field guide · the literacies
Nothing perishes, everything changes. Ovid · Metamorphoses · 8 CE
Nitrogen is moving right now. Moving through soil, through bacteria, through the air, gathering for a while into the arrangement you call your ‘self.’ When a body goes back to the earth the nitrogen keeps going. So does the calcium, which was coral once, and seafloor before that, and is only passing through bone on its way somewhere else. None of this is a void. A body going into the ground is going into a crowd. Read as a verb, death is a turning rather than a stopping point: decomposing, returning, becoming.
Why do we so easily picture death as an ending? Part of the answer is in our language. In many Indigenous languages, the living world is spoken in verbs and addressed as kin: a bay is not a fixed noun but a being be-ing a bay; a Saturday, a hill, a fire can all be animate. English, by contrast, files almost everything that is not human as "it" — an object, available to be used. Robin Wall Kimmerer calls the alternative a grammar of animacy.1
When the only words we have for the world are nouns, we treat it as inert, finished, and ownable, and we treat death the same way. "Death is a verb" is a small attempt to re-member our selves as co-constituted, co-evolved and made-with this world of motion, in kinship: to language the living world, and our own dying, as ongoing relations rather than static things. To verb with Earth, rather than noun-i-fying it!
Conventional Western deathcare quietly materializes separation. We embalm the body with formaldehyde-based fluid to hold off decay; we seal it in a vault against the soil; we lay it in a lawn mowed to refuse wildness.23 Each step enacts a wish: to keep the human pure, bounded, and apart, and sealed against being porous to the ecological world.
Many cemeteries were, and some remain divided by race, religion, and class, the living world's hierarchies extended even into death. The manicured memorial lawn, largely a nineteenth-century invention, turns death into real estate: individual plots, straight rows, a privately owned patch of earth.
Underneath is a way of language the world that this project names as colonial and Cartesian: a hard line drawn between subject and object, human and nature, person and thing. It treats Earth as inert property to be used, and the human as a separate, sovereign self who can be sealed away from decay. Human exceptionalism is, at root, the belief that we alone are not food — that we can refuse our own porousness. A cemetery, read this way, is one of its purest monuments.4
There are older and other ways. Many Indigenous and non-Western traditions have long understood death as ecological participation — a knowledge held here with care for whose it is and how it is shared.4 Practices like natural organic reduction (human composting), and the wider work of this project, let the body be a nurturing presence again: a temporary gathering of elemental flows, returning to the crowd it was always part of.
a practice
Walk through a cemetery and notice what it is built to do: to keep things separate, sealed, and still, elevate the individual. Then notice lichen on a headstone, rhizome-ing a path, moss re-lettering our homages. Here watch the living world composting the boundary we have set between ourselves and the ecological world anyway, steadily, without human permission.
to sit with
This guide grows from a wider lineage — see the project's Theoretical Roots and Suggested Readings. Its companion in sensing the more-than-human — what your city is made of — is coming soon as an NYC audio tour. The guides on the body and on technology are waiting for their writers.
The reading of cemeteries and embalming as expressions of separation and human exceptionalism is an interpretive, humanities argument — the project's lens — anchored to verifiable facts about conventional practice. The factual claims (cremation rate, embalming chemistry) are sourced above. Full citations for all four Field Guides, in Chicago style (CMOS 18th ed.) →