Transcript
Hi. Welcome to Dan's Tiki Bar.
I'm Dan Slone, and this is the first episode of Bits & Peaces for 2022.
It's going to be recorded in two parts. That’s because I tell a number of stories in the course of these two parts, and I wanted to sort of break it up, so it wouldn't be too long.
You might first be asking why cemeteries. What a weird subject for storytelling, and maybe it was suggested by my last vlog being on the Day of the Dead. Maybe it's because in the last few months, I reread Neil Gaiman’s, “The Graveyard Book,” which I love. This is a book written for 8-to-11 year olds that is all about a child who grows up in a cemetery after his parents are brutally murdered, and I long to write books like that. I think that's so cool.
Maybe it's because when I was young and I’d go to visit my grandmother and grandfather, I would play in the cemetery in Greeneville, Tennessee. It was a beautiful cemetery with lots of trees, and it had a hill in the middle and at the top of the hill, Andrew Johnson was buried. You may remember, Andrew Johnson followed Abraham Lincoln as president, and we used to say he was the only president to be impeached. That's not true anymore. But Andrew Johnson is buried there. He was born in North Carolina. He opened his first business in Greeneville, Tennessee, and begin his somewhat unfortunate political career there. Playing in that cemetery, walking on the wall - it was great. It was a wonderful place to play.
Maybe it's my parents’ fault. I think that's the traditional reason for sort of coming up with you know, why would somebody talk about cemeteries or things like that? It's my parents’ fault because when I went off to college I had two majors, one in political science, which my parents had no idea what that was and the other in chemistry, which they thought was a very good practical sort of major. And after organic chemistry. I drop that major and was trying to decide what to do? What do I want to major in besides political science? And they were very careful, having learned long before that., if you said for me to go one direction, I typically went the other direction. They were careful, not to suggest anything until one day they slipped, and they said, “Well please though, whatever you do, don't major in philosophy because the guy that drives the lawn mower for the cemetery, he majored in philosophy and look what happened to him.
So, the next day I announce that my majors would be political science and philosophy. And I not only majored in philosophy, but I focused on the existentialists who basically have an entire philosophy oriented toward our relationship with death.
Whatever reason, cemeteries have always fascinated me, and as I've traveled, I've taken lots of pictures of cemeteries, that we’ll be going through here along with some stories.
The very first story I wanted to tell you was one other that might influence why I think about cemeteries. When I was a teenager, my best friend Dave and I one Saturday evening, it was about 11:00 at night, we had nothing to do, and we decided to drive through a cemetery. This cemetery in Panama City, there wasn't much exciting about this cemetery. We’d just never driven it before, and we'd heard that late at night kids parked way back in the back of the cemetery to make out in the car. And so, we figured we'd drive around and see what that looked like. We drive into the cemetery and the first weird thing that happens, remember this is 11:00 at night.
The first weird thing that happens is, as we're coming in, just a little ways into the cemetery there is a teenage girl walking out of the cemetery. Just walking along by herself out of the cemetery. We passed her. We’re thinking, well, that's kind of odd, a little unusual, wonder what she's doing here, and we go back to the back of the cemetery and there's nobody there. It’s very boring, and we're not there very long. We just kind of go back there and we turn around, and as we turn around with my bright lights on, the lights sweep across the same girl. And the cemetery was big enough that there was no way she could have walked to be there at that time. She had to have, if anything, just taken off running to be back at that point. We turned around and when the bright light swept across her, she didn't flinch. She didn't look at us. She didn't do anything other than look forward and keep walking forward. We found that a little unnerving.
And so, as we made our way back to Dave's house, his parents weren't home that night, so we were staying over there, and we were going to watch Saturday Night Live, and we go home. We get there and turn Saturday Night Live on and just a few minutes later there's this loud thud against the door as if somebody hit it. And we were a little spooked by this. We go and we try to look out the door without opening it look out the window that's along the side of it. There's nobody standing there. We finally open the door. There's no bird that struck it. There's no rock that's been thrown by a car. There's no branch. There's nothing to have made this noise. So, we carefully locked the door and spent probably very little time that night sleeping. So, you know, a few experiences with cemeteries.
Humans are said to have gotten our start in Africa, and pretty much everything in Africa wants to eat you. It doesn't really care whether you're alive or dead - the viruses, the bugs, the hyenas, the lions, and the vultures are all happy to eat you. And Disney tells us this is sort of the circle of life, and that's all good. The earliest known human burial in Africa was about seventy-eight thousand years ago when somebody laid their three-year-old boy down in an excavation in a cave with a pillow. So, he's curled on his side with a pillow, and this is the first burial that they found.
But in many parts of the world, burial really didn't mean burial. The Vikings celebrated their kings by putting them in boats and burning them. In India, your body might be put in a sacred river and released. Cremation is common in many cultures around the world as is mummification. The Cavite people entomb their dead in hollowed-out trees, which I think is really interesting. Sky burials were practiced by Native Americans, Tibetans Tibetan Buddhists, and the Zoroastrians who came to India from Persia in about the 10th century, and they brought with them this idea that land and water were too sacred to be polluted by human bodies and as a consequence, they used sky burials.
They’d put the bodies up on towers and let the vultures eat them. And that worked really, really well for a long, long time, but ran into a problem in the 1990s when a drug that had been used in people was allowed to be used in animals. It was a human painkiller called diclofenac, and it was allowed to be used in animals, specifically cattle. The vultures not only ate corpses of humans, but they also ate corpses of cattle. And as a consequence of this drug, the vultures were wiped out. It took a little while, but they were wiped out. And so, what to do with these bodies. It takes about 250 vultures to manage 800 bodies. a day. A statistic I think is pretty wild. So, they created these solar concentrators to burn the bodies. And it became a topic of a lot of discussion, a lot of disruption, for a long time cultural practice. And an Indian friend of mine told me that, as the vulture population declined and they were pretty much full, they became less efficient and they would leave, body parts on the surrounding balconies and those sorts of things. But that's sky burial. So, lots of different versions of the this over the years.
When I was in Peru, I toured the Sacred Valley on my way to Machu Picchu, and in one section, the Incas had used the adjoining cliffs to bury their dead in small caves, and their city was right across from this cliff. And so you would literally come out of your door in the morning and your ancestors would be there in the facing grottos. When I was traveling, I was asked to bring back a few stones for a friend who collected rocks from different parts of the world. And while I was walking in this valley, I picked up a rock and put it in my pocket. And almost as soon as it went in my pocket, I heard these voices in my head that said, “You can't take this rock. Too much has been taken from this valley.” The Spanish, when they colonized this area, they killed so many people, massacred so many people. The church came and took the gold and even the stones from the Inca temples and used them in their own churches. So much has been taken from this valley. You know, that rock will be cursed and I took it out of my pocket right away and I dropped it. And then in my head, I heard “But you can take a stone from Machu Picchu because Machu Picchu was never found by the Spanish, and so it doesn't have the same sort of emotional intent as the Sacred Valley and so, I did that.
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