Mary Cecile Gee
August 2002

   When we die, our bodies are cycled through a time-specific ritual matrix invented by hygenic necessity and driven by spiritual belief.  Though the details of these ritual practices differ in many respects, it is true in every case (except the most extreme*) that we must quickly surrender the loved one’s body to its lasting dissolution somewhere out of our sight, whether we are ready for it or not.  We are, simultaneously, relieved and traumatized by the loss of the body.

    When we inter the bodies of those we love in the ground or scatter them to the elements, no body is then left for our bodies to see, recognize, smell, touch, embrace.  But bodies seek bodies – beyond the formulations of language, beyond reason –  bodies search for bodies throughout the eternity of their loss, never ceasing to wonder exactly where the body so longed for might now be.  The transformation from corporeal incarnation to an intangible state so defies the basic premise of the language of bodies, that the fact of the absence remains forever inreconciliable.

    In the aftermath of this same death, tangible things remain which still hold traces of the body we knew – a paint stain on a dress, dirt ground into the insole of a work shoe, safety pins still firmly locked into the wayward strap of a bra, the sharpened peak of a favorite lipstick, the stray note discovered in an evening coat.  Encounters with these traces simultaneously quench, then stimulate, the longing our bodies feel for what can never be reclaimed.

    Faced with the emotional resonance of these objects, the rituals that mandate the swift disposal of the body seem an inadvertent blessing. For the exact thing that makes these personal effects most evocative is the same thing that makes it seemingly impossible to cast them lightly aside or reintegrate them into our lives or the lives of another – they have been worn thin, literally and figuratively, by the registered impact of the loved one’s life upon them. Shoe-tops are molded around the eccentric shapes of little toes; soles are worn and broken. Dresses are threadbare or stained, moth eaten or impossibly out of style. Lipsticks are moist and resilient but so deeply imprinted by the loved one’s lips that it seems a moral violation to alter their shape by the application of our own.

    Still, we make our choices and this precious evidence meets many and varied fates.  It lives on with us, in obscurity, tucked away in boxes never opened again until we ourselves die. We wear the clothing, we use the lipstick, we paste the note into our journals. We throw it all away without ever looking – for fear of what it might cause us to feel or compel us to do or because we’ve convinced ourselves, there was nothing of merit there anyway.

    Whether we discard or embrace it, whether it is lost to us by folly or by an unreasonable fate, initially the evidence exists. Over time, our actions in relation to it fashion themselves into a pivotal tale of our grief – told and untold.   Bone Orchard is the partial revelation of such a tale.

    It is a visual tale that enlists the investigative device of the primordial grid and the real-time, body-reflective language of random and controlled animation to uncover, articulate, and occasionally unleash the mysteries and oddly celebratory joys attendant to the fact of human death. It is a tale that struggles to invoke a spector of the worlds we straddle when those with whom we have shared our lives disappear wholly, leaving us to wonder in their indigestible wake.

*  Eva Peron, the pharoahs, et cetera