It was a fuggy New York summer day as I opened my mail and discovered an invitation to freeze my head. I paused, stricken by the nostalgic contrast with the vernacular injunction of my old primary school principal, who occasionally invited me to go boil my head, then read on.
It was a brochure for a company that offered the opportunity to escape the cold, cold grave by offering an even colder cryonic receptacle – for a hefty price. Personally, I suspect Nigerian dot.com futures would offer a sounder investment. You only have to look at the unkempt state of old cemeteries to doubt that future generations will lavish long-term care on the expensive maintenance of canned deep-frozen egotists.
Paying an arm and a leg to have your head turned to ice is clearly an egregious waste of money. Even if some specimens were to survive, the exponentially rising costs of medical care for the living imply there is only an outside chance anyone would even try to reassemble any dear departed following in Captain Birdseye’s frozen footsteps.
As I read the brochure, I had a strange phone call. Did I know a certain woman, recently deceased? The caller had seen a pile of material on an Upper Eastside curb, spilling out of plastic trash bags. ‘She must have had a really interesting life,’ said the caller, worrying that the yearbooks and photos should really be kept in the family.
But she did not have any family, and space in Manhattan is at a premium, so her life ended up sadly but elegiacally on display on East 70th Street, with a heap of ephemera for a mausoleum. As the Keats poem Ozymandias might put it: ‘Look upon my works, ye mighty – but be quick before the garbage truck comes to take them to the landfill.’
The kindly caller had Googled the deceased’s name, and found my name on the funeral announcement for other journalists. It set me to speculating – as such incidents so often do. Such immortality as we achieve in the future is likely to be electronic, on the web. Authors, journalists and other such hacks and drudges can already claim their piece of blue sky with a Google search. Even pre-web authors are now being scanned and entered.
After many years of fruitless search (and its interim misattribution to Rudyard Kipling), I recently managed to track down the author of a half remembered poem from childhood, about the six wise men of Hindustan, who came to see the elephant though all of them were blind. The dead and buried New England clergyman JG Saxe has been intellectually and electronically resurrected on the internet after 50 years in limbo, with neither a pentangle nor a candle in sight.
Hence my latest venture, which should prove immensely more popular than canning and freezing, and certainly much more useful for historians, and perhaps even for pollsters in Florida elections.
I offer www.ozymandias.org, a living electronic graveyard, in which all the publicly held records of the deceased, their credit ratings, medical records, tax filings, litigation and voting records will be assembled for the base of an internet memorial pyramid, with the additional add-ons of photographs, family trees, personal letters and anything else that those who are about to depart want to add to the site. They may even list the whereabouts of their frozen and canned head.
