A Wooden Headstone

I maintain that spring is the most difficult season to love. Difficult because one never really knows what to expect from spring. The languid, dog days of summer and the long, desiccated nights of deep winter seem fixed and eternal. Spring, on the other hand, distinguishes itself through a kind of ambivalent moodiness which promises fecundity one moment and torpor the next. In like a lion, out like a lamb. And yet, as the dregs of winter slouch listlessly into vernal renewal, the dogwoods, the redbuds, and the forsythia dare to break through the icy, lifeless ground. These small ruptures of grace come slowly first and then, in an instant, accelerate to a kinetic rush.

At these moments of full swing, I make a regular pilgrimage to an unlikely place: the grounds of Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For a site that memorializes the dead, no other place teems with such life: azaleas, magnolias, and mountain laurel. Towering over these more ephemeral treasures are old-growth oaks and beeches, shading some headstones with their canopies and displacing others with their heaving, errant roots.

Originally known as Stone Farm, the land on which the cemetery lies took the name Mt. Auburn from the 1770 poem “The Deserted Village.” Written by the Irishman Oliver Goldsmith, it tells of an idyllic landscape of “Sweet Auburn! loveliest village of the plain.” The poem anticipated major themes in nineteenth-century Romanticism: blissful nostalgia for rural life and the bereavement of its loss precipitated by industry, commerce, and urbanization. The cemetery, on the outskirts of the then youthful town of Cambridge, was to be a pastoral escape from the miasma of Boston. Designed by Henry Alexander Scammell Dearborn, Jacob Bigelow, and Alexander Wadsworth (cousin to Longfellow, who is buried at the cemetery), Mt. Auburn opened its gates in 1831. Unlike the overcrowded churchyards that dotted New England, Mt. Auburn was the nation’s first landscape cemetery, an evolution of the English landscape garden and the advent of landscape architecture in the newly born republic.

The landscape itself is an enchanted composition of rolling hills and meandering paths. The grounds do not reveal themselves all at once; they invite exploration, with each new turn revealing some spectacular display of seasonal flora. Although it is, by New England standards, relatively young (The Old Burial Ground in nearby Harvard Square opened in 1636, nearly two centuries earlier), the site feels old and patinated. Mausolea hunkered into the hillside become more indolent each year. And the elements extract their incremental toll on antebellum limestone like a tithe.

Mt. Auburn is also the eternal home for many nineteenth- and twentieth-century luminaries. Some of their resting places are proud, such as Mary Baker Eddy’s grand rotunda located on the banks of the aptly named Halcyon Lake. Others are more humble. The headstone for the mid-century futurist Buckminster Fuller is a small hunk of granite, no more than a foot high, with the enigmatic epitaph: “‘CALL ME TRIMTAB’ BUCKY.” Fuller’s metaphor refers to a small, operable flap located on the rudders of planes and boats. The trim tab, though small and requiring minimal effort to operate, has a significant impact on the trajectory of the craft. Such was the way Bucky liked to think of his influence on society.

Located nearby, on an unassuming hillside path named for the oxalis plant, lies a contemporary of Fuller who was arguably as influential, though perhaps not as well known. Unlike Bucky’s squat block of granite, this headstone stands tall and slender like a mystic, abstract totem. Yet the most curious thing about the headstone isn’t its shape, but the fact that it isn’t a stone at all. It is a four-foot slab of tidewater cypress. Its epitaph reads:

GYORGY KEPES

1906–2001

Gyorgy Kepes (pronounced KEP-ish) was one of those mid-century polymaths (like Fuller) who seemed to live five lives in the time the rest of us mere mortals struggled to live just one. Born in Hungary, Kepes began his career as a painter, but became disillusioned with the limitations of the medium after the horrors of World War I and pivoted to film. While studying in Berlin he met fellow Hungarian artist László Maholy-Nagy (an instructor at the Bauhaus in nearby Dessau). Kepes would follow his compatriot to London in 1936 and Chicago a year later where Maholy-Nagy would establish a “New Bauhaus” (now known as the Illinois Institute of Technology). During his sojourn in London, Gyorgy had an encounter with a young woman and her mother while the two were searching for a photography studio at which they had an appointment. Unable to locate the studio, Kepes offered to paint their portrait instead. Within a year Gyorgy and the young woman, Juliet, were married. Gyorgy never completed the portrait. The Kepes couple finally settled in Massachusetts in 1947 after Gyorgy accepted a position from the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT. He would remain there until his retirement in 1974.

Photograph courtesy of the author.

During his tenure at MIT, Kepes founded its Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), an interdisciplinary design program that sought to connect its fellows with others across types of media, people, and communities. Of its many ambitions, CAVS aspired to the “incorporation of natural processes, such as cloud play, water flow, and the cyclical variations of light and weather.” This multivalent approach reflected Kepes’s own career. Over the course of his life, Kepes took a professional interest in light, color, painting, photography, and film (this is, by no means, an exhaustive list). In fact, the entirety of Kepes’s career seems focused on the interrelatedness of things. According to Kepes’s friend S. I. Hayakawa (yet another polymath likely to inspire an inferiority complex), to think like Kepes is to:

cease looking at things atomistically in visual experience and to see relatedness means, among other things, to lose in our social experience … the deluded self-importance of absolute “individualism” in favor of social relatedness and interdependence. When we structuralize the primary impacts of experience differently, we shall structuralize the world differently…. The reorganization of our visual habits so that we perceive not isolated “things” in “space,” but structure, order, and the relatedness of events in space-time, is perhaps the most profound kind of revolution possible.

This connectedness goes a long way in explaining the headstone. The first way the monument connects is through family and tradition; that Kepes should choose a wooden monument to mark his own grave is not without precedent. Even though he was unquestionably a modernist with both feet in the twentieth century, his headstone stands firmly in the past. The people of Hungary have erected wooden headstones for their dead since the Middle Ages. Carved by folk craftsmen from trees planted at the birth of the memorialized, these came in a multitude of forms, from simple boards to eccentric overturned boat hulls. Kepes’s marker is a particular type of wooden monument known as a kopjafa (or fejfa). Apocryphally said to resemble a spear lanced into the grave of a fallen warrior, kopjafas are most prevalent in Szeklerland in modern day Romania. The design of each kopjafa is unique to the individual, with a complex symbology delineating biographical details. The sloped top of Kepes’s kopjafa tells us that he was married, the geometric embellishments at the corners signify his ancestral village in Hungary, and each of the nine stepped serrations in the totem stands for a decade in Gyorgy’s life. Of course, another clear indication of Kepes’s marital status is Juliet’s memorial in the adjacent plot. Juliet’s headstone (this time not a misnomer) is also a tribute to her origins. Hewn from bursting stone shipped from her native England, Juliet’s memorial is engraved with illustrations from her career as an artist and Caldecott-honor-winning children’s book author. Both monuments were commissioned by their daughter, Julie, and designed by their grandson, Janos Stone. The two memorials play off each other. One simple and monolithic, the other articulated and creviced. One of enduring stone, the other of ephemeral wood.

Despite the accomplishments of Kepes’s singular career and the enigmatic details of his kopjafa totem, it is this – the memorial’s materiality – that continues to hold my curiosity. What does it mean to have a memorial of organic matter? Although tidewater cypress is rot and moisture resistant, there is little doubt that the earth will metabolize Gyorgy’s memorial long before it exacts any meaningful toll on a stone monument such as Juliet’s. While stone will also make its return to the earth, it is in no hurry to do so. It will take centuries to diminish.

For the past few years, Gyorgy’s monument has sported a copper cap to protect its porous end grain. No doubt, protection against moisture from above will slow the wood’s disintegration, but the greater threat comes from below. Wood, if it is to survive, needs to breathe. By forgoing a foundation of stone or some other inorganic material, the Kepes monument invites the entropic forces of bacteria, enzymes, fungi, ice heaves, and termites to have their way with the wood. Halfway around the world, in a sacred forest in a remote corner of Japan, the architects of the Grand Shrine of Ise employ a similar approach to the structural piers of Shinto’s most holy site. Ise’s insurance policy against becoming Japan’s most consecrated compost heap comes via a ritual rebuilding of the Shrine every twenty years. Since the late seventh century, every two decades a horde of specialized carpenters and priests have descended on Ise to painstakingly deconstruct the shrine and reconstruct it with new timbers in an adjacent lot. Like the ship of Theseus, rebuilt clinker by clinker, we define Ise simultaneously by the transient corporeality of its timber structure and its more enduring, yet intangible essence. Our bodies aren’t so different. Many of our cells have a lifespan of only seven to ten years. If our body is constantly replacing itself with new material, what then defines the physical self? Does our identity transcend sinew, muscle, and bone? Is it a symbolic manifestation of something more ephemeral: our memories, our consciousness, our soul?

Like our identities, the memorials we leave behind are metonyms for our mortal vessels. Here again we face a contradiction. Headstones acquiesce to a life of transience; they represent a life that was and then was not. And yet their materiality resists this fate. They are an attempt to leave something permanent. But even these stones are not forever. The wooden monument of Gyorgy Kepes seems singularly aware of this fate. It recognizes that while they can shelter our memories from entropy, monuments are not so much the physical representation of memory, but a repository for them, ritualizing “the capacity to forget within the very gesture of remembering.” Memorials linger for the benefit of the living; the dead have no need for them. The memorialized are in a state of waiting for the world of the living to set them free. Like the bardo in Tibetan Buddhism, it is a respite between lives. Gravestones may prolong the second death – the last time someone speaks the name of the deceased – but they, like our bodies, are not eternal. And although the world will likely remember Gyorgy Kepes longer than most, the memory of him will fade as surely as his memorial will rot and splinter. And like his body, his kopjafa will eventually return to humus and loam.

Mt. Auburn, like any destination worth its salt, is best appreciated over time. If and when you go, it’s best not to plan your visit with too much intent. Better to lose oneself there, piecing together lives based on shared surnames, lifespans conspicuously too short, or epitaphs that range from the tragic to the comical, enigmatic, and poetic. I have my own regular stops: the tower from which you can see Bunker Hill in the east and Wachusett Mountain far off in the west; the dell with its summer symphony of frogs amongst the duckweed; and, of course, the grave of Gyorgy Kepes. I make regular pilgrimages to check in on the old man. As a designer I come to pay my respects. But I am also curious to see how the wood is holding up. A part of me wishes to see it endure, for the beauty of the object and the memory of Kepes. But the better part of me wants to celebrate its decay and disintegration. Only through its impermanence can the humility of the object shine through. And only by coming to terms with this kind of ephemerality can we be at peace with our world.

It won’t be long before I visit Mt. Auburn again. And I know that when I go, the memorial to Gyorgy Kepes will still be there. But I also know that it won’t be there forever. And so I cherish it all the more.