Taboos June 2013

"Death is a taboo," she said, "We can't talk about death.  We must be happy all the time and we will live forever.  But for them it was different. Death was very present."

And she was right.  I was staring into the dark socket of the nearest skull behind the grate. And all four walls were stacked to the ceiling with bones and skulls, many obviously children.  Hundreds. Floor to ceiling, neatly arranged, everywhere you looked. They loomed from the corners and stared out from the recesses. Stacked, crisscrossed, balanced. How many?  It was a city built on bones, but only here, in this forgotten chapel, could you see the truth behind it.

Death is taboo.

We hide it. We put them away. Burn em or bury em 'cause Death doesn't sell.
Can't have you pondering meaning. Need you disgruntled and chasing
the next big thing.

I thought of all the fashion I didn't care about. How living here, in one of the capitals of moda, I'd seen the waves... every four months... in the fall it had been studs and spikes on even the most garish heels... and the winter it had been skulls... sewn or embroidered or jeweled...
Now it was camouflage skirts and pants... you could see the waves sweep over all the stores along Buenos Aires or in Vittoria...
That's why we weren't thinking about death. There wasn't any meaning to the fads, but they had to be had.  Too much death would remind you of what was really important.  Enough clothing to last... and family and friends to share the journey. That's all that mattered. And here we were, bent and spun and separated, divided, conquered, bought and traded...

"Working jobs we hate to buy shit we don't need..."

I was wearing a T-shirt I'd have for six years. It was soft and familiar. It had no holes. It sufficed me.



The skulls at eye-level had slips of paper rolled up and pushed through the grate into their eyesockets. Prayers, she said they were, and promises. Requests to the monolith of bones, hopes passed to the other side.

The Australian slipped a finger through the grate and rubbed the cranium of a pale brown skull, as if to see if it were real. I was tempted to do the same. But I'd feasted on enough death of late.  I'd stopped harping on them, but they were always around... and that was enough reminder to keep it together, keep the hunger for what was True separate from the 'reality' that was laid out to distract, frustrate and induce consumption.  The sound and fury, the colors of nothingness that filled the streets like a flood.

On the way home there was a line of a hundred people queued at some Coke gimmick machine that would print their name on a bottle.

And not 200 meters away, the wall of bones remained, dark and quiet and truer and more honest than any of it.