Man, stone and eternity
March 31, 2009
“All that we call history is largely dependent on stone. This is true for earth, natural and world history in the broadest possible sense; thus it holds true also for the creation of the planet, the arrival of plants and animals and of Man, from his primeval and prehistory all the way to the present day.
Just as we can only learn of the earth’s early history through fossils, so we know incomparably more about lost cultures that built with stone than about those that built with wood. Stone temples, stone graves and stone law tablets.
It is not the material per se that creates a historic culture but rather the time consciousness connected with that people, people who chose stone not randomly to eternalize themselves with and in. This consciousness has documentary power; it plants fixed points like obelisks, by which the past can be measured very far back.”
Ernst Jünger, Steine (my translation)
Ancient Buddhist graves hewn into the stone
This simple yet penetrating insight from this exceptional German author (1895-1997) captures far better than I could the relevance of returning to the use of stone in any new cemetery that aspires to perpetuity, that wants to go beyond time. And why conversely in our newest cemeteries the fragile materials of cement, steel and glass predominate.
The development towards ephemeral or even non-existent cemeteries is part of the global development towards ephemerality. We are now reaching the apex of a movement to ephemeralize all aspects of life, including culture and personal memory. We focus only on the present and the near future - our buildings, even our largest ones, are built of glass, steel and synthetics, and are intended to last a few decades at most. Our arts have “progressed” over the millenia from painting on stone cave walls and carving in stone, thus preserving memories and meanings from many thousands of years for us today, all the way to our virtual age, where most art exists only as non-concrete electromagnetic information that might last from a few seconds to a few years. Even paper photos are old-fashioned - our images, our memories now reside precariously in hard drives and other digital storage and viewing devices.
Ancient Corsican memorials - memories in solid rock
As that aspect of life most intimately connected with the passing of time, Death and the ways we deal with it in funeral rituals and cemetery practices have remained more immune to the surrounding ephemeralization of life. But even the supposedly timeless realm of the dead can no longer resist the change. Continental Europeans now get grave plots for just 20 or 30 years, North Americans and the British are moving towards burials with anonymous tree markers which might last a century, and in the most “advanced” parts of our world tangible markers are now disappearing into the ultimately fleeting realm of virtuality - centralized electronic displays of the deceased’s information at the cemetery or online markers. As Jünger says, this is a reflection of the time-consciousness of the culture, in our case one fixated on the present only, concerned only with acceleration and change.
Ancient Etruscan family tomb - in stone
But things are changing. Or rather, our sense of reality is improving, and we are beginning to see beyond the dead-end road our shortsighted “now-mentality” has led us down. In fact, this dead-end road will end, for our cultures and for each of us, in the same place it has since mankind has existed - in the grave, in the earth. When we begin again to realize our mortality, not theoretically, but palpably, directly in front of us, as aging individuals and cultures, then we will once again understand the ancient impulse to transcend time through leaving enduring memories.
In this connection, as contrary to current trends as it may appear, stone is the way of our future. The monopoly of NOW has come to a head, after which the pendulum will swing back towards a re-evaluation of time, memory, experience, and history - and we should add, of the long term future. At that point, closer than we may think, Perpetua’s Garden will be there as a place to create lasting memories of our culture and ourselves - memories hewn into, and with, the stone of our mother earth.
Learn how we can guarantee that Perpetua’s Garden cemetery will be truly perpetual.
Common and anonymous graves
March 11, 2009
Anonymous ash-scattering grave in Switzerland
Browsing through landscape architecture magazines in search of promising architects and architectural ideas for perpetual cemeteries in the 21st century, I at least found exactly what I would not want Perpetua’s Garden to become!
In Germany and Switzerland, recent demand has led to the creation of various forms of Gemeinschaftsgraebe, that is, common areas, usually plain flat lawns, where ashes are scattered or buried with no individual grave markers. At best, the names of the individuals whose remains lie there are inscribed on common plaques or pillars at the edges of these featureless lawns, along with the other unrelated people whose remains lie equally randomly there.
Often the scattering is completely anonymous, so that no-one except the cemetery register and the surviving families know who is buried there. In one example, urns were deliberately buried randomly under the lawn, so that survivors would not know even more or less where on the open expanse of lawn their loved ones lay.
I cannot deny that I find this personally abhorrent. It is an unsurpassable symbol of the heights that nihilism can reach, that there is no higher meaning to life beyond a one-time physical existence. No, that there cannot even be a hope of a higher meaning, be it only the memory of others. Therefore we should make an active effort to erase all memory of a life lived, loved and suffered through. No individual physical marker, no name or image or symbol to stir the memory of future generations. No, these individuals are dead and gone in the most absolute way possible.
To counter a possible objection…. Hindus also scatter their ashes and leave no sign of their existence once their physical existence is over. But they actively believe in reincarnation, that is, an aspiration to something beyond this physical temporal life. Those buried in these anonymous graves on the other hand actively believe in the meaningless of anything beyond this once-only purely physical existence. There’s is an attitude of hopelessness, the Hindu’s is full of hope and belief. There is no comparison to be made between the two.
For the record, the anonymity and hopelessness illustrated by these Gemeinschaftsgraebe is the perfect antithesis to what Perpetua’s Garden will be.