The Year I Counted and Named the Dead

The Year I Counted and Named the Dead is a named period in Piranesi’s life in the House, linking the work of remembering and recording to his care for those who have died. Its place in the journal chronology is recoverable, but the record is materially incomplete: journals have been renumbered, pages removed, and scraps recovered from gull nests, so the year’s surviving evidence also makes uncertainty part of its history.

Position in the Journal Chronology

Journal no. 5 is labelled as running from the Fifteenth Day of the Fourth Month in the Year I named the Constellations to the Thirtieth Day of the Ninth Month in the Year I counted and named the Dead. Journal no. 6 continues from the First Day of the Tenth Month in that year to the Fourteenth Day of the Second Month in the Year that the Ceilings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First North-Eastern Halls collapsed. The labels place the named year between two other periods in Piranesi’s calendar and show that it spans the end of one journal and most of the next.

This system of dating does not simply replace ordinary calendar time. An earlier journal was originally labelled November 2012 before the date was crossed out and replaced with a House-calendar range beginning on the Thirtieth Day in the Twelfth Month in the Year of Weeping and Wailing and ending on the Fourth Day of the Seventh Month in the Year I discovered the Coral Halls. The coexistence of calendar dates and named years preserves evidence of a chronology being revised, rather than offering a single, stable timeline.

Care for the Dead

The year’s title names an activity central to Piranesi’s understanding of his place in the House. He counts and names the dead, treating them as members of the world who merit continuing attention rather than as remains to be forgotten. In the surrounding record, the dead have distinct material histories: the Biscuit-Box Man’s small bones are kept in a red biscuit tin while the long bones are tied in bundles, and the People of the Alcove have gathered and laid the Fish-Leather Man’s bones with their own dead. These different arrangements make preservation and burial visible as acts of recognition.

Piranesi’s care is also ongoing and personal. He visits all the dead, especially the Folded-Up Child, bringing food, water, and water lilies from the Drowned Halls. He speaks to them about his activities and the wonders he has encountered, so that, in his understanding, they are not alone. The title of the year therefore joins a practice of classification—counting and naming—to a practice of companionship: the dead remain part of the community to whom he reports and whom he tends.

The Record Recovered and Altered

The journals that preserve these dates are not untouched records. Piranesi notices that entries refer to journals that seem not to exist, and that the handwriting in those entries resembles his own but is rounder and younger. When he examines the covers, he discovers that his first three journals were originally numbered 21, 22, and 23; someone has scratched away the first digit of each number, making them appear to be 1, 2, and 3. The faint remaining traces of the removed numerals make the journals’ physical surfaces evidence of an earlier history.

Later, Piranesi finds that the final ten pages of the journal formerly numbered 22 and the first thirty-two pages of the journal formerly numbered 23—the pages containing information about Ketterley—have been torn out. He cannot initially remember removing them, but has already recognised that he has done things of which he has no recollection. A scrap recovered from the Eighty-Eighth Western Hall bears the page number 231, linking the recovered fragments to the missing material; assembled, they include approximately thirty entries dated from 15 November to 20 December 2012. The gap in the archive thus becomes a clue: what appears to have vanished from the journals has survived, in pieces, in the gull nests.

Recovery, Memory, and Meaning

Piranesi retrieves those pieces through patient physical work. At the Eighty-Eighth Western Hall, he removes scraps from thirty-five nests, using warmed water and rags to loosen paper cemented to seaweed by gull droppings without dissolving it. By the evening of the second day he has recovered seventy-nine scraps, then checks every nest again before returning to his own halls. The labor underscores how little of the past is available to him as a complete account: it must be recovered fragment by fragment and cautiously reassembled.

The named year stands within this tension between deliberate remembrance and involuntary loss. Piranesi gives the dead names and attention, yet his own past is mediated by damaged, altered records whose history he cannot fully recall. The year’s title consequently describes more than a calendrical span: it identifies a period in which keeping account—of lives, remains, and written traces—is an ethical practice, while the surviving evidence warns that both identity and history can be obscured by gaps in memory and in the archive.