Grave Imaginings

Who would have imagined that digging foundation trenches would touch our sense of mortality so deeply? Is this because we usually bury our dead in the ground? Or because scrabbling in the earth brings us face to face with our own substance? I suppose it hardly matters what the reason is. What’s important is to plunge into the feeling and to extract some meaning from the encounter.

Building anything habitable will always stir deep emotions. These oftentimes mount a threat against our sense of security, leaving us howling at the moon or curled up in the full foetal. None of this is bad, merely an indication that ultimately we will die and return to the earth in the age old tradition of natural recycling. Why building work – particularly the laying of foundations – carries such philosophical weight is something of a mystery. Perhaps it is because habitable buildings offer such potentiality for living that the chemistry is activated to such an extent. This, I think, is where we come face to face with our own destinies and are challenged to live the lives we have been graced with. It’s not so much that we fear death but that we fear living.

That buildings can assist us in living our lives might be something of a truism but the truth is that most buildings, particularly the ones we inhabit, are rarely fashioned to accommodate our uniqueness. The ‘one size fits all’ approach to house design is as absurd as the idea that everyone might fit into a single size of glove or shoe. So, possibly, as the foundations of a building are laid we are confronted not so much by the shadow of death but by the bright light of our own potentiality dazzling us?