LAST BOW

By MICHAEL PERKINS

IF YOU THINK THAT LIFE IS ABSURD, consider….death.

Not the mere fact of the end of life. No, properly viewed, that final human stage can lead to some fierce contemplation, maybe even a revelation or two. No, it’s our own hilarious method of experiencing or marking death that reveals it for, at least some of us, one final shot at vanity. At mattering. Ranking.

We shop carefully for the precise spot where we or others we love will “spend” eternity, even though none of the surface elements we employ….the rituals, the tributes, and so on, are, themselves, of the eternal world. They’re expressed instead in the physical media that we understand. Mighty monuments. Pondrous headstones. Majestic crypts. It’s our last stab at distinction; my mausoleum is grander than yours. My farewell drew more mourners.

And so on.

I make a lot of photographs of cemeteries when I travel. Not out of some ghoulish need to hang with the dead, but because I find that what we try to do to comfort the living is, by turns, both elegant and idiotic, prosaic and foolish. There is also the endless pictorial variety in graveyards. Many are similar but none are truly alike. And then there is the acidic scar that time etches onto the “eternal” markers we’ve erected, creating mystery about the dead that their inscriptions, washed away by the decay of centuries, cannot answer. Initially, we are just dead; eventually, we are also forgotten.

Images from various boneyards can sometimes anchor them in their surrounding communities. They provide context, even commentary. One age’s sacred ground becomes another generation’s industrial development site. It’s as if, by trying to erect permanent tributes to our mortality, we actually underscore the futility of that very task. But the attempt goes on, and the pictures that come serve as a kind of barometer of how we see ourselves, and what we think we’ve amounted to.