Footnotes to a Cemetery
The proximity to the grave,1 instead of rendering him morbid,2 seemed to cheer him up.3 [...] Often he came home4 with flowers5 which he had picked in the cemetery,6 his face beaming with a quiet serene joy[.]7 —Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn
It is free to go on walks, but sometimes one has to pay in impressions: impressions that loom over the street you find yourself traversing, namely, impressions that pull you up by your shirt collar like a strong wind, impressions like unruly willow boughs hanging languidly over the street that you must go around in order to cross, and now the road leading up through the cemetery reaches toward a high ridge from which the whole town below and the shattered black lines of tree branches can be surveyed; the sweeping, oblique plane of the cemetery is entered between two stone pillars, the pillar on the right is crumbling, the willow bough droops above, and everything everywhere is a damp ruin, a site of dementia become material.
A few mornings ago I woke up feeling as though I were underwater in the sunken hold of a shipwreck, a headache begged me to lie back down and sleep the day away until I could wake up again, e.g., in the middle of the night when the air would be cooler and my head wouldn’t hurt so impossibly—but once outside on the cemetery path, I was able to ignore it and stuffed my hands in my linty pockets and walked slowly along the asphalt path, a steep upward slope of graves, rising, accelerating angrily, the line of a graph buoyed forth on bodies: Hollenberg, Moyer, Bremen, Bergen, Bismarck, Krieger, Friedhoff and Gottlieb made up a markedly Teutonic row of headstones (there was even a long epitaph detailing the lives of a “Grimm” family), and when I went higher up the road, as though ascending into a dead fairy tale, I paused in front of a mausoleum and turned to look down at the gray landscape, the chiseled German–American names, the ashen, wet grass, and higher, from the top of the cemetery ridge, I looked down at the town itself, and it was impossible not to think of each house as a lively, warm-windowed mausoleum while headstones bared like teeth below in the foreground—a Hollenberg patriarch rolled over in the soil, the hibernating worms stirred underfoot—a generation of Bergens sank deeper into the muck—the Grimms enjoyed nominal repose, and I saw them buried standing up, eyes straight ahead, their dreams flowing out into the soil.
My headache made me nauseous so that I couldn’t focus on the book I had with me, and the rooms of the town below glowed while provincial, stocky legs shuffled about inside of them, dogs stared out of windows (never people in the windows of houses but often dogs, always with the same expression, at once trapped and hopeful), and I sat down on a ruined stone flight of steps built into the aerated, purgatorial ground (the steps led nowhere) where I leaned back a little further until my head touched a soft patch of dry grass (everything else was damp from the intermittent rain and snow and rain again), and the sky seemed a nearby, thin veil of gauze: I closed my eyes, and the grass, trees, soil, the air, all injected with a refined distillate of embalming fluid, closed their eyes too.
The stars were like the fresh, irregular freckle-spots of a sickness, pale and faint, and when my eyes opened again it was dark, I was terribly thirsty, oh, it’s October now, I thought, my month, when the air is hard and expansive, like a calcified, glittering sheet of a mountainside, and under every leaf it is bright, the still green softness of grass———Venus flickered yellowish, a piece of hot slag sinking in the mire———the red of Mars’ iron-dust, a detached retina ruling over my insides———a flash (no bigger than a piece of dandruff) hovered into and out of view, a weak, faltering star———the scorpion crawled through a dark forest of horizons———and I lay there awhile.
A cemetery—I am using the words graveyard and cemetery here interchangeably, though I am sure there is some kind of etymological, double-register related difference between the two of which I am not aware—a cemetery seems neither private nor public, a kind of threshold of the concept of property, no matter if a cemetery is inhabited, owned or visited, related somehow to the law that prohibits suicide, a law which can only ever be purely formal with no examples of enforcement not nullified by the supremacy of the prohibited act itself—a cemetery or a graveyard is like a doorway that has been extended to the point of becoming a tunnel, raised to the point of becoming a chasm and widened to the point of becoming a vast tundra, so that one no longer knows precisely where one enters and where one leaves, nor who “one” is supposed to refer—to the living or the dead.
Giorgio Agamben: “In Paul, the messianic community as such is anonymous and appears to be situated on an undifferentiated threshold between public and private.” (The Omnibus Homo Sacer. II.4. Stanford University Press. 2017. 530.) (A person is to a body what a corpse is to a cadaver.)
Beyond the slope of headstones, a few lights were on in the blackness of town and, not yet wanting to go home, I made my way down the hill, where the grass was almost glowing, and the idea that it might frost over and disappear into the half-deadness of winter struck me as unbelievable—this autumnal grass could live forever, could live even were the sun to disappear, a grass flirting with bioluminescence, an algaic vegetation, almost glowing and very still, hiding its light away and again the looming impression—I had left the cemetery and was already up four blocks toward the courthouse that rises, stately, over the small town, built on the hill, and still, I wandered through one graveyard and another and another, and the whole world was dead, and I looked at the red brick echoing the red of leaves in a sea of unsuspecting October green, these green leaves not so much like that green grass insofar as any moment they would flash into red or gold and fall gently on the sidewalk, the world was dead, but what I only wanted to mention, without going into it too deeply, because often one cannot really go into what is only a fleeting impression without turning it inside out, like a mask turned grotesquely inside out, and I had only wanted to say that it is good to go on a walk in a place where everything is a cemetery and was from the very beginning, its foundation stone was a headstone, its pilgrims sailed in coffins, every day the sun rises black and funereal and the moon is only the blade of a reaper’s scythe, and I am walking again back through the cemeteries and every house and every church peeks out from the sinking golden memory of life but it is dead in that looming, eternal October where every brick becomes a leaf, the grass goes on being green into the centuries and the church bell that rings out makes the candles in the windows flicker, and on such a walk through a little town, concentrated like a forgotten cache of black powder in the embattled woods of the east coast, one almost has the feeling, traversing impression after impression of a dead world, alley after alley, death after death, that one is walking through a palace sunken in the sea which after millennia dries up or washes away and exposes the bones of the palace, now inhabited by death, good for going on a walk for which the only payment, because walks are otherwise free, is a looming impression: time against the background of space; the flashing dandruff of life on the black shoulder of infinite death.
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