the blank page is the world entire, a kind of wilderness, none of it legible. The poem makes a place by digging a grave in that nothingness, and the words keep buried within them the breathing silence and the names of things to which they are also memorial. Or is the poem a kind of cenotaph naming the names of those beings and things that drift back out past the border of the spoken world and get lost again in the depthless depth of the margin. We say the words because we don’t know where the lost are lost. We don’t know how to be lost with them.
The ocean? But the ocean is just a page thick.
Witnesslessness is a word I’ve made up to describe a certain kind of human condition. Though English has none, it must be heard with the quality of the middle voice. It is a condition that is active and passive at once.
That’s why I feel so hollow sometimes, digging with my fingers in the blankness.
“The dead body will not bear witness to that,” replies Antigone, to Creon’s claim that in burying the brother, Polynices, who had just killed her other brother, Etiocles, she has committed an act of impiety. In Sophocles, Creon’s language is vague, but direct, trying to tease out quickly the nature of the error: “You bestow a grace that is impious.” I didn’t know grace worked that way. Sometimes ethics seems concerned with doing what is right in difficult situations. At other times it feels more basic: How do I stay human?
Keep burying.
The dead body is no witness to impiety. It is no witness at all. It can’t see, so we must see for it. We must put it in the ground and remember the place. Must make the ground a place by putting the body in it. It is the dead that bury the dead. By being within our mortality we do this digging. By becoming one who dies we tend the dead. By seeing that we are dying. By seeing ourselves as they would see us, the dead.
Some say the first houses were built upon graves, and the first cities upon those houses. Some say in the Neolithic Age the earliest Europeans looked at the oaken markers built above the bodies of their ancestors and said, Here I am, here is my land.
The philosopher Thales of Miletus, who believed water the source of all being, asked, at the end of his life, to be buried in “an obscure and neglected corner of the city’s territory.” But he had predicted that one day that plot of weird land would be the marketplace of Miletus, place of every economy—discourse of exchange philosophic, poetic, commercial—from οἰκία and νόμος, the “habits of home.”
After the destruction of Troy, Aeneas travels with those who survive, bringing with them the ancestral gods, in search of new homeland. He carries the living with him; he carries also the dead who keep the living human. To say they are searching for a new home is also to say they are looking for a new place to bury themselves. So begins Rome. In the tumult of their voyage, Palinurus, a navigator well known for his expertise in a storm, is blown overboard not by mischance, but by the will of the gods who are seeking a sacrifice of one to save the many. Aeneas thought Palinurus simply failed, until he finds him in the underworld. Then he learns the whole story. Fulfilling Apollo’s prophecy, Palinurus did not die by drowning but survived in the ocean and washed ashore. There the natives ran him through with a sword, and now his body lies in the strand, buffeted onto the land by the strength of the same waves that, in withdrawing, pull him back into the sea. His is an unquiet grave. He’s homeless, and even the dead want a home. He begs Aeneas, the ghost of him begs for the hero’s hand to guide him across the Stygian marsh: “Let me at least in death find quiet haven.” But the Sybil refuses the transport. “Would you though still unburied see the Styx / And the grim river of the Eumenides, / or even the river bank, without a summons?” To hear that call even the dead must be at home. She tells him to be patient. Be patient, ghost. Many will come to appease your bones, “building a tomb and making offerings there / on a cape forever named for Palinurus.” Eventually his body will be buried and the wild in which now the sea roils his broken body will be named after him. No longer will his name point to a person, but a place, a land, a location. Then the blessings asked for can be granted, when the person succumbs to that larger fate, not to have had a life one lived, but to become a place where others do their living.
These blessings aren’t exactly one’s own.
But it is his plea to Aeneas I hear echo most often in my head: “Throw earth on me.”
According to Daniel Heller-Roazen, “the earliest surviving alphabetic texts of classical Antiquity consist not of literary works or economic inscriptions . . . but of graffiti and funeral inscriptions commemorating and recalling the dead.” For example he notes that “on a Theban object from the eighth century B.C., for instance, one finds an inscription that reads, ‘I am the kylix of Korakos’; and on memorials from the same period, one encounters such phrases as ‘Eumares built me as a monument,’ or, more striking still, ‘I am the commemoration (μνῆμα) of Glaukos.’”
The history of saying I might be far different than typically we assume. So easy to think the first-person pronoun refers to the livingness of the life of which it speaks, but maybe not. Saying I, more properly heard, isn’t heard at all. It’s found carved on a stone, or on the pedestal of the image that points in its odd way at the life that has gone missing below the ground. Μνῆμα meaning “a memorial, remembrance, memory” and “a mound or building in honor of the dead” relates to μνῆμα, difference being only in the stress the first vowel carries, meaning “memory as a power of the mind.” Memory must bear within it the fact of what yet hasn’t happened, it remembers while living that it has already died, and so works as an oracle works—by looking behind, it predicts the future. In saying I we speak from within the grave; or is it the grave speaks for us, because we cannot speak for ourselves, even as the words are coming out of our mouths, somehow it is not we who are saying them.
Heller-Roazen goes on to mention the etymology for I proposed by Karl Brugmann: “the Greek term ego, as well as its Indo-European relations, derives from a neuter noun (*eg[h]om), meaning simply ‘here-ness.’” No claim of an inner life in saying I, the word functions originally in claiming not a place for the self, but in claiming the self as a place.
Who am I? I am who is here.
The grave can speak it just as well as I can. The stone says I am the memory of myself. But the memory lives so much longer than the life. It points at what is departing, a kind of elsewhere that I am, an elsewhere that is me. I live it so I cannot see it.
Witnesslessness.
For a long time as a child I thought of the Quick Cemetery without reflecting on it. Later it seemed a kind of joke—cemetery filled not with the dead, but the living. But now I see there is no truer name for a cemetery. It is there where whatever living is goes on past the lives that lived it. There in the ground where memory builds her house, and the letter I points down at the ground and at the same time gives this gentle advice to look up at the passing clouds.
In the Paleolithic Age humans begin the work of representation. What they hunt and what hunts them, bird-headed shamans, mastodons, bulls, horses, all appear, and often with great subtlety of form, on the walls of the caves. I like to think they painted the images in the mind that only later we’d find to be our own. There is little evidence that the men and women who made these images lived in the caves where they painted. Life seemed to happen elsewhere. The images lived in the cave alone.
More than the animals, more than the occasional geometric pattern, what fascinates me most are the portraits of humans themselves. The portraits aren’t of faces.
