This is a photo from the Sedlec Ossuary, a chapel beneath a church located in a cemetery in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutna Hora in the Czech Republic. According to Wikipedia, the ossuary contains—in many ways, is built from—the bones of between 40,000 and 70,000 people. At the risk of imprecision, the bulk of those skeletons are from people who died in the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century.

It would be an error greater than imprecision to put COVID-19 on par with the Black Death (though perhaps some might say it’s still new, give it time), but when I didn’t have an image at hand for today’s blog post (nor an idea what to write about), I scrolled through the photos I’ve been moving around from computer to computer since about 2000 when people started giving me digital copies of their photos, and the series of photos from the Bone Church, which is how I remember referring to it when I was in the Czech Republic in 2003, seemed like something I could work with.

I’m not going to pretend to have any grand statement worth making, but a few thoughts come to mind. 

One of the frustrating things about the ossuary, and I remember thinking this at the time, is how difficult it is to find an image that comes anywhere close to capturing what it felt like there. I’ve looked online and had the same thought about those images, so it’s not simply that the photos I have in my library were taken by amateurs. Pictures of bones and the presence of bones have different effects on the nervous system.

I’m looking for the right words to say this, but what I saw in the chapel was evidence of a people taking their history for what it is. The Black Death is not viewed here as a crucible that helped forge the true nature of the Czech people, a trial that would test their mettle, even prepare them for their destiny. Nor is the plague underplayed. It was devastation, and the bone church—plus innumerable statues in Prague and likely elsewhere—reflect this. 

I think of so many of our memorials—with the sublime exception of the Vietnam War Memorial, which immediately came to mind—and they seem so sentimental. How difficult it is to sit with the fact that a horror happened here, and not want to turn it into a call for patriotic unity or justice for the victims or a crucial but necessary sacrifice for the greater good.

But then I think: these sentimental turns are almost a favor, because they are often what allow us to turn our skeptical eye toward the unstated assumptions, toward a consideration of how the status quo is served, rather than have to face horror without the cushion of irony.

And of course I wonder what kind of memorial we’ll be able to create—perhaps already are creating—in the wake of our current pandemic, assuming we even want to. Will it necessarily be earnest because it’s in the nature of that kind of thing? What power structure will it serve to perpetuate? Can irony be baked in? Is it even possible today for irony to be set aside? 

It also occurred to me that in some ways we’re lucky that an incompetent administration was not able to effectively capitalize on the novel corona virus the way a previous, slightly less incompetent administration was able to capitalize on the September 11, 2001 attacks.

This ossuary seems (again, thanks to Wikipedia) to have taken centuries to create, so my pondering is almost certainly premature. But time does move quicker now, and in some ways, imagining a future memorial might be a way to better understand what we’re going through. How do we even want this time to be remembered? Because right now what I feel more than anything else is a thorough but gradual grinding down… of what, I’m not even sure. I’ve also experienced a loss of the middle term—there is ‘after this is all over’ and the slow brutalities of today and nothing in between. And ‘after this is all over’ is starting to feel more and more like a fantasy. Not that there won’t be an after, because I don’t doubt there will be, but rather that it’s nearly impossible to project who I will be by that point.

It’s probably not coincidental that I reconfigured the machine for this month’s lecture. I am unsettled, not routed by life in the pandemic, but slowly ceding ground. For anyone who’s made it this far in this post, I would love to host a lecture of your creation. Maybe these lectures might be an ulna or a mandible in some yet-to-be-imagined memorial to our pandemic.