Kingdom Come
In Tibet's predominately spiritual culture a special school of monks perform Sky Burials for the deceased. This Buddhist culture seeks immortality through meditative practice and non-attachment to the statis quo. Our culture in someways has adopted the Egyptian modes of embalm and entomb. The Egyptians had a goal in mind; the resurrection of the dead kings and nobles at some time in the distant future. Over time their example and plan has crumbled into dust like the Sahara Forest. We too have passed our immortality on to future generations to solve. Only the very rich have been able to place themselves in liquid nitrogen to while away the time. We lesser gods trust ourselves to the embalmers and the unreal-estate managers in charge of cemeteries. More and more prime real-estate including farm land is invested in this morbid passion to save our dead. A few renegades perhaps distantly related to the Vikings find that 100 pounds of propane inspired cremation solves the problem. Timot
hy Leary now circles us in outerspace placed there by a huge missile. All these methods except for the Sky Burial denies the obvious environmental problems. Perhaps a newer greener method is needed.
The Tibetan Sky Burial ('jhator', literally 'giving alms to the birds.') is carried out with all the sensitivity of any other culture. The family grieves and celebrates the life of the deceased and then the body is given to a special group of monks who carry the body high into the mountains. There they cut the corpral vessel into bite size pieces and call the vultures and crows to carry away their treats. It becomes a picnic for our feathered friends who carry the deceased high above the cares of the mundane world. The simplicity of such an event has fascinated me for some time, but the transference to our culture seemed problematical to say the least. True we now have more vultures than when I was a child, they followed the road kill on our highways north. The thought of a special class of butchers graduating from Community College seemed improbable even in light of the steady stream of graduates from military institutions.
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The question becomes how does a culture dispose of its dead without large amounts of pollution or the large scale removal of arable land in a world where half the globe is starving? The Hindu culture burn their dead on huge funeral pyres, but they have less and less forests to sacrifice to the ceremony and in that culture the poorer the pyre the more for the turtles to finish in the Ganges River. Long before recent events on the world scene I would come back to the problem in spare moments. The classic "Farm Film Report" segment on SCTV came to mind. John Candy turns to Joe Flaherty and says, "He blowed up good!....He blowed up REAL good!"
Why not follow this stream of thought I reasoned. If the deceased was wrapped in dynamite or some of the newer rope or cloth and detonated, what could happen? If it was done in an isolated area in the country you would have instant fox food scattered over a wide range to feed birds and smaller creatures. This might go against some of the sensibilities of our culture, but the science of demolition could be tuned for more atomized results. The smaller spray could provide nutrient for the soil. Blood meal and bone meal is better fertilizer than if reduced to ash as in cremation. The tape used to hold the dynamite in place could be sprinkled with wild flower seed. What better testimonial for love ones to come back year after year and marvel at the beauty of nature in full boom. As an added bonus a percentage of the money spent on the dynamite is directed to the Alfred Nobel Peace Prize the inventor of dynamite and TNT. Thus the deceased could rest in peace as well as pieces
knowing that they had contributed at the very least in the end to making the world an illuminated, fertile, prettier place and to have graced the smaller creatures in the process.
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