Monument Valley
With the invention of the daguerreotype in the mid-nineteenth century, Americans adopted a strange tradition. They took family photographs of their dead.
Families dressed the bodies of children or parents in their finest clothes, then sat them in a rocking chair or laid them out on a divan. Sometimes, they stood the body up and relatives gathered around the corpse, Christmas card–like. Often, given the rates of infant mortality and the relative novelty of the medium, this was the only family photo that existed.
It’s a morbid habit, but not a new one. Pliny writes famously that painting “originated in tracing lines round the human shadow,” just as early daguerreotype advertisements claimed the technology would “catch the substance ere the shadow fades.” Right at the onset of a new technology, one whose future iterations would so display the muscles and ripples of movement—of what it means to be alive—people used it to do what they’ve always done: capture their dead.
For many years I owned a flip phone. When I finally bought an iPhone, I downloaded a game. This was a big step for me; I’m not an iPhone sort of guy. But Monument Valley, its creators promised, was a game full of “illusory adventure, impossible architecture, and forgiveness.” That sounded good. Ida, a young girl in a white dress and conical hat, navigates different levels, each with its own fantastic structure: ruins of cities, mazes, a jeweler’s box of mirrored rooms, waterfalls falling out of empty buildings.
The game plays with perspective. Ida begins a level at one spot and through a reshuffling of architectural and geographical elements, she M. C. Eschers herself to a point far distant. For much of the game, you manipulate angles, tapping and swiping until the physically impossible occurs. Columns appear different sizes or a stairway seems to end in midair, but then the structure is twisted round and a path beckons toward a place previously inaccessible.
Sometimes, crows pester the landscape, blocking Ida’s path, cawing at her with their big, loud beaks. A holographic figure called the Ghost, the game’s storyteller and cliché old wise man, floats around and offers equal parts wisdom and scolding. Mostly, though, Monument Valley is a solitary game. You and Ida figure a problem out. I played in bed in the morning or before I turned out the lights at night. When Ida reaches the end of a level, she takes off her hat and sets loose a spinning geometric shape. It floats in the air and lands on an altar. This is her offering, her ritual, her monument. The game hinges on its mystery: What does she offer and whom does she offer it to? What does she seek “forgiveness” for?
Something uncanny happens in these photographs of the dead. Daguerreotype exposures took notoriously long to develop, and living subjects needed to sit still for prolonged stretches, minutes sometimes with their heads braced and bodies propped perfectly still. Often, since the dead died at all ages and the family dressed identically and assumed monochromatically placid expressions, it becomes difficult to determine, when looking at a photo, just who is the corpse. It’s only when you study two pairs of hands under their cuffs—one a shade darker than the other—or notice how one family member sags a bit against a cushion, that you find the detail that separates living from dead.
These photos must have confused a sense of order. We say the living and the dead should not mix. The dead live in the land of the unknown and, if someone shuffles that seemingly impossible path back to the living, then something has gone wrong. Orpheus and Eurydice. The night watchman and the ringing of the corpse’s bell. A ghost is a manifestation of guilt, a forgiveness demanded, a memory contested. Our way of dealing with the uncomfortable truth: the dead do not return to life, but they do return to the living.
Like a daguerreotype, an iPhone is an intimate object. You hold one in your hand. You cradle it sometimes. There, relatively cheap and available, hovers the past.
About three-quarters of the way through Monument Valley comes the twist. The Ghost upbraids Ida—“Shameful Ida, why do you come back here?”—and she lowers her head. When she does, we realize her hat forms an inverted beak and that she and the crows are one and the same. Like the game’s architecture, we have only witnessed her from one perspective. Ida is in mourning, and each sacred shape she returns is also one she stole. Her monuments disguise her thefts, her paths through these ruins her penance.
Once I stood in a cherry orchard on a hill overlooking Prague. I had just turned twenty and, although I did not know it, my father was about to die. It was Halloween and I would dress up that night as one of the seven deadly sins. I seemed to be both myself and not myself at the same time.
The cherry orchard still had its leaves. They were yellow and magnificent and carpeted the ground. There were rows and rows of cherry trees, so many that wherever I stopped there were four directions to choose from. It seemed these paths were multiplying, that they formed all possible paths one could take in a life.
When I stopped walking the orchard, I climbed a tree. The fruit still hung from the branches and I ate too many cherries and spat the pits out on the ground. Sitting up in that tree, I wondered: When are you most yourself? Is it when you do what you do every day, or is it when you do something for the first time? Like say when you dress up as Greed for Halloween—are you more yourself then or less yourself? Like say when you find out someone you love will die. Are you more yourself or less yourself? Like say when you’re gone and someone tries to capture your ghost.
I climbed down from the tree. I wiped my jeans off and picked one last cherry from the ground. I walked back along the same path. The rows and rows of cherry trees merged and it no longer felt as if I could walk down all possible paths, as if they held all potential sums and endings. I figured it didn’t matter one way or the other.
For a long time after that, I thought memory worked like an encyclopedia. In order to remember someone, I would need all our experiences alphabetized and annotated. I must not forget anything.
Then I thought, since the person I knew was only one aspect of the person who lived, I’d also need the memories of all the people close to him. We’d layer them one around the other, like a tree with its rings, so that the form of the whole was dependent upon the advancement of each part.
But if I needed all the memories of those who knew this man, I’d also need the memories of those who didn’t: the woman who brushed his hand on a subway pole, the stranger who didn’t talk to him on a plane. The flower bed he weeded, the family pet, his favorite tree—I would need to give these language and add them to the book as well.
Yet even this wasn’t enough. Because what I really needed was the experience of the person himself, the person lost. And for this, he would have needed to have kept his own encyclopedic account. Still, this record would only exist of that one person at one specific time, and so unless he recorded every single thing that happened at every single moment (every passing thought, every urge, every decision or indecision he did or did not make), the book would be incomplete. And if he did record everything that happened, he would do this and only this for all of his life and thus have no real life to live.
I didn’t know what to do. I grew angry for a long time. And, of course, the person I most wanted to talk to about this was the very person I was trying to remember.
Though I did not know it, I was thinking of Monument Valley. The place, I mean. When viewers first saw its footage in John Ford’s Stagecoach in 1939, they made the mistake of assuming this site, one of the most photographed on earth, stood in for all of the American West. The land of the unknown—its myth, its grandeur, its memory—rendered in five square cinemascope miles.
If all that unknown land is out there, I thought, how do we choose just one path to stand in for all the rest? What is the right memory in the face of all we’ll forget? I began to suspect that the mind that haunts its past is not the shadow but its captor. That a ghost—the being that seeks forgiveness, the being that returns when something has gone wrong—isn’t necessarily the on
e who’s dead.
A Plan for the Afterlife
My mother announces that when she dies, she wants to be buried like the pharaohs. We talk over the phone and I imagine her sitting in what used to be my father’s green chair, surveying the frames and cabinets that crowd the walls, feet bouncing on the footstool, the black poodle perched alertly on her lap. I ask her why and she cackles back: “Because they get to take all their stuff with them!” She means, of course, that the ruling classes of Ancient Egypt buried themselves alongside their most prized possessions, rooms full of them sometimes, because these objects brought them pleasure and sustenance in the afterlife. My mother neither likes nor believes in immortality, yet she certainly doesn’t mind the idea of always remaining with the things she loves, the things that could fill a room. Or a storage unit. With a location on 135th Street and Riverside Drive, Manhattan Mini Storage is only a mile away from her apartment and “it would be a piece of cake,” she tells me, to move her cremains and other belongings into an eight-by-ten foot, climate-controlled cube. I wouldn’t even have to hire movers.
My mother says many things about her afterlife. At seventy-three, she’s at an age when long-standing intractability rubs up against a mind grown mercurial. First, she asks for her ashes to be laid alongside her parents’ within the low stone wall out back of the Episcopalian church in East Hampton. Next she tells me I’m to drop hers and my father’s ashes into the lake in the Adirondacks where we used to spend summers. “Which one?” I ask, since we stayed at two, Abanakee and Indian. “Oh, Indian Lake, of course,” she scoffs. “Abanakee is man-made!” Now her plan is for me to bury hers, my father’s, and the poodle’s ashes in the field next to her country house in Pennsylvania. “And where will I go?” I ask. “You don’t want to be with us in the country?” “Not really,” I say. “Well then, it looks like you’re out of luck!” And she laughs, the poodle yapping along in accompaniment, until the laugh sounds something like a roar, grown more and more phlegmy as she ages so that now it resembles one of her sister’s hoary outbursts. It’s a way, on some level, of masking the fact she’d rather not be laughing at all.
The Ancient Egyptians lavished such attention on death you could say that they lived to die. Death held such importance because it wasn’t exactly death; instead, the Egyptians saw it as a period of limbo and the afterworld a perilous journey, filled with spitting serpents and fiery lakes, four-horned bulls and monkeys that cut the heads off unwary travelers. At the journey’s end, the dead weighed their hearts against a feather. If the heart proved lighter, then the dead were reborn in another realm. If the heart proved heavier, a monster with the head of a crocodile, the torso of a lion, and the hindquarters of a hippopotamus devoured the heart’s owner. All in all, a daunting schlep.
The most important event in a person’s life was to build one’s tomb. Wealthy Egyptians commissioned mastabas, monoliths built some thirty feet high from the mud of the Nile, sloping upward like a pyramid sliced off at its base. A mastaba, with its cache of false doors and hidden statues, served as a monumental storage unit: its burial chamber lay hidden underground, the tunnel down to it rocked up with rubble so that the body and its possessions—what was most vulnerable, most inviolable—stayed secret and safe.
For a quarter century, my mother’s welcome mat has read Go Away. A joke, I’d explain to visitors, although was it really? Human contact brings pain. Ask about her childhood and she’ll say that the boys in third grade threw rocks at her. Ask her to search further back and she’ll speculate that when she was four, driving down a country road outside Baltimore, her sister Abby pushed her out of the car, her parents blithely motoring on until several minutes later a gleeful refrain emanated from the back: “Judy fell out of the car, Judy fell out of the car, Judy fell out of the car!” My mother lay in the median, head cracked open and bleeding, an injury she says still gives her headaches today. After my father died and I later moved across the country to Arizona, my mother was left on her own, save for the dog, in an apartment full of things once shared. There she found herself underground, sealed off from what was once most valuable.
Now she must adapt. A few years ago, she capitulated and bought a cell phone, though she often leaves it turned off. “Nobody calls me anyway, I never have any voicemails,” she says, the reason being that she doesn’t know how to check her voicemail. If I call her cell from the other side of the country, always my last resort, she answers only after five or six rings. As often as not, she’s taken the dog to the groomer and I can picture her fumbling with the thing, holding it up as if it were an alien object, fearful of what might pop out when she flips it open, the poodle puzzled and patient at her feet. Upon answering, she will clear her throat and say, “Hello?” and then, immediately again, much louder this time, “Hello!!!” as if she were trying to greet the satellite itself. And then I hear “What the fuck is wrong with this?” and she will hang up without waiting for an answer, unaware her voice has been drowning out mine the entire time.
Besides the obvious complications, my mother’s plan poses some problems. Take grave robbers, for example.
Most Egyptologists deem it rare to uncover a tomb, even a small one, that’s not been repeatedly looted. The men who robbed mastabas were often the ones who built them: thieves came armed with the exact location of underground chambers, tunneling down to a point beneath the room’s ceiling, before breaking through a side wall, gathering the dead’s possessions, and tunneling back out. Sometimes a corpse is found, the bones crushed where the underground walls collapsed, the thief turned to artifact himself, left to survive the afterlife with only the possessions stolen from another.
Aware of this, my mother has taken precautions. She’s flagged suspected looters and decreed that under no circumstances are family members—specifically, her sisters and nieces—allowed into her apartment after her death. “They’re snoops, they’ll poke around, they’ll steal all my treasures,” she says. “Surely,” I tell her, “you can’t be serious.” After she dies, I’m to bar the doors, opening them only for appraisers from Doyle Gallery. Pharaohs sometimes buried themselves alongside their pets and servants and so I ask her, “What about me?”—the only son returning to find he’s shuttered inside the dead widow’s two-bedroom apartment, riding out the siege amidst the clutter and leftover dog, the past lives slipped into the fabric and framework of the five rooms and one hall. Leave it to my mother to devise the most antisocial wake imaginable. But she, hearing a different question, brushes it aside: “No, Tom, I’m not worried about you taking anything. You’ve no eye for good stuff!”
This eye matters. The Egyptians believed the spirit divided into three parts—the ka, ba, and akh—and each required care to survive the afterlife. The ka, the dead body’s physical double, demanded all sustenance necessary during life: food and drink to give it energy, possessions for comfort and entertainment, attention and care from those keeping vigil. If looters and grave robbers stole from the dead, they stole what kept the dead alive.
This forms the kernel of my mother’s wish: that materiality not lose its practicality, even in death. Or maybe it’s my own unvoiced hope—nothing will disappear but merely transition. There is no end, only a false door to pass back and forth through. If I just preserve her in the right way, if I go down to the CVS and buy the proper embalming fluid and select the correctly sized canopic jars, then I prepare the way for her to last as long as the garnets and opals, the rose quartz and uncut amethyst she so lovingly collects.
Yet what happens if nobody is there to bar the door?
After my grandmother moved from East Hampton to a retirement home in Manhattan, my family packed up her house. My aunts and nieces arrived first and, in my mother’s words, “took all the best stuff”—the letters my grandmother kept, her finest set of sterling silverware, her books on Chartres. My mother has been tracking these down ever since, thinking that if she recovers her mother’s prized possessions, she’ll rec
over her mother herself.
It also gives her the chance to snoop. The other year at my cousin Ralph’s apartment in Vermont, she opened his closet door while looking for the bathroom. There she found, sitting on a shelf, a statue of a bull, its body twisted, horns torqued, iron rusting over like lichen. “This is where it’s been!” she cried out, loud enough that the rest of the family put down their chopsticks and looked up from their pad Thai. She emerged victorious from the closet, her eyes aglow, bull raised in front of her like a sacrificial victim. “I’ve been looking for this for years! You had it hiding in there the whole time. I just love this bull!”
This was not enough. The mystery—how it traveled from my grandmother’s in East Hampton to a dark shelf in Montpelier—required solution. “Who gave this to you?” She stationed herself between Ralph and the table where his mother and three daughters ate. “My mother did, I suppose,” he said. “And where did she get it?” She put her hands on her hips in mock seriousness.
His mother, my aunt Abby, called across the table. “Oh that was years ago, Judy, who can remember?” My mother ignored this, believing Abby the thief, and turned back to Ralph. “Well you can’t really want it if it’s just sitting in your closet gathering dust?” Ralph shrugged and, just like that, my mother pocketed the bull.
The Book of Resting Places Page 3
