4 September 2012 | Draft
Enstoning through Petrification and Entombment
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Annex 5 of Fivefold Clustering of Ways of Being Stoned: Imagination, Promise, Rocks, Memorials, Petrification (2012)
Summary
"Stone" is used metaphorically and otherwise in a quite disparate range of contexts. These nevertheless offer an elusive implication of connectivity which merits exploration, as attempted here -- especially given the associated sense of concreteness.
This offers an alternative understanding of the frameworks of belief systems, their articulation, and the problematic relationships between them -- exemplified by the communication processes in any gathering in which multiple themes are evoked and challenged from a variety of perspectives -- and to relatively little avail. Use of "stoned" as a provocative mnemonic device is then arguably appropriate through the distraction it offers, whether through use of drugs by individuals, or collective dependence on oil as a drug.
The argument is developed in the main paper in the light of five ways of clustering "being stoned", each summarized in a separate annex:
- Enstoning through imagination, dreams, drugs and imbibing (Annex 1)
- Enstoning of promise, potential, possibility and pattern (Annex 2)
- Enstoning with rocks and rockets (Annex 3)
- Enstoning in memorials and monuments (Annex 4)
- Enstoning through petrification and entombment (Annex 5)
This cluster can be used to associate the sense of being "turned to stone" through fear, of being buried (alive) through confinement in stone, of entombment after death, and of subsequent putrefecation.
"Petrification" through fear: The term is widely used as a metaphorically description of a response to terror -- whereby an individual (or possibly a group) is effectively stunned, dazed or paralyzed. Some cultures recognize a process of petrification in mythological tales -- involving the literal transformation into stone. Characters who fail in a quest may be turned to stone until they are rescued by the successful hero. The metaphor is of special interest in a period in which humanity is exposed to natural disasters, acts of terrorism, and other fearful possibilities. It is appropriate to ask who is "petrified" thereby.
Institutionalized confinement: Individuals may be confined by society for lengthy periods, typically against their will, in ways which are appropriately described as being "buried alive" -- out of sight, out of mind. Those so treated might well be considered to be in a state of "permanent" petrification. Examples include:
- Incarceration: Namely imprisonment as a consequence of conviction in a process claimed to be legal. The "legality" may be reframed by processes which enable imprisonment without charge or due process.
- Internment: Possibly difficult to distinguish in practice from "incarceration", this is the confinement of people without trial when they are perceived as a threat to society. Examples include those held in the Soviet gulag system of forced labour camps, or in the US Guantanamo Bay detention camp. These may be recognized as "concentration camps".
- Psychiatric internment: Namely confinement to "mental asylums" as a consequence of diagnosis of behavioural patterns which are framed as rendering the individual a danger to others, or to themselves. Controversially, psychiatrists around the world have however been involved in the suppression of individual rights by states wherein the definitions of mental disease had been expanded to include political disobedience. The diagnosis of mental disease can serve as proxy for the designation of social dissidents, allowing the state to hold persons against their will and to insist upon therapies that work in favour of ideological conformity and in the broader interests of society. As a consequence, political prisoners are sometimes confined to mental institutions and abused therein.
- Involuntary military service: This may be a consequence of legal provisions for conscription, as one development of the former practice of impressment and shanghaiing. Variants of the latter continue to be evident in the use of child soldiers, estimated in 2003 to participate (involuntarily) in about three quarters of all the ongoing conflicts in the world. The confinement may be to casernes or fortified operational encampments.
- Workhouses and Sweatshops: These confined environments have been used to derive work from the poor with limited options to ensure their livelihood -- and possibly under some form of threat recognized by the term unfree labour.
- Brothels: These may well confine women to buildings which they are not free to leave. The pattern may extend to organized sexual slavery and to the use by the military of "comfort women".
- Enclosed religious orders: Whilst entry into these orders may be voluntary, examples exist of their enforcement. The process of leaving may be complex and lengthy. Problematic examples have been highlighted by the case of the abusive operation by the Catholic Church of the Magdalene Asylums for "fallen women" in Ireland.
Living enshrouded in pain: Legislation in most countries prohibits any right of individuals to choose to die, even when in extreme suffering and indignity with a terminal illness. This has been highlighted at the time of writing by the case of Tony Nicklinson, suffering from locked-in syndrome following a stroke. Related issues include that of denial of release from a minimally conscious state or a persistent vegetative state. This is in marked contrast with the level of legal and financial support provided by states -- with the complicity of most religions -- to cause suffering and death to those declared to be enemies (and with relative indifference to any collateral damage affecting the lives of innocents). Curiously, despite the ever increasing sophistication in death-dealing devices and decision-making, the capacity to make ethical decisions regarding those faced with a life of pain would appear to be stuck in the Stone Age.
Living enshrouded in loneliness: There are numerous references, notably in song lyrics, associating loneliness with "stone" (cf. Michael Swanwick, For I Have Lain Me Down on the Stone of Loneliness and I'll Not Be Back Again, 2011). Any well of loneliness" may indeed be understood as metaphorically "encased in stone".
Entombment:
- Live burial: People may be buried alive accidentally or intentionally -- possibly as a form of torture, murder, or execution. Immurement is a form of execution where a person is walled up within a building and left to die from starvation or dehydration. It has been associated with a form of human sacrificed to celebrate completion of a construction project..
- Hermit cell: Functionally these may take the form of a cell into which the hermit or anchorite is confined,, possibly only with openings for food and waste.
- Burial or interment: This is the (ritual) act of placing a dead person into the ground, typically marked by a tombstone or gravestone.
Encasement of nuclear waste: Radioactive waste disposal poses a special problem because of elements whose dangerous radioactivity only decays over thousands of years. The waste can be encased in resin or concrete and sealed in steel drums. These may be dumped in the ocean or stored in deep mine shafts (cf. Long-term safety of concrete for holding nuclear waste, MIT News, August 2012)
Decomposition of the dead: Seven stages are distinguished in the decomposition of the dead (pallor mortis, algor mortis, rigor mortis, livor mortis, putrefaction, decomposition, skeletonization). Any of these may evoke a sense of horror and a form of metaphorical "petrification" (as noted above).
Petrification and fossilization: Through the petrification process living organic material is converted into stone by the replacement of the original material and the filling of the original pore spaces with minerals. Petrification may be associated with various forms of fossilization.
Myths of a number of cultures refer to people being "turned into stone". Joseph Campbell notes that: A Persian city once was "enstoned to stone" -- king and queen, soldiers, inhabitants, and all -- because its people refused the call of Allah (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2008, p. 53)
Preservation of bodies through freezing: Through the developing technology of cryonics, human bodies can be preserved at low-temperatures when life can no longer be sustained by contemporary medicine -- in the hope that healing and resuscitation may be possible in the future. Cryopreservation of people is not reversible with current technology.
Especially interesting to the argument of the main paper are clues offered by myth regarding exposure to the "petrifying" horror associated with death and decomposition (as notably explored in detail by the media for purposes of entertainment). The well-known myth of western culture is the encounter of Perseus with the Medusa -- rendered successful by looking at the Medusa via a mirrored shield, thereby avoiding petrification. The encounter has been the subject of extensive interpretation, itself highly controversial.
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