Bell Fountain Retreat

Wandering a cemetery to dodge ghosts in the machine.

I woke to light as harsh as the internet. The screen, I thought, find the screen and kill it. I rose to hunt the offender. It was three a.m., the dark hour of the soul, or as we call it in the 21^st century, any hour that ends in “o’clock.”

There was no screen: the glow of fresh snow lit the night. I couldn’t turn it off. 2025 had scrambled and stolen the seasons. Summer lasted until late October, followed by two weeks of fall. Now white light flooded my room like the inverse of a shadow.

Winter was early. I felt stuck and circumscribed, like living inside an app. I avoid apps when I can. The ones I have line my phone like little prisons. “Walled gardens,” they call them, like you can stop to smell the roses and the hills don’t have eyes.

Sometimes I think how the flat earth movement gained popularity when the apps did. A flat earth seems easy to step off and leave behind. I picture a flat earth rotating like a plate in the microwave, laden with comfort food ready at the beep. Safe and shallow, warm on command, instead of an iron magnet drawing heat from a relentless star.

It’s 3:30. I’m restless at night because I won’t get to be restless in the day. I won’t walk it off like I’ve done for months. In summer, I looked for birds; when the birds migrated, I looked for turning trees; when the trees shed their leaves, I found a new place to wander, new friends to see.

But I can’t go and make my visit. My friends are in the graveyard, and Bellefontaine Cemetery is closed for snow.

* * *

Bellefontaine Cemetery is a historic site of sophisticated grandeur that fades the moment you hear a St. Louisan pronounce it “Bell Fountain.” It’s not the worst example of Missouri French: “Ver-sails” and “Bo-Dark” (Versailles and Bois D’Arc) win. But it’s a contender.

No one says “Bellefontaine” like I do. “Bellefontaine” fuses my past and present into an involuntary barbaric yawp. My St. Louis fake French combines with my Central Connecticut Polish-American accent: yes, that is a real thing, a niche accent studied by linguists. You can read about it in The New York Times.

My Polish ancestors passed down their glottal stop, leaving me incapable of pronouncing “mountain,” “button,” or any word with a “nt” or “tt” in the middle.

“It’s called a GLAH’-uhl stop,” I explain uselessly. I resent it when people attribute my pronunciation to a lowbrow trend instead of a lowbrow heritage. I will not change my accent — nor could I. It’s an insur-MAH’ihble problem.

But in St. Louis, problems collide.

“Goin’ to Bell FAH’-uhn!” I say in Polack French, sounding like Chopin, if he were drunk. “Hope I don’t get HAUH’-ed by a PHAH’-um!”

There’s the regal Bellefontaine and there’s my “Bell FAH’-uhn:” a make-believe land where I alone utter the password. The dead of St. Louis know I swallow consonants, not pride. They don’t judge my speech because they guide my subconscious. They enter it through the door where my accent is.

In the cemetery, surnames from street signs spring to life. They have first names and birthdays and stories set in stone. They are my neighbors of history, and I visit them because I know they won’t leave me. They can’t: they’re already gone. I don’t need to worry that one day I’ll wake up and they won’t be there, the way I worry about everything else.

I drive through the gate and head to the friend of a friend, another St. Louis writer hypnotized by the city, to the point that it seeped into his poems.

“Hello, Prufrock,” I say, and park my car next to T.S. Eliot’s subconscious muse.

* * *

William Prufrock was an immigrant from Germany who started a furniture company in St. Louis in the 19^th century. In the early 20^th century, his son, Harry, built up the business by slapping PRUFROCK on street signs and full-page newspaper ads. Among those who saw them was the young T.S. Eliot, who grew up downtown on Locust Street. I’ve visited his house; it’s a parking lot covered in weeds.

In 1914, 25-year-old Eliot moved to England. In 1915, he made his literary debut with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: an agonizing confession of longing and self-loathing from the perspective of a middle-aged man struggling with the meaning of life. He is caught between what might have been and what never would be and the paralysis of his own self-expression.

Eliot did not mean to name his tormented narrator after a St. Louis furniture salesman. He admitted decades later that the act was subconscious: “I did not have, at the time of writing the poem, and have not yet recovered, any recollection of having acquired this name in any way, but I think that it must be assumed that I did, and that the memory has been obliterated.”

Eliot refashioned himself an Englishman, but St Louis stuck to his subconscious like gooey butter cake. The brown sludge river in “The Dry Salvages” was not the Thames, but the Mississippi. The yellow fog of “Prufrock” was not London, but Locust Street. “It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done,” Eliot wrote.

There is a recording of Eliot reading “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. He has a British accent, despite his St. Louis upbringing. He has an old-school St. Louis accent, despite his British pretensions. I’d call it a transatlantic accent if I could say that: he’s “transatLAH-ic,” caught between worlds. It’s a relatable plight.

Critics savaged “Prufrock” on publication. By the time Eliot recorded it in the 1940s, he had lived through two wars and found fame, but he never lost his miserable roots.

“To roll it towards some overwhelming question/ To say ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,” T.S. Eliot intones from YouTube, six decades after he passed. “Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’— If one, settling a pillow by her head/ Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all; That is not it, at all.’”

I found Prufrock’s grave on accident. I was wandering Bellefontaine’s spectacular necropolis of the celebrity dead: William Clark of Lewis and Clark fame; William S. Burroughs; Rush Limbaugh; beer barons including both Anheuser and Busch. They lie in crypts with sphynxes and obelisks and lascivious angels modeled on flappers. They weren’t what I was after.

“I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each,” Eliot wrote in the poem. “I do not think that they will sing to me.”

Nor to me.

I did not know what I was seeking. But I go to Bell Fountain to find it. For decades, I’ve wandered notebook in hand, writing down the names of the people with the most interesting graves. I would go home and look them up and find a wealth of information online: blogs, newspapers, history forums. Those are gone now, lost in broken search engines and AI slop. All that remains are books and stones.

The scariest sites in Bellefontaine are the QR codes near graves of note. I refuse to use a QR code in a cemetery. It would feel like performing an exorcism. I would rather be left with the whole of my imagination and the figments of facts I find.

I would rather be led to William Prufrock, whose tomb I stumbled upon without knowing its story. Could it be… I wondered — and it was. I had subconsciously found T.S. Eliot’s subconscious.

AI has no subconscious. With AI there can be no soul searching because there is no soul. There are no questions, only inputs and prompts. There is not even the possibility of being paralyzed by the minutiae of life, because there is No Life. The dead of Bellefontaine are infinitely more alive than AI will ever be.

Prufrock’s grave has a wreath on the front and a vase on the top. He died in 1913, as Eliot was revising the poem bearing his name. There is nothing to indicate the monument’s significance. You just have to get lucky, and that day, I was.

* * *

In May, Bellefontaine was hit by a tornado and briefly closed. The tornado was among the worst in St. Louis’s history, and hit the north side, where Bellefontaine is located, particularly hard. It decimated long-loved lands, turning arboreal havens like Forest Park into fields of decapitated trees. I waited a long time to return to Bellefontaine.

When I returned, I was relieved: it was damaged, but its soul was intact.

In 2025, it felt like everything was disappearing. Often, it objectively was. My daughter left home, my father has terminal cancer, my city got hit by a tornado. Democracy is desecrated, seasons are slain, history is being erased. We are offered AI simulacrums as consolation for our loss. The same AI that drains our water, steals our jobs, and annihilates independent thought and collective memory.

Cemeteries are sanctuaries from AI. They combine art, history, and nature in one place. They safeguard history and chronology, and honor lives lived that were real. AI may be the antichrist, but it cannot outwit the dead.

“Prufrock” is a meditation on the grief of an unlived life. The narrator struggles to find the right words and fails — but it is in his struggle that the reader finds meaning.

You surrender that struggle by turning to AI for answers on what Eliot called “the overwhelming question”. When you ask AI what the meaning of life is, you concede that it must be AI: how else could AI respond, for what does it know of being human?

* * *

In November, my daughter returned from college. We headed to Bell Fountain. I explained that I spend my days roaming cemeteries and she said that she missed me.

We walked through the remnants of fall, the leaves that changed too fast and fell too soon and too late. I showed her graves, for I have known them all: the marble sexpot statue commissioned by a wealthy horndog and trapped in a glass case for eternity; the mysterious sculpture of a girl known only as Poor Cecile; the tomb of David R. Francis, ambassador to Russia during the Bolshevik revolution, marked by a hooded ghoul.

I wondered what would land in her subconscious and in mine. The names, the dates, the voices dying with a dying fall. We passed Prufrock’s grave on the way to the car. I stopped and took a photo.

“Who’s that?” she asked.

“Everyone,” I replied.

* * *

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The grave of William Prufrock. All photos by me, fall 2025.

Herman Luyties got so hung up on a woman, he commissioned a 12-foot statue of her and put it in his home. He ordered that upon his death, she be sealed in a glass box for eternity.

David R. Francis, scaring the shit out of everyone since 1927.

The grave of William S. Burroughs with offerings of coins, pens, and poetry.

What happened to Poor Cecile?

Crypt of the Busch beer baron family, with VENI VIDI VICI carved at the top.

Bell Fountain on the day I returned.