Awaiting the wait
NICOLAS Cage is a Hollywood star who has bought himself a gawky gift. Not a mansion, not a car, nor anything else of a flashy kind, neither to flaunt his money nor to flourish his fame. Nicolas Cage has bought himself a mausoleum in Louisiana, which would serve as his final resting place. Great minds think ahead of time. My man Cage has thought of his death.
In Africa, legend has it that elephants also do something like this. When the elder elephants know their death is imminent, they leave their herds and travel to a place called the Elephant Graveyard. H. Rider Haggard writes about it in King Solomon's Mines.
Studies also reveal that when elephants come across skulls and ivory, they get emotional. The pachyderms are capable of recognising their relatives from mortal remains. Chimpanzees, who have rituals concerning their dead, only abandon the bodies when they begin to decompose. Lions have an unappetising way of showing their appetite for dead family members. They sniff or lick the body prior to devouring it.
Nicolas Cage has done nothing of that sort. He has neither shown emotions for others, nor done it to commemorate the memories of anyone of his ancestors. He has only shown his prescience for death, and knowing that it's unavoidable, he has found himself a burial place.
One can ask questions. What if his body is destroyed after his death? What if his body is never found? What, in that case, is going to be laid to rest in that mausoleum? Will it still be his final resting place? "After me, deluge," said French monarch Louis XV. The Hollywood actor has at least bothered to figure out something.
But his choice of a mausoleum is interesting. Perhaps he wants to map out something in the unknown terrains of death. Perhaps he wants to go with the knowledge of what will happen to his body once he is gone. Not an unlikely concern. Many of us have to worry about parking before driving our cars in this city. Right?
In Hinduism, the car is done away with after the passenger arrives at the destination. Dead bodies are burned on the pyre, the ashes of illustrious ones sprinkled into rivers and oceans. The final resting place is to return from ashes to ashes.
Parsis leave their dead in the Tower of Silence for vultures to eat. Many Parsis are beginning to doubt whether months of putrefaction amounts to a death with dignity. Besides, India's diminishing vulture population is posing a threat to this age-old practice. In 2008, newspapers reported how the Parsis of Kolkata had rejoiced after a few vultures were spotted on the city's skyline after a long absence. Dead bodies were decomposing and polluting the air due to the shortage of these scavenging birds.
These stories are amazing. Ensembled, they tell us something about life itself. Freud determined that we don't have a concept of death and dying until the age of eight. But it's believed that death doesn't hit us before fifty, when the chilling realisation hits us that the largesse of life is running out. And, it's running out fast.
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying tells us that we should die peacefully, especially if the cause of death is the exhaustion of our natural lifespan. It describes that a human being is like a lamp, and death is when it has run out of oil. Every moment lived is every moment died. Life culminates in death.
Man seeks renewal in the midst of this erasure. Mughal emperor Babur prayed to God that his son Humayun's life be spared in exchange of his own. The father died shortly after the son got well. Man makes concessions and promises, and he bargains with God, confesses his wrongdoings, and asks for forgiveness. He wants to buy more time, even begging at times for another chance to live.
The tinseltown titan has bought himself a mausoleum because he accepted the end. Most men die before they reach eighty, which is a fraction of the average lifespan of tortoises, vultures, plants and trees. A 255-year-old giant tortoise named Aditya died at the Calcutta Zoo in 2006. It had been brought to India from the Seychelles Islands in the mid-18th century as a gift to the British colonial ruler Robert Clive.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells us in No One Writes to the Colonel: "He who awaits much can expect little." The pursuit of life is pursuit of death. This is where Nicolas Cage gets creepy. Some flies last only a couple of days, while a termite queen can survive thirty years. Cage has bought his grave, and he is pushing forty-six. Older people know. When one is awaiting the wait, it makes the wait even more awaiting.
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