Conceptions of Death, Existential Tension, and Manifestations of Memory

Amanda Spencer

That there exists in the living mind a distinction between the experience of life and conceptions of death is undeniable – and nowhere are the resulting tensions from the interplay of these experiences and conceptions more apparent than in the human construct of the cemetery. The cemetery occupies an in-between space, what Edward Soja might term a “thirdspace”, and is comprised of an amalgamation of private plots collected into a semi-public space, where the deceased may be visited by their loved ones in their rest, yet can also be toured by strangers on whim. There is an existential tension manifest in the cemetery which is produced by the idea of death-as-space; that is, the idea of death as a space which is contingent only on its inaccessibility to the living. Interestingly, we choose to commemorate this existential tension through the denial of death at its very definition – we choose to commemorate it by creating a space for it in our world, the world of the living. This is the cemetery.

Beginning with the work of Edward Soja, we may better understand the way that the Allegheny Cemetery can function as both a unique site and medium for thinking about a number of interesting topics. For our purposes, the term “thirdspace” is the most critical, and can be defined in Soja’s own words as “a rejection of the either/or logic of binary thinking, wherein one is forced to choose between two opposing alternatives as if they were the only possible choices… an ‘other’ rather than simply another” (177- 178). In practice, this notion of thirdspace allows for the full complexity of the cemetery to take shape; it allows for the manifestations of memory-as-memorial in terms of its existence as a unique intersection between grief, anxiety and creative expression. Not only does it allow for this full complexity, but it allows for this notion to break down the preconceived notions of public and private as they relate to the living and the dead.

Considering death as a definitionally inaccessible space, and as a space for which the living can have no context, it is unsurprising that most of our treatments of the dead are simply a mimicry of our lives. Since we’ve no means for which to comprehend our own demise and decay outside the strictly technical, and no correlative for this breakdown in life, we deny death those very functions which we know death to do; we do not bury our bodies in the ground in such a way as to allow them to return in contribution to the world of the living. Instead, we solidify the arbitrary boundary between human and nature through a physical barrier, a coffin, allowing us to maintain for a while longer our self-perceived notions of identity and self as inextricable from our bodily integrity. Through this temporary fracture of a greater cycle of life, humanity likewise makes reality the departure from the natural world as envisioned in many religions – at least temporarily. It is in the cemetery that we create for ourselves anew this kind of temporary, physical “death space,” wherein we may reside until our deconstruction; when we are merely the unnarrated components upon which, long ago, some consciousness once imposed order.

From these remnants, up through layers of concrete and dirt, sits one tombstone among many, bearing a sparse distillation of details. It is only in death that one becomes truly the reduction of their familial ordinations and the collection of letters which amount to an identity at its bare semantics. This reduction of self upon the tombstone mirrors the more utter reduction of self which is inherent in the idea of death – the idea of death as the departure, death as an absence of consciousness, and death as preemptive to the decay of the body. One must ask, when faced with such a legacy of the cemetery, if this space can operate as such as a literal necropolis, a city of the dead and for the dead. Or, is it instead a kind of communally curated museum of the past, created solely for the experience of those who wish to commemorate? For these people, can the cemetery be the “quiet refuge where the history of Pittsburgh lives on” as promised by the Allegheny Cemetery, in their historical tour guide (2)? It is, after all, a space wherein the loved ones of those who have passed may purchase in their honor small displays with their departed identities, which stand resolute in the annals of local history. Yet, that there is likewise an amalgamation of ‘residences’ similar to that of a lived residential area is also undeniable. It seems that in this and many other respects, the cemetery and the city are comparable.

There can sometimes be a disparity between the treatment of the dead by the living with regards to their actions in life, or the way in which they lost their lives. For example, those who have gained fame – such as Stephen C. Foster, notable for his influential musical compositions, may be visited more frequently by the living, and be more likely have his memory perpetuated into the future. Another example of this perpetuation can be seen in the renewal of the memorial for the victims of the Allegheny Arsenal Explosion, which claimed the largest number of civilian lives during the American Civil War of any civilian disaster. To commemorate the explosion and its victims, there have been two different monuments erected in succession over the course of the centuries, on land which also functions as a communal grave site for many of the unidentifiable victims. Both memorials acted in turn to perpetuate the memory of those lost more lengthily into the future, a kind of luxury others in the cemetery may not have – the cost of which is the absence of their names utterly from the face of their own resting. The renewal of the memorial in the twentieth century is itself evidence of the different status that these victims occupy in death, though it came at the excruciating cost of much of their lives (Pitz). The renewal of the monument speaks to the greater staying power of such a blinding communal loss, as opposed to the quiet fulfillment of the human promise of mortality with which every individual must ultimately face.

This disparity aside, it seems that descriptions of the city and descriptions of the cemetery are interchangeable – in his treatise on walking in the city, Michael de Certeau describes a view from above which constitutes “a wave of verticals… [whose] agitation is momentarily arrested by vision…. [and] transformed into a texturology in which extremes coincide” (91). As notable by both the images below of the burial of civil war soldiers from the Allegheny Cemetery below, that the pattern of tombstones raising mute hands in a quiet askance of the viewer’s recognition is not unlike de Certeau’s description.

But so, too, it seems, is this pattern to be found in the experience of nature construed as ‘Other’ – amongst the trees, flowers and stalks of grass might one find a perpetual seeking of an upwards leaning, a reaching toward the sun, which demands from the esemplastic mind the imposition of meaning and narrative. These things appear not unlike the experience of written language which we have yet to learn, or agree upon (to quote Kahlil Gibran, “Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky,”).  Considering that the erroneous project of language can only be effective so far as it is agreed upon, the rows of tombstones, block upon block of city buildings, and stretches of unmolested forest all express a kind of inpenetrable communication for which we have yet the mutual agreement to understand.

In walking amidst the tombstones and atop the pathways of the Allegheny Cemetery, we can admire the layers of human complexity which color our endeavors at the conquering of time – we can admire the complexity of those who have passed, and the complexity of those who walked behind them, and erected monuments in their names. We can admire this complexity, all while simultaneously denying it. The blood rising in our veins, we marvel at the feeling of being alive in our own skin; we savor the feeling of the soft wind brushing past us, or the warmth of sun on our cheeks. We stand at the foot of the remains of those who have passed before, superimposing what they now lack upon them once again, and try to envision a time when they walked in our footsteps. We envision their complexity as encompassed in a series of small stones on display to us, marking their owner’s immutable inaccessibility, the stones themselves a vain attempt at the remembrance of the unfathomable depths of a human soul.

 

 

Works Cited

Cemetery. ca. 1910-1920. Allegheny Observatory Records, 1850-1967, Oakmont, PA. Historic Pittsburgh. Web. 19 Dec. 2015.

de Certeau, Michael. “VIII: Walking in the City.”  The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984. 91-110. Print.

Gibran, Kahlil. Sand and Foam. London: Heinemann, 1954. Print.

“Events.” Allegheny Cemetery, n.d. 19 December 2015.

“News.” Allegheny Cemetery, n.d. Web. 19 December 2015.

Sheldrake, Philip. “Placing the Sacred: Transcendence and the City.” Literature & Theology 21.3 (2007): 243-58. Print.

Soja, Edward W. My Los Angeles: From Urban Restructuring to Regional Urbanization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 2 December 2015.

Pitz, Marylynne. “Allegheny Arsenal Explosion: Pittsburgh’s Worst Day During the Civil War.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 16 Sept. 2012. Web. 3 Dec. 2015.

“Welcome.” Allegheny Cemetery, n.d. Web. 19 December 2015.