How To Disappear Completely

how to disappear completely Luis Lecea Romera

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there, there A small hospital chapel of solid brick and simple pointed arch windows sits amid a ring of greenery. Several tombstones mark burial sites scattered across the lawn, some of them in pairs.

Drown towards the tallest of them I try to read its inscpritions.

Only one name stays legible beneath the yellow moss:

Jacob Kalis

░░E░IZ AUG 1853 OV░R░G J░LI 193░

Whether I was in fact or not standing on his grave is also hard to distinguish with the naked eye. If the space before the tomb­ sone were to be dug out, no burial would be found. No cof­ fin, no bones; just earth. The same earth as before every other tombstone and everywhere within the whole enclousure of the church. 25 years after his death in J░LI 193░, Jacob Kalis' family stopped paying the upkeep of his gravesite at OV░R░G, after which his tombstone was acquired and relocated next to oth­ ers of similar physical and ethnographic characteristics at the Zuiderzeemuseum. His remains lay nowhere around the stone that carries the engraving of his name, and yet this stone unveils some sort of funerary space, one without a corpse.

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Since the actual location of his remains is unknown to me, the material misalignment between Jacob's body and his tombstone blurs the notion of his real place of burial. Here, the real takes the shape of the virtual, his virtual tomb, and indeed a of virtual space on its own, as the virtual is not opposed to the real but to the actual.

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Tombstones at Zuiderseemuseum, Enkhuisen (Sep 2020).

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dollars and cents Death is permanent and static, but its presence is not—it mu­ tates over time. The coexistence of the living and the deceased can be seen as an obscure, yet inevitable, bargaining for space.

The outcomes of these social formulations tend to come into effect through temporary pacts of cohabitation. The terms of these pacts are spiritually, culturally, and certainly economical­ ly, mediated until expiry. Thus, the degree of disengagement or overlapping between both worlds is, to a large extent, a shaping urban event. Dead people have commonly been observed as an unhygienic presence, and therefore often kept separated from the living. But at the same time, cult practices tend to reunite geographically the living and the dead in the city, as burial plac­ es for the dead constitute an element always present in the phae­ nomena of human settlement. Societies are always in a slow but steady renegotiation with fatality, rarely reaching durable agree­ ments. Assessing the spatiality of death and its turns requires a nuanced approach to that effect.

With the emergence and spread of Abrahamic reli­ gions across the Near East, Northern Africa and Europe, the belief in the resurrection of the dead—or anastasis—became in­ creasingly prevalent over time. Judaism and Islam incorporate it in their system of believes, but Christianity would make it central to its dogma: «if Jesus did not resurrect after the cruci­ fixion, then there is no point in the Christianity faith» (1 Cor 15:12–19 ESV). Unlike in Dharmic religions, Christian spiri­

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The Vison of Ezekiel or The Ressurrection of the Dead, Francisco Collantes (1630).

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tuality doesn’t aim at the immortality of the soul through the separation of the spirit from the body. On the contrary, it grav­ itates around an eternal figure of the corporeal. This renewed importance of the bodily as a quality that is not foreign to the spiritual would become crucial to understand spatial death cul­ ture in the West. The bodies of the dead are hence the last re­ tainers of personhood and individuality of those that will rise one day, and their presence within the space of the living has been assured hitherto.

Owing to this growing sanctity of the body, the aban­ donment of the practice of burning the deceased accelerated. As every church had its own graveyard, burial places for the dead within the limits of villages and cities became gradually prom­ inent. Organised religious life brought organised death. Soon the handling of bodies within and around the space of churches gradually became an important source of revenue. By enabling indoor burials, graves placed under or close to the altar were the priciest. More affordable locations were to be found outside the building, in the outer churchyard. The presence of dead bodies in the space of the alive started to give its first signs of commod­ ification. This profitable mode of business remained relatively unchanged for centuries across Europe till the ideas of the En­ lightenment started to reshape city expansion. The increasing shortage of space inside and outside churches, and a new hy­ gienist approach to urban planning, pushed for new cemeteries to be established outside old settlements. Churches saw this as a threat to their monopoly on death. This relocation of new graves out of their reach was faced with strong opposition by ecclesi­ astic institutions, since the fees associated with funerals often generated over half of their income1.

Together with these efforts to dismantle the religious monopoly of the death business, the new civic administrations

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VAN STEEN, P. J., & PELLENBERG, P. H. (2006). “A Dutch geography of death: Intro­ duction to the 2006 maps”. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 97 (1), 104.

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were met with other challenges. The city of Amsterdam, togeth­ er with many other Dutch cities, was notably surrounded by marshy areas, which hindered the quick and cheap construction of new cemeteries. In regions with a soaring scarcity of space, as it is the case in the densely populated area of the Randstad, cemeteries have to compete for space. For many local govern­ ments profitable use of land remains a priority. Sometimes this means that urban economies push for policies that might need to discourage burials, with price as an important and powerful instrument.

According to Monuta2, the largest funerary home in the Netherlands, a single grave for one person at the R.K. Be­ graafplaats Buitenveldert aan de Fred. Roeskestraat in Amster­ dam—the cemetery in front of Sandberg Instituut—adds to € 4,264. Funeral rights, € 1,700; burial costs, € 850; general main­ tenance, € 1,579; permit for grave monument, € 135. Around two thirds of this fee are associated with the ‘grave rights’ or the burial lease for a period of typically 20 years. After this period, an upkeep must be paid by the next of kin in order to extend the rental period and retain the right to remain buried. If not, a lit­ eral eviction can take place. This is why Jacob Kalis’s tombstone ended up in a simulated graveyard at the Zuiderseemuem.

Dying should be the ultimate anticapitalistic act. Our definite exit from the endless cycle of production, reproduction, and consumption. Leaving our bodies behind is becoming less affordable, making a departure from this world without a Cha­ ron’s obol in our mouth an almost impossible task. Then a ques­ tion arises, one of elusive answer: how to die for free?

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MONUTA (2021) Grafkostenmeter: Wat kost een uitvaart? <http://www.monuta.nl> (accessed 13/01/21)

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Kotsuage, bone-picking ceremony in a Japanese funeral.

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bodysnatchers In the Japanese practice of kotsuage (骨揚げ) the relatives pick the bones out of the ashes and transfer them to an urn using large chopsticks. Two relatives sometimes hold the same bone at the same time, passing the bones onto the next person and, eventually, placing them inside the funerary vessel. This is the only time in Japan when it is proper for two people to hold the same item at the same time with chopsticks. In any other oc­ casion it is considered a faux pas. Steering away from Judaism and Islam—both completely forbid the cremation of any living being—postchristian societies are experiencing a secularisation of spirituality and its economy. These new concessions to the disintegration of the body are nothing foreign to Eastern rites. It can be observed that cremation has started to displace burial as the main method of body disposal in many Western countries.

Although it still encounters opposition by many Christian con­ fessions, combusting bodies down to ashes and bones is com­ monly practiced across states and cultures.

A future where the dead lose their right to the city is taking shape, laid out by private companies that are slowly pushing toward a process of privatisation of death, aimed at the consolidation of a new paradigm: a profitable disposal of bodies.

Death takes up space in an economically inefficient way. With a dead population density that can be estimated to be 100,000 bodies per km2 of cemetery land for the Netherlands, in 2003 the number of cremations exceeded the number of burials for

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the first time. An interesting shift is emerging together with these new models of profit are being developed under an un­ precedented premise: the commodification of death is no longer based on the allocation of bodies but rather on how to make them disappear.

New paradigms of spatial and economical dynamics of death are being prompted, not by religious institutions or civil administrations, but by private actors. The possibility of a profi­ table disposal of corpses relies on three main approaches, each of which has its own marketing strategy toward full commodi­ fication. The first goal is to reduce the amount of space taken by bodies. Mechanisms to compress the occupancy of these to the minimum possible consolidate a vision of the corpse as mer­ chandise. Managing the mortuary means that the accommoda­ tion of the dead in the city is nothing but a storage endeavour.

One of the earliest of these proposed technologies is promession, a reduction technique patented in 1997 by the Swedish com­ pany Promessa Organic AB, who derived its name from the Italian word for promise. The processed involved a cryogen­ ic freeze drying of the body on liquid nitrogen at –196 °C, followed by a short mechanical vibration that turns the remains into a crystalised powder. In a final freeze drying in a chamber, approximately 30% was left of the original weight. After recei­ ving consecutive negatives by several governments, the com­ pany reached a dead end and was, ironically, declared defunct.

The second goal is to carry out disposal with a mini­ mum expense. This cost can be thought of as not only spatial but also energetic. Recent alternatives to fire cremation pre­sent themselves as more efficient, emphasising a greater commit­ ment to sustainability. Originally developed as a method to process animal carcasses into plant food, human body disposal by alkaline hydrolysis has gained prominence over recent years.

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It consists on the placing the body in a pressure vessel, filled with a solution of water and potassium hydroxide and heated to a temperature around 160 °C. In approximately six hours the corpse is effectively broken down into its chemical components.

Litters of a dark-tone effluent constitute the main residue of wa­ ter cremation, together with a calcium-based powder that can be returned to the next of akin of the deceased in the form of “white ashes”. Alkaline hydrolysis is also known as water cre­ mation. More recently it has gained prominence as resomation, the proprietary name of both the technology and the Scottish company that developed it in 2007. On the firm’s website Reso­ mation is described as a «gentler, environmentally friendly op­ tion that allows a natural process using water instead of flames».

This marketing cleverly depicts a battle between elements with a clear winner. The energy-consuming aggressiveness of fire is rendered inferior—even primitive—to the soothing effects of water. Along with other firms such as Aquamation and Bio-Solu­ tions, these companies have been lobbying for the approval of their technologies, aiming to build their proprietary facilities in order to compete with crematoria. In 2021 the Netherlands is expected to become the first country in the European Union to effectively approve the liquefaction of bodies as an alternative to burial and fire cremation. Its viability as a potential fertiliser is currently being debated. As the liquid if the chamber that enters clear and leaves darkened, green capitalism also shows sings of browning.

The third goal—and probably the gloomiest—is to re­ insert some of the remains, if not all, back into the productive wheel. This constitutes the ultimate abandonment of the Abra­ hamic belief in the inviolability of the body. It is not coincidental that some of the earliest examples of human recycling are found, not in the Near East, but further into Central and South Asia.

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Zoroastrian Tower of Silence.

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As early as is the 9th century BCE, a quite unique structure for specifically accelerating the decay of corpses appeared outside of cities across Persia, and even reached India. Dakhmas, also known as Towers of Silence, were circular, tall structures built

by Zoroastrians for the purpose of excarnation; that is, the ex­ posure of dead bodies to carrion birds. As twelve centuries ago human corpses were considered fit for animal feeding, the idea of human composting remains as one of the most controver­ sial techniques of body disposal, and the latest to be brought into debate. On her 2016 TED Talk3, Katrina Spade, CEO and founder of Recompose, firmly advocates for the vision of her company: a series of facilities spread across the city where bod­ ies pile up and undergo a controlled process of decomposition in contact with air and bacteria. The result: soil fit for fertilis­ ing. After being reduced to its minimum size at the minimum expense of energy, disposed bodies reach now and astounding new category: they become reusable. The eternal wheel of life and death takes the shape here of a ruthless, cycle of production and consumption of human matter. This anthropophagous form of Samsāra is the ace up the sleeve of capitalism: death is no longer destructive but generative.

The consolidation of this new private sector in the eco­nomy of death relies on governmental approval of new ­le­­­­gal and moral frameworks that facilitates their agendas. Both their economical and social viability depend on public administra­ tions approving their patented procedures of molecularisation of the body, as a condition of necessity for death to be assimilated, even digested, into the circuits of productivity. In other words, a dissolution of of human corporeity into industrial formula­ tions. It is interesting to observe how these new technologies for the deconstruction of the body are driven by elemental forces: fire for cremation; ice for promession; water for resomation; 3

Let’s talk about human composting | Katrina Spade | TEDxOrcasIsland https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRsopS7yTG8 (accessed 14/01/21)

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and air for composting. In the same way as old alchemists, these new dark mages not only make bodies effectively vanish through their magic tricks—they also can conjure profit. With death as their new philosopher’s stone, three commands are issued to us: die compactly, die sustainably, die productively. Veiled under a holistic, postspiritual rhetoric, this illusion of a return to nature is, in fact, a return to capital, in the shape of literal fuel for its inexorable running. An amalgam of black and green capitalism advances steadily on its path to perfecting, not only the good art, but also the good deal, of how to disappear completely.

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Effluent resultant of water cremation.

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