Dominion of the Dead<\/em><\/a>, 31). One might think that we left the Neolithic a long time ago, but Harrison suggests that the breaking point is more recent: \u201cThroughout this era, which got underway with the domestication of animals and discovery of agriculture, the great majority of human beings lived and toiled on the land where their ancestors were interred, where they and their children and their children\u2019s children would also be interred.\u201d That\u2019s no longer true: \u201cFor the first time in millennia, most of us don\u2019t know where we will be buried, assuming we will be buried at all. The likelihood that it will be alongside any of our progenitors becomes increasingly remote.\u201d This should shock us more than it does: \u201cUncertainty as to one\u2019s posthumous abode would have been unthinkable to the vast majority of people a few generations ago. Nothing speaks quite so eloquently of the loss of place in the post-Neolithic era as this indeterminacy\u201d (31).<\/p>\nWhat can make us at home again? Harrison quotes Heidegger\u2019s famous Der Spiegel<\/em> interview in which he stated that \u201conly a god can save us.\u201d The interviewers responded to Heidegger\u2019s insistence that human beings are essentially related to earth (humans to the humus) by proposing that human beings are not determined by anything at all. One day, they said, we may settle on other planets and then where, Prof. Heidegger, is your humus human? Harrison\u2019s own response is to distinction humanity from homo sapiens<\/em>; the latter is a biological species, but he argues that humanity is \u201ca connection with the humus,\u201d adding that \u201cIf one day we colonize other worlds, then we might be able to say, empirically and definitively, that \u2018man\u2019 was not \u2018determined\u2019 to be upon earth after all. But such a \u2018man,\u2019 when and if he comes to exist, will no longer be human, at least not in the sense in which Vico talked of homo humandi<\/em>, or in which [Vico\u2019s] giants pointed to \u2018this earth\u2019 and \u2018these oaks\u2019 as their place of belonging\u201d (34).<\/p>\nHarrison doesn\u2019t think we need a god to re-establish our humanity. An architect will do: \u201carchitecture has within its power to house our mortality, and, in so doing, to re-place the jar in our slovenly post-Neolithic habitat.\u201d (The placed \u201cjar\u201d is a reference to a poem by Wallace Stevens, in which the placement of a jar on a Tennessee hill turns the \u201cslovenly wilderness\u201d into an ordered world. Harrison takes it as an allegory of the sacred.) We don\u2019t need \u201ca global revolution or the advent of a god before we can re-humanize the basis of our building practices. I would like to believe that our constitutive finitude is accessible to us at any moment, and that we can build or rebuild upon that foundation here and now.\u201d The crucial turn is that we need to think of houses, cities, nations not \u201cmerely as places to live\u201d but \u201cas places to die.\u201d Without this, our homes and cities \u201ccan never become homes or take their stand within the limits of containment from which all shelter and placehood ultimately derive\u201d (35). A saving architecture \u201cmust not only rise from but also redescend into the ground of their edification. They must not only stand there but also lie there. In short, an architecture not so much of the humanistic (in the grand modernist sense) as of the humic\u201d (35).<\/p>\n
A humic architecture will necessarily be an architecture attentive to the dead who occupy the humus: \u201cIf a house, a building, or a city is not palpably haunted in its architecture features\u2014if the earth\u2019s historicity and containment of the dead do not pervade its articulated forms and constitutive matter\u2014then that house, building, or city is dead to the world. Dead to the world means cut off from the earth and closed off from its underworlds,\u201d since our life worlds \u201creceive their animation from the ones that underlie them\u201d (36).<\/p>\n
Penetrating observations. But then I want to say: God is God not of the dead but of the living. And, the first man is of the earth, earthy; the second a heavenly man.<\/p>\n
(Photo by Michael Day.)<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Robert Pogue Harrison calls the twentieth century \u201cthe fitful and prolonged continuation of a process that began in earnest a century earlier: the end of the Neolithic era\u201d (Dominion of the Dead, 31). One might think that we left the Neolithic a long time ago, but Harrison suggests that the breaking point is more recent: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[895,1596],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-burial"],"yoast_head":"\n
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