July 21, 2006
"...the zombie is a different kind of terror: a body without soul, mind, volition, or speech. ...Zombies are cinematic inscriptions of the failure of the 'life/death' opposition. They show where classificatory order breaks down: they mark the limits of order." —Introducing Derrida
Above: French philosopher Jacques Derrida's reanimated corpse...
"THIS DO IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME..."
I saw more than a few open caskets growing up. Tio Jorge’s two pre-teen boys — elegantly suited and surrounded in Catholic regalia — were the most memorable. They looked serene and almost rapturous despite the brutal story Grandma told of the hit and run. The resplendent funeral parlor bespoke a final resting place far from the corruptions of farm labor and colonia drinking water.
As is the fashion of the Christ.
The recent Korean funeral for my friend Brian’s dad recalled my grandmother’s late-’90s passing, though her burial box toured from Peoria to Wichita to Texas for all the family to see. For Brian’s dad, somewhere in the northwest Chicago suburbs, Brian’s relatives paid impeccable and geometrically exact bows, as Chinese mourners in the salon next door wailed ceremoniously.
Both Grandma and Brian’s dad looked like flesh draped over brittle frame. They seemed boxed up for a very long trip.
Unlike Grandpa, who looked ready to pull himself from beyond death’s accommodations and maybe start fixing shoes, watch a baseball game, smoke a cigarette and read the Bible.
Kneeling next to him and touching his hand in the funeral parlor, I imagined him rising up whole, ready to kick the whole family’s ass back into some respect for the dead and the living and the immaterial in-between. If I’d have known Brian’s family as a kid, my bow to Grandpa would have been a perfect, 90-degree salute of recognition and submission to greatness, the one show of respect that stays in my mind as undeniably sincere and poignant.
Lowering one’s eyes and facing the ground in humility is hard to fake.
Of course, if Grandpa had reanimated ready to eat the living, I’d have had to shoot him right through the head with the pistol he kept ready in the Shoe Shop for troublemakers.
“I consider it more barbarous to eat a man alive than to eat him dead; to tear by rack and torture a body still full of feeling, to roast it by degrees, and then give it to be trampled and eaten by dogs and swine…” —MONTAIGNE, “On Cannibals”
Sometime after Grandpa’s death and before Grandma’s three burials, I watched Night of the Living Dead for the first time in my cousin Dave’s back-room shanty in the apartment where Tio Ruperto lived after taking over the Shoe Shop. Like many other nights, I scurried a few doors down afterwards to go to bed, but I couldn’t sleep for all the visions of dead bodies coming to eat me.
I slept in Grandpa’s old bed behind the Shop, and sometimes I’d wake up almost literally frozen in mid-twitch, unable to move but awake and sensing a presence that kept me bound. Often, I’d survey the gauzy shadows and strain to break free from under the sheet that I’d usually pin under my head to keep myself completely covered.
Falling asleep, I’d imagine myself dead. Waking up, I’d wonder if it had actually happened, if my muscles were cramped by rigor mortis and the dark force surrounding me had come to claim my bones still aching with growing pains and pubescent terrors of cancer, AIDS, acne.
My teenage years were still magical with suggestions of living-dead corpses, the devil picking me (of all people!) to possess, and the Donkey Lady dispatching kids with hatchets at the fabled graveyard-by-the-irrigation-canal.
But why do I still love to watch zombies topple gravestones to drink blood and chew human gristle, later to be dispatched with fireworks-displays of viscera and gouts of flesh torn jaggedly from yowling bodies in paroxysm?
"The zombies were having fun/ The party had just begun ..." —"THE MONSTER MASH"Posted by Benjamin at July 21, 2006 12:59 PM
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