Dancing on the Tombs

This is what it’s all about.

The images of smashed graves on the television screens and online news posts in the last few days has provoked responses from horror, most commonly from the RSL, elderly citizens, and of course those in positions of political esteem.

But why? Apart from offending those families of those close to the dead, what was the destruction of headstones and mausoleums but just so much stone throne back into the ground?

What is this persistent worship of the death? Why is our natural response to this shock, horror, incredulity?

The dead are gone. We wrap them in little memories, put them in a box, bury them six feet under the ground (or burn them) then we etch their names in stone and pretend that this stone is them - that somehow by preserving the noun that signified their existence in the form of stone, we have guaranteed their name on the door list to whatever afterlife we believe in, or that we have stood them there, alive in the form of unmoving stone, never to collapse, never to utter another word - to simply exist, forever.

Numbers of the graves destroyed are for people who no one living has a memory of knowing - some for over two generations.
The dead should be burnt, cast aside, discarded like rubbish - what do they offer us after their passing?

“They live on in our memories” is a favoured saying by eulogists at funerals. So what are the point of these large tracts of untouched landfill? Aren’t the toppled tombstones nothing more than pieces of stone, once the dead escape our memory? What value is in the practice of retaining the graves of those long passed - if those memories that the dead live on in are now being hollowed by maggots not two rows away?

It comes as no real surprise that those who are most shocked by the vandalism of gravestones - the weary faces that the microphone cuddles up to - are the elderly. Those who fought in wars, those who “built this nation”. Those who are not so very far from trading in their red-brick for a nice plot with a slate roof and a named letter-box with no hole for correspondence.

Look into their eyes and you can see the fear that the youths who pulled down the tombstones were in fact pulling down the assumed safety of their imminent future - the stones are little doors to heaven, or so it seems to those not too far away from turning the handle and shutting the door behind them.

But for those who are closest to the tombs should be afraid. Death, despite years of christian/islamic/jewish (or any other religion, really) indoctrination, is not something to be embraced willingly. It’s something to be feared, something to run headlong away from. There is no safety in that hole in the ground, old man - only a dead end.

Pull them all down, I say. Bare no respect to religion, to creed or colour - as some of these recent attacks have clearly done.

Pull down the tombstones of your relatives and your enemies - burn the past and stop fearing the ghosts of the past - stop letting them stand upright in our world, untalking, unmoving, ineffectual - spectres of inaction.

And do yourself a favour and pull down your own tombstone - pull down the idea that you are guaranteed any eternity, or lasting presence in this world, or in any other, after death.

Burn the past and the future. Build towers to the now, and pull them down as soon as they are built; that’s what they were built for.