On our way to Syracuse, could hardly believe my eyes and good fortune, caught a glimpse from the road over well taller than me walls. The cimentero de Avola, partly of a sort frequent in Italy, lovely contemporary elaborate mausoleums of a dazzling ornateness that leaves one marveling. But alongside were massive concrete angular assertive two level blocks, brutalist crypts instantly legible in their reverence and stolid permanence of beloved memory.
Walked around reading the names, unable to quite picture the lives, but eager to acknowledge the shared traverse through time to arrive at these geometric verses to forever.
I’m gripped by the modernist monumentality, clarity of grief and hope distilled into materiality. Plastic flowers, LED lamps that shine amber after sunset which we would cheer on the way back, industrial ladders that might be made in a factory for the purpose of painting a lintel yet now enable family members to scale to the higher portals where their relatives are interred. The open breezeways as vestibules are perfect for the Sicily heat.
In the end I am thinking of life as the local temporary coalescence of complexity, a non-equilibrium set point, all of us, all sentience. Thinking of the way that, in acknowledging the particular beauty of our death we hold on—there’s a energetic joy in it—we hold on by finding another fixity, a new proposition from which we spar with entropy.