Beyond Dial's reclamation of material goods is his parallel vision of how human beings are also recycled. For Dial, death is not life's great equalizer. Rather it is the soil, the place to which all those who lived and died are finally relegated, no matter what their prior station. Plowed back into the earth, humanity becomes, both literally and symbolically, the fertile ground for our future existence. Something dies so that something can live; decay is the natural order of creation. According to Dial, "The world will never be destroyed as long as people be put back in the ground. One pass, one come. . . . That goes for you, me, everybody. In Every Year Carries a Number (Old Life Recycling), Dial depicts this moment of transformation as the last remnants of a soul dematerializes and disappears back into the universe out of which it once emerged
