are we a death cult?
processing spooky szn in archival and historical practice
I learned to be scared of death while at a sleepover with my best friend. Gazing up at her Laura Ashley ruffled floral bedding and dark wood four poster bed, I asked what she meant. “I worry that my dad will get cancer and die, or my mom will get cancer and die,” she said, “and I worry that I will get cancer and die.” This had never occurred to me. Not just specifically about cancer and my parents, I mean, but this whole idea. Of worrying about dying. About lying awake terrified by not knowing what’s coming.
I got really good at it though. I cried myself to sleep, paralyzed by terror of the door opening and someone coming in. As I grew older, and kidnapping seemed less alarming, I learned to be afraid of other things. Of cars crashing, mostly. Of dying, always of dying. More importantly, of dying before I was done. With what, I am not sure. With living? With achieving, more accurately. My fear of dying was for myself, and of losing the chance to reach my dreams. Which, again, I’m not sure what they are. Of being someone, of succeeding, vaguely and desperately.
Which raises the question: how do I know if I am someone?
I had a dream once. It was a dream that was words.
in the future
or was it the past
people would crack the bones
of humans
to suck out the marrow
and scratch their own names into the bone
“otherwise how would anyone know
that we had lived”
they asked
still it gnawed
and they gnawed down to nubs
and still they were ravenous
I tried to shoehorn this into so many essays. It once began “she dreamed that,” so that I could say a character dreamed it. I tried to make it mystical. But it is not. It is only barely even a metaphor. This dream is about what we do, as people in a world that is killing itself. It’s what we do when we’re motivated by fear of dying and being unknown, rather than a love of living and of knowing others. We live in a world powered by petroleum, the literal bones of other creatures.
What I realized was that fear was what made (okay, makes) me ravenous. Ravenous to learn more, to do more, to buy more. Ravenous to start things, ravenous to have things, knowing but never really deeply knowing that these aren’t what will make me known. The hunger comes from impatience, from worry, from a desire to fill that pit of worry with something, hoping it might close it up. Worry about nothing in particular, and not really worry in the way we think about it, though I did that too, but rather avoidance of that thing that’s really difficult, the thing that is fundamentally difficult, the unknown. I realized, in fact, that this fear of death was, practically speaking, an obsession with death. In Buddhism, this might be called a hungry ghost.
A hungry ghost is a personification of the trauma therapy truism, that hurt people hurt people. The death drive comes from fear, or the sense that something is dead inside, or that there’s something inside that is too painful or scary to face. This doesn’t have to be the result of any specific or serious harm, though it may be. I think it is part of what some people experience of what some people call, “ADHD.” As I once heard it said of a toddler: he moves too fast because he isn’t strong enough to be balanced when he’s still. As a teacher once said about religion, it exists because we are afraid to die. In other words, I’m talking about myself but I don’t think this is a me-specific experience, and I don’t think it’s a diagnosis or a disorder or a condition. Or well, actually it is — it’s the human condition. And it’s human to seek ways to avoid it, and if you give in to them, it is destructive.
Traditionally, in Zen Buddhism, hungry ghosts are the restless spirits of unacknowledged and unsettled dead. The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki, which I recommended a few weeks ago, is basically about this. And there’s a character in Spirited Away, the Miyazaki movie, called “no face” who is also this. A great maw at the center of a black body, devouring everything. Because the creature is lonely. The thing that causes haunting need not be “scary” in itself": what haunts us is the fact that we can’t let it go, and we let it eat us, or we give ourselves over to the hunger ourselves.
On the Saturday before Halloween I went to a Hungry Ghost (seijiki) ceremony. For the ceremony, the main zendo altar is covered, and the ghosts receive gifts at an alternate altar, because they fear enlightenment — which only comes from being with what is. They are feasted with sweet foods (which are what I crave when the emptiness comes on, for sure) and greeted with loud, uncoordinated noise: “it hurts our ears because hungry ghosts are hurting, so they like hurt sounds,” the teacher said.
On Rosh Hashanah, the Torah portion is about a Biblical story in which a father is asked by God to sacrifice his son. He is about to do it! And his son keeps asking, where is the goat for us to sacrifice? And I welled up with tears. And God intervened at the last minute. Why, the Rabbi asked, is this a story we retell? Why is this a story that we tell at the New Year? I raised my hand. It makes me think about how each generations of humans sacrifices our children, in spite of also committing to raise them. Sacrifices them to wars and to work. Now more than ever. We are, as a culture, more than willing to offer up our children on the altar of our belief in something outside is that will save us. We are more than willing to sacrifice them for the opportunity to keep living the way we have been.
It’s easy to notice how comfortable we are with our ghosts these days. It’s easy to think that we do this for our kids. Halloween decorations festoon every neighborhood. You might interpret these as encounters with the anxiety of the darkness, like a kind of exposure therapy. But I’m kindof wondering if we’re actually a death cult.
Ecophilosopher Glenn Albrecht explains that a culture that is necrophilic values having over understanding, and remembering over being. What is that if not taking photos of your kids instead of being with them during their important moments? What is that if not filling acres of land with storage servers for our undeleted photos “so we don’t forget,” having so many things that you need a storage locker, having a society with so many storage lockers that you can watch people open abandoned ones on television and wonder what everything inside is worth (I love storage wars)? What is that if not stuffing attics and basements and shelves and shelves full of stuff in the name of memory?
Mariame Kaba and other activists and thinkers about prison abolition and other world-historical injustices also use the language of “death culture” to explain the absolute destruction of other beings that our society perpetuates. This isn’t (just) about killing individual people. It’s about killing ways of being, about destroying the possibilities for future life, for certain groups of humans and nonhuman beings, and also for all of us. Breaking up social ties, obliterating languages, destroying the place-connections that make ways of life possible. That’s what colonialism did, and we’re still doing it. We’re even doing it within ourselves, as we scroll, scroll scroll.
When I started thinking about it this way, I couldn’t unsee it, and it being October made that pretty easy to sustain. How can I not be a necrophile? I asked myself? Where is the death drive showing up in my life, and how can I reorient myself? Can I make more instead of buying, sing and dance more instead of reading, use things up more than saving, tell stories more, be outside more, live more? Put away my phone, wait til I see people to tell them things, write letters, sing along, dance (it always comes back to dance)? Cook and then give everything away, stop using my freezer as a guilt-reduction device for my food waste, because refrigeration and freezing are also taking up more and more of our power? More growing, less freezing. More weeding, less impulse buying new plants. Maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. Love my kids for who they are. Calling people instead of texting. All the things. All the things that I think are pretty much the requirements of living.
I have begun to think that the history field is part of this death cult. If we are focused on saving and keeping the past without a practice of engaging in the present and future — and not just with a vague notion of “learning from past mistakes,” then archiving. is. hoarding. I know this because when I call things “my archive” I feel better about the clutter all over my house. That’s me valuing “remembering over being.” That’s me trying to fill that hole of fundamental dread with things. That’s me thinking there’s nothing I can do but gather up the pieces.
How can we be-with the past in a way that best support life and flourishing? How can we separate memory from death worship? This is the question I’ve been sitting with for several years, after residencies in historic house museums and working with personal archives in the homes of elders.
. Death care is different from death worship, and we can adapt this in historical and other community memory practices. Death care involves supporting individuals and community members with immediate grief, transition practices, and processing loss and grief over time. The emphasis is on life, and metabolizing the grief and experience of change, rather than on focusing on the remnants of what has been lost for their own sake.
. In other cultures, a day of the dead is celebrated, because “the veil between worlds is thin,” but the revelry and danger of that thinness ends. We feed our hungry ghosts once a year, so that during the rest of it, we can live our lives. I say the same thing to my kids about Halloween: it’s a day of making things that scare us into something fun, so that we can practice experiencing it, but then we let it go. Engaging with the dead, with graveyards is, in an animist culture, always combined with protection magic. Our need to do it never goes away, but we also can’t let the ghosts become us, or let our lives become preoccupied with feeding them.
This is what ceremonies and holidays do for us: they proactively make time for the psycho-emotional needs that we have as individuals and communities, depersonalize them, and makes us practice them at a predictable time in a predictable way. And then the altar gets packed up, the decorations come down, and we live.
. We can’t forget children. In the field of public memory, it is a given that elders are the age cohort with whom we engage the most. This is a wondrous thing, and I have been so grateful to be in this position! Elders have time and wisdom, often. They have stories. I have been in many rooms where the “number of grey hairs” is lamented, as a sign of irrelevance or failure. This is so untrue. Elders are an essential community asset, duh!
However: without the alchemy of elders and children, remembering the past can instead become defending the past against change. Now: in capitalism, in which the hungry growth machine tends to smash anything not fast, new, and shiny, sometimes defending the past is about preserving human flourishing. I get that. But, sometimes, memory accumulates for its own sake. Sometimes, things are kept for the same reason, by perverse logic, that other things are eaten by the growth monster.
Like a demon with two heads, the anxiety of preservation is the other side of the growth monster. Both things rob children of their chance to thrive in the future. If children and their needs are cared for by our communities, and in institutions that focus on culture and memory, and imagined as the same as the needs of elders, because we are all part of one long continuum of life, then we can keep memory serving its vital collective cultural function: as a resource of wisdom, information, meaning and connection for future generations. This doesn’t just mean saying “children welcome.” This means creating opportunities for interaction between adults and children in which children are allowed to be children, which doesn’t mean they are disrespectful to elders, but in fact they are being taught how to respect elders by direct engagement with them.
. We can’t be neutral. This includes the space that collections and exhibitions take up. Again, this doesn’t mean we forfeit to the growth machine and abandon all historic houses and sites in the name of “progress.” Keeping places out of the economy of land ownership is an important part of a culture of life, if it is treated as commons and sustains sacred space across time.
How much resources does storage consume? Do we need to digitize everything? What can be handed down through use instead of “keeping”? For example: the foods that are “family recipes” to my kids are the foods we eat all the time. If I am anxious about them knowing what comes from “our family” (and I am) then I need to cook them more often, and talk about where they come from with them. Homework assignments “about their culture” on the other hand don’t do anything to help them understand this. Similarly: what does it do when we have “collections” that only gather dust, in the name of “researchers?” What if we understand everyone to be repositories of meaning and story, and instead focus on giving every person a lived experience of the world that we hope they will cherish?
As always, it’s more questions than answers. I think that’s how life is supposed to be.