Lumbering into eternity

Sheldon riffs here on something I hadn't heard about but didn't have much trouble finding once I looked for it.

Actually, the seed isn't in the pod. The deal is that the tree gets planted on top of your pod and you just fertilize it, but that's a distinction without a difference and one of the few ideas I think the project gets right, because the whole thing falls further apart the deeper you get into it.

Which is to say that, beyond that detail, Arthur and Sheldon totally nail it: Becoming a tree won't guarantee your immortality.

In fact, within the grief-counseling community, there is a caution about planting memorial trees at schools and so forth because transplanted trees don't always make it and so now you've just killed the person again.

But even if they do make it, and even if they are not cut down and turned into decks, trees don't live forever, unless you choose a bristlecone pine, which, if you want it to live, would limit where you could be buried.

And I'm not sure a bristlecone wants as much fertilizer as you would provide. Perhaps an apple tree would be better, and here's a case in which that made the apple tree pretty close to immortal.

So either a bristlecone or becoming really famous and then being eaten would be ideal, if you don't just want a compact little stone.

And I would add that compact little stones don't necessarily last forever, either. I walk through a cemetery in the neighborhood that dates back to the early 1800s and the marble stones are pretty much etched away while the slate ones are falling apart. Go with granite.

The idea that burial plots should be forever untouched is not universal. In other places, other times, only major nobility got its own permanent spot, such that Ophelia was to be buried in the same place as a jester so recently dead that a 30-year-old prince remembered him. 

Now that we have done away with double-occupancy, however, the amount of space dedicated to graveyards is indeed a problem, but it's one that this scheme would make worse, not better.

(T)he overall goal is to create cemeteries full of trees instead of tombstones. Instead of a cemetery, these parks will be referred to as “memory forests.”

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that, in a world of city folks who are unclear on the origin of the pink stuff in the foam trays in the meat department, there is some confusion as well over how forests grow.

But, really, you don't have to know very much to know that you have to plant trees a certain distance apart if you expect them to live, even in a city park. Or, y'know, that they get bigger.

Your "memory forest" is going to be, what, eight or ten times as space-intensive as a field of headstones?

Unless you periodically thin it out and make decks.

Just imagine… a late husband and wife, sprouting new life side by side as two gorgeous trees. It truly adds beauty to the sadness of burying a loved one.

That worked once, but it took some divine intervention, which leads not to a Juxtaposition of the Day, but to a ... 

 

Juxtaposition of Viral Stuff

The woodpecker/weasel photo that was suddenly everywhere this week reminded me of a lovely Japanese folk tale I had retold a decade ago, mostly because bird in the illustration by Marina "Rinacat" Tay had the same color scheme, so I posted this link on Facebook.

It's worth the click. Rina commented that she remembered the project fondly and I replied that the series was one of my favorite artist/writer collaborations.

This tree-burial nonsense brings to mind another favorite project from the same year, once again a re-telling of folk tales, these from ancient Greece and Rome and illustrated by a college student named Dylan Meconis.

Since the stories are too long to tell both, I'll send you to the woodpecker one and post the more immediately relevant one here:

 

Philemon and Baucis were an old couple who lived in a tiny cottage in the land of Phrygia. They had little, but they had each other, and they never paused to think they could be unhappy, for they had, in each other, everything they could ever want.

One day, just as they were about to begin their modest dinner, an old man came to their door, with a younger man who seemed to be his son. “We are seeking shelter for the night,” the old man said, “but none of your neighbors will give us hospitality.”

Philemon and Baucis opened their door wide and invited the travelers inside. “Here is some bread and cheese, and some olives,” Baucis said, as she pulled out a bench for them to sit on. “We have already eaten, so please enjoy yourselves.”

The travelers could see that the loaf of bread was uncut, and the table had no bits of food to show that anyone had eaten dinner there, but they broke the bread and enjoyed the couple’s hospitality.

While they ate, Baucis took a small piece of meat from the larder and sliced it to cook for her guests, while Philemon mixed dark wine with water.

“This is only a very plain wine,” he apologized. “Not really fit for company, but I hope you will accept it.

As he drank from his own cup, however, he realized that it was very good wine indeed. “Well, each jug is a little different,” he said. “I think you have brought us luck, though, for this is far better than I had expected!’

The travelers smiled as Baucis brought out some fruit and nuts and placed them on the table. She went back to finish cooking the meat, and Philemon refilled their cups.

As he did so, he noticed something very strange indeed. Although it was only a very small jug, and he had already poured out several cups of wine, it was still quite full.

Philemon went out to the kitchen. “I do not know who these guests are,” he said to his wife, “but I think we must serve them our best.”

“We would do so, of course,” Baucis replied.

“I mean that we should make a special feast,” he said. “But we have nothing special at all, except the goose we had been saving.”

“If you feel we should serve them the goose, then we should,” Baucis replied. “You butcher it, and I will put on water to scald its feathers.”

Philemon went to the yard to catch the goose, but it flapped its wings and ran about, escaping the old man each time he was close to grabbing it.

At last the goose ran into the house, where it flew up onto the bench between the two travelers and laid its head on the older man’s lap, looking up at him as if to ask for his mercy.

Philemon stopped in the doorway, and Baucis froze where she had been about to put a plate on the table. They both stared at the goose, and then at the two travelers.

The young man laughed. “Your goose has given us away!”

And at that moment, the old couple realized they were in the presence of Jupiter and his messenger, Mercury. Philemon and Baucis fell to their knees and bowed down to the floor, but the gods reached down and gently pulled them to their feet.

“You have nothing to fear,” Jupiter assured them. “We came to see if it was necessary to destroy this wicked land. We wanted to meet its people for ourselves.”

“None of them would even speak to us,” Mercury said. “At each house we visited, they slammed the door in our faces, until we came here.”

“Come with us,” Jupiter said, and the two gods lead them outside, and then up the steep hill across from their cottage. As they walked, it began to rain, and as they climbed higher, the rain came faster.

At last, when they stood on the top of the hill, they looked back and saw that the entire valley was flooded, and all who lived there were surely drowned.

Philemon and Baucis wept, for even their wicked neighbors deserved some pity. But they saw their own cottage standing alone, dry and untouched amid the water.

And as they watched, it began to grow. Its mud walls turned to marble and its wooden posts turned to golden columns, and it grew larger until it was a great temple.

“Now,” Jupiter said. “What can we do to repay your hospitality? Name anything, and it is yours.”

“Only let us serve in that temple which was our home,” Baucis said. “We will be happy to devote our lives to your service.”

But Philemon had one more wish. “We have loved each other so many years,” he said. “Can you arrange it so that I never have to bury my dear wife, and that she will never have to see my death, either?”

Thus it was that Philemon and Baucis went to serve Jupiter in his temple for many long, happy years, until one day, Philemon looked at Baucis and saw that her face was growing brown and her fingers had grown long, and her hair was turning to green leaves.

As he saw this happening to her, she, too, saw it happening to him. They clasped their hands together, and Baucis said, “I love you, dear husband,” and Philemon, too, declared his love for her, just before the bark formed over their mouths.

And ever after, when pilgrims came to pray at the temple of Jupiter, they stopped outside to marvel at the two trees outside the temple doors, a linden and an oak growing from a single set of roots.

 

 

Comments

[Mark Jackson]

Fun fact: much of the tree's mass will be water, most of the rest will be carbon from the atmosphere. (Photosynthesis breaks apart carbon dioxide into carbon and oxygen; the oxygen is excreted - we breathe plant poop - but the carbon goes into building the plant.)

All the cadaver will contribute to the tree is some trace elements, a small fraction of the total tree.