches
life...
Bypassing
entropy with beauty.
*
(For)
Travel is either hedonism, or nature worship or ancestor worship. So either:
the pursuit of pleasure in all forms of consumption (stimulating all the
senses, but primarily culinary, alcoholic/hallucinatory and sexual, the culture
of release); or the cult of Pastoral, the exotic, the authentic, supported by a
Neo-Romantic, ‘Nature-first’ philosophy verging on the mystical; or it is a
death cult where all that is gone, all that has gone before, becomes of
paramount importance; an importance now transferred, found only in its signs
and reminders, in what survives and what we find in ruins; an importance
predominating in the imaginations of those who choose this particular pathway,
this pilgrimage through the shrine of stones… this dromos in a petrified forest, leading to the underworld of our
imagination. For our secret (and not so secret) desire is to find the sacred
places of the world – to find the spring that feeds our particular font of
value, releases our mode of giving, enabling us to bestow the blessings of a
Grail firmly lodged in our nervous systems. Only looking for a key… (with much
the same to be said for Nature worship…). To make of the world again a shrine…
As
opposed to an expedition; a shopping expedition for a set of bargain basement
thrills…
If
the mono-theistic religious mythology begins with the Garden of Eden, it is not
the only historical world view that begins with this unity with a tame and
obliging Nature, certainly the depiction of the Heaven in the writings of many
religions (and some secular religions too) as on the engravings on stone
sarcophagi, and other representations, show heaven as a verdant garden – with
the dead enjoying a happy life, carefree and well-fed. Nature worship and
ancestor worship, the cult of the dead, are not so far apart after all. Nor
separable from our desire for the Good Life (however defined). Our modern day
Neo-romanticism appears not so new (and as a Nature-first philosophy, certainly
much older than the movement that gives it its name). A set of traditions and
desires we express, perhaps most fully, in our practices and expectations, in
our expenditures and investments, in the time we put aside for the varieties of
tourism and travel. For what we do when we have a choice of what we want to do.
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2017