[3]Many details about keitai shosetsu are taken from Dana Goodyear’s unusually entertaining and instructive article “I ♥ Novels” published in The New Yorker of December 22, 2008.
[4] Alexander Aciman and Emmet Rensin, Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter (Penguin, 2009).
8. THE MEANING OF LIFE
I never asked Mom about the meaning of life. In any case, I know what she would have replied: “Well, my children of course!” This reply would contain within it the desire that I not ask her silly questions. The meaning of life is the new day and that’s all. In her final months, when basic movements were painful and she had become half-blind, we didn’t have any other option but to put her in a rest home. Having taken care of the formalities and settled her in, my brother and I got ready to leave. At that very moment the nurse came in with lunch. We waited around a little longer. As obedient as a soldier, Mom picked up the spoon, and, her hand shaking, scooped some soup from the bowl. A tear slipped down from her eye and into the soup. That tear falling into the bowl of soup struck at my insides. The image often flashes before my eyes, enlarged, and in slow motion. Mum’s tear ricochets around my soul like shrapnel.
Mum’s hypothetical answer wouldn’t have been far from that given by a philosopher, who, responding to the same question, replied, “The meaning of life is reproduction.” I posed the question to an acquaintance of mine, an older gentleman, who was hit by a car at age eighty-three. “It’s a stupid question! Life doesn’t have any meaning!” he muttered, before adding, “Collecting. . Maybe collecting is what gives our lives meaning.”
Many people think Zagreb’s Mirogoj cemetery is beautiful, particularly the arcades in which notable Croats are buried. On Sundays Zagreb residents often visit the graveyard to place flowers on the graves of their loved ones and go for a walk. The different rows clearly demarcate the social differences among the deceased, the nouveau riche jostling for the first rows. With its imposing headstone, the grave at the very entrance to the cemetery is that of Franjo Tuđman, the first Croatian president, its strategic position suggesting symbolic leadership. Social differences are reinforced by the amount of marble and the size of the headstone, but the cemetery’s architecture is traditional, nothing much is over-the-top. Serbian cemetery culture is more inventive, although money rules the day there too. I have a striking photograph of a headstone from a cemetery in a Serbian village. A computer monitor, “house,” and keyboard carved out of white marble, all to natural scale, sit atop the gravestone. Imprinted on the marble computer screen is a black and white photograph of a young married couple.
The façades of Amsterdam houses are adorned with all manner of symbols, reliefs, and mini-sculptures (people, flowers, and animals — cats are the sweethearts of Amsterdam!), commissioned by the original owners to designate their professions and highlight their social standing. Today, Amsterdamers put photographs of their children in their windows (particularly newborn babies), alongside souvenirs (replicas of Amsterdam houses, cheap collections of little wooden boats, plastic flowers, and figurines) and personal effects meant to reveal something about their occupations, preferences, interests, and hobbies. The anonymous passerby is left to his own devices in interpreting these vivid autobiographical fragments.
Visiting Amsterdam for the first time, I was initially taken aback by this exhibitionism. The story goes (at least the one in the tourist brochures) that the Dutch are reluctant to invite new friends over, but, as a kind of compensation, they don’t think twice about exhibiting photos of their children for all to see. It occured to me that Amsterdam was a European city inhabited by an unknown tribe, European Indians or something. The colorful “arrangements” in the windows, dolls, flags, teddy bears, the posters and slogans draped over the façades — all of it is incongruous with the dominant Protestant culture, or the Catholic one for that matter. It seems that the residents of Amsterdam practice urban voodoo: the things they put in the window or hang out on their façades are supposed to protect them from evil spirits. All this colorful urban infantilism beats in perfect rhythm with the bodies of prostitutes in the red light district windows and the city’s carnival spirit.
Zorgvliet is one of Amsterdam’s cemeteries, and it looks more “Indian” than European. It’s not so much the sandy soil, but the graves, which the Dutch love to decorate with shamanic desiderata. If the deceased had been a barber, the blade he used all his life might be placed on his grave. If he liked a good drop, there’d definitely be a glass and a bottle. On one grave I saw Chinese take-out, fresh drumsticks, and rice in a plastic container. Who knows, maybe someone has a regular gig bringing the deceased a fresh lunch every day.
On a bench beside the grave of a child sat a family of teddy bears, the thirty or so of them bathed in damp. Pressed into the sand on the graves are touching colorful “arrangements”: sea shells, pebbles, plastic toys, painted Easter eggs, plastic Christmas trees decorated with candles and little gifts. In place of headstones, many graves have glass reliquaries the size of home aquariums that exhibit little items that belonged to the deceased: a comb, a toothbrush, a letter, a favorite book, a CD, miscellanea of all kinds.
The arrangements belong to the burial subculture of a new time. These assemblages are brief biographies of the dead written by the amateur hand of their nearest and dearest. At Zorgvliet, religious and cultural syncretism reigns. Relics co-exist in fraternal fellowship: a cross and an Indian dream catcher hang on a nearby bush, slippers embroidered with native silver brought home from a trip abroad, a little Buddhist oil lamp, plastic airline cutlery, a Chinese wooden rattle. .
Death is an empty orchestra. Those who remain behind try and brighten and fill the emptiness. They do so as best they can, either honoring strict burial conventions, or, more often, by breaking them. Zorgvliet graves remind one of MySpace or Facebook, of the final image of ourselves we leave behind. The bouquets of flowers and candles left on All Souls’ Day are testament to the number of friends we have.
Or maybe it’s actually the other way around?! Contemporary technology has given the ordinary individual the opportunity to indulge all kinds of fantasies, to live several lives, but the one thing it hasn’t yet dreamed up is self-interment. In this respect, it’s entirely possible that Facebook and MySpace contain within them the anticipation of death, the idea of the cyber tombstone, a display on which friends and acquaintances can, in our lifetimes, see who we are, what we are, what we like, the music we listen to, the films we watch. Here my elderly friend’s suggestion that collecting is the meaning of life becomes quite plausible. Collecting and consumerism are not only ways of overcoming the emptiness, but also presuppose a fear of empty space, of horror vacui. Death is an empty space. For as long as we are alive we try and fill the emptiness. Collecting is a secret negotiation with death.
A few months before my Mom died I opened her wardrobe and spent hours going through it arranging her clothes. I don’t know why. Her old Sunday best, a georgette blouse and pleated skirt, caught my eye. Mom had a lot of silk things, but it was that outfit, that skirt, which my eye happened upon. I spent hours carefully unstitching the pleats, one by one, not wanting to damage the silk. I cut the fabric into usable pieces, and then, almost in fear that someone might see me, took the scraps to a seamstress and asked if she could make me something. The seamstress protested that there was little to be salvaged from the assorted scraps, but she kept the bag and told me to come back in a few days. Mom died a month later. The bag is still at the seamstress’s. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe in mutilating her clothes I wanted to end her life? Or maybe it was the opposite; maybe I was trying to postpone her death. Maybe I was trying to slip into her “skin,” to make the pain more bearable for her. Maybe her clothes were supposed to be a kind of amulet, a magic shirt to protect me from evil spirits? Maybe, anticipating what was to come, I was taking a small piece of her body in my mouth, as was done by primitive tribes, where women had to ritually eat a piece of the deceased’s flesh in order that his or her spirit remain within the tribe? Maybe I was heading off the emptiness that would appear with her departure? Maybe destruction (ripping her clothes apart) is simply the flip-side of collecting, of the fear of emptiness?