(DE)CONSECRATED
Dawn Tefft
You will need to wear tennis shoes with nons-skid soles when you go down into the catacombs.
*
When you enter the catacombs, you go back nearly 45 million years to Lutetian limestone. The stairs wind endlessly. Your knees are nervous.
*
Descending into the catacombs is labor, but nothing compared to the labor of working in a quarry. You have never swung a sharp object into the rock over and over. Never strengthened the collapsing tunnels. Never transferred the Cemetery of Innocents down with your hands. Or come through years later and reorganized, arranging bones with an artist's eye.
*
You read words on plaques that you find more beautiful than the ones you normally find on plaques. You think of these plaques as a specific sort of poem.
*
Funerary décor. Ossuary. Deconsecrated.
*
When you were on the Irish island of Innis Mor to see the ancient fort Dun Aengus, you felt such a strong desire to physically connect with the stones that had survived so much time that you wanted to touch them with your tongue. In the catacombs, you reach out reverentially for the water dripping down walls. Life moving above and below and through. You lose your footing on the muddy rock as you walk slowly past moldy skulls that are beautiful in their greenery, past very old signs in French you cannot read.
*
At times, you think about sex.
*
You are strangely calm. Despite being claustrophobic in most situations, here you feel like you could keep moving slowly, breathing.
*
Though you take pictures with your phone and pay careful attention to graffiti and stickers, you feel like connectivity and plans no longer matter.
*
The urban art on rocks and relics make you feel at ease. You think of the many ways people are always claiming death is the biggest joke of all.
*
As far as stickers go, the Brussels Tattoo Convention is well represented.
*
Attendants all look depressed down in the catacombs. They sit silently in chairs, staring straight ahead as if they see nothing. Seemingly less alive than the fossilized humans they are meant to protect from the rest of us. A labor that is in some ways harder than mining.
*
You admit to touching more than one skull. You regret that you never put your tongue on the stones of Dun Aengus. How could you live with yourself if you truly respected the dead who respect nothing?
*
You find yourself repeatedly wondering what one does if one needs to go to the bathroom down in the catacombs.
*
The worst (and best) part of the catacombs is other people. They are loud and cracking jokes and speaking authoritatively and talking on phones. At turns they ruin your meditation and remind you that meditation is one half bullshit. You appreciate the reminder that bodies are made of shit and silliness.
*
When your knees nervously climb back up stairs and you wind up stepping out onto the street, you immediately see a store for buying stickers and shot glasses with skulls on them and postcards that say “Keep calm and remember you will die.” You buy a few of these things. The shoppers around you are already making plans for later.
*
“We have two-and-a-half cold beers back home. Stella Artois only counts as half.”
Author's Commetnary: "(De)Consecrated" is a lyric essay that I wrote in a cafe near the Paris Catacombs after ascending to the surface. It is a meditation on death that takes into account the material and historical conditions surrounding the creation of the Catacombs and their continued maintenance, the various psychological needs the Catacombs have served over the years, and the humor that is a constant companion to death and our attempts to process it.
Dawn Tefft has poems published in Fence, Denver Quarterly, Witness, and Sentence. Her chapbooks include Fist (Dancing Girl Press), The Walking Dead: A Lyric (Finishing Line Press), and Field Trip to My Mother and Other Exotic Locations (Mudlark). Her fiction and nonfiction appears or is forthcoming in Pleiades, PopMatters, Truthout, and The Account.
