So I finished Living among headstones: life in a country cemetery by Shannon Applegate a few days ago, and it naturally fed right into my somewhat morbid personality and affinity for cemeteries. It actually inspired me to visit a an old cemetery here in Salem, the Salem Pioneer Cemetery, which is right next to the Cityview Cemetery and Mt. Crest Abbey Mausoleum, as it so happens.
The Pioneer Cemetery is, naturally, rather old. But, aside from a few particularly well-kept graves, the sites is a little shabby. Ground squirrels have made their homes amongst the graves and, quite honestly, appear to rule the place. The plants and trees have grown large, their long branches hanging low over the graves. Many gravestones are unreadable, with lichens of various kinds obscuring their names and dates. Strangely, though, along with the traditional questions one might consider - who was this family that was important/rich enough to have an above-ground mausoleum - there was a peace there. Life was flourishing, and the cemetery keepers clearly made little effort to prevent those ground squirrels, those crows, those plans from spreading their life throughout the area. It felt as if the dead there had truly achieved peace, had returned to the earth, to heaven, to hell, to nothingness, to whatever you believe the death return. There was little order to the gravestones, either in their design or layout. The variety kept me constantly curious, constantly veering off the path toward another monument, small or large.
The Cityview Cemetery was quite a contrast. Clearly a newer cemetery, the gravestones were in neat rows and shone with the brightness of upkeep and modernity. No dull granite for contemporary folk: we want shiny marble. The mausoleum, built in the 1970s, was even more staid and ordered. Its walls shone like a Russian czar's palace.
But even with all of its order and the pomp and circumstance undoubtedly associated with its ceremonies, the newer cemetery seemed - unfulfilling. I don't mean for me - I would prefer not to be buried in such a place - but rather for the dead. By encasing the dead in these sealed marble tombs, by laying them out in defined rows, by cutting the grass whenever it exceeds some predetermined length, are we entrapping them? Is all this attention comforting, or stifling?
All along the edges of the new cemetery, you see like trying to creep in: weeds, blackberry vines, trees limbs. But they are unceremoniously cut when they reach the boundary. The only trees and plants within the confines of the cemetery were small, well-trimmed, and, if I might say, soulless. It seemed almost as if, by so rigidly controlling what was and was not in the cemetery, its keepers were saying: this is a place of death, and only by keeping it as such do we do justice to those who lay here.
But still, its age aside, the pioneer cemetery, an area teeming with life, seemed somehow more fitting. I wouldn't say it was neglected, just . . . allowed to develop a bit more naturally. And it seemed to carry the duality of life and death much more comfortably than the new cemetery, seemed to inherently acknowledge that the two cannot be artificially separated without generating angst, dissatisfaction, a lack.
Current book: Avatars of the word: from papyrus to cyberspace by James J. O'Donnell. This book is for class (ugh!). I'm only about a chapter and a half into it. The guy rambles a bit, and I'm skeptical of his interpretations of Socrates, but I'm keeping an open mind.
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remnil) wrote,
morbid
