Or all the dead unburied

Walking a dog can be boring business. Down this street, over this one, cross here, when are they gonna get that curb fixed? oh wait she stopped, is she pooping or just sniffing? how are we doing for time? what should I have for breakfast? is that a skunk? oh she stopped again... You get a lot of exercise, it's true, and you get to spend a lot of time with your best friend, and you get to do a lot of observing of nature and the pre-dawn existence of your hometown, but...well, it can also be, as I said, downright boring.

So you think about things. Things that you've read, things that you've written, things that you'd like to write. You listen to songs in your head, because you're too smart to walk in the morning twilight with headphones blotting out your hearing. (Wang Chung's "Dance Hall Days" was a good song to play to myself. The beat really made me pick up the pace.) I wrote a background for a TV series in my head once, and revised it on subsequent walks, and I still might actually do something with it so I won't give details here. I also wrote short stories and came up with ideas for several essays while Haley and I walked around Nanticoke. This is one of them.

I can tell you exactly where we were when I had the idea. We were a few blocks into our walk, in front of my brother's old house across the street from the library, heading West. It was a Monday, I think, because one of the seeds of the thought was (of all things) a Family Circus cartoon from that Sunday. In it some of the kids were walking through the woods with their father, and one of them said something like "Wow! I bet we're the first people to ever walk here!", and all around them were the ghosts of everyone who had walked there before: American Indians, European colonists, kids from all ages.

Then another thought came into my mind, words from Abraham Lincoln's beautiful Gettysburg address:

...we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.

And then the two thoughts came together: What if the body of every person who had ever died in a conflict were to remain forever at the spot where they had died, unchanging, undecomposing, an eternal monument to their deaths and the conflict that had brought them to pass? I saw the world suddenly as a histogram of war, of conflict, of hate, the bodies piled high at Manassas and Normandy and throughout the Middle East and anywhere else there had ever been deaths that resulted from conflicts. Bodies everywhere: Before me there lies some nameless Indian who died in some conflict on the banks of the Susquehanna hundreds of years before Europeans came to this land. The seas are choked with the unbloated corpses of sailors. Some three thousand office workers and firefighters and police and airline passengers stand on a relatively small piece of land in New York City. Everywhere an eternal testimony to violence and the death that comes from it. And what changes? What do we learn?

Nothing changes. We learn nothing. The dead are buried, if they can be found, tucked away in little memorial parks with granite or marble monuments and pretty trees, or burned to ashes and stored on mantelpieces or tossed to the four winds. Perhaps we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. Perhaps their struggle has consecrated it above our power to add and detract. But we still have the power to forget.

The vision passed, and I was glad of it. Haley and I walked on, breathing in the pre-dawn air. And I tried not to forget.

Title reference: I have no idea where this title came from. It arrived at the same time as the original thought some early morning back in 2004. It may be from the Hugo-winning Science Fiction short story "Or All the Seas with Oysters."