In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

64 ARRAYS
cipation" from their cultural roots and of integration into lay society.
But as long as the renunciation of religion is a civil right which only a
minority of citizens decide to exercise, the act of cremation connotes a
claim to individuality on behalf of the deceased. [see Individuality vs.
Collectivity] Whoever supports cremation seems an independent thinker
and an ethically responsible person trying to live up to the demands of
the Kantian categorical imperative. Opting for cremation also means
making a distinction between the functions fulfilled by the body during
one's lifetime and the ecological burden which the same body as a corpse
will represent for the community of survivors. [see Authenticity = Artificiality
(Life)] But such rationality regarding the material side of human
life is not easy to distinguish from an aggressive spirit of asceticism
played out on the body. Thus, paradoxically, the sobriety of the pro-cremationists
bears strong religious connotations. [see Hunger Artists] It is
in a religious sense-namely, as a holocaust implying the certainty of
ultimate redemption-that the Communist poet Johannes Becher describes
capitalism and war as a crematorium of proletarians: "The hell
of fire swallows you. Meat coffin rugs / Rolled into one. Stomachs sliced.
/ Break, oh you bones! Already they bake into clumps. / As fine dust they
trickle out of the chimneys" (Becher, 27-28).
Most important, perhaps, choosing cremation presupposes the courage
to face the fact of one's own death before this death occurs. Nothing
is more generally acknowledged, at least in Europe, than that such
courage is a sign of composure (Heidegger, 235ff.)-and nothing represents
more strongly an attitude of heroic subjectivity. But although in
Europe (and especially in England) cremation becomes a way of confronting
death as a part of human life, in the United States the funeral
industry, since the beginning of the century, has successfully promoted
embalming, the opposite way of coming close to a simultaneity between
death and life. Whereas with cremation one chooses, during one's lifetime,
to have one's dead body transformed into nothingness, embalming
preserves the corpse of the deceased "in the semblance of normality, ...
unmarred by the ravages of illness, disease or mutilation" (Mitford, 71;
Editors of Consumer Reports, 88ff.).
Related Entries
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