The Hindu Business Line : To be human means to bury?

IN the search window on Google, I type `bomb, kill, bury' and the faithful engine trawls billions of pages to bring up — not the dead alive — but stories of car bombs in Iraq, hotel bombings, curious children at a crater, bodies "scattered like sheep" and so on. TV visuals would show clips of funeral marchers and coffins, as usual. And I wonder, at times, if places and the number of casualties only change; the scenes are the same, so we are already becoming numb.

While it may be a curse that the planet has lost itself in violence, it is a blessing that it allows for the disposal of its dead, according to Robert Pogue Harrison's The Dominion of the Dead, from The University of Chicago Press (www.press.chicago.edu) . How queer! But it seems the Latin word humanitas comes from humando, burying, and so "to be human means above all to bury."

Thus, we bury or burn after one's innings is over, and the remains return to the elements. Now, think of all that has been disposed of over millions of years. There's little difference between "receptacle and contents," Harrison would point out. A mass of the dead is what lies beneath our feet and also what surrounds us as forests and hills. We are "humanising the ground" by burying and building our world on top of it. The world itself is a big graveyard.

The most aboriginal sign, I learn, is the grave marker. A sobering observation in the book is that "a grave marks the mortality of its creators even more distinctly than it marks the resting place of the dead." The Greek word for `sign' is sema, and it is also the word for `grave'. Why? "For the Greeks the grave marker was not just one sign among others." A sign that perhaps points to itself. Here lies so-and-so... and that's not a lie, normally.

On words, again, from an Italian angle, casa is house, but it also means chest, safe, coffer and chamber, as also coffin — cassa di morto. "These linguistic connections are not casual," adds Harrison solemnly. "They bring together within a single word (as only poems can do) the house, the dead, and the poet's medium of expression."

On TVs, we don't try to understand the audio of grief-clips after tragedies, not only because they are in unfamiliar languages but also because the mood says it all. If, according to one theory, we were mute originally, where did our sound come from? In a chapter titled `the voice of grief,' Harrison postulates that man would have first stammered — "a kind of singing punctuated by consonantal gaps." If the first melodies were vowel-based and continuous, "the first human consonants arose as the vocal introjections of this void, or effect of interruption, which the death of a loved one brought about."

While animals "find a voice" in their violent death, humans find their voice in the presence of a corpse. "This is the voice that calls out to the dead without response... " A corpse is so icy still, but from a different angle, there can be "nothing more dynamic." How? Because, it is disappearance that takes place leaving behind "its unambiguous evidence," an event of passage "taking place before our eyes." That's something to see the dead in new light.

But even as I try to bury myself in the book, there is fresh news of how the cops are trying to look for bodies that John Gotti, a crime boss in the US, buried in marshy land; burial policies overcharging blacks for decades "5 hours ago," car bombs killing 11 in Baghdad "3 hours ago," ...

SayCheek@TheHindu.co.in

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