The college that I attend, a small liberal arts institution somewhere in the Midwest - it isn't important where, suffice it to say that it's in a slightly charming suburb of a city reputed to be distinctly lacking in local charm - is noteworthy for the prettiness of its mostly modern campus. Most of the buildings aspire to the beauty of their older, more distinguished Ivy League elders. They borrow the architecture of an earlier time, a time when architects all tried to copy the genius of Sir Christopher Wren. There are very few boring buildings on campus, even though most of the dormitories and many of the academic buildings have only been inhabited for two or three decades - four at most. There's none of the formal ugliness that seems to so often follow on the Brutalist heels of the post-war building frenzy.

   The main student center, Strosacker Union, is a tasteful example of neo-colonial architecture, borrowed perhaps from Williamsburg, Virginia. There's a replica of the Liberty Bell in front of a nearby dormitory, which of course is called Heritage.

   Everything is borrowed.

   Borrowed as well is the college arboretum - there isn't really a campus arboretum, or even a campus golf course, but there's a nearby metro park that suffices, and really, the metro park is very nice, probably much nicer than anything the college could come up with. For one thing, it's huge. It's part of a park system that has been nicknamed the "emerald necklace," and theoretically a student with too much time on her hands could tootle through the parks for miles until she'd made a giant loop around the city. This is all quite nice.

   Somewhere near the local metro park, there is a pioneer graveyard that I like to visit. I've only just discovered it, and I am pleased with myself for having stumbled on this graveyard during one of my daily walks. I find my graveyard time to be very comforting. I don't think there's anything unusually morbid about my fondness for graveyards; I simply find them peaceful, reassuring. I almost want to say, There's a presence in a graveyard that needs my homage, but I know that's a superstition. Does there have to be a reason behind my fondness for a place that's been taken over by monuments to the dead? In earlier, more civilized times, we humans as a race accepted death, and did not try to avoid cemeteries, except during those embarrassing and emotionally overwrought ceremonies called funerals. We used to visit our graveyards on a daily basis. Along the Via Appia, by the entrances to the catacombs and other tombs, there were benches where people could sit and eat lunch with their dead relatives, who no doubt (in the public mind, anyway) were lonely for the company of the living.

   There's quite a lot of the pagan in me, universalist latitudinarian that I am. I like the company of dead people whose names I do not recognize. I would say, I like my ancestors, but since I have been cut off from my family, strangers suffice. On pleasant days I take my homework to the graveyard and sit near an ancient pine tree that is bordered on three sides by the broken remains of pioneer tombstones. Now, when the days are usually rainy or snowy and the little purple wildflowers that speckle the ground will soon perish in the frost, transient like all living things (are all wildflowers found in graveyards so small and delicate?) I must leave my books behind. It's too cold to sit on the muddy ground. I wear my boots and pace around in patterns as if I am winding my way through a monastery cloister. There is peace in my agnostic, confused heart. I have the trappings of religion, the orthopraxy, without the orthodoxy of fervent belief. It's almost as peaceful as clicking rosary beads. I wear black, and were my black trappings not the leathery insult to straight society that they are, I might almost look like a religious figure. The cold rain falls on dying leaves. Peaceful: to die, to sleep, to quiet the ego in a circuit of cloister-walking.

   Perhaps, after all that, after the pacing and the exorcizing of emotional woe, perhaps there is something morbid in my fascination with tombs. Like many of my family, half of whom are of Eastern European descent, I am superstitious. I carry a little of my ancestral past wherever I go. I have a vial of graveyard dirt, a little piece of ancient earth, a direct link: an umbilical cord to gods that I don't even acknowledge anymore. It's a weird sort of totemism, marking me as gothic. Only young people, who want to be immortal, dream about being vampires to the point where they become such. Youth has no understanding of death, so it flirts with undeath. I must be young, because there is a vampire lurking within me, flapping its batlike, demonic wings as it settles itself against the same tombstone that I lean my back on. Yet I contemplate death fondly, I greet death as a friend, provided death always remains abstract.

   I can't see myself living past the age of thirty-five. I can much more easily visualize my body wasting away from some terrible (but sudden) illness, or falling victim to violence or accident. Even self-murder is easier to contemplate in the abstract than long life. I can picture myself holding a gun to my mouth to avoid hospital bills from extended care, to avoid being a burden. I can't picture myself senile, loopy, an eighty-year-old victim of dementia (a condition I am apparently at high risk of developing, having eaten a hamburger or two in England at the height of the spread of Mad Cow disease). Old age is a fearful specter to me. I have worked in nursing homes and have seen what happens to people who are abandoned there. Hemlock would be a better fate, I feel. At least for me.

   I do not imagine my ancestors as old. To me they are ancient, but their faces are forever youthful. They are gods, and they can have their cake and eat it too if they like. There is only one crone in my pantheon, and I am afraid to leave offerings at her shrine.

   To die, to sleep; perchance to dream - of course, I do not want death to come to me. If I wanted to die, I would not take the antibiotics that were prescribed for me to treat the bronchitis that currently racks my frame, I would not get vaccinated, I would not look both ways before crossing the street, I would not drink tea and eat toast every day in the late afternoon, I would not hold my nose and ears every time I submerged myself in the bath but would let myself drown, to make myself resemble the Ophelia of Waterhouse minus the flowers and the song. No. Dying is terrible, and it always involves disease, famine, accident, violence; pain. When asked what death would be the best, Julius Caesar replied, "A swift one." What dreams may come to us after we have shuffled off our mortal coils? Dying is a nightmare. The graveyard dust that I carry is a talisman against misfortune: my pocket full of posies. I only seek to delay my time of falling down. By meditating, by taking in a little death, a little peace each day, I inoculate myself against my inevitable fate.

   There is much peace to be had in graveyards, however, and for that I am grateful. When I enter a graveyard I am instantly welcomed into the arms of loving relatives I never knew. I am enfolded in love. I go to graveyards and meditate on the tombs when an old and familiar acquaintance, misery, pays me another unwelcome visit. I tumble out of disorder and cry at the feet of those unknown ancestors, whose tombstones have been so worn down by time and abuse that their inscriptions are no longer legible, and my offerings of pain are accepted.

   In return, I am given peace: the peace of the dead, the peace of ego-dissolution. My tears are never refused. The dead never complain about the amount of pain I dump as an upgiving of waste onto their grounds; they never try to change me or improve me or offer advice, the way my therapist and acquaintances do. They listen and accept. They know. They were once alive, and one day I will be dead, and while I live and feel the pain of the living I will continue to make offerings to powers that I do not see or touch. Were it not for this daily prayer, I might be a howling tree in a wood of suicides, undead, undying, unable to offer any sacrifice in my howl. Does it matter whether our temples are dedicated to something immanent, or distant; to one God, to many gods, to ancestors, to ourselves? The end result is the same. Our temples always wind up being inhabited by something strange and hovering yet never near, some power or empowered, made icon that always becomes grandparent, parent, sibling, and lover.

   Worship always takes place in a temple of the dead because the living can always walk away from a churchyard. Woe be to the one who worships a living person, who is unable to control their god by simply leaving the temple and shutting off belief for the rest of the day. I will always feel a mixture of contempt, pity, and envy for a would-be saint; I imagine many people feel this way at heart, although I could be mistaken.

   To die, to sleep... I imagine dissolving into the grave, dissolving into nothingness... nesting. I have made love in graveyards, rucked over a memorial bench, or pushed up against an ancient tree or marble obelisk. I have felt my heart burst at the moment of orgasm and felt pain wash over me in a wave of delirium and painful exhaustion. I have drowned in the ocean of my lover's ego, only to die the even more painful death of grief when the affair fell to pieces. Ego, surrender, ego's return in a shattered chariot and a sad shield. It's just another way of holding off death. If I mate, I will live forever in a single moment, even if contraceptives prevent my living forever in a new extension of myself. I will die the small death and avoid the larger one, even if the larger death will seem kind by comparison after all is said and done and the match has run its course. It's a ritual I act out.

   I am a hierodule, summoning the gods within to a Great Rite. I hold a goddess within me and a god within my lover and submit to this moment so that I might be free of their touch. I leave my offerings at the foot of a high and cold altar, dwarfed by a power that I fear and worship and somewhere, in my rebellious heart, detest. This is my body, this is my blood; I am the sacrifice, and I go under the knife as willingly as a drugged ox, for I know no other way to placate the terrible fates who accept my pain.

   I cry at the feet of tombstones.

   My prayers are accepted, and I leave the cemetery peaceful, renewed, last night's bad dream forgotten. Perhaps my next sleep will be more peaceful. It's not as if I have a choice; to be human is to require, and pray for, rest. Dreams, even more so, especially for me, since I am a creative type and need dreams and metaphors to fuel my writing. Who can comprehend the ultimate serenity and cruelty of necessity that is the eternal Will? Who can fathom it? Without our gods, we would go mad; it is far more terrible to know that we leave offerings to ourselves. In the graveyard, I am at least not alone. I am surrounded by the dusty bones of my imagined relatives.

   It strikes me sometimes how obsessed I am with age. My worst point of contention with the airy-fairy New Age movement, aside from its lust for instant gratification without price to be paid, is that it contains the word "new." I am terrified of the old, but I am entranced by the ancient. I want my graveyard dust and my possessions to be pieces of the first day of the universe. That's why I lurk in pioneer graveyards and Victorian necropoli rather than modern cemeteries; my walls are plastered with reproductions of Renaissance art, pre-Raphaelite fantasies, Victorian angels, souvenirs - memento mori. I need age. I imagine my roots in a handful of earth. As obsessed as I am with youth, like most members of my blasted generation who want to live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse, I trace my roots back, reincarnating myself in ancestral memory. This: My mother is Polish, and I have applied to a scholarship program within the University of Krakow, fantasizing that I might one day return to some of my native soil; my father's side is a little more difficult, because there's Scots and a little Ulster and even some Welsh yeoman blood, and his ancestors originally came from Normandy because he can trace himself back to Hastings when his relatives were William the Bastard's scum, lightly-armored arrow fodder who survived, unlike Harold who didn't.

   Perhaps I will tour Europe to visit all the places I've read about and meet my literary ancestors. I'll spend a night at the Villa Diodati, praying for inspiration that will scare me out of my wits. I spent several months in England for my junior year abroad, part of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and fancy myself half-English now. Oxford is an old temple and I fit well in her catacombs. But can I not trace my roots still further, trace my blood to some source, some single ancestor? I would rather wander the earth, seeking its center, hoping to attach my umbilical cord once more. Was there not some universal mother, a mitochondrial Eve, a single genetic mutation? My desire for earth is insatiable. I spent too much time in my youth contemplating Olympian heights and staring at the sun. I could visit the Pyramids in my mind, those ultimate tombs, and touch antiquity with my fingertips: Grandmother Time's mysteries incarnate in a single musty papyrus, a solitary monument. Perhaps all gods are human with the heads of mighty beasts.

  The path into the woods, where lie more tombstones and the remains of an abandoned quarry, beckons to me, whispering of Orphic mysteries. I will take my moly and my ship of death and go. I will pour yet another libation. I cannot, at heart, deny divinity and become atheist; I am too human, too full of earth. I need my belief. I need to cry my bewilderment to the forgotten inhabitants of long-neglected graves.

November 1995