This paper was submitted on May 8th, 2020 as my course paper for EN152: Advanced Literature.
Often, we search for meaning in works of art or prose. We look deeper into the context of the work and the life of its author. But what if the work has no author? What if the work was never created, but just is? What if our “work” is a physical location? How do we make meaning of it then? Our context is now history, and our author is those who have interacted with the location. All those who have lived there, or worked there, or are buried there are the authors. It is not the place itself that has inherent meaning, but it gains meaning through the continuum of human interaction with the location. With each new interaction, that meaning is altered ever so slightly, and what we make of any given location becomes deeply personal and individual. The past meaning of a place can never go away and the present meaning is entirely dependent upon its history.
When one imagines New York City, they see the “Big Apple.” They see Manhattan, bustling with business and culture and life. Drive half an hour northeast and one is in the Bronx, just a short boat ride away from Hart Island. Hart Island was purchased from the natives in the 17th century and was used for multiple purposes, included bareknuckle boxing bouts, until the Civil War, when it was used to train units of the United States Colored Troops (Wikipedia). It was then used as a prison for captured Confederate soldiers, a burial site for unclaimed Union casualties, a potter’s field, a disease quarantine site, a prison, a workhouse, a segregated amusement park, a missile shelter, an AIDs burial site, and a rehabilitation center (Wikipedia). This is not the New York that lives in the popular fantasy. This is the New York that we try to forget and push aside as we progress in our Whiggish history. It represents centuries of not-in-my-backyard attitudes and social stratification.
At its most basic level, Hart Island represents a separation from things we (as in society) dislike or don’t want. C. P. Cavafy’s 1904 poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” describes the citizens of Rome affecting certain customs and traditions in order to impress, intimidate, and separate themselves from the barbarians soon to arrive at their gates. At the end, the barbarians never come, and one Roman remarks, “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.” (Cavafy, lines 34-35). They were a solution in the sense that these Romans had no way to define their culture besides having superiority over those around them. Their worth came from the separation between the civilized “us” and the barbaric “them.” Any action the Romans took had no real meaning other than to appear more civilized. The physical separation by distance and social separation by customs between civilization and barbarism can be seen in Hart Island. In the past, we stigmatized racial and religious minorities, the poor, the sick, the delinquent, and the deviant. New York society pushed those groups off the mainland of New York City onto an island, putting physical separation between the wanted and unwanted. The phrase “out of sight, out of mind” is the essence of this concept. Society did not just want to ignore these groups, however. It actively excluded and separated itself from these people. It made black soldiers train in separate facilities. It buried AIDs victims offshore. It kept prisoners and delinquents in facilities separated by water from the main population. Instead of confronting our problems directly, we put up a fence between us and the “barbarians.” We determine what does not fit the model of civilization at the present time and send it away. In a way, Hart Island serves as a relief valve for New York society. Anything unwanted or determined to be refuse is shuttled out to pile up on an abandoned and uncared-for island. The island is the garbage dump of civilization. The dead that are unclaimed or unwanted get thrown in the landfill. The activities that are deemed unacceptable or uncivilized get thrown out the valve and spit out far away. The excess of our civilization must be disposed of somewhere, and where better than an island physically separate from the rest of society?
We have long associated the “low” with death and all that is bad, while the “high” has been the place of life and righteousness. The ancient Greeks believed that dead souls went to the underworld. The Nicene Creed, from the fourth century AD, states that Christ “came down from heaven” to live in human form on the sinful lower earth and then “ascended into heaven” after his resurrection (Book of Common Prayer, 358). In burying societal rejects on Hart Island, we maintain the superficial appearance of normalcy on the outside. We physically and figuratively bury our problems. Hart Island exists as a sort of underground for society, while also having bodies buried beneath its own ground. What does it mean when we continue to bury the unwanted “deeper” than everybody else? These thoughts come to mind when I see videos of inmates in hazmat suits digging mass Coronavirus graves on Hart Island alongside industrial construction machinery. In his 1922 poem, “The Waste Land,” T.S. Eliot tells readers to “Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you” but now “a current under sea pick[s] his bones in whispers.” With this drowned Phoenician sailor, Eliot toys with the idea of legacy. No matter that Phlebas was tall and handsome in his life; he is buried and forgotten underneath the ocean now. His memory is reduced to whispers as he gets tossed over by waves. The idea that Hart Island is separated by water from mainland New York represents an interesting connection. It is as if we attempt to downplay the legacy and memory of those on Hart Island by burying them far away, inaccessible to most, and thus “deeper” than most others. In a similar sense, Osama bin Laden was dumped into the sea after his death to deny him a legacy and disallow the use of his grave site as a shrine to him. Phlebas, who had no marked grave or ritual to lay him to eternal rest, is near forgotten. The separation of the mass graves of Hart Island by a body of water and the anonymity of most burials demonstrates an attempt, whether deliberate or coincidental, to erase the legacy of those buried there.
The way that Hart Island is treated in the present indicates a deliberate abandonment of the past in a way that expresses much cognitive dissonance and contradiction. Iain Sinclair in his article “Into the Underworld” describes the havoc wreaked in Hackney, London, by widespread industrial mining: “Mining operations can take as long as a year to complete. Giant compressors thump and thunder. Security guards lurk, bored and edgy, warning off casual photographers. Backs have been torn from properties, and cavernous pits revealed.” This machinic method of excavating the earth is contrasted with the “Hackney Hole” society that digs peacefully and quietly with shovels and their hands. The manual diggers experience a greater connection to their work and the effort is more meaningful and personal. On Hart Island, when we designate prisoners as the only people worthy of burying our virus-dead and give then construction machinery to use, we make a statement about how we value those that are buried there. They are placed in mass-produced graves, in mass-produced trenches, dug by mass-produced machinery. It is entirely impersonal and dehumanizing. The solemn memorial ritual of burying the dead is replaced by an assembly line that strips death and burial of its meaning. “Disposal” would be a more appropriate term than burial. Hart Island has always been a place of disposal. It has never been revered or remembered or desired. It is where things are placed in hopes that they are forgotten and left behind as history marches on. In depersonalizing the past of Hart Island, we express a cognitive dissonance. We say that we have progressed as a society and that we have moved on from our past of oppression and discrimination. Still, we continue the same policies of our past. Hart Island still fulfills the same purpose as when it was used to hide away blacks or criminals or AIDs victims.
Sinclair writes in the same article that “Whatever could be preserved of the tunnels would remain as evocative quotations, concrete-cancer molars from the spooky London past nudged into the bright light of the now.” The tunnels Sinclair describes are those dug by the Hackney Mole Man, a resident who dug extensive tunnels beneath his property before being evicted. All his work was done by hand and was thus personal and had meaning. Each scoop of dirt from the tunnels was removed by human effort and not that of an impersonal machine. In a way, it had a beauty of its own. It expresses the exploratory spirit of man and his desire to seek more, achieve more, and conquer space. The Mole Man dug because of a human desire to conquer more space in harmony with nature, while the machines used to dig on Hart Island and in the rest of Hackney represent a molestation of space already conquered in spite of nature. Mechanical digging does not discover anything new, but instead streamlines a process to hide things away as quickly and effortlessly as possible.
The fact that the Mole Man’s tunnels remain only as “evocative quotations” of the “spooky London past” shows that as hard as we in the modern world try to abandon our less-progressive past and distance ourselves from it, we can never escape it. Sinclair mentions that David Adjaye, a Tanzanian architect, designed the Hackney Idea Store, a building to replace the old town library. Sinclair describes it as looking “like a Rubik’s cube made from Perspex.” The Idea Store is textbook modern architecture—glassy, geometric, and incongruous with nature. It is a deviation from traditional English Gothic architecture seen at places such as Buckingham Palace or Westminster Abbey that was harmonious with nature and emphasized beauty. Adjaye’s architecture has no continuity with the history of England. He does not seek to put himself in continuity with English tradition because he is not English and has no reason to place any value in it, seeing England’s past of colonialism and conquest to be detestable. The Hackney Idea Store runs perpendicular to tradition rather than parallel with it and represents a deliberate movement away from the past in the Whiggish view that the past is bad, and the present is good. Adjaye’s mechanical and impersonal future clashes with Hackney’s and the Mole Man’s natural connection to beauty and tradition.
Derek Walcott, a Saint Lucian poet, presents a further development of this idea in “The Ruins of a Great House:” “The world’s green age then was rotting lime Whose stench became the charnel galleon’s text. The rot remains with us, the men are gone.” He describes a ruined colonial mansion as an allegory of the British Empire. What was once beautiful and great in the past has come to a state of ruin in the present. The ugliness of the house and grounds evokes memories of colonial slavery and oppression that have been buried under history and left to ruin alongside the house. As time progressed, beauty faded and the true ugliness within was revealed.
A look at photographs of Hart Island reveals a similar ugliness. One sees rotted, dilapidated buildings; abandoned structures; wild vines covering the sides of buildings; dry and dying vegetation. Nature has tried to reclaim the manmade structures of Hart Island but nature itself has been left ugly. It looks like the set of a movie in post-apocalyptic middle America. There is a sort of poetic beauty in it all, that a place home to so much societal ugliness has rotted away to match the island’s physical landscape with its moral character. A particularly powerful image from Hart Island is a run-down, overgrown, brick gothic church, with a shattered rose window and boarded-up entryways. Like Walcott’s Great House that lie in ruins, this church represents the eventual revelation of the fundamental problems of society that were masked with beauty and wealth. What was once a house of God is now a decrepit building, unused and uncared for. It is as if God has abandoned Hart Island for its complicity in sins of the past.
In Andrew Marvell’s 1681 poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” he writes: “Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity, And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust; The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace” (Lines 25-32). The speaker is addressing his “coy mistress” who seems to think her youth will last forever. The speaker warns her that when she grows old and dies, which is inevitable, she will be buried and forgotten. Any beauty she had on earth will be meaningless as it is shoved beneath the ground and left there. Like the mistress, those buried on Hart Island are put there with the intent of being forgotten. They are the sick, the unwanted, and the indigent. The act of burying them offshore on an abandoned island indicates that we desire to be separated from their memory. The death of the mistress represents a fall in social status. Who was once beautiful and admired in the living world is equally dead with the “silent majority” of those who have gone before. Poor, rich, beautiful, or ugly; all are equally dead. Despite appearances, this concept is a sort of social mobility for those buried on Hart Island. The societal rejects buried on Hart Island, through death, are brought to parity with the mistress, and even with those who discriminated against them, rejected them, and ostracized them in the living world. Death strips one of his or her individuality, and it was individuality and the state of being different that led to the exclusion of those on Hart Island. Without this individuality, all become equal, and any beauty or ugliness fades away to plain, expressionless death.
The loss of the mistress’ beauty also represents the concomitant decay of morality and aesthetics as time progresses. While beauty qua beauty does have intrinsic value, it is also indicative of the moral character of what the beauty represents. This brings to mind the beautiful Christian cathedrals of the past, built when faith was more prevalent in everyday life, in contrast with certain sects of Christianity today that meet in uninspiring convention centers and lack much theological conviction or understanding. Japanese writer Yukio Mishima realized the importance of aesthetics in maintaining the character of a society, especially in his context as a witness of the fall of traditional Japanese culture and values following the Second World War. In his discourse Sun and Steel, Mishima uses the human body as an allegory of the relationship between beauty and character: “feeble emotions, it seemed to me, corresponded to flaccid muscles, sentimentality to a sagging stomach, and overimpressionability to an oversensitive, white skin. Bulging muscles, a taut stomach, and a tough skin, I reasoned, would correspond respectively to an intrepid fighting spirit, the power of dispassionate intellectual judgement, and a robust disposition.” This idea shows a conflict in the way beauty can be used. In Walcott’s view, and the view expressed through Hart Island, beauty is only a fragile mask for the injustices of society. No amount of beauty can conceal injustice forever, as it eventually decays to reveal the truth. Mishima would disagree. He sees beauty as what holds a society to its moral grounding, and that as beauty dies, so does the character of society. As he saw Japanese citizens accept defeat to the West and submit to foreign rule, he noted the death of bushido values in society. Mishima believes that the physical show of weakness is what enacts the moral decline. Mishima saw no other escape from the ugliness and decline of his modern world than ritual seppuku to atone for the failings of his people. He was devoted to this belief and committed seppuku himself after a failed coup against the new government.
In the most literal approach, a mass of land has no meaning. What makes the soil on Hart Island any different from that found in China, or in Australia? The chemical compositions are near-identical, and the soil does not have any inherent race or creed. The meaning of a land or a place comes only from its context, its history, and the people who remain there eternally, whether in spirit or in decomposing bodies. In a concept discussed by T.S. Eliot in his essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Hart Island holds meaning today because of what has happened there in the past, and the events that unfold on the island today become part of the continuum of meanings and gradually alter the meaning of the island as a whole with their own contributions.
WORKS CITED
Cavafy, C.P. “Waiting for the Barbarians.” 1904. Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51294/waiting-for-the-barbarians. Accessed 23 April 2020.
Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” 1919. Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent. Accessed 5 May 2020.
Eliot, T. S. “The Waste Land.” 1922. Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land. Accessed 23 April 2020.
“Hart Island (Bronx).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 28 April 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hart_Island_(Bronx).
Marvell, Andrew. “To His Coy Mistress.” 1681. Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44688/to-his-coy-mistress. Accessed 23 April 2020.
Mishima, Yukio. Sun and Steel: Art, Action, and Ritual Death. Kindle ed., 1968.
Sinclair, Iain. “Into the Underworld.” London Review of Books, vol. 37, no. 2, 2015, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v37/n02/iain-sinclair/into-the-underworld. Accessed 23 April 2020.
The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church : together with The Psalter or Psalms of David : according to the use of The Episcopal Church. New York, N.Y: Church Publishing Incorporated, 2013. Print.
Walcott, Derek. “Ruins of a Great House.” 1954. PoemHunter, https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ruins-of-a-great-house/. Accessed 23 April 2020.
Cammack Shepler 
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