Katherine Pogson

we bury what we wish to remember

After watching Into Eternity: A Film for the Future, Michael Madsen, 2010. 14 January 2021

We bury what we wish to remember. 

At Onkalo, the Finns have built a place to bury their nuclear waste four kilometres deep in the rock (1).  It is not a shaft, exactly, though the entrance is mine-like.  It has the structure of a lung - a branching series of bronchioles extending underground, each terminating in a copper-coated alveolus full of plutonium fragments.  Or an ant’s nest, where cylindrical plugs are inserted in neat rows, one after the other, like eggs - with room for more to come.  Of course it is a graveyard in the early stages of being filled.  An unvisitable catacomb.  A body of evidence. 

What are we ashamed of?  What needs to be buried so deep, sent so far into the future that languages, signs, landscapes and intelligences surpass prediction?  What can be considered a universal form of communication beyond time?  If signs cannot be trusted to project so far, perhaps stories can be handed down from generation to generation.  Always remember to forget what we did here. A creation myth in reverse.  

Myth-making is an interesting approach when visual language breaks down, because we know two things about origin stories and myths.  They are so shrouded in layers of protective patina, or metaphor, that they can be interpreted many ways.  They are opaque - they degrade, or evolve. People love to reframe them, guessing at different hidden ‘truths’.  These truths usually reflect an aspect of the present psyche, a psychological mirror of the now - and that is why they persist, and yet are unstable at the same time.  And, we know what happens in stories to things that bear the label “do not open”.  Pandora’s Jar (2).  Knowledge will out. The sins of the world unleashed?  Or, simply, the inevitable coming to light of understanding, evidence - the full picture.

Howard Carter opened the second chamber, and the tomb breathed a first and last breath.  Desert air  sucked in, and then rushed out, expelling the stale atoms of three thousand two hundred and forty six years, or so the story goes.  Did the atoms infect the scratched mosquito bite on his face, causing sepsis?  Or was it a momentary neglect of personal care, letting the guard down, a slip while shaving?  The hieroglyphs and seals dabbed into the once-fresh clay, when they were deciphered to contain the usual florid warnings, were in any case, added much later.  Tomb robbers had already been in - but not all the way. 

Hubris tells us that if the unknowable future generations a hundred thousand years ahead of us in time retains any of the qualities of our present age, they will not hesitate to dig up this fascinating mausoleum.

Is there anything found buried that we have not dug up?  We invent technology specifically to do so.  “But if they are sufficiently technologically advanced, they will have the intelligence to understand the warnings”.  The pathos of this earnest endeavour.  Can we evolve beyond curiosity?  Can we breed out the fatal flaw, the slip of the razor?  We try to imagine an ‘us’ that is better than the ‘us’ we are now, to predict, and influence what might evolve.  If we applied this far-seeing speculation to other areas of our environmental activities, what would happen?  

Where do we bury all the rest of it?

The tombs of Highgate cemetery mimic the addresses of some of the dead.  There is a row like a street of houses, with pediments, porticos and front doors.  The names of the properties alongside those of the deceased, “10 Charlton Square”.  As if that house is somehow permanently theirs, their time more solid than anyone else’s. The Victorians set great store by the solidity of buildings and monuments.  Now, there are so many of us we turn to fire and ash, a biodegradable willow basket under a tree is the new memorial. We prize decomposition or sublimation - it is an efficient use of space - or we wish to ‘fade into the landscape’.  Our physical traces are so evident within the geological strata now, we no longer need to emphasise them.

According to Merlin Sheldrake (3), plants caused the third or was it fourth mass extinction in the Carboniferous period, gorging on, and then crashing with, the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, leaving us the buried ‘gift’ of fossil fuels in the process.  Fungi evolved through working out how to break down lignin, and have been around so long, rolling through a series of mass extinction events, that their genomes contain the memories of many dietary evolutions, like a set of master keys.  They remember.  As a result, they can turn on this ‘buried’ genetic trick to metabolise a number of human toxic waste products.  Cigarette butts, weedkiller - nuclear waste? Mopping up our sins, taking advantage of a ready supply, opportunistic.  A comforting myth for us, perhaps, wringing our hands at the edge of a great stink. What have we done?

Perhaps you have evolved to absorb, and even utilise, the higher levels of radiation?  Perhaps you will sniff out and dig up these plugs, not for the rare metal casing, the treasure inside, but as food? Perhaps they will bloom into rare truffles, fruiting bodies, catalysts for new life.

The dismembered Pharaoh in his elaborate tomb, lies surrounded by all he needs for the future life in some unknowable place.  He will need: this clay model of food, this cat wrapped in linen, this bed, this - his liver preserved in a jar somewhere.

Forget that we did this.  Remember to forget that we did this.  Don’t forget to remember to forget that we did this.

(932)

1. Into Eternity, directed by Michael Madsen (2010; Denmark: Films Transit International) Documentary Film.
2. Natalie Haynes, Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek myths (London: Pan Macmillan, 2020).
3. Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life (London: Vintage publishing, 2020).