from Jeffrey O'Malley: "Starlight Ossuaries & Flesh Gardens"

In her essay on the death of her husband, “The Disappearance Approach,” Susan Howe recalls that she once “read that… language attaches to and envelops its referent without destroying or changing it—the way a cobweb catches a fly” (31). Lapses in memory abound as words cover objects, people, places, and we forget that we ever remembered. Lapses, lapis, lapsus, careful not to trip on that stone. In my tradition, the dead bones of holy people are encased in stones and placed in altars awaiting consecration. Otherwise, we display them in glass containers. Stone covers bone or glass envelops bone. Bone as object and stone/glass as envelope/cobweb. Some cobwebs ossify so that we forget why we ever applied a word to its container. The second-century Roman grammarian, Aulus Gellius, records one such instance in his collection of fragments, Attic Nights, on which a reconstructed temple in ancient Rome could not be realized because of the obstructing underground presence of favisae, a Latin word whose etymology was unknown, then as now, to the author. The story goes that these favisae were pits that contained broken and otherwise decommissioned statues and sacred objects, many of which had been cast from currency that had been removed from circulation. Web of stone, impedimenta, defaced currency, hidden from sight, nevertheless obstructive. What to make of disruptive reservoirs that hold objects, stones, relics, currency, fallen from use, secreted away, that still hold power over our current and future plans? The Hebrew scriptures point to a bone called luz, meaning nut or almond, that retains the soul, indestructible, after death. I can’t help but mishear the Spanish word for light in luz. Bones, almonds, seeds, gardens, the night sky: side chapels, altars, cisterns: starlight ossuaries and flesh gardens.