The Bones of Things

There is something morbidly comedic about the basement of a chapel in the Czech countryside that has been decorated with bones.  Human bones.  Lots and lots of human bones, in fact.  The comedy might come from the legend of the half-blind monk who was first put in charge of "taking care of the bones" (he formed them into a crypt, naturally) because he really wasn't suited to anything else. It could also come from the family crest made entirely of aforementioned bones that hangs on the "wall" there.  On it, there is a human bone bird eating the eye out a human bone King skull.  It's weird- but so cartoonish and absurd that it becomes gloriously macabre.

Either way both morbid, funny, and morbidly funny.

The Sedlec Ossuary itself is an unusual place- where people throw coins in the empty eye sockets of the long dead.  As though they think these skulls have some amazing supernatural power. As if.

As though if we wish on or to the dead, we are somehow tricking the spirit world into forgetting us a little longer- or at least bribing them to.

But then the Bone Chapel is really just a function of it's location.

There are a lot of bones in the Czech Republic.  Bones of buildings, ghostly bones of societies. Wooden bones of dancing, dangling marionettes, metal bones of window bars- metal bones of selfie sticks dropped, tossed, or trashed (thank you for not shoving that in front of my face, annoying self-involved tourist). It's bones on top of bones here: democracy, communism, monarchy; revolution, spring, boldness, sourness of time.  I find myself looking at everything here in terms of skeletal structures: as though the city itself is skin: strong yes, but sloughed off every so often.

I look at the ground here as I walk- in part because I trip all the time on crooked cobblestones and in part because I am thinking all feet, all the tiny phalanges and metatarsals, that have hit this particular pavement before me.  And of how many will after.

I think about who the bones of Prague- Praha, who the bones of Sedlec, and all the hundreds of millions of bones spread around the countryside and slumbering in cemeteries, belong to.  Who keeps them, whose they were, whose they will be as time passes.  Who will take care of the bones that built this place?  Who will remember it all?  All the bones, all the stories, all the ages and faces?  All the time, the history, and passion?

Yes, Prague makes me think about bones.  But why is that so morbid (and it is)? Bones are the pieces of us that are left the longest once we no longer are.  Bones are the proof of history, of living, of the passage of time and migration of place.  They are the strength of the body- moreso than muscle and flesh- because they are the structure, the foundation, the solidity at the core of it.

But yeah.  Still morbid.

And Until Next Time.