The Body (Dis-)incarnate: Notes on a Subterranean Theological-Phenomenology (original) (raw)
On a recent blistering high summer afternoon in Cape Town, I attended a Jewish funeral. Perspiring uncontrollably, I observed, as the mourner’s kaddish concluded, the unadorned wooden casket being lowered into the ground. One by one, members of the large group of friends and relatives made their way customarily to the designated shovels and began casting piles of soil into the burial site. I recalled the sensation witnessing the ritual: the cadenced vibrations of the ground underfoot as the darkness of the earth submerged the wooden coffin. There was something provocative in this slow acquiescence to death; in the fading geometry of the casket that beckons the imagination to a call – a call not so much from a realm beyond but from the tremors of the underground. The body in the subterranean and the body as subterranean. Had this body already reached the advanced stages of decomposition into the organic matter from which it came? A literalisation of the famous formula from Ecclesiastes: “from the dust and all return to dust” – I wondered.
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