Entry 8

It would be easy to make a correlation between the cemetery and springtime; rebirth, what is dead once more come to life, et cetera. It would be even easier to make these connections today, on Easter, a holiday celebrating resurrection, and on Passover, celebrating release, regeneration, beginning things anew. But if there's anything I've learned from these past three and a half months abiding with this cemetery, it's this: connections, and the meanings we make from them, don't come, can't come, easily. To force these metaphors would be to homogenize this place sparkling with diversity, to assume a consistency and predictability of the seasons, to flatten out the experiences of all those tens of thousands of dead buried here--to do a disservice to their lives.

April 18, and almost all the trees are in leaf and bloom. A blessing of green washes through me. Here's the tall silver maple clustered with golden flower buds; the scarlet oak with its young leaves like viridescent starbursts; pink dogwood, branches curved upward like the outstretched arms and curled fingers, at the tip of each digit a four-petaled blossom; and the evergreens, still here, stalwart as ever, like Viking pioneers who have outbraved the siege of winter.

April 18, and the trees are in leaf and bloom, and some have begun shedding petals, dusting the grass and pathways that now look like the aisles of a wedding chapel. Far too early.

We've all been reading about how spring has sprung weeks earlier than usual across the country this year, in stubborn defiance of Punxsutawney Phil's predictions. Snowdrops barely had a few days to bow their heads in a show of grace to the passing of winter before a wild nor'easter hit. They didn't stand a chance. Time is out of joint, and I hesitate to believe that this is the new normal--to do so would mean giving in to the admittedly enticing oblivion of apathy. But I wonder how much we'll ever be able to rely on the regularity of seasonal changes again, how sure we can be of that cycle, rooted deep in our most primal imaginations, of death and rebirth.

I've been amazed at my ability to restrain myself from overly morbid or macabre ruminations on the cemetery and the corpses six feet beneath everywhere I tread, and my ability to avoid any death-related puns (well, perhaps a concession was given to the blog's title), especially taking into account my repeated reflections on crows without ever using the word "murder." But the truth is, I wasn't necessarily actively avoiding these easily usable and abusable tropes--they never really even came to mind. For me, my perambulations became acts of intense witnessing--of the city, of the wild, and of the great difficulty that lies in attempting to separate the two. I feel that my inquiries into the history of the cemetery aren't that far removed from this witnessing, either, for in examining this distinction (which is ultimately more semantic than ontological), I also consider the distinction between "history" and "natural history." Over the semester, my inquiries, then, into the natural history of the cemetery have taken into account flora and fauna, yes, but also people, the human manipulation of and engagement with place (and time), and the necessity of integrating humanity, even if this only means our own writerly bodies, into our meditations on the environment. Perhaps this comes from repeated explorations of a place situated within a dense urban center, or perhaps it comes from being increasingly, acutely aware of the human-engendered disruptions in our climate, but--even through observations of deer and crows, spruce and holly, goose and rabbit--it is impossible for me to extricate the human from the inhuman.

Stillness and staying put; watching, listening, reading what's written on stone and in moss--these are skills I know I've sharpened over the course of writing this journal. Awareness, too, and over time, a sense of belonging, to a place both alien and familiar. Pittsburgh being the city in which I grew up, I began to feel a kind of intimacy or kinship with this place, bodily, even; a sense that my own history is rooted in this soil. I learned more about the city's history through this cemetery than I ever did the first eighteen years of my life here. I believe this came less from my own personal investment in historical research than from an absorption in the task of ingesting, digesting the environment around me.

In communing with the cemetery, I became part of its community. Connections elude us. But I revel in that elusiveness. I celebrate the difficulty that lies in making sense of things, in the recklessness of metaphor. We can feel for those collusions, conspirings of sense and story. It's the work of feeling out that counts. Feeling for the links (even the broken ones) that bind me to birch bark and willow, gravel and grass. To the yellow feathers of the flicker, the sistrum-rattle of chestnut leaves as it alights on a pliant bough.

These sounds are enough; this song is enough; there are stories there. Go, write them down.