103. A Sudden Shudder (Remember Me As a Time of Day)

There is a place in Brooklyn, in New York State just outside Manhattan; a little plot of land deep in a Jewish neighborhood. I know it, because a piece of me is buried there; a piece that existed long before I was born. There is a bit of mythology in my family, you see: I share most of my name with my great-grandfather - the one in my direct paternal line, the Jewish side of my family. Because I resemble him so closely in temperament - an aesthete, an epicure, an ideologue, a traveller, a polyglot - the story goes that I am his reincarnation, giving this whole "living" thing a second crack. I've traded an MD in internal medicine for a PhD in math, and I can't enjoy pistachio ice cream anymore, but I'm in better health and don't have to contend with a world war. So once a decade, I join my father in a visit to the buried part of me whose nameplate I share and thus inherited, right down to the "Dr.".

 I visited it on a fine Saturday much like this one, and you might ask how it is we visited despite the Sabbath. The cemetery was indeed closed that day around 10 years ago, and the wrought iron fence might have stopped us were we less daring or more frum. We scaled it instead on that second visit - the first had been a decade earlier yet, under less fraught conditions - and set to tending the gravesite. We washed the gravestone and set a visitation pebble atop it, in accordance with Jewish custom, and then we kept going. Dad told me stories about my great-grandfather, and him, stories about me: stories about favorite foods and obscure defining life events and plans and struggles and roads ahead and roads behind. Behind us on the other side of the fence, large Hasidic families in their solemn black walked by, glaring sicae at us; our loosely shared culture rendered them powerless to call the authorities as we toasted Great-Grandpa's memory with the kind of cheap Bordeaux he used to like; a change from last decade's Mavrodaphne. I think I'll bring a nice mead for him this time; I'll see to it that we return to the modest libations we once poured as well.

 

There is a place in Namyangju, in Gyeonggi Province just outside Seoul; a little plot of hilly land tucked away in an anonymous suburb next to some forest and a temporary truck parking lot. I know it, because pieces of me are buried there; pieces that existed long before I was born; some long before living memory or modern countries. There is a bit of mythology in my family, you see: I share part of my name with a famous ancestor from the 7th century - one in my direct paternal line up until my mother, the Korean side of my family. My mother's family gave me his name for a middle name, flush with the expectation that I would go do incredible things, perhaps nearly as world-shaping as the unification wars he fought and won, and I do my best to live up to that name. So whenever I get the chance to - squeezed in at the very end of a trip to a machine learning conference, or tucked in alongside a family tour - I go to perform seongmyo, Korean customary gravetending rites, since as time has gone by, everyone else has fallen out of the habit. What family I have locally has become derelict in their filial duties, mired in a land dispute that has snared my stateside family, too, in a fragile truce, and resulted in that truck lot; for its part, that stateside family all cannot afford the time and money, or has grown too old and tired to go pay their respects, or has simply never come to understand the importance of the rite. And it's not even an especially involved custom, either: you show up to the memorial site - often not actually a grave. You pull some weeds from between the flagstones, and perhaps you scrub the flagstones or grave markers themselves. You light some incense atop the main altar, and as it burns, you kneel before it. You offer treats - soju or candy, to your taste; you bow; you think or speak the latest news; you bow again. Then you depart, perhaps before the incense even has time to burn down. But as the eldest grandson, foremost of my generation of the family, the duty ought to fall to me anyway, and it's a duty I take on with solemn gladness.

I fulfilled that very duty on a fine Saturday much like the other one - depending on how you count timezones, I visited today. The monsoon humidity sat heavily over Namyangju like wet wool, soaking my own practical coat by turns with condensation and sweat. I very nearly didn't end up there at all: that land dispute and its fragile truce meant that from the other side of the world, Grandma Kim at first forbade me from going, terrified all morning that I might be arrested for visiting the late Grandpa Kim and the other ancestors. So I asked further, and was directed to a caretaker; asking him gave me an early evening appointment at a gate I could have hopped without breaking stride, where a man I'd never met before let me in to kneel on a hotel hand-towel to offer fine orange chocolate and burn frankincense Grandma and Grandpa Kim would both have approved of, and to take a pair of weeding gloves to the nettles over the remains of those whose faces I have only ever seen in pictures but whose stubbornness and sense of duty I demonstrably carry.

The caretaker seemed in a hurry to leave that day, but a quick search after I'd packed up and left the drenching wetness behind set me right. Here's what I came to understand, ash-smeared incense holder in breast pocket and phone in hand: a seongmyo is a brief social call, not a seance, for a tomb is not for the dead; they are far beyond real estate, whatever you may believe of them. Instead, a tomb is an address, a coordination point: a place where the living can reliably find you, or less metaphysically, infrastructure laid down by people optimistic enough to believe that they themselves would have their own descendants come pay visits. Give many cultures similar desires and similar constraints and watch them converge on similar practices: handshakes and bows both leave you politely vulnerable to violence; calling cards found their home both at mansions and in meeting rooms. Dad was never taught to expand the Jewish stone-leaving ritual thus but chose to spruce it up a little more with news and tales and a good drink, and yet he arrived at the same set of ritual steps seongmyo did, half a world away and half a millennium ago. The spine of the ritual is identical: arrive, say hello, bring the news, tidy the yard, share a snackrifice, and leave. The brevity that disappointed me at first is the whole point: calls are short because the relationship is a standing one. There's no need for a long visit with those you never stopped knowing. As for Grandma Kim, there's a second more involved rite to commemorate the dead: a jesa, which is a longer offering and commemorative dinner, prepared and eaten at home, and often consisting largely of the deceased's favorite foods. When Grandpa Kim passed away in the mid-2010s, she saw fit to bring an old rite to a new land. Every year when our family has its reunion on Cape Cod, we make time for a dinner dedicated to the late Grandpa Kim, with fresh lobster - his favorite - as the centerpiece. Never mind that he passed away in LA, nor that I weeded around his marker in Korea: the address to pay him a visit was never solely the ancestral tomb, but rather wherever we agree to meet. Rather, that mountain plot in Namyangju is one quiet terminal of a network whose true substrate is a matriarch's steel-trap memory and a gathered table of her descendants, and the role I played was a bit of tidying and refreshing of the older side of the route; showing up is how you stay findable to your own line, in both directions.

I'm prone to a sudden shudder now and again, a chill feeling with no obvious draft to cause it. There is a folk belief in many places about those sourceless twitches - that it means that someone's just walked over your grave. But like many of my reference class, I've become rootless - so if we grant that old superstition its due, whose tread could I be feeling, and more importantly: where? My great-grandfather lived for most of his life in Brooklyn; Grandpa Kim's family, in Gyeonggi Province. I and those like me are not quite so lucky. Through four cities, two coasts, and an upcoming fifth move, I find myself increasingly carrying a singular question: where, exactly, is that tomb? I don't mean that as a morbid rumination, but rather as an infrastructural question every bit as practical for the legacy and memory I might leave a century hence as wondering where I'll need my mail sent next year. The traditional answers are all broken for me in obvious ways: one family plot is in a country I visit on layover-sized trips and in a legal condition best described as contested; the other belongs to a religion I don't particularly share. My own life has been a study in liminality: I have lived in enough places that no soil has a majority stake. If a tomb is an address for the living to find you, then those rootless like me have a real problem. "Scatter me somewhere pretty" is not a solution; it's a refusal to leave a forwarding address.

There is a place somewhere in the universe, probably but not certainly in the Solar System. I don't know it at all, but much of what I once was will be there; those quiescent pieces that will exist long after I am dead. You will visit it on a fine Saturday much like this one. Like any right-thinking creature who read LessWrong in 2010 and still holds extropian dreams, I admit the possibility of living a billion years; unlike many in that reference class, I have consciously chosen to decline cryogenic preservation. I am not so desperate to persist in this universe in some form that I will cling to any chance to do so; even should liquid nitrogen see me through, I would become mere data, and data cannot defend itself. No, I do not believe that ours is a safe world for entrusting yourself to the cold, hoping to be reborn; nor, as a mathematician, can I ignore the brute fact that be it two years or a trillion, finite is as finite does. A tomb for me, there shall be; never mind that I cannot know where it is yet.

 

So: where is it you'll go, on that soft Saturday? Surely not Brooklyn or Namyangju, nor likely anywhere I've ever lived. Perhaps it will be somewhere out in the quiet void, on some unexpected celestial body. Or maybe it will instead take some suitably distributed form, befitting one rootless, preferring practice and participation to the static and stolid. Maybe here: a corpus of hundreds of thousands of words, perhaps millions by then, letting my voice whisper or ring out across the ages. Or maybe it will be an appropriate dining room with soft chairs and the gathered unborn, at a table groaning with sweet spirits and food prepared from archival recipes, now reproducible without my hands, let alone Grandma Kim's. (Two is not as real a number as one is; will any of them be the next to claim that old nameplate?) Maybe I'll be best found at any pocket where the silver coins that denominate debts of gratitude still dwell - glittering sculptural threads, as they are, through the block-universe as seen from outside time. Maybe that same plot at Namyangju really will be one of many fitting places to call upon me, or maybe it will be New York, or Neptune; maybe it will instead be a softly blue-shining plaque on a singularly secret rooftop terrace in Berkeley. Any and all of these are fitting forwarding addresses; the important part is seeing to it that my memory is worth calling upon. Remember me, then, as a time of day, as a standing appointment: Saturday - perhaps around dinner, or that liminal pre-dawn time, or whenever it's raining. Someday, you might have to hop a fence to visit me, or ask a stranger's permission, or spend ages seeking out some secret spot, to pass that Saturday at; will anyone bother? I should hope so. Grandma Kim has set an example through intercession and lobster; Dad, through tales and fence-hopping. Should our shared Singularitarian salvation suffer setback, I ask that you spend your Saturday doing much the same. Eat and drink well, leaving a little for me. Savor smoldering incense, in pine or sandalwood or violet. Tell tall tales about my impossible deeds and my virtues and my victories against the odds. And do not, under any circumstances, leave my coins there: those are meant to travel.