This is not a tombstone. And yet it is not not a tomb stone. There is a space, that is.
More precisely, it is a sepulchral boulder, a phrase my partly Italian brother-in-law proposes, looking over my shoulder at the screen, at the words masso avello. The boulder is technically an erratic: a rock brought to its current resting place by glacial displacement. This particular erratic is marked by a bathtub-shaped hollow, carved by an unknown people for a person unknown. The name of the people has fallen between the cracks, as it were, between the fall of an empire and the arrival of its barbarians. I am not in a position to speculate about the group, but I find myself trying to imagine the individual. Person unknown: the purpose of the phrase, inversion and all, was to evoke the discourse of murder but I now see that the evocation involves a slippage. Person unknown is the absent perpetrator, not the missing victim, as should be the case here.
The person was not a nobody, or there would be no grave. But now there is no body. (Italics, in this case, indicate the intentionality of the space.) The absence of a body gives me room to imagine, or to remember, figures from literature and history or something in between. The shape of the space determines my choice of figures.
Let me single out two: A and M. A comes home from the war—but when is the war ever over? Something, says a seer quoted by the chorus of a Greek tragedy named for A, has stayed behind at home, something terrifying. . . an anger that remembers. Recall that A killed his daughter I, to make the winds favourable for his fleet, to make the war possible. This daughter, naturally, was never his alone. She, I, came from the womb of a C, in the usual transliteration. She, C, lays a trap for her husband, their daughter’s killer. Against his better judgment, A steps onto the red carpet she has laid for him, a fabric dyed purple, to be more precise. To incarnadine, if you will, such a quantity of cloth, you would need countless sea snails and a multitude of laborers. There is the sea, says C, and who shall drain it dry? My partly Hungarian professor notes the hubristic conspicuousness of this consumption, the economic and environmental violence of this waste. Making A complicit in this obscenity, C leads him to the fulfilment of his deeper guilt, trapping him in the cloth before stabbing him in his bath. We do not see this death, only hear.
Meanwhile, millennia later, M comes home from the revolution—but when is the revolution ever over? Like A, M is a leader of men, but much of his leadership takes the form of journalism. M writes one of the most influential periodicals of the French revolution, The People’s Friend, in which he calls on the people to enact justice against their enemies. Outraged at seeing the representatives of the nation in league with its deadliest enemies and the laws serving only to tyrannize over the innocent. . ., M calls on the people to . . .mete out justice for themselves. A woman, C, holds M responsible for the massacres of this period, and kills one man to save a hundred thousand. She claims that in killing this individual, she has acted as an individual: I alone conceived the plan and executed it. The execution involves a ruse: C gains entry into M’s house with an offer of inside information on a coming uprising. Troubled by a skin condition, M has been conducting his business from a medicinal bath. C stabs him in the bath.
A and M. C and C. The names may be obvious by now: Agamemnon / Marat. Clytemnestra / Corday. Beyond the gender of the active and passive parties, beyond the location of the murders, the parallels only go so far. Even so, the idea of the parallel is hardly ridiculous: travelling from Caen to Paris to kill Jean-Paul Marat, Charlotte Corday took with her a copy of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.
This is not Marat /Agamemnon. That is, what I am writing now, what you are reading in another now, is not ultimately about those individuals and their perverted sacrifices—those over which they presided or those to which they were subjected. To some readers, that pair of names, joined by a slash, would immediately register a riff on Marat / Sade, the popular name of the German play whose full title is, in translation: The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade.
This is about what is not a tombstone, about the shape of a space that once held the body of somebody who was not nobody. Erratic mass in this context need not evoke the soteriological stakes of a perverted sacrifice. It could simply refer, in an incomplete calque of the Italian phrase, to a wandering boulder. Glacial erratic / il masso erratico / le bloc erratique / der Findling.
My partly Italian brother-in-law informs me of a German aphorism, from Lichtenberg: Er las immer Agamemnon statt »angenommen«, so sehr hatte er den Homer gelesen. My partly Hungarian professor reminds me that in Homeric Greek, the semantic range of the word sēma contains sign, signal, symbol as well as tomb, specifically tomb of a hero. As the phrase hero stone surfaces in my own mind, I recognize it as the calque of a compound closer to my own home: Tamil vīrakkal.
In my ignorance, an ignorance I apparently share with archaeologists, I cannot read the masso avello as a sēma, or as a vīrakkal. It is not even a tombstone—if a tombstone is something vertical, jutting out of the ground, making sense by making reference to an individual whose reach extends beyond the grave.
Trapped in the bathtub image, I realize that my parallels are flawed at a formal level. The tomb-word, avello, does derive from a Latin bath-word. But I have no idea what Agamemnon’s bath looked like, and I know that Marat’s medicinal tub did not have the shape of the sepulchres, the shape I have been thinking of as bathtub. You would not know from looking at David’s painting, The Death of Marat, but the real tub is shaped like a boot. Perhaps it is material, not just shape, that makes me align David with Aeschylus: Marat, stabbed in the bath, is already shrouded in an abundance of fabric.
Red factory / rot fabric. Remember, Clytemnestra speaks of the sea as if it is an endless source of dye. To Cassandra, the house reeks of the grave, the grave of Agamemnon even before his death.
Mondegreen/ Soramimi. I know that Rotefabrik, the site of this magazine’s production, does not mean rot fabric. But I feel as if the hollowing out of the German word into English nonsense made space for something meaningful, something uncanny, to resurface from the Greek play.
Matters of state / states of matter. Before he was a revolutionary publicist, Marat was a scientist. He tried to demonstrate that fire was igneous fluid. The body of Marat was still warm, it seems, when Madame Tussaud made his death mask. The half-smile gives the contorted face a strange calm, like that of a Bodhisattva, as do the half-open eyes. The funeral mask known as The Mask of Agamemnon likewise has the hint of a smile. But instead of half-open eyelids, we have two pairs of lids: one open, the other closed.
Raindrop / drop-top. Closing my eyes, I hear the hook of a trap hit. This is not a mishearing, only a misuse. Maybe all my play on tombs has been inappropriate appropriation.
Raindrop / drop-top. The phrase seems like an unlikely juxtaposition of nature and culture, until you stop to think, to feel.
The tomb in the woods by the lake has lost its lid.
It fills as the rain falls.
Aditya Menon is a graduate student in Comparative Literature
at Harvard University.