Catherine Greenfield-- Let the Circle Be Unbroken...

I was reading one of Amanda DeSalme's posts, and started thinking about the sacred life exchange. Are we, speaking of current American society as a whole and removing outliers from the picture, really a part of the great circle? We put our dead in coffins and crypts; we burn their flesh and place their ashes in urns. They never go back to the earth. Most people do not participate in a sacred life exchange when we eat, because they never give back-- when they die, they want their bodies to be placed in certain places, in certain ways. I read once that, in Japan, some grave sites have been relocated to the roofs of buildings that were erected in that space. The dead are cremated and put in those sky-scraping graveyards. According to the article I read, the Japanese culture views the tradition of placing bodies in caskets and burying them disgusting, because they see the decaying
flesh as disgusting. It is better, to them, to cremate the body, because then it will not have to go through the humiliating process of decaying.

Does that make sense? What is so bad about the decaying process? All things decay... or, maybe they don't if we don't let them. If the wood siding on your house starts to mold (which, seeing as how it's wood and outside, would make sense), you power-wash it. Strip it of that new cling-on life form. If you get mildew in your caulking, you get some sort of powerful, acidic cleaner to strip the life right out of it... and the first layer of skin from your hands, while it's at it. Termites, those little speed-decayers, who grind the wood up nice and small so the earth can have bite-sized pieces to munch into soil, are exterminated by the boatload. Leave us be, we scream with our Clorox and our Comit, leave us be, we don't want to be a part of this!

But how much of a choice do we have? We are made to decay. Our cheeks hollow as the firm skin loosens, round and supple arms bag and wrinkle at the elbow; bones grow brittle and lose their ability to hold our forms upright; fingernails won't grow with strength anymore; hair slows its growth as well, becoming dryer, colourless, less of a hassle for the earthworms and trundling beetles. We are supposed to be returned to the earth, like everything else. And so we inject ourselves with our man-made, indestructible plastics. Women pad the insides of their useless, flopping breasts with more man-made material-- THAT won't fail her, the way nature has failed her quest for immortal beauty. A plastic Aphrodite. A Steroid-pumped Apollo. Both in their white Styrofoam crowns survey what they have made, survey their battlements and moats against the inevitable, and see that it is good. But it is not good.

Ha. A funny thought just came into my head.

What will happen when, thousands of years from now, man has died out, to be replaced with a similarly inquisitive race of beings who, during their archaeological digs, find something strange beneath the silt and sands-- breasted bones! Skulls with plastic cheeks and lips! It's like something off of a bad 80's half-shirt, minus the BBQs and the cut-off jeans...

There's something very backwards about our determination to not fit in with the rest of the world, right down to our refusal to decompose. I am going to think about this some more...