What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would create such a complex and fancy worm food?”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, 1974
“Here lies one whose name was writ on water." So goes the epitaph of the Romantic era poet John Keats. His tombstone sendoff sums up a secondary fears of personal death: the withering of others’ memories, and the final extinction of being forgotten by future generations. (Keats managed to dodge that posthumous bullet himself, as attested by college lit class compilations.)
The effort to 'make a mark' -- to announce one's existence and fling it against time - is seen in its humblest form in graffiti. It’s kind of a territorial lifting of the leg, communicating a message common to both pets and poets: I was here.
I’m not big on most graffiti. As far as I’m concerned, taggers only add to urban blight by spray-painting their street names in public spaces, in lettering recognizable only to other taggers. That’s just me. Different spray can strokes for different folks, I guess.
But occasionally something creative pops upon the urban landscape…this visual pun recently caught my eye in a nearby back alley:
Looking past the typo, I had to give the anonymous graffitist points for wit and for transforming something on its way to the dump into disposable art, rather than vandalizing apartment building walls.
Here’s another in the same spirit…
Of course, there’s a whole other level of graffiti, the public art (sometimes subsidized, sometimes guerilla) conceived by talented street artists. Such as this tremendous, multilevelled piece sprawling across two walls in East Vancouver:
But I digress. Let’s get back to the topic of making a mark with tombstones.
At 44 hectares, Père Lachaise Cemetery is the largest cemetery in Paris, France. With more than 3.5 million visitors annually, it could be called the world’s biggest theme park for death.
Père Lachaise was designed as a park, and its broad cobblestone boulevards wind through the resting places of Marcel Proust, Honore de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Gertrude Stein and other Gallic greats. After wandering a few hours through the cemetery one spring day many years ago, it didn’t seem odd to see couples and families picnicking on the grassy banks near the bones of the dead. But one thing puzzled me. I kept on coming across a cryptic name, “Jim,” scribbled on every other tombstone, with arrows leading onward.
Following the Jims, I came across the grave of Doors singer Jim Morrison, who snuffed it in a Paris bathtub in 1971. The headstone seemed out of proportion to the man's myth - a small, irregular brown block, garnished with wilting flowers from fans.
The surrounding tombstones, like the Jimbo block, were a garden of script: greetings, fragments of Doors songs, and "Jim" repeated over and over like verse in a dimwitted chorus. The cemetery looked like it had been used as the Lizard King’s guestbook, with visitor's signatures scrawled everywhere.
This was in 1989. The gravesite looked even more rock n’ roll 18 years earlier.
It looked to me like the singer’s headstone was small enough for a circle of friends to hoist and make off with. Perhaps that's why two gendarmes were standing by, to make sure fans didn't get too proprietary with their hero. ( I returned to Père Lachaise a few years later to find a cleaner, more conventional-looking headstone at his gravesite, so perhaps the one above was successfully nicked, the bust of Morrison being first to go.)
After the overkill of the Lizard King's resting place, I found a nice counterpoint in sculptor Jacob Epstein's magnificent monument to Irish poet Oscar Wilde: a granite angel in flight, rendered in a style somewhere between Art Deco and ancient Assyrian.
Here the graffiti was limited mostly to small discreet scribblings, including the signature of UK singer-songwriter Stephen Morrissey. All from visitors paying homage to the persecuted Wilde - who by the way, never actually come up with the deathbed wisecrack attributed to him: “either those curtains go or I do.”
The pilgrims to Morrison’s and Wilde’s graves had made that small but fundamental human gesture in words: I was here.
Time Signatures
Two decades after visiting Père Lachaise I was at Strawberry Fields, a small landscaped section in New York City's Central Park dedicated to the memory of the tragically assassinated former Beatles member John Lennon. This was my pilgramage.
The centerpiece: a mandala with a simple but powerful sentiment drawn from the ex-Beatle’s most famous song as a solo artist, “Imagine.” There was no graffiti anywhere that I could see. Perhaps as a culture hero Lennon was beyond defacing; his mojo too powerful for any visitor clutching a Sharpie or spray can.
In attaching our names to our culture heroes - whether it’s a name etched on a tombstone or a ‘like’ of a celebrity Instagram post - we display our need for attention, if not timelessness. “It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized,” wrote the psychoanalyst Ernest Becker in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 book, The Denial of Death:
“It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count.”
(Side note: Although Earth’s population will soon reach 8 billion people, this represents a rather small fraction of all humans ever thought to exist over the past 200,000 years, estimated at between 77 to 108 billion lives. It’s encouraging that only 1.25 percent are believed to have been killed by that great maker of identity and meaning, war. A far bigger killer is the lowly mosquito, which has polished off 52 billion - approximately half - of our species over time.)
Another memory from my first trip to Europe. Soon after visiting Père Lachaise I was in the shadowed recesses of an ancient Roman amphitheater in Arles, checking out graffiti that appeared to be hundreds of years old. The more recent inscriptions partially effaced those beneath, but here and there I could see a patch with an archaic-looking name, carefully carved -- serifs and all.
These scrawled expressions of identity were affecting -- uncanny, even.
I looked at those names, trying to imagine their creators. All those voices, now stilled; all those long forgotten souls who aimed for a small eternity in stone.
For a moment in time I was here, and passed by. This is my name. Are the letters fading? Carve your own name if you will, do what you can to carry it through time. Chisel away at the rock-- as I did. My bones are now mingled with the dust, but I once lived and loved as you did. I was here.
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Really just now enjoyed all of your 'musical' selections. Thanx 💜
I always enjoy your musings, quotes, and musical suggestions. I remember in 1983 on my pilgrimage to the JM grave. It wasn’t that easy to find, until one was close to the breadcrumb trail of graffiti. Or an attendant saw my attire and forlorn look , before asking “Jim Morrison?” and pointed me along. A decade later the graffiti “tour guide” led you there right from the entry gates, which took all the fun away, prohibiting the contemplation and fortuity involved in finding other graves along the way - both famous and obscure