Veritas & Beauty

I love jogging around the Calvary cemetery. My roommate finds it eery but eerily I don’t. There’s something soothing about the vastness, some kind of an unconquerable gentle defeat. The feeling you get when you’re struck with awe at nature’s gravitas. The moment you jolt in the middle of your breath and your limbs freeze because nature supreme hits you in the gut as it passes by nonchalant and ever so graceful. Quietly. Gently. Without hesitation. Without stopping for your existence. Isn’t that why we all travel? In search for this grandeur?

I haven’t had these kind of moments in quite a while. It’s true that it’s harder in New York. Buildings everywhere and not enough nature, true. But it’s that 24/7 chugging along state of mind that gives you no headspace or leeway for these moments to interject. Unless you have a car and can go hiking without having to spend 4 hrs to and fro on Amtrak. (Call me let’s be friends.) But I’m sure it’s all around me and everywhere if I pause enough to look up. Or look around.

Since we’re stuck where we are because of Covid, how can we increase these moments of discovery in our usual routines and vicinities? How can we — how do we push the boundaries of our bodies to go beyond habitual, lived patterns and routes without having to fly all the way to Kenya to find awe?

I’ve seen many skies in many different places but here it’s like no other. There’s that quintessential new frontier, the wild wild west, rustic soil in the air kind of way about it. In South Korea, where I’m from, the smog from China has settled in and crisp clouds are becoming a rarity.

The Calvary Cemetery was purchased in 1845. So you can see the dead all the way from 19th, 20th to 21st century. It seems families bury in lineage, names stacking on top of each other. The deeper the grave, taller the monument, more exorbitant the price of inhumation becomes.

Death is never buried in the sky. How curious the grieving will pay more to erect a higher Mary to look over the dead who sleeps deep under the ground we walk on.

I spotted couple of beheaded saints. Are they meant to be carrying on the loving memory of the dead? Or to witness the dying of generations to still live on and protect the dead through hundreds of years? Yet their castration is morbid. Half living and half dead. Meant to live beyond human’s lightness of being while in the semblance of our bodies. Why are they in human form when clearly their role is to be the gods, the victor over death? Maybe to remind the living that the line between flesh and ashes is a very fine one. The line between deities and mortals is the two sides of a coin.

As I took one last sweeping look, an imagination came to me of a world of heavenly living and hellish living coexisting in the same dimension but in different planes — like two sides of a coin.

I will be in my same body, same name, same feelings, same situations, same desires, rejections, opportunities, struggles. In hellish living, I will bury my head in the ground (or the phone — the modern grave) and let the walls cave in as I walk out of the cemetery.

But in heavenly living, I let myself be seized by awe and stand still to take in something greater that is outside myself. To place my stress and worries on the tails of these clouds that move faster and farther than I ever will. And to let them drift away to where they will go. And I’ll walk out of the cemetery with a deep sense of comfort that my life is minuscule and that is fine.

It’s almost midnight now as I wrap up for the day. I wonder if our ears have dimmed to being discovered by potential notes of our desires that extend beyond our imagination. Just like how we have crammed too much in our lives that we miss being discovered by magnificent mise en scene. We ourselves might have tightened the contours of potential that we live in a 1x1 cell. We think we do the discovering — that it’s our responsibility and ours alone. What if it’s the other way around? How does it feel to be discovered? I want more of that twang of a contrabass that breaks this inertia and wakes me from atrophy. I think today was that.