23 April

Bit longer post, but (to me) a mysterious, magical topic. This is Tollund Man, buried in a bog in Denmark for 2500 years. Many cultures mummified or embalmed dead bodies. Today very few cultures still do, we’re uncomfortable with the presence of a corpse. We pay people to bury and incinerate them. Some cultures though still have departed loved ones in their homes, for some time after death. This is about much more than ‘organic matter’. Corpses are the way humans felt their direct connection to the ground, to ‘objects’. A corpse isn’t alive, but it’s not strictly dead either, it’s not like soil or rocks. It’s jarring to stand over the corpse of a friend or family member or lover, because they do feel sort of there still. Look at Tollund Man, you still feel his life, after 2500 years. Death is the origin of the idea of ‘place’. I post a lot about how our idea of place is limited to street addresses, or countries on a map. We’re not grounded, maps are designed for travel, moving over the ground. It’s not a coincidence cultures, including ourselves, have rituals around death and burial. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We come from the Earth beneath our feet, and we return there. Death is what grounds us in space. It’s why societies built tombs, pyramids, mausoleums…sacred spaces that grounded their cultures in the ground beneath them. Many ancient cities are built on top of necropolises, you can still visit them. Death isn’t the opposite of life, it’s the grounded part of life. We have no sense of place now because we reject death. We want ourselves incinerated so we can avoid putting down roots, so we can travel. Corpses were also the way we invented language. They were the first objects that had meaning, as anybody today standing over the corpse of a loved one will feel, directly. Humans then invented statues, which are very like corpses, made from the ground but not of the ground. The pyramids and other tombs are surrounded by statues. Hieroglyphics were carved into these stones. From there language and writing followed. The dark lines of words on a white page are directly descended from the shadows statues and pyramids cast on the ground. Light needs shadow to create meaning. Shadow comes from objects, from the ground. From death. Meaning is the interplay of life and death. A world without death, without grounding, a world only of travel, is a world without meaning.