The obsession with burial and what to do with bodies when life has fled is a defining human trait, as much a subject of poetry and epic as love or jealousy or war. It is the central point of the Iliad: not Achilles’ wrath but Priam’s decision to go and beg for the mutilated body of his son, Hector. It is the motive of Sophocles’ “Antigone,” in which everything turns on a sister’s desire to have her dead brother buried, not “left unwept, unsepulchred.” And it has haunted our own time in the search for M.I.A.s in Vietnam, the silent rituals at Ground Zero, and the anguish over the refusal to show the return of the war dead from Iraq. It is irrational—we ought to fuss more about babies than about bodies, more about keeping people alive than about what to do with their envelopes after life has left them—but it is always there, the disposition of the dead being the obsession of the living. “It is the dead / Not the living, who make the longest demands / We die forever,” Antigone bluntly explains.
Though man has lost his claim to uniqueness as a toolmaker, war planner, and even serial murderer, there is a case, made at length by paleontologists, that humans are still unique in having burial rituals for their fellows, or friends, or fashion models. Even Neanderthal man may have buried his dead, dusted with ochre and possibly sprinkled with flowers, a thing no other animal on earth had done before. Man is no longer the toolmaker but the gravedigger, arguing for all time in a Florida courtroom or a Roman imperial city about what to do with what’s left of us.
-from "Remains of the Days," by Adam Gopnik.
Happy mother's day eve.
Posted by: badfreak | May 12, 2007 at 04:35 PM
Happy Mother's Day!
Posted by: Marilyn | May 13, 2007 at 12:59 AM