Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered
In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin.
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind,
— Sylvia Plath, “Colossus”
I wanted to dive into the thoughts behind remembrance because — ultimately — I’m trying to think through the ways I might remember my father. But more than that — to see my father as I remember him before illness and age.
Currently, the methods that exist for honoring the dead are stationary and offer little in the way of imagining the person as they were. Below I’ve listed a few of the historic pieces which shape our conventions of death and remembrance, and their advantages in order to understand how to best improve on them.
The Reliquary
These structures are meant to hold images or tokens of the divine. They can be shrines, but differ in that their contents are generally more specific to the person or figure honored.
The earliest reliquaries were boxes, either simple box-shaped or based on an architectural work (i.e. the church). The 9th century saw a rise in cross-shaped designs decorated with precious stones. During the Middle Ages, transparent reliquaries (philatory) rose to prominence despite the cost to produce them. These transparent boxes were designed to exhibit bones and relics.
Urn
Pottery urns, or footed vases with covers, date back as far as 7000 BC. Funerary urns are commonly used for cremated remains. Various historical examples show that, while the practice of urns and cremation is not unique, the interaction with them has been. Some cultures chose to bury urns, as shown in the Urnfeild of the Bronze age, while others have put them for display and ritual rites.
The practice of scattering ashes is fairly new, and recently, biodegradable urns have become more commonplace as the answer to a growing carbon footprint. These biodegradable urns can be anything from wooden boxes to being buried with a tree, or taking a dive into the Neptune Memorial Reef.
Mummies + Displaying the Dead
A departure from preserving fragments is the ancient idea of preserving the dead whole. Egyptian mummification practices make their mummies the most notorious. The Egyptians removed all moisture from the body, leaving only a dried form that prevented decay. This practice heavily influenced the modern practices of embalming bodies.
While interaction seems more passive since mummies (and embalmed bodies) are typically buried, it is their permanence mixed with human curiosity which makes them important to note as a source of remembrance. Unlike the urn or the reliquary, the mummy captures the human form to its most full. Similarly, the display of the dead has gone on to shape artwork and notions around death. The most famous interplay is Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” and a Peruvian mummy which was on display during Munch’s tenure.
Caskets and coffins
Similarly, Egyptian sarcophagi echo another modern tradition: the coffin or casket. Coffin is derived from the French word cofin, which means a cradle or basket. Wooden coffins were commonplace all over the world, and their four-sided box shape seems to have followed. There is no particular date or origin, nor a consensus on why the boxes emerged, simply this idea that the coffin captures a human notion about death and burial.
The casket, rather, is a more Western tradition, but stems from ancient and wide use of ‘caskets’ as jewelry boxes. The modern casket differs from coffins and has a more complex hexagonal shape. Caskets can have ornaments, such as handles, but vary widely based on religious practice and tradition. Most are built from wood, but glass caskets, which are similar to the reliquary, exist to encase the body of someone noteworthy, whether famous or infamous.
Process Journal 