At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I will once again call upon some of my experiences from the funeral industry to shed light on topics that have been bouncing between my skull for quite some time.
As a removal technician, it was my job to remove human remains from wherever and however they may be. 'However' is important. Quite often, a typical day of hospice homes and elderly removals--all very bread and butter in that business, as you can imagine--would be interrupted by a jarring suicide, heavily decomposed corpse, or a scene that would put most horror movies to shame. I've had sheaths of skin slip off in my hands, collected brain and skull fragments between my fingers, and had whole limbs pop off as though from a doll. (Made possible after weeks or months of rotting.)
These situations were surreal. It felt like stepping into a nightmare, all the more profound for the reality behind it. I valued these experiences, even came to look forward to them with time. Of course, no part of me relished the pain that the victims went through. Speaking from a view of individual growth, they felt irreplaceable in the complex truths they offered.
One of the first ideas that struck me was realising that this sort of thing is not abnormal, it's merely a luxury of the western world that we are more or less sheltered from it. Most people won't have to ever brush up with these aforementioned scenes, let alone with great frequency. Despite the abundance of gory media available online, modernity doesn't offer firsthand encounters with the morbid mechanisms underlying our world.
More importantly, the squalor of the environments I came across spoke as loud as the bodies themselves. They depicted people in the bowels of hopeless depression, in states of mind so dark that perhaps not even the brightest light could pierce through with any hope. I could go into specifics, but I think I will spare the reader here.
(Obligatory nod to other countries where such conditions are more rampant, and death a common sight for locals.)
As an atheist, this is particularly interesting. With theological frameworks, I believe it is an easier task to reconcile or otherwise ignore the Hell on Earth that is endured by countless people. (I am speaking mostly of Abrahamic religions.)
Even still, the very primal, mechanical underpinnings of our bodies seems unnaturally significant to me. The sinews. The rot. The pooling, melted fat. The stiffened appearance of a person objectified in death. This is an idea I've broached with many good friends and have found difficulty understanding myself.
We have such grand, gorgeous, ethereal notions of the human soul, the art that springs forth, almost as though our world is not conjured of flesh and blood, but something elegant and easy to look at.
If somebody was miraculously only allowed to see the human experience through the eyes of the Sistine Chapel, hear it only through Mozart's “Requiem,” they might think that the death of such creatures would be but a sudden passing of dust accompanied by a hymn of angels.
It is a fascinating contrast, our obsession with beauty and expressing it, despite inhabiting something quite dissimilar to it. After all, even our own remains and births shock us.
It makes me wonder, indeed, if the horror genre is far more neglected than I previously thought.
We are surrounded by so much art that speaks to the beauty of our world that sometimes, with enough of it in our lives, it almost becomes hard to consider the brutality accompanying it.
One of my coworkers was a devout Christian. After working with her on particularly gruesome calls, I would ask her what she thought. Each time, she would say something like, "It just comforts me knowing that god has a plan, and we're going somewhere better after." She could shrug it off with apparent ease. I could not.
These scenes burrowed into my marrow. Of course, just about everybody can imagine the extent of suffering possible in this world, and everybody has their own experiences; this is merely some take aways from mine.
I saw it as an incredible opportunity. A challenge to my philosophy that there really is beauty in horror, now being tested by true scenes of it.
As somebody without a theological framework, no safety net in God, I had to parse both the divine, awe-inspiring nature of our existence with the callous nightmares webbing it together.
Is it possible that they should not be separated, rather seen as one, unholy union?
For me, it is an emphatic yes!
Bones, flesh and blood became divine symbols in it of themselves.
Religion often explains away our bodies, as though our impermanence is evidence that something pure and ethereal is at the heart of them. Spirituality is often divorced from the very organic matter that allows us to ponder and experience so deeply. The 'soul' is seen as higher, or 'above' our very primal, Darwinian backdrop.
For me, it is precisely the opposite. It is embedded in it. And that is our 'divine' essence, our terrifying ability to create majesty as both collaborators and traitors of our darkness.
Death became something of a deity for me, if we must use that word at all. An omnipotent deity with no bias towards good or ill, rather a ravenous hunger for all of human experience, a mercilessness in finding it.
Death provides context, motivation, both the promise of suffering and the opportunity to overcome it.
Within the radical acceptance of our partnership with death, a path unfolds. And in shaking hands with the Devil, suddenly we need not explain away the darkness, rather know it intimately and incorporate it into our lives. Some tragedies may be hideously devoid of any silver lining, while others bloom with newfound meaning.
By choosing not to isolate divinity to all that is wholesome and beautiful, we may begin to find it in greater abundance in unlikely places. A new practice emerges. An art, you might call it, for turning nightmares into dreams, and finding yet more shadows, and therefore substance, in what we previously thought pure.
