About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
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Charnel House Meditations You're 15,000 feet above sea-level. The wind is a sharpened icicle up each nostril, and there's way too much of it -- or would be, if the air wasn't so damned thin. In fact, you have a bulky little bottle of oxygen stuck in a pocket in your cargo pants in case you feel the onset of altitude sickness, here in this tiny village three times as high as Denver.
The most annoying thing, though, is that you keep burping up the mighty interesting flavor of rancid yak butter that someone at the last stop blithely plopped into your tea.
Welcome to the Himalayan Alps. You're going to a funeral. If things go well, it won't be your own.
It's not particularly clear whether you're in Nepal or Tibet -- and even the villagers don't know for sure. They pay taxes to whomever makes the heroic effort to try to collect them, but no one showing governmental papers -- either Nepali or Chinese -- has been by in the past six years. Most of the villagers speak Tibetan, though.
The service for the dead monk is held in a the main room of a small temple -- sooty, but well-tended. There are no flowers. There are colored ribbons, however, and plenty of butter lamps and a few beeswax candles. The smell of incense blends fairly well with burning yak butter and beeswax, but Este Lauder won't be bottling it any time soon.
The temple is full of people who laughed their asses off at the troop of Californian mystic-wannabes who were here to beg to study under the monks fifteen years ago -- demanding vegetarian meals and damned near dying from altitude sickness. Rice and beans and even common-seeming herbs have to travel a long way up steep trails not fit for cars, but yaks they have in plenty. The greenhorn new-agers were invited to compete with the yaks for bristly tundra forage, if it would suit their needs. Otherwise, there was plenty of yogurt.
The service includes plenty of singing, some of which is sing-song recitation of scripture. The bells and drums are beautiful.
When it is over, they bundle the body onto a stretcher and hitch it to what looks like a cow with dreadlocks, decked out in beads and bells for the occasion. One of the priests starts to lead the yak away. No one accompanies him.
"Wait," you say. "Is that poor bastard going out there to the gravesite alone? Is the grave already dug? Will he be filling it in all on his own?"
Your English is translated into Nepalese, which is then translated into Tibetan. The answer comes back inviting you to accompany the old priest, if you truly want to help. Someone reverently hands you a mid-sized iron hatchet -- very sharp --with a much handled and well-carved ornate handle. They mutter blessings over you and point you in the direction of departing priest and his hippie yak and you follow, bewildered.
You hike for a few miles. The ledge-plateau that is your final destination is pointed out to you by the priest. It's an easy hike since the yak is no speed demon. Occasionally you or the priest lift the dragging end of the stretcher when the terrain gets rough.
And you're there. The sun shines harshly, about six times brighter than you are used to because of the thin air, and the plateau is swept clean of snow. The ground still looks white from a distance. Before you get out onto the field, the priest blows a baritone horn for a while. It's a relaxing way to catch your breath.
While he plays, you look out over the field for a grave. There are no dark spots, no mounds, no holes that you can see. You now think you might have volunteered for some heavy-duty digging. This altitude is way above the permafrost level. Maybe five or six hours with picks, but there doesn't even seem to be an ice-axe in the yak's pack. The other priest carries a hatchet in his belt similar to the one handed to you. Not exactly optimal for digging, unless there's some weird Buddhist discipline for digging furiously quickly with hatchets that you don't know about, which could well be the case....
You see a black shadow flit by. The old priest puts away his horn and unhooks the stretcher from the yak's harness. He picks up the end supported by the yak and starts to drag the monk's body off fieldwards. You pick up the hind end and follow. He is chanting and singing gently.
A third of the way onto the field -- you've been paying attention to where you put your feet and not stumbling -- you see that there are bones everywhere. And there are more flitting black shadows. Birds. Large dark birds between you and the distant-seeming sun.
The priest unbinds the corpse from the stretcher and unwinds the silk cloth from the body gently, singing his chant the whole while. You take the stretcher back to the yak and by the time you come back, the priest has already hacked pieces off the end of the dead monk's left arm with his hatchet and is tossing them skywards to the birds.
Your stomach churns, and this time it's not just the rancid yak butter from your tea. You look down at the hatchet in your own hand.
There will be no digging in this permanently frozen ground, dumb-ass. This is the way things are done here. Shock covering your horror, you take a seat on the ground several yards away from the priest and his grisly task, and watch him sing and chant, feeding human flesh to hawks and ravens like any senile old gaffer throwing popcorn to squabbling gulls on the Jersey boardwalks.
It sinks in. All around you are the remains -- in bones and birdshit -- of absolutely everyone who has ever died in the little village for as long as it has existed.
Hours pass, somehow. You find somewhere else to look as the old priest hacks the top of the skull off and sets it reverently on the ground. Black birds gather to eat from the fresh bone bowl. The priest rises to go and you quickly proceed him to the yak, not looking back.
* * * * *
February 15, 2002 -- this year's Cheap Chocolate Day (the day after Valentine's Day when all of the chocolate in the drug stores goes on sale for 50% off) -- stunned authorities in Noble, Georgia, discovered the beginnings of their own funereal nightmare. A crematorium in the quiet North Georgia town has not been cremating the corpses delivered to it. At the time of this writing, more than three hundred bodies have been discovered on the grounds of the crematorium and at the neighboring house of the man currently responsible for the facility.
Bodies have been found in ridiculously huge numbers stuffed into what would normally be single-person vaults. Corpses were mixed in with the dirt that was used to fill in over buried boxes, also full of corpses. Bodies were found distributed through the woods and dumped in the adjoining pond. God alone knows why, but caskets buried more than ten years ago had been unearthed and added to the haphazard collection.
It may be eventually discovered that no body that has been delivered to the facility -- one that served dozens of funeral homes in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee -- has been cremated since 1986. A functioning incinerator can handle around two hundred bodies per year, meaning that the total could conceivably be in the low thousands.
Speculations abound as to why two generations of owners would go to much more effort than it would take to keep a furnace in repair and incinerate their charges rather than distribute bodies over more than sixteen acres, burying them and hiding them as was convenient to them at the time. More than four hundred state authorities are involved in the investigation and the cleanup. And almost none of the poor bastards are prepared to handle the massive psychological trauma.
Most cultures have strong taboos concerning the handling of the dead. When we face a situation where it is handled differently than we would do it, the horror of the breaking of the taboo against handling dead human flesh jumps gut-twistingly to the foreground.
It's in any particular culture's best interests to make sure people stay away from dead bodies. As humans, we get attached to people when they are alive, but it simply isn't hygienic to maintain those connections after someone has died. Death, at its root, is contagious -- and for about a month, it is messy and smells very bad.
Even though we know, in our minds, that handling a recently dead or well-preserved body isn't any more dangerous than cooking dinner, the violation of taboo requires ritual to put out spirits at ease. Only specially trained people may touch the dead -- doctors, investigators, and morticians -- even though anyone can cut up chicken for a stir-fry or fillet a fish.
The hundreds of people -- officials local to the area, like volunteer firemen and parole officers -- who handle the removal of the not-exactly-fresh corpses will never be the same. There is no such thing as a part-time veteran, honorary priest, weekend mortician. These people, pushed past the barrier of taboo, will become something else, something other than what they were. Statistically speaking, it's not likely that all of them will be able to handle it.
If you're of a mind to pray, pray for them.
It would be nice if our culture was one that dealt well with the fact that we're all walking meat -- meat that will go bad when we cease to be able to maintain ourselves. The machinery that we are built of is designed to break down and decay. If we ever decide to get rid of death permanently, we probably won't be walking around wearing a hundred pounds of gradually decaying meat, except maybe every once in a while. Maybe to fancy parties.
One of the traditional meditations of certain Buddhist traditions is the Charnel House Meditation. In this meditation, one spends time contemplating decaying flesh -- one's own in particular. It turns out that enlightenment is fairly unlikely if you have any delusions as to how and why you sustain yourself -- and how and why you will, in all probability, eventually grind to a halt.
Until we, as a society, start to believe that death might be curable and start working towards eliminating it -- until we get rid of death -- we have to continue to find ways to prepare ourselves to deal with it.
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Vidicon has been the buddha, but the pay was lousy. |
