Walking in Paris - Walking Among the Dead

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It was a perfectly lovely morning to be walking through the perfectly lovely Pere-Lachaise cemetery, with its cobbled, tree-lined paths and the warm sun filtering through the thinning leaves.

There is a map near the entrance which directs you to the grave sites of the (in)famous.

Who the hell is the clown?




We were going along, quietly mocking the living




and also the dead, as we like to do (you may find that cold or lacking in empathy but I can assure you I am only returning the favor—the dead are surely mocking the living and if they are not then they have no business being dead. If death does not strip away every vestige of our human absurdities then what is the point?)

Besides which if the dead did not wish to be mocked then they should not give us so much to mock them about. After all, who the hell needs to buried in a castle? What does that say about you and your life? That you always wanted to live in a castle? That you slaved away your life for enough money to afford a castle in death?



Nothing says that you were a rich and powerful man more than having a bare breasted woman holding a giant condom for you:



or that you were so beloved in life that you need not one but two permanent mourners:




And then there was this:




which deserves a close-up. Were you a vampire? Did your family hate you? Why would anyone put such a thing on a tombstone?




We visited with Oscar Wilde, he of one of my favorite quotes, ‘we are all in the gutter, some of us are looking at the stars’




Je t'aime Oscar, someone scribbled on his tombstone, while hundreds of others left lipstick kisses.







Then we visited with Jim Morrison, also originator of one of my favorite quotes, ‘I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer, the future’s uncertain and the end is always near.’

And someone thoughtfully left him an empty beer can as if to express their own appreciation of that sentiment.

His grave has been fenced in since a couple were discovered having sex on it.





The Greek inscription on the bottom enigmatically has two translations:

'one who fights his own demons'

'true to his own spirit'

Whichever was intended, certainly both applied.






And then as we headed for the exit, we came across this:





and this:




and this:







and this:














And I came as close to crying in public as I ever have.

Many people are casually misanthropic, such as anarchists and hipsters who hate just because they enjoy the act of hating. They define themselves by their hatred. I consider them dilettantes. My misanthropy has been carefully cultivated, well thought out, rationally reasoned and reality based. Grown from a single seed self-planted in my early teens my misanthropy grows straight and true with prudent pruning throughout the years to keep stray growth at bay. I have always thought, from my early teen years, how absurd we are as humans. An animal may kill another for food or for territory or for the right to mate or the right to lead, but only humans will kill another human because of an idea.

What, exactly, is an idea? Let’s take it to the quantum level. Isn’t an idea merely an impulse in the brain? A firing of synapse and dendrite, a micro-jolt of electricity. An idea, any idea, no matter how powerful, has no more substance than air, than the fleeting spark off a flint. An idea is a puff of smoke, the evening breeze, the vapor rising from the ground after a summer rain. An idea, good, bad or indifferent, contains less electricity than the static cling coming off your socks fresh from the dryer. You can’t hold an idea in your hand, put it in the bank, barter it away, have sex with it or eat it, yet men will kill one another for a single one of them; not so they can possess it but rather so they can destroy it.

I’ve always believed that this distinction alone is what marks our species as hopelessly irrelevant and doomed to annihilation by our own hand. It is the fount of my misanthropy, the Schaden in my freude. In my heart I know that as a species we are fucking idiots and every bit deserving of whatever self-induced extinction we settle upon be it melting polar ice caps, peak phosphorus, nuclear conflagration, man-made virus, or just killing one another out of simple fear of each other and a perverse love of guns.

I know that’s cynical and not a little bitter, but it’s a conclusion I came to long ago based entirely on all of recorded history and observed human behavior; no one could argue my conclusion unconsidered or undeserved.

But as a person who aspires to enlightenment, I try to hold my cynicism in check, try to see the good as well as the apocalyptic, but faced with what we saw that day in Pere-Lachaise, it is hard to see anything but the total idiocy of our species.

That afternoon, in the Latin Quarter, we stumbled upon the Pantheon, down the block from the Sorbonne. Not knowing what it was, but intrigued by it's scale and architecture, in we went.








Inside we saw a recreation of Foucault’s pendulum which, as it swings back and forth, appears to shift its plane 11 inches every hour, but in fact it is the earth rotating beneath it that is shifting.







and we saw the tombs of a lot of dead guys. Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Dumas, Marie Curie and Louis Pasteur, Emile Zola, Andre Malraux.

And then Mary pointed out this tomb marker in a dim corner, tucked out of the way as if an afterthought:



the inscription reads:
a la memoire des martyrs de la revolution
tombes en 1830 et 1848
pour la defense de leurs ideaux

in memory of the martyrs of the revolution
tombs in 1830 and 1848
for the defense of their ideals

And I realized instantly that this is the flip side of my well-reasoned dismissal of humankind. We may be willing to kill another because of an idea, but we are also willing to die for one too. Perhaps our damnation also has our salvation built into it, yin and yang, life held in balance.

It’s a more comforting thought to have than my blanket condemnation of the species but I am still left with, in my heart-of-hearts, this Taoist sentiment which has always guided my path and informs my belief about most human endeavors:

Of Mites and Men

I know some people are squeamish about scenes of animal death but I am fascinated by them. I have spent many a fine evening enraptured by the documentaries of Sir David Attenborough with his matter-of-fact voice, “here is a majestic wildebeest…being eaten by a lion.” and “look at the playful meerkats…as a hyena snatches one away in its jaws of death.” The depiction of the miracle of life juxtaposed with sudden violence brings into sharp focus some of the starkest issues of our existence. Purpose, meaning, deity and mystery are always the subtext of death; and if it is animal violence we speak of then Darwin is sure to enter the discussion as well.

I came across a gruesome scene on my walk last Friday (warning: graphic pictures ahead—I will post them at the very bottom so you can easily avoid them if you so wish). On the path along the creek there was a large rat, neatly decapitated with the middle third of it’s body— neck, fore paws, and thorax—missing. The lower half of it’s body was left on the sidewalk, it’s still gurgling digestive track spilling out, with nearby head unblinkingly watching me.

It was hard to tell which animal had performed this fatal surgery but easy to rule out the innocent. It was too neat a job for cat, house or feral, and raptors tend to jab and tear at the flesh with beak and claw. The precision of the bite that cut the body in half was almost knife-like; it was clear that something had bit through the poor beast in a single chomp. It could have been a coyote which I did not even know existed in Oregon until several weeks ago when on a walk near sunset I heard a chorus of cub yips in the distance followed by the familiar howl. We have cougars here but it is hard to imagine a predator which typically goes after fawns, chickens and family pets bothering with something as small as a rat. Perhaps a small bobcat or it might have been a weasel; there is a family of them living in the meadow across the way. I once saw mom and her pups undulating in single file across the field in the low morning fog like some evolving sea serpent transitioning to land.

What was most curious to me was, which animal would have gone to all trouble to procure such a catch, to expend the energy necessary to track and kill this fine repast but then to abandon more than half of it here on the sidewalk? Perhaps some human happened upon the scene and scared it off mid-meal, though it seems more likely that the predator would have just carried off it’s prize to consume in safety elsewhere.

This circle-of-life-Simba scene quickly brought to mind the nature of vegetarianism. I understand the vegetarian arguments against eating meat. The moral reasons, the ecological reasons, the health reasons all make sense; but the sense of those arguments is diminished when viewed through the lens of the natural universe.

Writer Isaac Bashevis Singer proclaimed that, “even in the worm that crawls in the earth there glows a divine spark. When you slaughter a creature, you slaughter God.” Singer stopped at the worm in his journey down the food chain, but I’ll go a bit further. Think of the Jainists who sometimes wear veils so as to not inadvertently breathe in a midge or gnat to die ignominiously in the mucal goo of their sinuses. Is this compassion misplaced? Could we perhaps be doing more to alleviate human suffering rather than waste any of our short lives worrying about gnats? What about when you clean the toilet or vacuum the rug? In those acts we are killing millions of bacteria and bugs and dust mites. Are those life forms also not deserving of our respect?

In our home we have an arachnid relocation program wherein spiders are given new identities and transplanted to the great outdoors. But just as often as not, if it is pouring outside or the spider too hard to catch or looks to be poisonous, I will dispatch it quickly twixt Kleenex’d fingers whilst saying with faux sincerity (and, curiously, a British accent), “Oops, so sorry, better luck next life.” I often imagine that if there is a god, and it is not without a sense of humor, then no doubt the last words I will hear as I am squashed in the fingers of some Cockney giant will be, “oops, so sorry, better luck next life.”

The spider relocation program was instituted by my daughter, she of the species, adolescent vegetarian. I understand the compassion behind her attitude but I also find it selective. When you ingest an antibiotic you are killing countless bacteria who would not give a second thought to whacking you (if indeed they have any thoughts at all). I’ve never heard a vegetarian or vegan speak compassionately of the bacteria and dust mites that we inadvertently slaughter by the millions each day just by dint of living. Our compassion for other species seems limited to the life forms we can see and preferably who embody some degree of cuteness (Ironically and amusingly, this adorable stuffed dust mite:





will soon be home to thousands of actual not-so-adorable dust mites shortly after you bring it into your home.)







In consideration of the dust mite, is it so far-fetched for a sentient mite to think of their host as some sort of god? As far as the mites know the being that supports them in the entirety of their life cycle gave rise to them as well. Perhaps they too have erected churches to you, their deity, and sing your praises as well before each meal of dead skin cells that have sloughed from your body. Maybe they also wonder if there are other life forms in other galaxies, trillions of mite years away, in the next room.

And so perhaps the entity we think of as god is no more god to us than we are to the dust mite who inhabits our couch. Perhaps we are ascribing vast powers to this god only because we cannot conceive of its size and its nature but who surely must be aware of our existence; just as we know of the dust mite who also cannot conceive of our size and nature. We would then be left with god having conjured us no more than we the mite; which makes our relationship with god entirely tangent and not a little weird, like a Facebook friend request from a dust mite.

When the galactic janitor finally makes his way into this dusty corner of the multiverse for a thorough housecleaning perhaps we will all be as dust mites to his solar system sized Dyson, with nary a sentient being to give us a second thought as we swirl into the oblivion of his vacuum. The most oft-asked question that fills the cultural chasm of this human world is, “Do you believe in god?” I propose that this may be the wrong question and frequently wonder if the right question is, “Does god believe in us, and if so, is it in the same manner that we believe in dust mites?”

Only the galactic janitor knows for sure and perhaps the dispatched rat I found on the sidewalk knows something about it too.