The Voice Over

When the past is not preserved but discarded (the way you might clip hair or fingernails), the dead have fallen out of favor. They find themselves in the position of an aggrieved minority. They lose the right to our attention (and the ability to dodge said attention); they no longer have a say—they are remembered as others see fit. In a way, they are beyond the purview of the law: their possessions belong to others, anyone can insult them, we don’t know anything about them, but we act like they don’t even exist. Cemeteries, these ghettos for the dead, move to the outskirts of large cities—beyond the threshold of the everyday, where the living can only venture a couple of times a year, with dread, as if crossing a front line.

Because the first thing a cemetery conveys, any cemetery, large or small, covered in marble sculptures or in weeds and nettle—is the actual bulk of everything that came before me (“I had not thought death had undone so many”). Our natural inclination to look at history as an exhibit of accomplishments (or a sequence of traumas) is suddenly pushed out by other kinds of histories. Cooking pots, bedsheets, irons, porcelain, faience, diapers, baby powder, hollow gold rings, underskirts, postcards from the city of Gorky, a Niva edition of Chekhov, sleds, a Napoleon cake, union fees, ring four times,⁶ theater clutch bags, two kopeck coins, quarter kopeck coins, a monthly pass (September), a vocabulary notebook, a butter dish, a mimosa, a ticket to the Moscow Art Theater. Over each grave, like a post, like a beam, there is an invisible (maybe glowing, maybe devoid of any color or weight) mass of what has been. It reaches as high, it seems to me, as the sky, and indeed the sky rests on it.

What is memory to do in a world of overproduction—when there is so much surrounding us, so many old pots, featherbeds, glasses cases? So many dead languages and so many unmarked and abandoned graves? At the old Jewish cemetery in Prague it went like this; there was very little space, and many dead people, and time passed year after year. The dead were buried in layers, one floor atop another, and when they came up against an old headstone, they would pull it out and put it right next to the new one, like a row of steeple-roofed houses. This seems like the fate of any attempt to bury one’s dead: you try to dispatch a dead idea underground, and an older one works itself loose underneath it, and not even one, but three, like the heads of the hydra. That’s what history looks like from a fixed vantage point: layers and layers of accidental proximities and irresponsible analogies; from this perspective it really seems that it’s time to digest the past. To draw out (of the organism) the excess, the unnecessary, the things that have been weighed in the balances and found wanting. To leave the nutritious, the beneficial, the usable. To remove the typical, to leave in the singular. At last, to establish a vertical.

But everything about the reality of graveyards resists the vertical. The trade of the dead is, in the most literal sense, horizontal; their bodies and their deeds prove the futility of any kind of selectiveness. Rows, and rows, and rows, names and dates, if you can even find a name. A giant daycare, a nursery with millions of beds—that’s what it looks like, if you imagine for a minute that the sleepers might wake. A dormitory under the open sky, with little beds (and bunnies on each cubby). And look how many of us there are.