I was by no means the first to establish a memorial-page service, but the Port of Departure online-memorial-grove concept became the business standard for a long time.
Where others were satisfied to convert the profile of the deceased to a memorial page, Port of Departure created a separate memorial grove.
The memorial grove was a place where the deceased could gather materials ahead of time: pictures, video clips, musical selections, texts and links to pages related to the person’s life or life’s work. Some of the memorial groves were miniature Wikipedias, where even the smaller turning points of the person’s life were thoroughly described. Although they may have never made the news in their lifetimes, in the end their memorial groves would tell their story, from the medal they won in a relay race in primary school to their high-school term papers to the only promotion they ever received.
After death the memorial grove can be public or restricted (through passwords supplied only to those authorized by the family, although sometimes the deceased doesn’t let anyone touch it at all). Visitors can write their messages of grief, personal memories, greetings and eulogies on the page or link to audio-visual material. Most of all, they can light a virtual candle or bring virtual flowers (a wide variety, in very lovely arrangements available from our website).
Soon almost every obituary included a web address for a virtual memorial grove under the name of the deceased.
Port of Departure also offered a premium memorial-grove service that included site moderation. A person recovering from the death of a loved one doesn’t necessarily want to sift through the trash heap of virtual graffiti left by enemies of the deceased or cranks that show up on any public website. Another service we offer, which has divided opinion, is Ouija. Loved ones still living who visit the memorial grove page can ask questions of or chat with the deceased. A simple word and phrase-recognition program searches the media profile left by the deceased and finds posts, comments or other activity to fit into ‘answers’ to their questions. Most visitors to Ouija experience it as true communication with the dead.
The Port of Departure memorial-grove concept is popular and extremely profitable. Before it was created there was no way to reconstruct a departed loved one from the shards of memory and give them a new life in the no-man’s land of the internet for all eternity.
*
I’m not going to make a memorial grove for Eero.
It’s three days until the funeral.
I go out to the hives.
*
Bees bustle at the hive entrances in the languid, late-evening light. The flowers are quietly closing in the shaded corners of the meadow, and the bees, too, are ready to call it a day.
I talk to the hives about this and that, like some people no doubt talk to their house plants. ‘Aren’t you looking lively!’ or ‘How’s things over here?’ or ‘You need a little attention, don’t you?’
I hear myself say everything’s all right, there’s no need to worry, I just wanted to let you know that my son Eero won’t be coming to take care of you any more; he’s gone away. Please pass the information on, and forgive me for not telling you sooner, but I’ve only just recently learned that such an announcement is customary.
The hive, the wooden box, is what I’m talking to, the animal I’m giving a friendly scratch with my words, a god I’m placating. Somewhere deep inside is its heart, or its womb, the queen, but its consciousness is divided among its buzzing cells.
Announcing the death of a bee-keeper might have very rational roots. In our ancestors’ times hives might have suffered from neglect when their regular keeper was lost. Perhaps a new, competent beekeeper couldn’t be found right away, causing the colonies to react to the poor treatment by leaving and the disappearance of the bees was then associated with the death of the bee-keeper. The tradition of informing the bees might have even prevented colony collapse just because it served to remind people not to neglect the bees in their time of grief.
Our ancestors must have envied, and perhaps feared, the bees. Not because they could sting but because they were necessary and yet uncontrollable; they couldn’t be tied in a stall, shut up in a barn or tethered to a post. You couldn’t call them like a dog or treat them to a meaty bone or a drink of milk. And when our ancestors realized that bees had an ability to travel between worlds, a capacity to break through the walls of the universe when necessary to save the swarm or the species, they tried to use charms, magic spells and rituals to obtain a little piece of that divine ability.
Knowledge of this can be found in traditions everywhere once you know what to look for. It’s been so watered down, so altered and obscured, that you can’t always recognize it. But it’s there.
In virtually every culture where honey is gathered it is considered a food of the gods and is also often thought to confer immortality. The bodies of great men have been interred in honey (this actually does prevent the body from decomposing, but there may be other reasons behind it as well).
In Wales it’s believed that bees are the only animals that originate directly from paradise.
Porfirius wrote that the moon goddess Artemis sent peoples’ spirits to Earth in the form of a bee, and – get this – after death the spirits returned to their own world like a bee to its hive.
I repeat the information I’ve gathered to myself again and again, hanging on to the sliver of hope it gives me.
And somehow, somehow, I’m absolutely sure of one thing – Pupa, who nailed the Hopevale beehives together out of discarded wood, put one nail too far from the end of that strip on that hive. A handle that years later would warp away from the side of the box and tear a hole in my new overalls. And it was a message, a purposeful act in the arc of space-time. It led me to what I’ve found. It was meant to happen.
PERFECTING THE HUMAN SPECIES
A BLOG ABOUT THE ANIMALIST REVOLUTIONARY ARMY AND ITS ACTIVITIES
BEES AND AMERICA
In reference to comments received on my previous post, I don’t blame the United States as a country for anything, and I don’t have any particularly strong political opinions about it. It’s simple history. Let’s look at a few facts.
The European honeybee, apis mellifera, is an import to the American continent. When the first colonists came from Europe they brought fruit trees and other useful plants and seeds with them as well as bee colonies.
Without European honeybees the European plants wouldn’t have survived, and as the imported plantings spread so did the bees. The original inhabitants of the continent soon realized that the European bees they’d seen meant there were newcomers in the vicinity. Seeing the European bees was a fateful omen of the destruction of Native Americans’ way of life. They called the bees the white men’s flies.
North America had its own pollinating insects, of course, including wild bees, but the Europeans’ imported honey-producing bees displaced the local species from farmland and monoculture farming took care of the rest – there simply wasn’t any corner left for wild bees to nest among the fields of corn, alfalfa and almond trees that stretched for miles.
Monoculture farming is the enemy of bees in other ways as well. Gathering nectar from a single species of plant doesn’t provide the same dietary variation, nutrition and balance as buzzing through meadows of wild flowers. They simply become as malnourished as a person who eats just one food. Oatmeal is a healthy food, but it’s not enough by itself.
And now that the Europeans have increased and filled their new country, harnessed its natural resources and drained and stripped great swathes of land, virtually obliterating the original inhabitants, the white man’s fly has turned against its masters and left them up to their armpits in shit.
Nobody asked them if they wanted to come.
LEAVE A COMMENT (total comments: 62)
USER NAME: Masters of doublespeak
This ARA propaganda never fails to amuse me. First you preach vegetarianism and in the next sentence you yourselves admit that a person ca
n’t live on oatmeal. You make people feel guilty for perfectly normal enterprises like gardening. What are you vegetarians going to eat if there’s no agriculture?
There is no doubt a natural explanation for the wild fluctuations in bee populations. There is, for instance, a variety of mole with populations that explode at regular intervals without any help from people. But you probably aren’t interested in protecting moles; you’d rather jump right in and fuss over some even smaller critter. What’re you going to start whining about next, amoebas?
MODERATOR: E.H.
ARA focuses on animal rights, especially the status of farm animals. ‘Animal protection’ is a dated concept that projects humans to a higher level than other animals, to guard and care for them. History has shown that what animals most need protection from is people themselves.
There are enough holes in your logic that I won’t take the time to go over each one but will just state that when talking about the treatment of domesticated animals their size is irrelevant. What matters is whether they are allowed to behave in species-appropriate ways, and, if they aren’t, what are the consequences?
The honeybee genome was mapped in 2006.
It was learned that bees have an unusually high number of genes associated with learning. But the gene map also revealed genetic weak nesses such as the fact that bees have a low number of genes associated with immunity and the elimination of toxins and are thus more susceptible than many other insects to various poisons and pathogens.
This has been known since 2006.
For a much longer time it has been known that bees are vital to the entire ecosystem.
The bees are starting to disappear.
Could there be a connection between these things, and should something be done?
Hello? Can anybody hear me?
From 2006 to 2008 worldwide Colony Collapse Disorder was the worst mass disappearance of bees in recorded history.
In 2008 it was predicted that if the collapse of bee colonies didn’t slow there would be no bees left in North America by 2035.
Some joker made up a name for it: the Beepocalypse.
In this, as in so many things, the world is well ahead of our predictions.
USER NAME: Proggles not hippies
In the US they know that you Singers are behind this bee thing, so you can quit pretending. Your terrorists are poisoning and irradiating beehives. And you got the feed production, and through it the meat production, to collapse. Are you happy now?
MODERATOR: E.H.
You’ve got it all wrong. We’re actually using our vast spiritual powers to hypnotize the bees into killing themselves.
And yes I am very happy now, because we’ve started a real black market in meat in the United States. You can always find someone who’ll feed corn and potatoes to cows illegally. And as far as we’re concerned it can only be a good thing that Brazil and Argentina are cutting down more and more rain forest for grazing cattle. We’ve also hypnotized many Americans into believing that we’re behind all these things, and even some bee-keepers who’ve lost their livelihoods are blaming us. Thanks for point ing it out so thoughtfully and accurately.
USER NAME: Tirsu
Oh no! You’ve caught us red-handed with our electromagnetic satanic machine built by mad scientists.
USER NAME: No user name
thanks for the confession the next time i see you in a dark alley your fat arse will be black and blue right quick. ps. i know where you live.
USER NAME: What’s your beef
People have always eaten meat, and they always will. Meat is nutritious and essential to the body. And besides, it tastes good. That’s just a fact, and you can’t escape it no matter how you twist your words around. In a word, animal rights agitators would prohibit people from satisfying their basic needs. It’s just as clueless and weird as prohibiting sex for Catholic priests. We know very well how that idiotic prohibition has turned out.
SHOW ALL 56 COMMENTS
DAY THIRTEEN
In the morning doubt hits me like a knockout punch. I squirm beneath it like I’m held under its thumb.
The feeling is familiar from childhood: the expectation of inevitable disappointment. I think I’ve done well on a test, then on the morning the tests are going to be returned my stomach sinks like a stone with the certainty that I actually didn’t know any of the answers. In my mind I’m sure that the package that Ari sent, just arrived from the USA for Christmas, waiting to be opened, is a camera, but the next day doubt seizes me, and I’m certain that the package contains some stupid American toy intended for someone years younger than me, some remote-control car or toy tank painted in precise detail.
That feeling is back.
I imagined it all.
I don’t want to spend another minute telling myself how real it all seemed, don’t want to think about whether a delusion is less delusional if you doubt its truth.
Then one of the memories of disappointment steps to the front of the line, says hello and makes itself known. After a moment I nod. I understand.
There was no camera in that package from Ari.
Now I have two. There’s one in my phone, of course, but I also have a high-quality pocket digital camera.
I wonder if you can photograph an illusion? If the queen opened up such a concrete passageway that I’m able to go through it, couldn’t it also be recorded on a memory card? That way I would have some evidence, for myself, at least, to certify my sanity.
*
I climb up to the loft with the camera. I’ve put together a little bag for the queen and have it on a string around my neck, under my shirt. That way I can be sure it’s touching me, and I would not drop it or damage it by keeping it in my pocket. With the queen against my chest I see the opening as soon as I come up over the floor of the loft.
The best angle for a photograph is from a spot just to the right of the trapdoor. The round opening ought to fit nicely into the frame. I decide to underexpose it a little so that the landscape isn’t completely washed out. I lift the camera and aim at the scene and the hole around it.
When I look at the camera’s display, there’s nothing there but a log wall.
I go closer, right to the edge of the opening. I look at the display.
The log wall almost hits me in the face.
I look up from the display and the opening shines with the magic light of August, aspen leaves trembling in the wind, the glow of grass turning gold.
Drab, grey wood in the display.
*
The disappointment is so crushing that I fall to my knees and then sit on the dusty floor. The camera clatters from my grasp and lies on its side. I put my head in my hands, my elbows on my knees.
After a moment of deep stillness I realize something.
This isn’t the first time this has happened.
When I found the opening the second time it was night. I could see the light of a star. But when I aimed the head-torch at the wall I couldn’t see the opening.
I’ve buried that strange fact under all the other weirdness and wonder without stopping to think about it. Switching from bright light to artificial light in the darkness can play tricks on your eyes, after all.
Artificial light. Of course.
I look at the trapdoor and think about this whole building, as old as the cottage but left in its original condition much more than the cottage had been. It doesn’t even have artificial light – not even in the sauna. I take my saunas with a hurricane lantern.
The California almond groves. Just yesterday on the news they were saying that they’ve trucked in new hives to replace the empty ones. The new hives have been fitted with every possible means to prevent swarming, and they’re trying to monitor them day and night in person and with cameras. There’s no way to tell the bees to stay, not to move from this place, but at least this way they can get some information.
And all they’ve learned is one thing: the new hives are emptying at almost the same speed a
s the old ones did.
Bees have been fitted with infinitesimally small telemetric trackers weighing just a few thousandths of a gram. But in some ironic twist of fate the bees with the trackers are faithfully returning to the nest. Just those bees, and not the others. All the rest have vanished into thin air.
The interviewer asked whether it wouldn’t work to attach trackers to every bee in the hive and get them all to come back to the nest that way. The bee researcher could hardly keep the sarcasm back as he explained that, first of all, the trackers are very expensive high-tech devices and each hive has more than sixty thousand bees in it, and, second, every bee with a tracker that returned to the collapsing colony was dead within twenty-four hours.
Interesting.
Extremely interesting.
PERFECTING THE HUMAN SPECIES
A BLOG ABOUT THE ANIMALIST REVOLUTIONARY ARMY AND ITS ACTIVITIES
TO OUR ESTEEMED COMMENTER WHAT’S YOUR BEEF AND HIS MINIONS!
We all have basic needs. This is true.
That’s about the only thing in your comment that makes any sense. The most important human needs are air, water, food, sleep and shelter. Without these things a person will die.
People have eaten meat for millennia. That is true. But there are also cultures of millions of people who have eaten nothing but plants and have indeed managed to survive up until the present day to tell of it. Imagine that! And I happen to know that there are many vegetarian foods that taste pretty good, almost as good as meat! The thought of this amazing paradox almost knocks your brain off its hinges, doesn’t it, Mr. Beef?
To be more precise, there’s a difference between wants and needs.
It’s interesting, in fact telling, that in your discussion of denial of basic needs you mention sex.
Sex is a basic need of our species, of course, in the sense that if we don’t have sex we won’t reproduce and the species will die. But at the individual level – the level most central to our desires – sex is not a basic need. An individual will not die even if he spends his entire life without having sex at all, not even solo. (It wouldn’t be a pleasant life but a life nevertheless. And there are asexual people who do just fine without it.)