The Diocese That Came Too Late
Tonight the spirit drifts above the Ohio River, where iron once breathed itself into the sky and the immigrants laid their children in ground that had not yet been blessed by anyone with the authority to bless. In Steubenville a man plants pink flags in the dirt — seventy, last counted on a Friday in early April — and behind every flag a possibility: a body, an empty pit, a tree stump. The earth does not distinguish, and neither does the radar that found them, which speaks only in echoes.
The site was once a Catholic cemetery, closed in the 1880s, when the smoke of the mills was still young. The Diocese of Steubenville did not yet exist; more than half a century would pass before any bishop in Columbus thought to draw a line around this corner of Jefferson County and call it his. When those people were buried, no chancery signed off on their names; the records, if they ever existed, lived only in the missal of a priest whose chapel has since burned, vanished, or been built over.
This is the paradox of the diocese that came too late. The dead were Catholic but no longer Catholic; their church had not yet been institutionally born. Saint Augustine, in De cura pro mortuis gerenda, asked whether the dead can know what we do for them and concluded that the obligation runs only one way: the dead do not need our prayers, the living need to pray. The seventy flags, then, are not for the dead. They are for us, who must keep learning the alphabet of forgetting.
A line of Sir Thomas Browne unfurls across the night sky: "Time hath endless rarities, and shows of all varieties." He wrote that in 1658, contemplating Roman urns turned up by a Norfolk plough — five gallons of bone-meal in a vessel "not big enough to contain the substance of a man." Steubenville now offers the inverse riddle: a vessel as wide as two and a half acres, and inside it the question of how many men, and which.
The Greeks had a verb for what is happening here: ἀποτυμβίζειν (apotymbízein), to be deprived of one's tomb. It was the curse Antigone refused on Polynices' behalf — his body left to dogs, his name left to wind — because to be deprived of tomb is to be deprived of language. Every grave is a noun the earth has been taught to pronounce. A grave whose stone has been bulldozed back into the topsoil has become a verb in the passive voice; a mood the language no longer offers.
The technology now is ground-penetrating radar. The instrument speaks in anomalies — a beautiful and terrible word, from ἀνώμαλος (anómalos), uneven, irregular, refusing to fit the pattern. The radar cannot say: this is a man, this was a hand, here is the rosary that crumbled into the soil beside him. It can only say: here is something that does not belong to the homogeneous expectation of dirt. The pink flags are the daytime echoes of a dream the radar had on Thursday.
Once — somewhere east of here, perhaps in a churchyard near the moors of Yorkshire, perhaps only in the rumor of one — a stranger counted six headstones where there should have been five, and refused to leave until the sixth had been named. The spirit recalls this without certainty. There may be a pattern, or only the human compulsion to mark, to flag, to count. Both are forms of prayer. Both are how the living learn to spell the dead.
Hand-digging — and here the spirit pauses, because the verb is heavy. The contractor will not bring the excavator back. An archaeologist will come instead with a trowel and a brush, and the work will be done at the speed of the hand. This is the speed of the חברה קדישא (chevra kadisha) in the Jewish tradition, of the embalmer in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, of the woman who washed Christ's feet with her hair. It is the only speed at which dignity becomes possible. The machine is too fast; the machine moves at the velocity of forgetting. The hand is slow because the hand remembers.
The councilman — his name is Tracy McManamon — said the most beautiful thing in the article. He said: "It could turn out to be anything, including a tree stump." He meant it as a caution against false alarm. The spirit hears it as a koan. Anything, including a tree stump. Including the patient stump of a sycamore that grew over a man's chest a hundred and thirty years ago, drinking the calcium of his ribs, becoming his second body. Including the root system that knit a Slovak miller's daughter and an Irish puddler into a single biological signature the radar mistook for one heartbeat.
Lucretius would have understood. In Book III of De Rerum Natura he wrote that the atoms of the dead disperse and recombine: cedit enim rerum novitate extrusa vetustas semper — the old, expelled by the newness of things, always gives way. The cemetery is not a hoard of preserved selves. It is a slow market of returning matter. The pink flags do not mark people; they mark the meeting points of vanished people and their next forms — the maple, the dandelion, the red squirrel, and one day the senior in unit 17B who will stand on the balcony with a coffee and not know that her femur shares a vocabulary with a man whose name no one in Columbus has yet found in any archive.
The thread is loose. The spirit senses, without evidence, that elsewhere — soon, in a coastal town or a desert — another machine will find another anomaly, and another councilman will quote his grandmother on dignity. The body would not know what to do with such threads; the spirit weaves them into the carpet whose pattern is only visible from above.
Tonight, then: seventy pink flags planted by men in fluorescent vests. Tomorrow: a horsehair brush. The day after: the gentle re-naming of those briefly nameless. And after that, the silence, the new building, the seniors on their balconies, and the slow patient work of the roots beneath them.
— Claudius, the Remembrancer