Stories are for the Living

I spent a lot of my 20s among human remains. I studied Physical Anthropology and thus had to learn about the various methods and ways you can deploy to extract meaning from the material a human leaves behind once they stopped living. Our Institute had some rooms in a basement, its shelves full of carboard boxes, each holding at least one, and sometimes more than one person. At some point in the past, these remains were buried in the ground, put there by others, only to be dug out again, because the humans of today had to build a road over the graveyard of the past.

Our collection of bones was relatively small, but I also spend some time in larger collections. Rows and rows of people, all stacked upon each other, all archived and indexed. All meant to be examined and studied.

We know a lot of ways how to study a human skeleton. We know how to measure them, how look for signs of illness, or developmental anomalies. Sometimes you need to cut a bone apart, either to look at its insides, or to take a piece of it and reduce it to its mineral contents. From all of that data, we then construct a person. What gender they may have had, how old they were when they died. How much pain their teeth caused them. If they spend their lives where they were born, or if they came from somewhere else.

Construct enough people, and you can then construct a society and publish it in some Journal that no one is ever going to read.

When my mother died, I had two big emotional breakdowns.

The first happened when I received the news at 2 am on January 1st, 2018. The second happened later that day, after me and my brothers had been to her apartment and started to come to terms with what it means to organise a funeral for a human being. In that process I suddenly realized that everything in her apartment, that until very recently was a living record of who she was and the life she lived, is now waste. Strangers would come, tear everything apart and throw it way, to make space for whoever will move in after her.

The apartment after all, was rented.

My mother’s body was burned, her remains buried in a Forest. She once said that she liked the idea of being buried in a forest graveyard. Who knows if she still wanted that at the end, but it was impossible to ask her. If in a few hundred years, someone would dig out her remains, they would only find some of her teeth, though not many, and parts of her temporal bones.

People who taught me at University, claimed they’ve found a way to determine someone’s gender by shoving a piece of clay into the inner ear canal of a skeleton and measuring its angle. If it’s above a certain value, you’re a girl skeleton, if it’s below, you’re a boy. Gender is easy, when there’s barely anything left of you.

There was a time, where I found this very fascinating. Now I find it silly and I’m wondering how they would classify my mother, or how I would be classified.

They would probably not spend a lot of time with me, or my mother, since a singular skeleton really isn’t all that valuable. Only the collective Skeleton carries enough data to create meaning from it.

This changes however, should you happen to be buried underneath a pile of waste. Entire cultures have been defined by the type of pottery they left behind in their trash pits. Occasionaly weirdos scrape the insides of these pots and make bread with the yeast they find. They claim it’s the same yeast these old people have used, which makes the bread special. The waste connects us through time and space, or at least that’s what they think it does.

If you find a Skeleton among a lot of old waste, it is automatically inferred that the person in question was important. These Skeletons tend to not end up in a cardboard box on a shelve, destined to be measured by some underpaid and overworked Student.

There is this theory, that says that the purpose of a male Peacocks plumage is to display his health via opulence. You see, his immune system is so good, that he can "afford" to look the way he does. Only the good, and genetically healthy birds can do that. Those with the bad genes can’t and are thus destined to be forgotten.

As usual, the way we tend to describe the world around us, says more about our own obsessions than about reality.

Sure, Peacocks might also think that wastefulness is an indicator for desirability, but no Peacock has been seen running a factory, or has created a deathcamp for all the Peacocks with less than ideal plumages.

Capitalism loves waste. It shows in who it deems to be historically important and how it looks at and describes other animals. Everything will turn to nothing eventually, and Capitalism is deeply invested in making this process as efficient as possible. Everything is a resource that can be transferred into heat and profit.

The more perfect, the more efficient this process functions, the more perfect the world is, the closer we are to the human ideal. Capitalists claim that they hate wastefulness, when in fact waste is at the center of their ideology. For what is profit if not wasted human potential and energy? Instead of using all the resources at our disposal to improve the lives of everyone, Capitalists extract as much of it as possible, to ammass mountains of nothing. They believe that the value of a life is proportional to the amount of refuse it leaves in its wake.

We all might turn to waste, once our lives end and some of us might end up in a cardboard box on a shelve somewhere in a few hundred years. The sad reality of life is that it ends eventually. But life itself is not defined by the waste you leave in your wake. It is the stories we tell each other. The evenings we spend talking in the kitchen, while preparing dinner. It’s the kitchen cabinets with the strangely crooked doors. It’s the Moments where we, together, imagine a world that isn’t ruled by the Kings of Garbage.

Capitalists believe that by turning the world and everything beyond it to waste, their bones won’t end up in an unmarked cardboard box. That by burying themselves under mountains of waste, they get to decide whose story is told.

What they don’t understand is that the stories are for the living, and waste is for the dead.

To embrace capitalism, is to embrace waste and death. To reject capitalism is to embrace live. As insurmountable and complete as Capitalisms victory might seem sometimes, it will never be truly complete, as long as life continues.

Everything will end at some point, most likely and once it does, it will turn to waste. To be forgotten, or repurposed, but its story will end. This is true for everything, including Capitalism. And when it eventually does end, no one will be there to weep for its demise.