Roving the Eternal Hills
One of my favorite kinds of places to rove around and take pictures is a graveyard. For one, no one's ever bothered me a graveyard; if you're looking for peace and quiet, a nice place to curl up and read a good book, pop down to your local graveyard and enjoy the atmosphere of people who will neither judge you nor interrupt you.
Occasionally the living people get in the way with their wailing, and crying, and gnashing of teeth, but by and large they come and go, here and there, and leave you with a much more appreciative audience for anything that you might be interested in doing.
In my case, that usually photography. Or hitting unsuccessfully on corpses. But we'll get to that
On the 2nd, my henchman and I decided to go wandering around one of the larger graveyards in the area. Not the largest, by any measure, but large enough that there were some forgotten corners and strange things to see, which is the whole point.
There are the usual sort of things like family members:
… Who tend to be unresponsive despite repeated queries.
But there's also really interesting compositions, sometimes purely by accident. A bundle of flowers attached to the outside surface of a mausoleum, for example. Marble and silk and bronze, all stumbling down the way like we all seem to do on the way into eternity. Colors strangely muted not by solemnity but just a lack of interest in going any faster or being any brighter.
The house that we build for people who no longer care if they sleep indoors are festooned with fake things that will live forever because they were never alive, images of creatures which have no trade with mortality because they were never mortal, and fictional characters who promise the return of the dead in a very literal sense but are just as much locked within the domain of our underworlds as the dead themselves. It's a serious contradiction, the way humans think about death by and large. They build huge edifices to celebrate it and simultaneously keep them hidden away so they no longer have to think about them.
It's not all doom and gloom. In fact, it's not always doom. In life, people pursue their interests with single-minded dedication; no matter what those interests are, for good or ill, those who remain behind remember those purposes and iconify those purposes. The intent of the hidden celebration taken to the door of death and seen by someone on the outside creates the looming expectation of story.
Surely there was a story here. Surely there is a story here, one that connects Pabst blue ribbon beer, two strings of Mardi Gras beads (particularly representing dice) and something lying underneath a headstone. It's no longer a "someone," but it remains the player in a story, one that is spilled out for people to see the hazy shape of, even if they're not told the story.
I want to know the story. Like any journalist, if there's no way to know the story, I'll make it up.
Stories in a graveyard are everywhere, whether you want to see them or not. Sometimes the stories you see are definitely not the stories those who grieve and those who left behind want you to see, but the stories exist in and of themselves – and not for anyone.
Like this for example. I can't look at it without imagining that there are three other variant headstone/covers, all reporting the "Death of Superman."
Sometimes you don't really have to work very hard to make up a story. The story is right there in front of you. It's a story never expected to run into or have run into you. Again, one is reminded of the fact that headstones are handcrafted items, constructs which don't roll off a 3-D printer or an assembly line but which have to be lovingly polished and traced. Here, someone had to take the time to build a motorcycle out of negative space.
The story writes itself.
Of course, it calls back to other stories. On the vast bulk of headstones in the graveyard, when there is a double wide opportunity, only one side is inhabited – and that side is inhabited by a dead man awaiting a partner. In the entire day, I saw only one headstone where the reverse was true. A whole field of marble staring out in roughly the same direction with a look of expectation. At least if you get to ride your Harley, the wait might be somewhat more bearable.
Sometimes – only sometimes – stories are too big to be eaten with the eyes and too interesting to be made up. The headstone that thunders over 5 feet into the sky, that peers with eagle eyed gaze off to the side and into the woods, not at anything in particular. It's already stained with pollen this early in the season, giving a light yellow patina to the obsidian bulk. Over the back of the great raptor is draped an American flag, but not so gaudy as to be colorful or blinding, but instead dour – and perhaps even sheltering.
The regular flow of walking traffic through the graveyard has one coming on the stone from behind, seeing nothing but what looks like a particularly large monument with a tarp thrown over it. As you get closer, you can make out lines, horizontal and wavy, but to no real purpose. Once you're nearly on top of it, you can tell that there is no tarp, nor seam, just black stone.
And then you come around it.
And then it sees you.
It sees all of you.
Does it judge you? It's just a thing. A thing cannot judge. All it can do is stare, and stare, and make you judge yourself.
I do so love graveyards. Face-to-face with all the signs and icons and cultural magic that we use to keep Mr. Death from our door, to keep him from our minds, settled down with a good book under the spreading chestnut tree (or more likely here in the South, a pecan tree), or wandering around with another set of eyes that can share everything they see with everyone I know for all of eternity, I know that the stories already lie there ready to be mined, ready to be turned up in the fresh dirt, ready to have their heaps tossed aside with the shovel of my consciousness, ready to have their lids thrown open and the harsh yellow light of a hot Spring thrown down into the holes where they hide.
But then there's the sun.
Comments