^aftermath of a vehicular accident, University of Georgia (source)
The opening paragraphs of Karl Ove Knausgaard's 'A Death In The Family'. A thoughtful rumination on our relationship with the just deceased, and its irrational, atavistic infrastructure that forms its own architecture within and under that of the living, as well as motivating instantaneous and universal impulses, actions and rituals that are second nature to us, but which on second glance reveal themselves to be primordial, groundless and strange.
"For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it
can. Then it stops. Sooner or later, one day, this pounding action will cease of
its own accord, and the blood will begin to run towards the body's lowest
point, where it will collect in a small pool, visible from the outside as a dark,
soft patch on ever whiter skin , as the temperature sinks, the limbs stiffen
and the intestines drain. These changes in the first hours occur so slowly and
take place with such inexorability that there is something almost ritualistic
about them, as though life capitulates according to specific rules, a kind of
gentleman’s agreement, to which the representatives of death also adhere,
inasmuch as they always wait until life has retreated before they launch their
invasion of the new landscape. By which point, however, the invasion is
irrevocable. The enormous hordes of bacteria that begin to infiltrate the
body's innards cannot be halted. Had they but tried a few hour s earlier, they
would have met with immediate resistance: however, everything around them is
quiet now, as they delve deeper and deeper into the moist darkness. They
advance on the Haversian canals, the crypts of Lieberkuhn, the islets of Langerhans.
They proceed to Bowman’s capsule in the kidneys, Clark’s column in the
Spinalis, the black substance in the mesencephalon. And they arrive at the
heart. As yet, it is intact, but deprived of the activity to which end its
whole construction has been designed, there is something strangely desolate
about it, like a production plant that workers have been forced to flee in
haste, or so it appears, the stationary vehicles shining yellow against the
darkness of the forest, the huts deserted, a line of fully loaded cable buckets
stretching up the hillside.
The moment life departs the body, it belongs to death. At
one with lamps, suitcases, carpets, door handles, windows. Fields, marshes,
streams, mountains, clouds, the sky. None of these is alien to us. We are
constantly surrounded by objects and phenomena from the realm of death.
Nonetheless, there are few things that arouse in us greater distaste than to
see a human being caught up in it, at least if we are to judge by the efforts
we make to keep corpses out of sight. In larger hospitals they are not only
hidden away in discreet, inaccessible rooms, even the ways there are concealed,
with their own lifts and basement corridors, and should you stumble upon one of
them, the dead bodies being wheeled by are always covered. When they have to be
transported from the hospital it is through a dedicated exit, into vehicles
with tinted glass; in the church grounds there is a separate, windowless room
for them; during the funeral ceremony they lie in closed coffins until they are
lowered into the earth or cremated in the oven. It is hard to imagine what
practical purpose this procedure might serve. The uncovered bodies could be
wheeled along the hospital corridors, for example, and thence be transported in
an ordinary taxi without this posing a particular risk to anyone. The elderly
man who dies during a cinema performance might just as well remain in his seat
until the film is over, and during the next too for that matter. The teacher
who has a heart attack in the school playground does not necessarily have to be
driven away immediately; no damage is done by leaving him where he is until the
caretaker has time to attend to him, even though that might not be until some
time in the late afternoon or evening. What difference would it make if a bird were
to alight on him and take a peck? Would what awaits him in the grave be any
better just because it is hidden? As long as the dead are not in the way there
is no need for any rush, they cannot die a second time. Cold snaps in the
winter should be particularly propitious in such circumstances. The homeless
who freeze to death on benches and in doorways, the suicidal who jump off high
buildings and bridges, elderly women who fall down staircases, traffic victims
trapped in wrecked cars, the young man who, in a drunken stupor, falls into the
lake after a night on the town, the small girl who ends up under the wheel of a
bus, why all this haste to remove them from the public eye? Decency? What could
be more decent than to allow the girl’s mother and father to see her an hour or
two later, lying in the snow at the site of the accident, in full view, her
crushed head and the rest of her body, her blood-spattered hair and the
spotless padded jacket? Visible to the whole world, no secrets, the way she
was. But even this one hour in the snow is unthinkable. A town that does not
keep its dead out of sight, that leaves people where they died, on highways and
byways, in parks and car parks, is not a town but a hell. The fact that this
hell reflects our life experience in a more realistic and essentially truer way
is of no consequence. We know this is how it is, but we do not want to face it.
Hence the collective act of repression symbolised by the concealment of our
dead.
What exactly it is that is being repressed, however, is not
so easy to say. It cannot be death itself, for its presence in society is much
too prominent. The number of deaths reported in newspapers or shown on the TV
news everyday varies slightly according to circumstances, but the annual
average will presumably tend to be constant, and since it is spread over so
many channels virtually impossible to avoid. Yet that kind of death does not seem threatening. Quite the contrary,
it is something we want and will happily pay to see. Add the enormously high
body count in fiction and it becomes even harder to understand the system that
keeps death out of sight. If the phenomenon of death does not frighten us, why
then this distaste for dead bodies? Either it must mean that there are two
kinds of death or that there is a disparity between our conception of death and
death as it actually turns out to be, which in effect boils down to the same
thing: what is significant here is that our conception of death is so strongly
rooted in our consciousness that we are not only shaken when we see that
reality deviates from it, but we also try to conceal this with all the means at
our disposal. Not as the result of some form of conscious deliberation, as has
been the case with rites such as funerals, the form and meaning of which are
negotiable nowadays, and thus have shifted from the sphere of the irrational to
the rational, from the collective to the individual –no, the way we remove
bodies has never been the subject of debate, it has always been just something
we have done, out of a necessity for which no one can state a reason but
everyone feels: if your father dies on the lawn one windswept Sunday in autumn,
you carry him indoors if you can, and if you can’t, you at least cover him with
a blanket. This impulse, however, is not the only one we have with regard to
the dead. No less conspicuous than our hiding corpses is the fact that we
always lower them to ground level as fast as possible. A hospital that
transports its bodies upwards, that sites its cold chambers on the upper
floors, is practically inconceivable. The dead are stored as close to the
ground as possible. And the same applies to the agencies that attend them; an
insurance company may well have its offices on the eight floor, but not a funeral
parlour. All funeral parlours have their offices as close to street level as
possible. Why this should be is hard to say; one might be tempted to believe
that it was based on some ancient convention that originally had a practical
purpose, such as a cellar being cold and therefore best suited to storing
corpses, and that this principle had been retained in our era of refrigerators
and cold-storage rooms, had it not been for the notion that transporting bodies
upwards in buildings seems contrary to
the laws of nature, as though height and death are mutually incompatible. As
though we possessed some kind of chthonic instinct, something deep within us
that urges us to move death down to the earth whence it came."
