JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
In the death-drenched year of 1917, in the third year of the then Great War, P.S.G. Dubash offered to readers here and there the idea of transforming the ashes of the dead into something "useful", using them as the material for creating statues of the "Great Departed". "The world today is so much the poorer for not having the ashes of such great men as Isaac Newton, Lord Kelvin, Martin Luther..." and so, we can create statues of them using the ashes of others. This would be particularly so for people contributing their ashes to the statue of someone whom they admired. In that way, as Dubash points out, the remains of soldiers would live a more sustained post-death state by being part of a statue of, say, Lord Kitchener. "Towns can be thus adorned with the living memories of the great dead."
Part of this 18-page pamphlet (published by George Toulmin & Sons of Northgate) describes the four ways of disposal of the dead: internment, embalming, burning in the open, and the towers of silence (where bodies are brought to a height and displayed to be eaten by birds). Dubash makes the case of great waste in three of the four, only finding use in the "exposure" category.
And so, there you have it. There's a certain something here that makes sense, using thousands and tens of thousands of remains to create statuary. Gravestones and memorials aren't made of ashes, but they are reminders of what sleeps underneath, and in a way they are a type of mostly-repetitive statuary sans biological remains.
There is an interesting part here at the end of the pamphlet, where Dubash makes the case that "there should be no colour prejudice, because after death there is no colour prejudice, because in the eyes of God the colour prejudice is a sin". This is a provoking comment, and makes me think of the history of the skin color in Heaven...a history that I do not know.
Comments