A Prologue to Departure.

It's odd how as I sit here, I ponder whether or not the title of this post should have a full stop or an ellipsis.  The aforementioned sentence will hopefully make some degree of sense by the end of this blog entry.

When I decided to embark upon my '39 Project', I made a series of promises to myself.  One promise was to continue to visit graveyards and cemeteries and from this year onwards to take photographs.  Now to some this may sound like a morbid or even creepy dalliance with death but to me, it is a necessary step.

Throughout life, we are confronted with constant reminders of our eventual fate.  People we know go away and we never see them again.  The very fact of separation is perhaps of more significance than where they have gone.  They may simply have moved and we lose contact with them or they have may have died.  The sense of loss we can experience can hinder our ability to move on.  Whatever myths that human beings may create celebrating change, continuity provides the safety net or crutch that stops us crashing to the ground.  The daily rituals are only significant in the knowledge that you will see that person, thing or creature again.

The art of capturing people, things or creatures through photography, film and the other aesthetic mediums provides some solace to our restless souls yet when we are in a distressed state of mind, these representations can be harmful.  I am not advocating not creating these representations merely reiterating the fact that the things that matter to us exist in our hearts, memories and spirits.  They have touched us and we have touched them.

Now cemeteries, graveyards and the other sites of rest are important because they have been created with the express purpose of containing and celebrating the dead.  Establishing areas of mutual grievance and even community.  When we think about it rationally, these areas are more about the living and fundamentally, they are amongst the only places where we share the same general feelings.  The human condition is reflected back at us.  We come as respectful or spiteful visitors to honour or discard our memories of people who have gone.  They are peaceful places where animals and birds freely roam.  Originally, many cemeteries were intended as public places.  Like parks with more stones than benches.  Places where families could go together.

My need to explore cemeteries and to confront and embrace death could be seen as a coping method as I get older.  I prefer to see it more as a celebration of life and the human capacity for remembrance, so maybe the title of this post should have an ellipsis.  After all, what happens next is hypothetical yet inevitable.  The 'live forever' brigade are overly in love with science and deluded by their illusions of grandeur.  I would rather be remembered by the people who care about me than stuck in some kind of suspended animation until science catches up with Nature.

Barry Watt - 15th June 2013