Claire Donato -- the preface of Burial
A morgue is an obtrusive building with a roof and walls, like a house, school, store, or factory. The feeling inside is one of deep intensity, a physical discomfort marked by doubt. Morgue, from the French, is used to describe rooms in early 19th century building in Paris where corpses were kept. A corpse is a dead human body; hence your tightening chest, your quickening breath.
A corpse dissected in a laboratory is most often called a cadaver–cremains, if the cadaver is cremated: placed inside a box inside a furnace inside a crematorium. A cadaver is burnt ash, and dried bone fragments are placed in a vat–an urn, to be exact–to be preserved: kept on a shelf for persons to perceive. Now the vat is exposed.
Repeat the expression: Now the vat is exposed. Not unlike a small carafe that holds only a few ounces of wine, the urn’s translucent vat contains only a handful of ash. To free the urn of its ash–to make room for more ash–persons empty the vat; tap a carpenter’s hammer against the cool glass. Wine pours quickly; the glass shatters immediately. Ash blows out of the urn, and the dusty pile of dried bone fragments gathers on the floor. Or, the ash scatters: spreads across a field, over a mountain, into the sea.
You may contemplate, perhaps, what it means to ‘scatter ash.’ Is it a personal choice, or is it demanded by the dead? To please the dead, should one ‘scatter ash’? Each of the five senses may be pierced, and this piercing may be noted, professed. Fingertips smear the bowl of glass. Oh, the wind blows–does the ash? Sadness draws close. It rests, endures, may never leave. Unless it is thrown up, it may never leave. And the most unpleasant thing is the eyes, lips, and cheeks, which turn green–gaunt and sickly–before sadness is thrown up: issued from the stomach toward the mouth in a low stream.
And thus sadness is thrown up: issued from the stomach toward the mouth in a low stream, which covers the floor. Woe, now the floor is covered. Which is just as well, well with one’s soul. Drudgery of mopping the floor will keep everyone out of the room, and there is no advantage in mopping in empty room. It is a hollow task, mopping a room, making it clean, free from dirt and ash. And sadness always sticks. Or, if sadness softens, another sadness hardens in the throat’s wooded forest.
Indeed, the throat is a forest: a lush, wooded environment covered in brush, small trees, and shrubs that bloom white leaves. The white leaves scatter, the entire forest is ablaze. And what does it mean to ‘be left dead’? At night, one’s awareness of death is heightened by the specter of dreams. One’s dreams are attuned to the specter of death, death is a ghost, and the ghost’s form is fixed: its shape, a body, appears in the mist, is difficult to perceive. Its shape, a body, extends one arm up toward the sky, points a finger. Gradually, a roar of sound descends. The clouds break open: pour cylindrical containers, gallons upon gallons of tears. Tears, fluid content that pours from the eyes to disinfect the eyes, transpire only when the eyes are diseased. Is a ghost ashamed of its tears, its disease? Does the ghost tremble in dreams? Oh, ghost, how your body deforms, becomes so grossly misshapen. Shame is another form of self-destruction, and as the sympathetic nervous system abandons its sympathy, shame grows colder, more sadistic–how wretched, to think! The eye deceives, remains motionless, refusing to see that, like an urn on a shelf or a handful of ashes, a carcass also represents death.
A taxidermy mount is hung above a desk: an animal’s body severed from its head. To sever, saw the head and limbs away from the body. Saw the limbs and head away until what remains is a bloody incision, a mangled display, a torso: the trunk of a body that exists apart from its head. ‘Get your carcass out of bed,’ a person says, and the torso grows–lengthens–and two words–‘numb sensation’–are emitted from the head’s open mouth. The two words make a knocking sound–‘numb sensation’–, and a peculiar clarity comes, takes on the shape of–what is it? A glass? To sit still as glass, to not move or make sound, is to revoke the power of perception: to relinquish clarity, deprive the body of oxygen, to deaden and be dead. Bear in mind, to be dead means no longer to be alive; it implies completely resembling death. And the head of the animal is so round and full. It is the first day of hunting season, and the framework of a body rests across the ground. A deer has been mauled, slaughtered by a hunger for its meat. Admire the victim; pity the hunter. Skin the victim–but the poor creature only wanted to live! And the hunter needs to eat, to devour with insatiable desire. Still, the deer smells dead. It will taste good, grilled as meat. Cooked, the meat will blacken, grow dark in the night like a bruise. So blacken the meat: char its surface with hot flames until its skin turns ebony.
A flower, the seed-bearing part of a plant, consists of reproductive organs, petals, and a stalk, and is typically joined with the end of the deceased’s arm beyond the wrist–the hand–before a burial, at a viewing. A viewing is an assembly where a corpse is kept visible, clear, in full view, so that persons of an area or community may pay their last respects, let go the dead. Still, persons never completely let go the dead. A hold is loosened, the knees unlock. Time passes. Persons mourn–show deep sorrow, ceremonial and public. A flower stops living, dies in a hand, and no sooner does death ensue than a person starts to scream, to expel words from her lungs in a dreadful expression of grief. She expels a necklace from her lungs, and no one knows what it means, when it will recede, or how to wear it. No one sees. ‘At the open casket viewing, the persons mourned her Father’s death,’ a person speaks. Another person screams.
Following the end of a life, persons go months without speaking. A person’s mouth falls open in an expression of grief, allowing access, passage, or a view into an empty space called the flowerbed, a garden plot where chrysanthemums regenerate by flowering only one type of plant, the chrysanthemum flower. If one fills the deceased’s mouth with a bouquet of flowers, the deceased’s throat stands in as a vase. Traditional vases are made of glass or china, used s ornament, and stand tall, vertically, in order to support the cut flowers’ stalks. Cut flowers breathe more than bouquets; incisions cut along the flowers’ stalks allow air–hydrogen and oxygen, smoke and toxins and leaves–to fill the flower from the outside in, giving rise to breath. During burial, the deceased’s throat expels air–emits breath–and gives rise to water: a liquid substance that must be drained, must flood out in order to release the body’s weight and surface tension. And thus the deceased’s mouth falls open, a water duct opens, and chrysanthemum petals cascade. Water floods out from the mouth in a low stream, causing the throat to drain. The throat drains, closes, and becomes translucent. In a supernatural fashion, the landscape that exists within the throat is now perceived: stones, little castles, and lines of neatly groomed trees (plastic; covered in algae). A hand presses against the cool glass. The glass shatters; the water floods again; again, the flood is unending–a wholly relentless and torrential overflow, whereafter the bouquet of flowers is dead, and the deceased’s body is still dead, and the throat, dead or alive, no longer stands in as a vase. And thus to a great extent the throat is a broken fishbowl, a broken round glass bowl for keeping pet fish, devoid of water.
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