This Pyramid Is Potentially Any Human Being’s Grave
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Let’s face it: you want to be buried in a pyramid. Who doesn’t? This summer, while searching for the meaning of paradise in Costa Rica, my associate and I came upon an American woman who had built a pyramid right next to her Egyptian-themed house, perhaps precisely for this purpose. (Alert! Alert! Exclusive first-glimpse of a yet-undisclosed adventure!)
Given this inevitable fact about human nature (again, that we want to be buried in pyramids), imagine my delight when I discovered, yesterday at the Art Book Fair at PS1 in Queens, Solution 9: The Great Pyramid, a remarkable volume published last year by Sternberg Press. It is a collection of essays proposing (and remembering, from the future) the construction of a for-profit pyramid of human graves bigger than the Great Pyramid at Giza. The projected location is in eastern Germany, though there are also plans for a global network of such things, which will be a fantastic and profitable use of our dead. The sample pages on the Sternberg website are most alluring:
The creators’ ambition is vast…
…no less than their morbidity.
Why is this so wonderfully desirous?
Nathan Schneider is an editor of Killing the Buddha and writes about religion, reason, and violence for a variety of publications. He is also a founding editor of Waging Nonviolence. His first two books, published by University of California Press in 2013, are God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet and Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse. Visit his website at The Row Boat.