the niki download

#22
10/01/2021

In life you may become rich or poor, but death is the great equalizer. The greatest communism is death. However you live, it makes no difference; death happens equally. In life, equality is impossible. In death, inequality is impossible. Become aware of this, contemplate it.

-Rajneesh

The Great Equalizer

Happy October!

A month rich with allegory and symbols to remind each of us of how this all ends… The inevitable mysterious event we will all presumably experience: Death.

The fact of our finite lifespans is the most important unifying aspect of our shared reality. No matter our position or identity in life, we all share the same mysterious fate. We are all working towards “the transcendental object at the end of time”.

For most of us, we only know the concept of death through the experience of others. Death is something that happens to other people.

To get in the spirit of spooky, I spent the week checking in on people who are not here anymore. People who I never knew.

If you google “Washtenaw County’s Oldest Grave” you will find hardly any reliable information on the actual oldest burial sites: Native American burial mounds, many of which have been erased.

I plan to return to this in a future newsletter, it is a significantly lacking piece of local history that stems from the history of archeology in the region.

What does come up, is Terhune Pioneer Cemetery which actually contains no human remains. It contains three headstones which were recovered after an industrious farmer with other plans for the land chucked all the headstones in a nearby stream to erase the burial site and not have to move the bodies…

Interest in the site returned in 1939 when the Daughters of the American Revolution realized a revolutionary war veteran was buried there.

We can understand their motivations and mental models of our projected reality by the symbols they left behind…

The actual bodies at the Terhune site are speculated to be a few hundred feet away where a DTE Power Station now stands. Interestingly another historic burial site, Ann Arbor’s first cemetery, was located where the University of Michigan Power Plant and Power Center stand today. Hallowed ground makes for great energy transmission both electrical and performance based…

During Ann Arbor’s expansion in the mid 1800s the bodies that occupied the power center site were moved, often by descendants who buried them there, to a new cemetery, Forest Hill, founded in 1857.

James L. Glen designed the cemetery in the rural or garden style in order to promote a peaceful serene environment for the living to remember the dead.

Or to you know, cosplay as the dead.

Forest Hill holds some beautiful headstones…

…some surreal headstones…

…a monolith labeled with my very common last name…

…ornate monoliths…

… and smokey ornate monoliths.

It is a great place for a walk, while we still can.

See you next week…

Realm of the Dead

If you are in Ann Arbor and are looking for something cool and spooky, you should visit the Realm of the Dead, an art installation created by my friend Rogério, running October 4 - 17, at the U-M School of Social Work.

The installation includes dozens of vintage suitcases and trunks that have been intricately crafted into sculptures, evoking how Pinto grew up in poverty in Brazil, and how at 21 he arrived in the United States and lived in New York City for nearly a decade as an undocumented immigrant.