by Sally Mann
In the end, it turned out he wasn’t like any of those, and not overweight or weenie-wagging either, not even close. He was just a kid, my son’s age, nineteen: skinny, wet, cold, scared, exhausted, confused, and defiant. And dead in my front field.
When it was over, after the medical examiner and ambulance teams had cleared out, we watched from the porch as Sensabaugh’s weeping mother was led back to her car, and the trucks, television vans, and helicopter all took off. Then came a strange silence, a deep absence of something, and the farm grew still, as if beginning to heal itself.
I walked over to the place where he died. The underbrush was matted down, patches of blue and orange spray paint marked coordinates of some kind, yellow crime tape hung on the wild rose, and, at the base of a hickory tree, a dark pool of blood glistened on the frozen soil. I was tempted to touch its perfectly tensioned surface. Instead, as I stared, it shrank perceptibly, forming a brief meniscus before leveling off again, as if the earth had taken a delicate sip.
Death had left for me its imperishable mark on an ordinary copse of trees in my front yard. Never again would I look out of my kitchen window at that lone cedar on the prow of hickory forest in the same way as I had before. I would never be free of the memory of what happened there. But would a stranger, coming upon it, say, a century later, somehow sense the sad, lost secret of the place, the sanctity of this death-inflected soil?
22
Bearing Witness
I chose to play the role of that hypothetical stranger, but on different soil and much more than a century later, when I visited Civil War battlefields, looking for the answer to that very question: does the earth remember? Do these fields, upon which unspeakable carnage occurred, where unknowable numbers of bodies are buried, bear witness in some way?
And if they do, with what voice do they speak? Is there a numinous presence of death in these now placid battlefields, these places of stilled time?
Some years before I took these battlefield photographs, my friend Niall had sent me Wisława Szymborska’s “Reality Demands.” It’s a haunting, wildflower-at-ground-zero of a poem that gazes unblinkingly as life goes on at the world’s most blood-soaked battlefields. It reports “Music pours / from the yachts moored at Actium”
and couples dance on their sunlit decks…
The grass is green
on Maciejowice’s fields,
and studded with dew,
as is usually the case with grass.
Perhaps all fields are battlefields,
All grounds are battlegrounds,
those we remember
and those that are forgotten…
“There is so much Everything,” Szymborska wrote, “that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.” These lines, I decided, posed an artistic challenge that needed answering.
Five months after the shooting on our farm, in May 2001, I drove to the battlefield at Antietam and spent the night. Just past dawn, I pulled my rolling darkroom into a far corner of a field by the Burnside Bridge. The grasses were pendulous with dew, and it took a hot spring sun to lighten them into an airy undulation. I watched it happen. The fields began to ripple like satin cloth flapping in slow motion, as each stalk, exuberant with seed, swayed in easy unison with its neighbors. I looked across those oblivious fields, and thought Isaiah was right: surely the people is grass.
I wasn’t alone in having these thoughts before the death-hallowed ground of Antietam. Indeed, I had plenty of company; by midmorning busloads of tourists stood reverently looking out across the landscape. I’m pretty sure their thoughts, too, were about the power of death to transform the perfectly ordinary fields before them, looking like every other field they had passed on the interstate, into something profoundly moving.
When I see an ordinary landscape like that, I also see the underpinnings of death; when the American prairies unfurl beneath my airplane window, or when I eagle-eye the trails as my horse gallops along them, I am reminded of the powdery bones shifting uneasily beneath all of it. And the skeletal bones of living humans, deep within a healthy body standing before me: I imagine them, too.
Among my father’s collection of death iconography is a reproduction of a hanging scroll by the nineteenth-century Japanese painter Kawanabe Kyyōsai. In it, the eccentric fifteenth-century Zen monk Ikkyū dances with joyous abandon on the head of a skeletal courtesan, as a conga line of smaller skeletons, one holding the bare ribs of a fan, weaves around the pair. This same Ikkyū is known for his cautionary and unsentimental appraisal of earthly love: “Remember that under the skin you fondle lie the bones, waiting to reveal themselves.”
In these lines, Ikkyū forms an unlikely cross-cultural kinship with Flaubert, a writer I highly esteem, as did my father. In an 1846 letter to his longtime mistress, Louise Colet, Flaubert echoes Ikkyū’s observation:
I always sense the future; the antithesis of everything is always before my eyes. I have never seen a child without thinking that it would grow old, a cradle without thinking of a grave. The sight of a naked woman makes me imagine her skeleton.
What is wrong with us? Is this a sign of incipient madness? In Beckett’s Endgame, the invalid Hamm tells his servant about visiting a friend in an insane asylum. Hamm, in an attempt to cheer the demented friend, drags him to the window and cries: “Look! There! All that rising corn! And there! Look! The sails of the herring fleet! All that loveliness!” The madman turns back to his corner. Where Hamm sees loveliness, the madman sees ruin.
As for me, I see both the beauty and the dark side of things; the loveliness of cornfields and full sails, but the ruin as well. And I see them at the same time, at once ecstatic at the beauty of things, and chary of that ecstasy. The Japanese have a phrase for this dual perception: mono no aware. It means “beauty tinged with sadness,” for there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay. For me, living is the same thing as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madwoman; I believe it can make me better at living, and better at loving, and, just possibly, better at seeing.
After two trips to Antietam, my diminutive greyhound Honey and I headed toward the thick cluster of Virginia battlefields in the Piedmont.
Leaving behind our serene Shenandoah Valley and crossing the Blue Ridge, we drove through increasing urban sprawl, catching glimpses of battlefield markers sandwiched between entrances to big-box stores. Entering the government-protected battlefield sites, I found the physical remains of the war immediately perceptible,
especially at the Spotsylvania Courthouse where the landscape bulged with earthworks so well preserved that they appeared serviceable for the next Civil War (which, given the present state of our politics, seems no longer so far-fetched). It was high noon when we got there and not a soul stirred. When Honey and I got out and walked around those rolling swells, one of us dislodged a lead Minié ball, deformed and dusted with white oxidation; the spoor, the spoils of war still surfacing, unbidden and irrepressible. Death owns these fields entirely. It sculpted this ravishing landscape and will hold the title to it for all time. The down payment, a deposit of fallen bodies, hopes, loves, joys, and fears, is now the dark matter of death’s creation.
With the midafternoon heat, Honey and I retreated with the cameras into the woods, which were furiously thrumming with locusts and curiously sparse. The trees there seemed retarded in their growth, unconfident. Oaks were spindly; the Scotch pine poorly needled.
These had to be the great-grandbabies of the trees that stood during the Civil War, but still they seemed sickly, as if the hot metal embedded in their ancestors had weakened the saplings as they struggled up through that lead-poisoned soil.
In the late afternoon, my favorite time to photograph, we left the woods and went back out into the fields, empty now of tourists. Within the shadow of a luxuriant climbing grape that romped over a lone cedar, I set up the camera and Honey dug into the cool dirt for a place to sleep. The smell of that soil came up to me; the smell of ancient bloodshed, of bodie
s plowed under, all part of the land, part of the earth I was breathing, the creamy smell of the feminine force in the world. That force is Death, the dark, damp, implacable creator of life, the terrible mother who nourishes us and by whom we are, in time, consumed.
While Honey slept, I photographed in the waning light, the lumpen shapes of the vine-covered cedars looming monstrously over me. When finally it was too dark for pictures, I set up the tent at the top of a hill and scooped the remaining handful of ice from the cooler for a gin and tonic. Honey ate her supper, then curled next to me on the blanket while I stared down at a field nourished by the fallen.
As I watched, rising tendrils of ground fog pierced the gloaming, as if the spirits of the battlefield dead were drifting toward me. Those men, once vehemently real, are now vanished as utterly as I myself will be, these fields and distant mountains the final vision for their closing eyes, as they are for mine. The rich body of earth took them in its loamy embrace, acknowledging with each spring’s luxuriant rebirth their dumb demands for remembrance.
The air was fragrant where I lay. It smelled of dirt and of grass, the eternal life of the dead. As wispy mist wrapped around the tent, I extinguished the lantern, and we bedded down for the night.
23
The Sublime End
I was in Sweden recently, where I discovered a particularly evolved attitude toward the disposal of dead bodies (and, of course, toward nudity, sex, war, gender issues, and so on). Having just researched the topic of whether it would be legal for my unembalmed, unincinerated, de-organed and de-eyeballed corpse to be simply placed in a hole dug in my pasture, I was intrigued to learn of a novel Swedish solution to human burial. In a country where cemetery space is at such a premium that older bodies are dug up and reburied more deeply so that second- and third-story tenants can be installed in the same plot, the practical Swedes have now developed a system for composting human remains.
They start by freezing the corpse in a vat of liquid nitrogen. Once solid, it is easily shattered into tiny frozen pieces, nugget-sized, by ultrasound waves or, somewhat less palatably, a hammer mill, a process likened by one proponent to that of making chipped beef. The nuggets are then freeze-dried and placed, with a starter of bacteria, in a biodegradable box to be buried as fertilizer for whatever plant you place above your still-serviceable “loved one.” In my view, this is about as close as we’re ever going to get to reincarnation: our very atoms coursing through the venous leaves of, for example, a long-lived oak.
It seems only right that we should set our species to the same immemorial task as any other compostable matter—the leaves piling up and rotting on the forest floor, or the kitchen scraps thrown every week onto the compost. The amount of resources expended in unnecessary funeral operations is absurd. Even cremation, long considered the simplest, least wasteful solution, uses a lot of power to produce temperatures sufficient to incinerate a human body (around 1,700 degrees). Cremation also releases volatilized mercury from dental fillings into the atmosphere, an arcane fact that concerns the Swedes.
So why not just let bodies decompose like any other compost, giving them, literally, a possibility for new life? The earth is well practiced in the business of efficient, ecologically sound burial: an average-sized human body, if buried in heavily soiled wood shavings from a horse stable and aerated every ten days, is disposed of in just over six weeks.
Now, you might reasonably ask, who on earth figured that out, and the answer is: a graduate student at the University of Tennessee’s Anthropology Research Facility, popularly known as the Body Farm. The program endeavors to determine exactly how human bodies decompose, codifying stages of decay and the environmental and situational factors that affect it.
For years I tried to get permission to photograph there, writing the founder, a friendly and open-minded man named Dr. Bill Bass, who at first gave me permission but had to retract it after his board got wind of it. Then, in another instance of felicitous timing, Kathy Ryan at the New York Times Magazine asked me in the fall of 2001, not quite a year after the convict died on my farm, if I wanted to go to the Body Farm on assignment. Although commercial work is something I never do, I jumped at it. I was in.
Packing up my cameras and my wet-plate darkroom, I drove late at night to Knoxville, laying over at a seedy 1950s-era hotel on the airport strip that had a curtain-churning heater under the single-pane picture window in my room. At a frosty 7:00 a.m. the next morning I knocked on the office door of the wickedly handsome Murray Marks, my Forensics Department contact, who led me to the three-acre plot, its tall, wooden fence topped with razor wire, where bodies, donated or unclaimed, were laid out to decompose.
It was October, and, except for the dense smell of carrion, the overgrown and heavily treed hillside appeared to be just an unremarkable corner of scrubland not yet taken over by the parking lots lapping it on three sides. Murray unlocked the big gates, and I backed my Suburban into the opening, nearly filling it. As I climbed out, Murray was already walking back toward his car throwing out a casual wave and a “Good luck.”
This was not what I expected.
I squeezed between the car and the fence and stepped into death’s little garden plot. It was singularly quiet, save for the rustling of squirrels in the heavy leaf-fall and the droning of the HVAC at the nearby medical facility. The remaining leaves of the hickories were a brilliant yellow, and the pokeweed was empurpled at the stalk, with only a few leaves still green. There was not another living soul inside that fence with me. The only person I saw right away was a very tall dead man, lying on a level part of the landscape, dressed in mismatching reds, his long arms protruding from a sweatshirt that read HARVARD.
He was hugely swollen and his nostrils and ears were frothing with something gaseous. I now know it was bloat, a process of methane expansion that occurs, depending on the temperature, several days after death. It usually resolves without actual explosion, but looking at Harvard that morning I wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t pop at any minute. I felt pity for his distended midsection, jaundiced skin, and the cold-looking gap between the sweatpants and socks.
One thing about the helpless dead struck me right away: you want to fix them up, to press the sagging lips together, close the indiscreet legs, wipe the dripping butt, shutter the liquefying eyes. Surely if they had their druthers and knew they were going to be exposed to the scrutiny of strangers, they would have had their roots touched up or run a razor over their chin. Poor Harvard: six foot seven, he was too big for the clothes from Goodwill that the graduate student, probably doing research on the effects of clothing on decomposition, had bought for him. Several days of postmortem beard growth had roughened his cheeks, and his fingernails were dirty and long. He looked like a Dickensian down-and-out who had stumbled into Lewis Carroll’s body-stretching fantasy by mistake.
I suppose it was the red that drew my eyes right away to Harvard, but in much the same way that light-struck eyes adjust to darkness, as I stood looking around me, my death-struck eyes now began to see bodies everywhere—under the arching spirea branches, atop plywood boxes, beneath woven wire cages, drifted over with leaves, paired and in groups, many half-gnawed with missing parts, some nearly skeletal and some still zipped in body bags.
I walked up to a white body bag on the slope above Harvard, and, since Murray had told me I could open any of the bags, I gingerly unzipped it a bit. My heart lurched in its cavern as the gap revealed first the red hair and then the beautiful pale face of Gail Nardi, a reporter from the Richmond Times Dispatch who had interviewed me years before. I leapt away as if burned, and skittered back down the hill, heart pounding, reflexively swiping my hands against my pants.
Looking around to see if anyone had seen this animated little dance, I caught sight of a vulture in a locust tree, which cocked a defiant eye toward me and flapped down next to Gail. Yelling and waving my arms, I ran back toward her and he moved away on his pinkish legs but did not fly. I opened the bag a little further, revealing a po
uchy white stomach. Maybe it wasn’t Gail. This woman was way larger than I remember Gail, and why would Gail be here in Tennessee? I tried to remember what Gail looked like. Didn’t she have green eyes? I lifted an eyelid: milky blue.
I freed her shoulders and, grabbing the sides of the bag, I pulled up, and she lazily rolled out, landing on her stomach. This definitely wasn’t Gail. The legs were elephantine, out of proportion to her body.
Relieved but still a bit shaken, I went back to the Suburban to get my cameras and set up the collodion chemicals. When I turned back to look at not-Gail, the vulture was next to her, pecking out the exposed eye, then working on the lips.
I made a wet-plate exposure of the bird, but the emulsion nearly slid off the glass in the cold. Blowing on my wet hands, I walked back to not-Gail and could hear the vulture grunting with his efforts. I shooed him away and saw that in just a matter of minutes he had rendered her face unrecognizable.
When I turned away, he fearlessly returned to her, hissing and occasionally spreading his huge wings. I thought, somewhat dubiously, of Robinson Jeffers’s poem “The Vulture” in which he anticipates the “sublime end” of his body when it is eaten and becomes part of a carrion bird, a feathery, sharp-eyed life after death, “an enskyment.”
Directly up the hill from not-Gail was White Mary, lying on her side, orange and brown liquids draining onto her white body bag, her skull sawed in half, presumably from an autopsy. She was wrapped in cloth as translucent and beautiful as any woven for the Pharaohs, the graceful drape of the reeking, saturated fabric accentuating her slender outline, the stickweed stems offering a rigid contrast to the line of her hip.