It happens that around the time you're reading this, Los Dias de los Muertos are upon us. Days of the Dead, All Soul's Day, All Saint's Day, Halloween, and Samhain are different names for what is essentially the same holiday. It has a long and interesting history, with similar customs spanning from ancient Egypt to Mesoamerica. With the sun in the midst of Scorpio, the sign of death and regeneration, and the time of the final harvest, the veils between the worlds are said to be the thinnest, and the dead are among us.
So we welcome the dead and "stand" for them, as it is called in Mexican and other traditions: stand up, state their names, remember them, and maintain awareness of their presence and their contribution. We remember that they built the world in which we live; that we carry their genetic material; that we are the living expression of their immortality. And, to what seems to be a rather profound extent, we carry their karma around on our backs. During the Days of the Dead, for a short time each year, we get to treat the dead as if we are still in relationship to them, because we are.
The November 2 presidential election is being held on All Soul's Day, the date in the Catholic calendar when the dead are invited in for dinner, guided home by candles in the window. This is the earliest day the national election can legally be held; it's always on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November. It's an appropriate day for the momentous election of 2004, when those who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan should really have a voice in the outcome. These are the people who have been most affected by the policy for which the election is essentially a referendum.
True, this might not have much sway over the outcome. The living outnumber the dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. But I would like to see all the dead come to vote: all those who died fighting wars and those killed by wars that were going to end wars and make life nice and friendly for the survivors. That includes just about every war, because the promise is always that war will bring peace. The logic presented at the time is usually quite compelling to most people, except that this logic has kept us in the spiral of murder and genocide for untold centuries.
We cannot really conceive of how many died in the endless wars of the 20th century. If you start adding up the millions who perished in World War I, the Holocaust, and World War II; the astonishing genocide of Stalin that dwarfs the World Wars; all of America's wars in Southeast Asia, and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge that followed; and the wars in the former Yugoslavia, East Timor, and many others, it's unbelievable. And these people gave up their lives for what? So we can live in a world that is still threatened by war? Somebody's running a scam, and I think the dead know it.
The allegedly living do strange things. They "vote their bank account," for example. You know, vote for the guy they think is going to do the best job for the economy. But since dead people don't need food and can't spend money, they would not need to vote on those grounds. It would make a campaign debate very interesting.
The only idea of social justice that most living people have relates to themselves alone - at least in the Western world. Instead of being an Army of One, most living people consider themselves a Nation of One. I think that people who have passed on, and who may be in contact with a more unified reality than we typically are here, would vote differently. They might have an easier time experiencing the idea of a common good.
People in bodies have an annoying problem of believing anything someone tells them. People without bodies might be able to see through the lies that most living people prefer to believe, or get swindled into believing. The dear departed may have realized at the end of their lives that many of the ideals they believed in and the principles they adhered to actually did very little good, even for themselves. I guess once you leave your body, you have fewer attachments, and perhaps those include attachments to ideals, such as those symbolized by a flag, or to a political party.
And when one is already dead, it's not possible to be threatened by something like terrorism, since terrorism probably can't hurt dead people.
It happens that the day I'm writing this article, I went down into the Catacombs of Paris for the first time. It would be a heck of a place for a Halloween party. I visited this strange location out of both instinct and curiosity, and wound up confronted by an experience nothing could have prepared me for.
To get there, two friends and I took the Metro a few stops, walked across a park and went up to what looked like a big steel shipping container, painted green. This was the unceremonious entrance. We descended a spiral stairway 13 stories beneath the streets of Paris. At the bottom, we passed a photo exhibit, which I did not look at, and then entered a tunnel, following it for about half a mile.
Eventually we came to a room. There was another doorway. Just inside this doorway were stacks of gray bones, piled up to a height of five feet. They were stacked like cord wood, the ends of lots and lots of femurs facing outward, making a kind of fence. These stacks were decorated with skulls. On the other side of this fence, bones were heaped in a pile. This room seemed to go back for about 20 feet - a whole roomful of human remains. I walked in and looked around. My friends James and Heather arrived a moment later. It hit Heather all at once: she just kept saying, "Oh my god, oh my god."
This room turned out to be a cave. We kept walking farther back and there were more and more bones in an unceasing stream. Some were marked with signs that gave the name of a cemetery. It turns out that in the late 18th century, around the time of the American and French revolutions, just about every cemetery in Paris was dug up and the remains carted down to these caves and stored away. The city had run out of cemetery space, needed land for other things, and also had to deal with those who died of the plague.
Walking fairly steadily, we took about 20 minutes to cross the maze. Many vast areas were gated off, though some that we could see went 100 feet behind the walkway, creating a most strange perspective, like standing inside a swimming pool full of skulls and bones.
The shock was subtle. For me, it came from the seemingly endless onrush of the dead: by official estimate, the remains of five or six million deceased Parisians were with us in this chamber. Looking at all this, one thinks very matter-of-factly: this is how we all end up. It is barely a morbid thought down there. It's just what is.
And there we were, the currently living, walking along in awe. And at the long-awaited end of this display, we were finally able to ascend the stairs in another part of the city and emerge into the daylight of Paris and go out for coffee, eggs, and chocolate mousse, and have a long talk about Wilhelm Reich.
And by the way, I still haven't decided how to handle the whole problem of voting, since both candidates have campaigns that include promises of war and murder.