Where the Dead Live – Cimetiere Pere Lachaise

In a very strange Parisian suburb, you find streets of spired houses with neat doors, high set windows, arched porches, and dead residents.


I can’t pin down exactly what it is I love about cemeteries. It certainly doesn’t bother me that I don’t believe in the sprits of the dead, either hanging around in their little houses or watching from above. As far as I believe in the soul, dead is dead. But the living in this place are amazing and wonderful, the devotion of architecture, construction, maintenance, time and money, and to what end?

A dead end? A place to leave behind your mourning, or to build someone’s legacy? I don’t know, I’m incredibly fortunate enough never to have buried anyone, if I was given the task of building the world from scratch, it would never occur to me to put cemeteries in it. And every time I find one I re-find the distant mystery of the whole phenomenon. This is my fortunate privilege I know, and I’d hate to be insensitive, but that is the way my life has lead me.



So what then, to make of these tombs? Their gross extravagance, the hot heavy atmosphere of camp Parisian gothic style in late spring, the sheer amount of dead people, the still families of mourners and clucking families of tourists.

Really, if I knew what I felt about a place like this, there would be no point going there and taking pictures, I hope I never know.



 

The Outcast Dead

On Redcross Way in Southwark, an almost featureless street overlooked by the thousands of people swarming around London Bridge just 100 yards away, are the red gates of a construction site, beyond which were recently discovered the bodies of hundreds of prostitutes and paupers in a mass grave.

Now those gates, to the Crossbones Graveyard, have become a pilgrimage for the sympathetic, for tourists, descendants and outcasts. They are covered with layer upon layer of tributes, poems, ribbons, of the wildest array you couldn’t imagine. The site has been fully excavated and the history well documented, I would direct you to the Crossbones website, with the caveat that the decent historical research is wrapped in a spiritualism that I personally find hard to swallow.

I don’t see ghosts, but I do see respect and regret for the undignified mistreatment of women and the poverty stricken, expressed with a depth of feeling and honesty I find touching in the extreme.
The words in this post are taken from notes attached to the gates of the graveyard:

“We are the weavers, we are the web,



We are the witches, back from the dead!”



“Set candles here, Redcross and Union, where once a goose was feathered and tarred,

 

Where her daughters were ditched in an unmarked pit, candlemass X mark her cross-bones yard.”



“In memory of all the women who died in the oldest profession, who the rest of society chose not to remember…







Jane, Caroline, Rachel 2000, Tracey 2001, Sarah 2001, Tina 2002, Fiona 2003, Hashley 2004, Deborah 2004, Tracey 2004, Samantha 2005, Ellen 2005, Zoey 2006, Sam 2005, Ellen 2006, Caroline 2007, Julie 2007, Sonya 2008, Michelle 2006, Miss P 2009, Kim, Anne, Joanne… to name a few!



It’s not just another day! It’s not just another death!”



 


“Here lay your hearts, your flowers, your book of hours,



Your fingers your thumbs, your “Miss you Mum”s,



Here lay your hopes and dreams, your might have beens,



Your locks your keys, your mysteries.”