For, like Death itself, the cemeteries of Constantinople are in the midst of life…
W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants
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Wall-advertisements – you’ll find them all over France; as far as my travels go, a rather unique national phenomenon. Even if the lover of such pastel-tinted wall covers finds that they often embellish them, not every house owner wants his house defaced. Neither is any wall fit for the purpose, as the ad must be visible from the road, or from a market in town. The palimpsest has saved this typical French advertisement industry, re-using the wall space available. You simply cover the last fad’s commercial with lettering announcing the lures of a new one.
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In France, there is also a widespread industry of thrift shops with second hand clothes; the yet visible ad for ‘your preferred clothes’ might very well imply a double recycling. The advertisement men, the followers of Hitchcock’s Roger O Thornhill – the letter O standing for nothing – were not averse to mixing an ad for clothing with one for a visit to the Mont St. Michel; the palimpsest never lies, it merely tries to hide the various messages behind one another, following the Thornhill code: “In the world of advertising, there is no such thing as a lie. There’s only expedient exaggeration.” Of course, being a stranger here, I may have missed the fact that Mont St. Michel has been the name of a clothes manufacturer.
Life seems to be all about recycling: how, in a decent manner, to get rid of the old and the decaying. It has been like this since Darwin’s story began; it has become more of a problem when the ratio between the living and the space they take up after death began to grow more lop-sided. In truly olden days organisms just died – in elephant pits, in the woods, in the fields, to become the feed for new life. Man, with his ethical scruples, ran into problems rather early on. How to get rid of the remains, and still keep up the good spirit of faith with some version of the resurrection? At least, by burying the dead intact, as far as they were intact; which is another problem of faith, taking into account John Cleese’s infamous “It’s just a flesh wound.”
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This little drawing represents an ossuary from the 13th century, showing how clever one had solved the puzzle of combining decency with storing away a mass of human debris. After the decay, the bones slid through the openings, making place for a new corpse. Still, with the growing of the human population, especially in greater agglomerations, the problem grew and a movement began which supported cremation instead of a burial. There are intermediary solutions to the problem, as I shall show; more in the spirit of the palimpsest, not throwing away the old bits before they are fired away for good.
A famous novel by the Peruvian author Gabriel Marquez tells the story about ‘a death announced.’ However, is not each death announced, even if in the here and now the moment of that death may not always be clear? Only the illusionist may think to live on forever, the ideological affliction of most people ‘of the faith.’ Perhaps, Marquez could better have titled his book ‘Everyman’s death, announced.’ Which does not alter his implied idea, that one death will be announced more precisely than another. Someone, sentenced by the doctors to dying by multiple sclerosis or aids, does indeed know more about that moment, than a man who is merely pondering his own death in abstracto.
Yet, such are the vicissitudes of death announced. Given my bodily unpleasantness, eleven years ago doctors predicted my death in ‘say, four to five years.’ Thus, like me, the few friends I had were convinced that I would be the first one of us ‘to go.’ By now, four of the five have died; I feel deserted; I am still present, thanks to the invention of a chemo-treatment, taken pill-wise every morning. The cure may have disastrous effects on skin, hair and nails; it may affect one’s love life, which was anyway decaying thanks to old age; yet, I am there, I read, I listen to music, I hear the birds sing and I play chess, though badly so.
However, all my life I have lived with death as a certainty, not to be feared, simply to be expected. And I have also managed the form of my death. Decades ago, already, just before I hoped to turn sixty, a letter from the Leyden University Medical Centre came with the post. ‘Hoped to be…’- my father died at that age, and till the day when my 60th anniversary arrives, I still count on preceding him. The letter announced the moving of the Department of Anatomy. The reader may ask: why did a philosopher receive a letter re: Department of Anatomy?
One of the telephone numbers mentioned, could be used not so much to ‘announce’ my death, but to inform the institute when I would be actually dead. The number of my reservation, received a long time ago, was printed large. A little paradox indeed, as the number seems to be meant not for me, but for my surviving relatives… My wife and I had entered our names on a list of people, who ‘gave’ their corpse to be cut up by the medical students during their anatomy lessons. It seemed, and it still seems, the ideal intermediary step in the process of recycling, before the rests of the body would be burnt in the hospitals’ incinerator. My choice had been influenced by two authorities on the subject: the prodigious painter Rembrandt, and the sad writer Marquis de Sade.
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Already early in life – I must have been thirteen – Rembrandt’s Anatomical Lesson had made a huge impression on me. The concentrated focus of the student’s gaze on the open cranium and the disemboweled belly of that grey corpse! The prude, yet aesthetically indispensable radiating white sheet, covering the genitals and the thighs. No doctor becomes a good doctor, unless he has exercised his clinical gaze on death – as well as his fingers.
In the most brutal way, Sade’s philosophy is short-circuiting organic and inorganic nature. He considered the killing of a man as the simple ‘transformation of matter.’ This is taking it a bit far; yet, there is not all too much difference between life and non-life, in any case not so much that it inspires me to imagine that I may live one after death. That is the solution of those who believe in either one of their gods, or in ‘a something’, in a little extra out there or inside of us, that will linger on after it is over.
As a true atheist, who has no appetite for meddling in other people’s convictions, that is: if they also leave me alone, I find no place for that little extra. I do confess, though, that I believe in cats, even if some amongst them, like the Cheshire Cat, do suggest that their smile may smile on after they have gone… When our cats’ lives were over, we cried, then buried their little corpses in the garden, by now become a cemetery of a certain size. When they were still alive, I loved their soul, which must have evaporated when their life stopped. Dust to dust…
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Now that I am living full time in France, already before my death my registration number for future anatomy has become defunct; somehow, I shall have to find a new arrangement for the right ending of my body, though in this country that may cause a few headaches.
Thinking – the disease of the philosopher, which makes him quiz even the most obvious and the evident – lead me into a new predicament. After having read the letter of the Anatomical Centre, with my death announced, thinking about my eyes and organs I asked myself this: By entering my corpse on the list of bodies to be cut up, did I automatically become an organ-donor, or would I still need to organise this separately?
One thing about the track I chose, is that it takes away the pleasure of visiting a cemetery, seeking its melancholy. The palimpsest-like recycling of advertisement images is enriching our surroundings; but, if all of us would do what I intended to do with my remains, no latter-day Thomas Mann would get the chance to write his little story about The Road to the Cemetery, and describe the curious behaviour of his protagonist Lobgott Piepsam, a figure and a name which the writer could only have invented because there were still cemeteries.
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Sierksma, Montmorillon May 2024
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