I’ve recently taken to hanging around in graveyards. Don’t worry, I’m not trying to revive late 90’s goth subculture. Rather, it’s that amidst the hectic urban sprawl in which I’m now forced to spend almost all of my life, they offer the closest I can get to peace and solitude. To nature, even. Weeds, weak flowers, and small trees hardly compare to mountains. But they are better than honking traffic and hordes of Deliveroo riders.
My favourite is the large cemetery about 20 minutes from my apartment. Judging from the inscriptions, it must be at least 150 years old. I can’t even imagine the real estate value of a plot this size in London. Maybe 4 or 5 football pitches in total? Which isn’t to say it’s huge, but it’s by far the most alone I can ever now manage to get given that there is rarely anybody else around. After nearly two years where I was never more than five square meters from another person, I find a kind of peace in just putting distance between myself and other human beings. Living ones, at any rate.
It is one of those cemeteries where the vast majority of the graves are old, now falling into conspicuous disrepair. Every now and then you’ll see an etching added in the last 20 years or so, typically that of a woman finally laid to rest with her husband, often two or three decades later. But for the most part the tombstones mark the names of people not only themselves long forgotten, but regarding whom everyone who knew them is also lost to memory. It is a stark reminder that it just doesn’t take that long, not only to live and die, but to die such that it was as if you had never lived.
Even before my accident I always found the idea of the Christian God wildly implausible. It is now especially hard not to roll my eyes when I see inscriptions invoking His love and glory. That there is an all-powerful and all-loving entity watching over me, and yet who nonetheless signed off on the wholesale destruction of my life, putting the ongoing nightmare of paralysis in its place, does not strike me as very likely. Save me your invocations of theodicy, your vague appeals to inscrutable purposes, of acting in mysterious ways. A more credible picture is that whatever we are, we are a cosmic accident. That from a confluence of unlikely causes life arose around here. Following some even more unlikely confluences and causes, after billions of years a strange species emerged that, for reasons we will probably never entirely understand, exhibits individuals who are not only conscious, but aware that they are conscious. One thing they do with that consciousness is tell themselves stories, to make themselves feel better about the pain and suffering they frequently encounter. But those stories don’t become true just because they are soothing. Not least because, one day, all of the clever creatures will die, and eventually their sun will go out, and it will be as if nothing ever happened.
Yet despite myself, as I trundle around graveyards in my broken corpse, I think – but what if? God has clearly foresaken me. But Lucifer might now usefully take a look. Back in spinal rehab, another tetraplegic and I discussed what we would accept in exchange for somehow reversing our catastrophes. How many dicks would you suck? We agreed that 1 million would be no problem. In turn, I’m an easy mark for Satan. You want my immortal soul? No problem. In exchange I wouldn’t ask for fame, or riches, or to be the best at playing the fiddle. All I would request is to wake up that summer morning and choose to climb any route but the one that we did.
Of course no deal is ever offered, nor struck. The stray tomcat who prowls around the perimeter pays me no heed, is nobody’s familiar. Further away, the man walking his dog sheepishly avoids my gaze. The biggest Labradoodle I’ve ever seen bounds across graves, pauses to cock his leg and piss on a tombstone. Memento mori.
This post evokes Auden’s poem, Musée des Beaux Arts, and how suffering is a universal, and it “happens,” while the horse and dog are somewhere too:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
This post is so stunningly beautiful, and profound, and funny, and heart breaking, all at once. As your writing tends to be. Which is why I am such a fan ever since I wrote your stunningly brilliant cover story in the Guardian. I'm Buddhist, and we Buddhists love to hang out in graveyards ;-) A great teaching on impermanence. A reminder that, just as you say, our time is fleeting. And a reminder to use this time as best we can