Sometimes I feel like a ghost, drifting through life in a weightless fashion. Do you ever feel that? I don’t just mean a ghost in the sense of an apparition who appears to living persons in a gauzy form and makes them go agh! which would be more tangible, but a ghost in the sense of a false image, a secondary image, often faint. I sort of . . . float along the washed-out pastel boulevards of Culver City, among other actual human beings. I feel like I could float . . . right through you.
On the back of my map of Holy Cross there is a list of instructions, informing patrons what they can and cannot do. No dogs. No artificial flowers. Only a certain type of vase permitted. The construction of trenches around graves is strictly prohibited. No idling or loafing or any other form of boisterous activity.
There are security guards enforcing these rules during visiting hours, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Sunday. I’ve seen them chase off the skater boys who come to the cemetery, dressed in their black hoodies and their skeleton-patterned clothes like brand-name memento mori, to skate down the hill: the spinning, humming sound of a skateboard approaching; that could be a death omen. I wish the guards would spend more time regulating the traffic; I don’t know the speed limit for a cemetery, and those drivers might be grieving, but most cars clearly exceed the limit. One time a guard even came up to me and asked what I was doing. He seemed to think I was loitering. He eyed my black bag, as though I were hiding a knife in it. I told him I was from the university, doing research, which was sort of true.
Holy Cross claims the directives help maintain the beauty and dignity of the cemetery. I think they’re being disingenuous, and the rules are to maintain order, form, structure, in the face of death’s chaos, formlessness, disarray: Death, the great disintegrator, the gnarly unmaker. I just don’t see much beauty there, or here, do you? All I’ve seen is a bureaucratic method designed to counter Death’s awesome humiliation.
Luckily, the guards never bothered me again. In my black shirt and trousers, they probably assume I’m in mourning or just some harmless white-collar worker with a buried Goth past. I’m not sure if either supposition is true, but I adhere to these principles of conduct, which apply only to visitors, not the cemetery’s residents, who must find the whirr and skitter of those skateboard wheels annoying, like the constant movement of upstairs neighbors. We are obliged to display reverence for the dead, but they must feel no such need. We must comply with these regulations, but within the confines of the cemetery, the dead have been given free reign.