Conversational Outline

We can stuff them full of botox and stick them full of collagen. But whatever their wrinkle quota may be by the time their lives have finished, human bodies will biodegrade. Back into the earth. Like wood. And so even if your life had been different, even if you'd died in your own bed of old age, you still wouldn't have escaped death in the end, even if you'd been able to outrun natural elements run amok.

I can't help but believe, despite the lack of evidence and the scoffs about naivety from some societal corners, that death has no sting, that it's a door. Is that what you found? Whether or not we find that is true, none of us gets to escape the physical fadeout that must occur before we know either nothing or something.

Marble, stone and bronze stands strong across centuries, across millennia even. In 1709, an Italian farmer sank a well and in the process hit upon a marble sculpture that existed in the town next to yours, at the time that you lived. Buried 1630 years before and forgotten. That farmer was sinking for that well exactly 309 years previous to me writing these words. We sure do have a lot of space between us, you and me, don't we?

In recent years I saw a touring exhibition that showed many objects from your town. The space between you and me equals green patina on bronze. The things I saw were owned by rich people. Would you have had any possessions to even put in one of the glassed-in display cabinets that showed how your rich people lived? They were pretty cashed-up by the looks, the lucky ones. Not like you. I saw spoons and measuring devices and beds and frescoes. I saw busts and cooking ovens and plaster casts of a bread loaf carbonised within one of those ovens.

Those things were all interesting. But they were just stuff, in the end. What pricked my heart most of all was seeing you. But not even you. The plaster cast outline of you. The imprint from your body was left embedded in the ash after your skeleton was removed. How strange it is that even with just an outline of your body, I know exactly what you were trying to do on 24 August 79AD. You were trying to escape.

Some of us die without leaving behind any sort of imprint. I don't know what the imprint of your life was on the people you knew. Did you have enemies? Did someone love you? Did you yearn for someone? I bet in a million years you never would have thought you'd leave behind the kind of imprint you actually did.

I don't know if any volcanic eruptions will feature in my demise, but however it happens I'm not going to survive my own life either. It just seems impossible that I will one day be gone, even though I can see it happening before my eyes in slow, slow motion, the slow downward sag, my skin drawn to the earth that in an earlier time I would have been buried in but which more likely will be a small box, in a wall. Then, both of us will have burned.

All of those gods you guys had, Bacchus and his ilk, Victory and hers. Plastered all over the joint. We have different sorts of gods these days. We were invited to indulge in the worship of our main one out in the gift shop after the exhibit.

The culture of my direct ancestors only really has a leftover god now. Mythology is as necessary as water so long as you enter into the story. We're of rather a too literalist bent these days to reap the rewards of swimming around inside mythological stories. This particular mythology had a man at its centre who claimed he was a god, or from God. According to the story he was killed for that, amongst other things. He said the kingdom of heaven was near to all, as close as everyone's heartbeat. The literalists have drilled his story down into the usual one of control and fearmongering and hell avoidance so it doesn't do us much good these days. Dualistic divisions of heaven and hell. Culturally speaking, this story now has as much life as a Bacchus marble bust.

I do think it's much more difficult for us in my time to understand we are going to die. We have so many baubles and trinkets that keep us diverted from even needing to contemplate uncomfortable ideas. Things you would not believe. It would seriously boggle your mind. I watched a plane fly overhead as I drove in a car last night and either of those things would probably scare the shit out of you if you appeared beside me now, out of context. So much has changed and yet, as they say, I bet so much has most likely remained the same. Human nature is still the same but I wonder if it was as hard for you to remember who you were as it is for us right now. We have become endumbed by our masses of information, smothered by the fragmentation of the 10 billion things and the abstraction of bodies which move through space and time. We look at ourselves in the mirror and forget who were are five minutes later.

A video at the exhibition was a reconstruction of exactly what happened when the volcano erupted. How on earth did your people not even have a word for "volcano"?

It could be easy for us perhaps to presume that we are so much more enlightened than you, that you were a bit dimmer than we. Forgive us that. Our era blinds us. I imagine there would be more than one viewpoint from which you would be able to see us as a bunch of dullwits who mistake quantity for quality. We tend to think we're at the top of the perch, despite the fact that we can't even begin to find answers to wed our economy to our ecology, despite the fact that we don't even know how the hell the pyramids and Maccu Picchu were constructed by such technologically unenlightened beings as our experts inform us existed then. You guys had running water and inside toilets and so what if you didn't have wifi or Facebook or encyclopedias or bachelor degrees? So what if you believed in a panoply of gods? We believe in a global economy. And the stuff we have made is dismantling us from each other and so truly, how far have we really come? In the end it's all still about the same old shit but with a different backdrop - power and privilege and blindness and the corruption and the beauty of human nature.

Your doctors had instruments remarkably like the ones we have now. They performed skull operations. They knew to boil their instruments in water and they extracted morphine from opium.

The time we live in now is full of shadows and outlines in some ways. Our culture is rather a baby sort of a culture. I think yours was too, from the looks. The empire model that we share, despite cosmetic adjustments, makes babies out of people. How close was hope to your life? Did the rhythm of life following death following life flow through yours? We tend to follow a life-death model here with nothing coming afterwards. Its unsurprising that capitalism flowed from such a linear view. Hope evades us here often, with so many things we once thought were solid now fragile, their insides hollowed out. But many of us still hope, even if only to ourselves and even when it feels dumb and stupid, that the strangely pointed, abstracted age in which we now bewilderingly find ourselves burmning will not have the last word.

The crevice that once contained your now-decomposed body had plaster poured into it by an archaeologist called Guiseppe Fiorelli. This was 151 years after that farmer first sank a well and hit upon the theatre at Herculateum. The discovery of that town led to the discovery of yours. The archeologist poured in plaster and out came you and the others in all your imprinted horror. The agony on your poor faces.

I saw the woman whose tunic had ridden up her back because she was stuffing it in her mouth trying to escape the ash and the fumes. And I saw you, the outline of you. Were you a prisoner, or were you a slave? What sort of a life had you led that led to the fetters round your ankles, the ones that stopped your escape after your owners had fled?

That volcano, old Mount Vesuvius, has done a lot of damage over the centuries that exist between you and me. Did you know there are three million people living within its vicinity now? It erupted massively in 1906 and killed 100 people and buried nearby towns. The most recent one was 1944. There was a war going on then. The volcano destroyed a few more towns and a bunch of bomber planes to boot, things of metal that fly in the air when we war against each other, which is often.

Ahhh, World War II. Would it have horrified you, who lived in an era that admitted its penchant for violence more openly than ours? We like to project our inner urges for violence on to everybody else. The people of your era watched gladiators maul unarmed men, or men attack beasts for sport. That war is probably one of the biggest things to arouse cynicism about the future of the human race in recent times. The whole Hitler thing, mass mob hallucination. The atomic bomb that killed more people in a couple of drops than your volcano has done in its entire history.

Our big-time toys, bigger than your shields and bayonets, up the level of mistrust. And it's not just the destructive stuff like bombs and planes and ICBMs. It's the other toys too like Facebook and computers and mobile phones, all the innocuous stuff that keeps us away from each other. But the ICBMs add that nice little green shade of paranoia to everything. I really wish the make-peace-internally-so-you-can-make-it-outwardly idea of the man-god had caught on a bit more, instead of what has transpired in between you and me. Like, scrap the whole dumb god sending everyone to hell bit and turn and face instead all those suggestions that the best religion must be based on owning your own shit and not pouring it out on others. Perhaps next millennia.

Peace is a hard proposition these days. We are so fucking fragmented now, so alienated from each other, from ourselves. So paranoid. I guess thats why I find it easier to talk to you as an outline than I would if you were standing in front of me. The tears welled up seeing your outline, but would I cry so hard at your death in person? If you stood before me with all the stupid little fucked-up bits that go into making up a human, I would be tempted to fear you, dislike you, distance you in my mind and my heart because of your ability, because of your humanity, to scare me and wound me. Regardless of whether you were a prisoner or a slave or a rich free man.
Distance of time and space gives safety. We can love him as the King of Pop again when he's Whacko Jacko no more. The daily round of anxiety grinds us like metal against metal against each other, all of these defences that keep the status quo in place. Sometimes you need a few millennias worth of distance, a green patina, to feel the connection underneath the fire and the ash.