Digging Up Bones

Alright ya goblinheadz, I know its been awhile and the crew pines for the return of THE goblin, but lets not stand on ceremony. Let’s talk about bones.

Why bones? Its macabre for summer. Bones are a winter affair, even though the common cliche to qualify them is “sun-bleached.” Leave the morbid for dreary weather. Contemplate all the murky, icky things when the rain pours down and the fire burns hot.

Sometimes shit defies its corresponding aesthetic. We unearth skeletons under friendly skies. You’re shovel strikes a bit of soft dirt, you tear away at a garbage bag, find a bit of felt, continue to remove dirt, unearthing a skeleton. The bones, old, anonymous, come from the earth with a grateful sigh. Grateful, for despite the cool comfort of the earth, there is the opportunity to once again converse among people.

Ya goblinheadz, the goblin finds himself occupied with scattered, rattling, clacking bones. Bones buried in the sand, just waiting for the unlucky bystander to stub his toe.

Its a recent obsession. I’ve collected bones in the past: random bones founds in strange places. My favorite came from a late night talk with my friend Ali. It was the end of the semester, and we were talking in the gazebo tucked back in the corner of the physical plant workshop. Perched on the weathered handrail, a vermin skull stared at us. I took it, named it Peter (after a professor I hated) and taped it to my car’s dashboard. After a bad break-up, I drove solo cross country. I would talk to Peter. I’d tell him my anxieties, tell him about the climbs I wanted to do, how I wanted to surf. Peter listened, and thought he could not directly speak, sometimes the light would catch his manilla surface in such a way to invoke the sensation of a response.

Peter played the sentinel until I flipped my car on Skyline Boulevard in Pacific Grove. He survived and now sits in the garage, watching my tools.

Played, survived, beared witness. Its a skull with personality. The personality, in this case, stems from a prolonged monologue. Its a bone, that while addling you with its coolness, maintains some vitality. It remains vibrant, still set on affecting the world - even if its just to redirect or absorb a little bit of sunshine. Its no wonder that Hegel said the skull-bone has the significance of “being the immediate actuality of spirit” (Phenomenology of Spirit, 200).

Whatever that means. Spirit, life, movement. Bones, while being objects that you hold in your hand, that you throw, that you bury, never settle with that tangible stasis of most things. Everything always moves. Nothing is static, but certain objects appear more static. This table, my brothers Creatine; they can evolve grotesque ideas and appear to move with their own will, but nothing seems so alive as bones. Skeletal vivacity: its why it makes so much sense for Hamlet to talk to poor Yorrick. The discourse between us and the dead never ends. Responsibility persists.

…

Why bones? Why now? On one hand, the world now witnesses another explosion of violence: the emergence of what Achille Mbembe calls the “politics of enmity.” Violence, always present, emerges in countless novel configurations. The bones I mention before, Yorrick and Peter, appear vibrant through their continued maintenance of individuality, identity. The fear, however, comes from the anonymity of the abyss. Expulsion from discourse. Death, so significant, rendered meaningless. Bones without spirit. Mbmebe touches on something similar while accounting for the plethora of massacres streaking across the 20th and 21st century:

In the case of massacres in particular, lifeless bodies are quickly reduced to the status of simple skeletons. Their morphology henceforth inscribes them in the register of undifferentiated generality: simple relics of an unburied pain; empty, meaningless corporealities; strange deposits plunged into cruel stupor. In the case of the Rwandan genocide - in which a number of skeletons were, when not exhumed, kept in a visible state - what is striking is the tension between, on the on hand the petrification of the bones and their strange coolness and, on the other, their stubborn will to mean, to signify something” (Necropolitics 87).

The general: quantity devoid of quality. Bones mixed together with no attempt to keep them included in the world - to continue fostering a sense of responsibility to them.

Violence reaches us at every corner. We are watching a genocide unfold and seeing the response be a tepid, disingenuous indignancy from the people directly funding it. Mbembe strikes something essential when considering the paradox between the “strange coolness” and “stubborn will” of bones. Despite the termination of life, the bone continues to persist - refusing to succumb to nothingness, requiring one to take responsibility.

Responsibility may be the crux of the matter. In her book Plastic Matters, Heather Davis artfully deconstructs conservation narratives that stake the claim of environmental preservation on the rights of future children. This “universal” child, as Davis writes, ends up figuring as white and able bodied: “It is by turning to the Child (figured as able-bodied, cisgendered, and white), who is imaginatively projected into a future that will serve as the beneficiary of our contemporary way of life, that present consumption is shortsightedly justified” (91). The Child - and the future in general - becomes a justification for the continuation of present modes of exploitation and violence. Justice becomes myopic: focused on ensuring the same right to consumption and violence as the present situation. What responsibility is neglected when one only considers the future?

I am not arguing for an overemphasis on individuality. Nor do I believe that exhumation and recognition alone will lead to collective liberation. Instead, I’m putting forth a type of responsibility not solely hinged on the future. By asking what is owed to the bones, we are asking a whole new sort of question that goes beyond asking what we owe ourselves. In Brothers Karamazov, both the Elder Zosima and Dmitri Karamazov conclude that everyone is guilty in front of everyone. I mention Brothers K, because the cited guilt appears in Donna Harraway’s “Staying with the Trouble.” Haraway, rather than focus on guilt, instead considers what responsibility is owed. Responsibility that forces one to remain alongside, and even die with, the muddled entanglements. Responsibility means to stay with the trouble. Responsibility means to reckon with the bones.

Bones ask us to be responsible to those that died - those that died hoping for liberation, hoping for something better. Its more than looking backward: its a long-sweeping glance, one which refuses to flounder on a myopic obsession with the future. How do you remain responsible to something - not here, but gone? Its one you have to answer everyday. You can’t be afraid of finding new bones.

Stay grateful to your bones, ya goblinheadz.