The mummified remains from the peat bog looked both like a
man and yet very alien at the same time. The chemicals had preserved his body
whole, but had tanned it like leather. It looked like one of Van Hagen's
plasticised human art exhibits. His clothes were only preserved as shredded
rags in places, but the bindings that shackled his hands behind his back were
intact for all to see. Who was this man? Who had he been?
The detail of the fetters pricked people's imagination, as
conclusions were drawn that the man had been executed as a prisoner. Or offered
as a sacrifice. Science could analyse what the man's last supper had been. The
remains of his clothes, or their accessories to be more accurate, suggested
tantalising glimpses of his social status. His tattoos were felt to yield him a
personal narrative depicted on his skin. The wear and erosion of his X-Rayed
bones was interpreted for the way that he had walked and that he was left-handed.
A profile of this man was built up and accordingly a name was conferred upon
him so that everyone imagined they knew who he was. We conjured a full idea of
who he had been. Had he known himself as much as we purported to know him? Had
he looked inside himself as deeply as our forensic instruments?
There were queues snaking round the museum. A glass case,
like a Damien Hirst bisected animal exhibit, contained the lithified remains of
a man. A citizen of Pompeii, cured and petrified beneath volcanic ash. Who was
this man? Who had he been?
No one of course, since his essence had long vaporised into
the air. The ash had formed a perfect mould of his body, and the hollow mould had
been cast with plaster of Paris to bring out his ghostly essence now on display
behind glass. The idea and outline of a man. Slightly shrunken compared to our own
contemporary well-nourished corpulence, his body bent into the unnatural angles
of death. Hands protecting his featureless face, or perhaps clasped there in
final prayer. Or maybe just blotting out the sight of impending oblivion. This
sleeping man persecuted by unimaginably agonised dreams for eternity. Tourists
travel to Herculaneum to see the lewd mosaics and graffiti, in order to
transpose Pompeii's victims to the clues here about their lives. The wine
coolers. The baths and water plumbing. They never saw it coming, but we have a
pretty good picture. We fleshed him out, gave him a back story and inducted him
into our collective history. This hollow man was now full of substance.
Ornamentally displayed there under glass. Cast as an impure idea of a man who
once might have been. Fired not in flesh but in gypsum. His body pockmarked
with air bubbles and tiny gouges in the grain of his second skin. Turned inside
out, like a death mask viewed from within. Glazed with our projections
colouring him. Fusing him to our sensibilities rather than any he may have once
held.
The TV channels had deemed that we couldn't view deep fried
crispy human, but squashed flat as a pancake man was entirely palatable. Hence
the cameras didn't zoom in on retreating armies burned in the cabins of their
trucks and seared to the steering wheels by the heat of high explosive. However,
the soldier who had presumably tried to flee from the troop carrier once the
planes had been detected overhead, but ended up beneath the caterpillar tracks
of his armoured vehicle, was fit for human goggle-box consumption. Who was this
man? Who had he been?
He had been filleted, his vertebrae crushed beneath the
multi-tonned vehicle, permitting the triumphant news crews of the victors to
pun about his spinelessness. But his body had merged with the hardened banks of
mud under the tracks, so that he was the same colour as the soil. It wasn't
possible to determine if he was an unwilling conscript into this war, wrenched
from his family, or a fervent defender of the motherland. Either way he was
regarded as an implacable foe. Both sides could legitimately claim him as their
kill. Whether he had perished underneath the tracks, a victim of friendly fire,
or killed from above and his lifeless corpse tangled up in the desperately
grinding caterpillar tracks, neither would be determined through any forensic
autopsy, since this was reputedly not a crime scene. Despite the helpless
turkey shoot it had turned out to be for the pilots and bombardiers.
He was scarce a man anymore, more of a caterpillar track. A
skid mark. Fastened to mother earth, part of her topography, a contour of the
local terrain. The war for the land, or more accurately the minerals and ores
contained within it, had absorbed him into its maw. His bones pulverised, once
again embosomed he could suckle toothlessly at the motherland's dried
up-breast. An etiolated baby she offered up in her begging of favours from the
victorious armies.
These men we never knew when they were alive. I'd say we
only injected them with humanity posthumously, but posthumous etymologically
speaking implies they were buried in soil, when of course two were merely
shrouded by their murderous surroundings, while the third was blended into
them. They were ashes to ashes, dust to dust on contact with their reaper. The
only fleeting corporeality they evidenced was that they had died and ceased to
be. That is the only pure idea of these men we were entitled to hold. Their
quietus the sole element these mortal beings ever shared with us.
