‘Tis the season to visit your local cemeteries! There are some gorgeous burial grounds in these parts, and autumn’s the time to take ‘em in.
I recently paid a visit to Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. It was a beautiful, crisp, clear day, perfect for climbing Washington Tower, with its marvelous view of Boston.
Well, OK, maybe “marvelous” is too marvelous a word for it. I mean, it’s still Boston. But it’s a nice view. As good a view as you’re likely to get, anyway.
I was there with my old friend Robert, the one who dragged me through the mega-maze the week before. And as you might expect given a trip to the graveyard, we got to talking about bodies, and what to do with them when you’re done with them (or what you arrange to have done with them once they’re done with you, which is the more likely scenario). I said I wanted mine disposed of in the most expedient manner possible, and thought cremation would do just fine. He objected to cremation, on environmental grounds. Chemicals and things, I guess. But until they come up with some sort of deep-space laser-blaster particle-dispersal mechanism, cremation will have to do. I certainly don’t want to be embalmed. I don’t want my body displayed (it’s as creepy as people staring at you when you’re sleeping). And I would never, never, never leave my body to science, for fear that it would end up in the hands of first year med students, who would give my corpse a pet name, and then cut off my head, hands and penis for laughs. No thank you.
If you want to know some of the ways in which your corpse is put to use when you leave it to Science, Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers is a good read. But not on a full stomach.
Robert said he didn’t know why I should care what happened to my body after I’d vacated it. It wouldn’t be me, after all. Just my body. Which I would no longer be in.
Well, whatever. I wasn’t going to get into that whole mind-body thing again with him. You know, I can understand if you have a contentious relationship with your body–and who doesn’t?–you might be thinking, good riddens! But it’s not that cut and dry. The fact is, we are our bodies (I feel like a property dualist today). If you don’t agree with the our bodies, ourselves hypothesis, go talk to some poor short, bald slob with bad teeth who’s making ten grand less than his coworker in the next cubicle, who’s a foot taller with a full head of hair and a mouthful of pearly whites. Go tell it to the disagreeable dude with the little prick in the giant SUV, honking his impotent horn and screaming obscenities at the guy in the minicooper with the placid demeanor who’s slung like an ox (trust me, I’ve done a lot of research on this, and size really does matter). Or the plain jane with irritable bowel syndrome and a persistant skin rash who can’t enjoy a day out with her perky roommate, who looks like Angelina Jolie, can eat all the ice cream she wants and never get fat, and loves to bungie jump with her hunky boyfriend, Brad. Not to mention that epilepsy, schizophrenia, clinical depression, and alcoholism are all physical ailments that play a huge role in bahavior, character, and personality–in who we are to ourselves and others.
But even in those of us without serious physical and mental conditions, don’t underestimate the power of a hardy constitution–or, conversely, the power of irritable bowels: our personalities and our characters are very much shaped by these things, too. The idea that there is some pristine spirit unaffected by the physical that’s just waiting to take flight from its gnarly old body is wishful thinking (mostly of those with irritable bowels, I think).
But I didn’t get into any of this with Robert, really. All I said was, I think of my body as a buddy, a companion in this life, and I would not want to think of it being molested in any way while I was helpless to prevent it. Maybe I’m selfish, but we came into this world together, and I would like us to go out together, too. I think a healthy concern for your own corpse is a quite natural extension of the survival instinct that’s kept you and your body together all your life.
He said, still, you won’t know any better, whatever the case. The only people it should matter to are those you leave behind.
He was actually rather strident on the point, but the fact remains, my remains are my remains. If he wants his thrown to wild dogs, I have no particular objections. What you do or have done with your body is up to you in the end. I, personally, have few sentimental attachments, aside from this. I have an odd affection for this vessel, and I don’t want to cast it off like some old junker I drove into the ground. Remember that Neil Young song, “Long May You Run”?
Weve been through some things together
With trunks of memories still to come
We found things to do in stormy weather
Long may you run.
Long may you run.
Long may you run.
Although these changes have come
With your chrome heart shining in the sun
Long may you run.
That was a tribute to his car, for chrissake. People love their cars like that, I can love my corpse.
Robert had expressed some interest in seeing the “Body Worlds” show at the Museum of Science, which I’d first read about a decade ago in The London Review of Books (I was so much smarter then than I am now), on a train from Frankfurt (and well-traveled, too), as I recall. (I mention all this only because I want to stress I worked through any issues I may have had with Creepy Dr. von Hagens long ago.) Der gute Doktor was taking his traveling macabre to all the capitals of Europe. There was a bigger hooha over the plastination and display of skinned bodies over there than there has been over here, surprisingly. I think if an American had done it we might have been more alarmed by it. We’ve come to expect this sort of thing from creepy doctors with German accents, and von Hagens definitely has that shtick down:
You can bet he’s wearing black leather gloves, too.
I do think it’s all in the worst possible taste, though I wouldn’t say it’s immoral. (Bad taste should be immoral, but it’s not.) And it’s not that I’m not all rah-rah! for science, either. But, anyway, von Hagens is more a showman than a scientist in the end. Defying British law he performed a public autopsy (the first in nearly 170 years) in the Old Truman Brewery in London’s Brick Lane back in 2002, and the reviews were luke warm at best. One eyewitness said von Hagens “often appeared out of his depth.” The Guardian reported: “He struggled to saw open the skull, handing over his hacksaw to an assistant as the bone splintered, and couldn’t find the pancreas.”
Von Hagens himself says he’s part artist, part scientist, but do his plastinated corpses hold up as art? I don’t think so. They’re spectacle. Period. they’re corpse as kitsch. You want art from corpses, take the sometimes appalling, often breathtaking, always horrifically beautiful photographs of Joel-Peter Witkin:
Joel-Peter Witkin’s Glassman, 1990.
Witkin’s pictures call to mind the beauty of Baudelaire’s “
Une Charogne“: “And the sky was watching that superb cadaver/Blossom like a flower.”
Hmm.
Should my corpse survive me, that’s what I hope it will aspire to.
To get to Mt. Auburn Cemetery via T: At Harvard Square Station (Red Line), take either the Watertown Square or Waverley Square trolley (#71 or #73). Get off on Mount Auburn Street at Aberdeen Avenue. Cross Mount Auburn Street to the Entrance Gate.
Fortunately, a friend of mine was able to wrangle up some free tickets to the “Americans in Paris” exhibition at the MFA. I say “fortunately” because after seeing it, I know I would have been upset by it had I paid twenty-three bucks to get in. Sunday morning was definitely not the time to go. Here’s what it was like:
It should be heartening to see so many people getting excited about 19th Century art, I guess. But it’s actually not hard to see the appeal (it was much harder to see the art, in fact)–not much has really changed since then, as for the aspirations of the middle class. Styles of dress have come and gone, but the modus operandi is intact. We can still identify fully with Mary Cassatt’s subjects. We may think we have come a long way, baby, since Sargent’s Madame X scandalized society in 1884, but artists and advertisers are operating along the same lines today.
Aside from Madame X, the show’s centerpiece seems to have been Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black: The Artist’s Mother, 1871, which people in the gallery flocked to, for some reason. There seems to be a sentimental attachment to the picture that goes utterly counter to the artist’s intentions for it. He painted it as an arrangement of objects, essentially, not as a portrait. But sentimentality was the lens through which art and culture were viewed by the bourgeois in the Victorian era. And not much has changed in this, either.
“Whistler’s Mother” was given a wall of its own, which further lent it an aura of importance. The exhibition organizers seemed to say, “lookit, here’s something.” I’m not sure if it would have commanded quite as much attention if it had been presented differently. Not that it’s not worthy, in its way. It’s an interesting picture, with an interesting past, for sure.
I didn’t spend much time scrutinizing it, myself, though. It was hard to spend much time with any one painting, there were so many people pressing to get up close and personal with all of them. It was so crowded and stuffy in the hall, that we didn’t spend much time there–I think we were probably in and out in fifteen minutes.
I decided it would be more fun to hunt the halls of the MFA for animal portraiture, anyway. This took us to several galleries, where we found some snakes, lobsters, fish and frogs:
(All on this delightful mid-16th century oval platter attributed to Bernard Pallisy, which my friend said would be an absolute bitch to clean. I told him, not to worry, we have people for that. He scoffed, saying, “and anyway what on earth would you serve in it?” I told him I thought Jell-O would be cool.)
And, of course there were lots of dogs, doing what dogs do. Far too many for this humble blog (they deserve an art-dog blog of their own). But here are a couple of my favorites:
Emanuel de Witte’s Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, 1677
and:
David Teniers, The Younger’sButcher Shop, 1642
On our way out of the museum we had to drop by the Rococo Room, where they’ve got this magnificent Boucher displayed:
Now, what would you guess the title of this painting is? The Battle of…? Perhaps The Triumph of…?Actually it’s Return from Market. What an ordeal, eh? All for a few eggs, a hunk of cheese, and a loaf of bread. It reminded me a little of getting to Trader Joe’s by T, truth be told.
When this last weather system blew through there were some breathtaking skyscapes. Sometimes I have to say I prefer clouds to clear skies. These clouds weren’t really all that threatening. It was like a crowd of clouds just mulling around in the sky. Like Democrats, they were all sort of just kicking around individually, digging their own cloudness, each expressing its own version of what it means to be a cloud, ultimately blowing over prettily, but impotently, unable to gather into a storm like those angry thunderhead Republicans, to rain on everyone’s parade. Sometimes we need a storm, but these little clouds–multitudes of them–couldn’t muster one.
My friend Robert dragged me out to the “mega-maze” near Clinton, Mass., on Labor Day, where I took these shots:
The maze was a nightmare, by the way. I thought, how difficult can it be to find your way through it? They said it could be done in half an hour. Don’t believe it. We were wandering around in circles for over three hours in there. I kept telling Robert, “always go right!” But he was sure the rule was “always go left!” We never settled this dispute. The fact is, after about an hour, I didn’t care whether it was right or left, I just wanted out. Robert took this as a victory, and we took every left for about the next hour before he, too started to question his dogmatic approach.
I thought, if we ‘d had the foresight to position a couple of gay guys at the exit, we could use our gaydar to get out, but lacking that, I really had no plan of escape. It was clear to me, though, that, as is the case outside the maze, the dogmatic approach was not the way inside it, either. Hour three brought a decided shift in policy to pure pragmatism–the whatever-it-takes approach–including but not limited to bribing and then threatening the snarky high school kids who work in the maze and know all the shortcuts, brazenly cutting through “no access” passageways, and finally screaming “help! I’m having a baby!”
Ah, the mega-maze. It was a lot like my mega-life. The thing I have to say I enjoyed most about it was watching dads with their families in tow totally losing their shit. You know, these dads were like me, thinking, this is kid’s stuff–we’ll be in and out of here in no time. They start out all confident–shouting “This way! That way! Straight ahead!” Then two hours later you’d see them looking all knotted up, just this side of furious, about to go postal. They should probably think about having metal detectors at the entrance. There were some old-school dads in there that were the type that can’t ever be wrong, and can’t be contradicted. It was hardest on them, of course. You made way for them when they were tearing through, with their frightened brood struggling to keep up. You knew everyone was gonna get a whoopin’ that night, for no other reason than all-knowing dad couldn’t find his way out of the mega-maze, and totally lost his shit.
If you’re on the edge, the mega-maze is not a good idea. Really. Because, obviously, it’s just too easy to see it as a metaphor for life.
But there were also new-school dads who were perfectly happy to have mom take charge and get lost. And there were plenty of people who apparently enjoyed the challenge of finding their way through the maze. Bully for them, right?
We had not eaten lunch before entering the maze at noon, and I was starving and sunstroked by the time we emerged, and babbling about a minotaur. Robert gave me a firm smack in the chops and told me to snap out of it, it was nonsense–we could not have encountered the Minotaur because we were in a maze, not a labyrinth! In the first place. And secondly, there was only one Minotaur, and he was in King Minos’s Labyrinth (the original labyrinth) in Crete, not outside of Clinton, Mass in the friggin Mega-maze. We did, however, see Paris Hilton and Fabio in there. I am sure of that.
Back in my beloved Dot, the clouds continued their magnificent march across the sky:
Clouds have been a source of such fascination through time. They have inspired artists and poets since the dawn of time. The tradition lives on on the web, of course, in places like the Cloud Appreciation Society (CAS for short). They have a poetry section on their site, as any “appreciation” site worth its salt should. I liked this one, From Duncan Edwards in New Orleans:
closer than breath through a telescope,
dreams lie in wait.
blessed impermanence writ,
up there,
a bit.
(Glimpsing clouds, uptown New Orleans, April 2006)
What is it about clouds and dreams? Actually it’s not hard to figure out, is it? They pop up, change form as they drift across our mind’s eye, and dissolve, leaving nothing in their wake. Ouch.
Clouds as dreams. Clouds as emotions. Political clouds. Little Democratic nimbus clouds: drifting hapless, passive, “that can quietly watch and no more.” Or the “bulbous cumulus” Neocon cloud “that/thinks to force the world to be/and then blows itself out.” Clouds that look like cats, butterflies, a mother’s smile. Thieving clouds. Mocking clouds. Phantasmic, arty-farty, musical clouds (hmm). Shangri-La clouds. Clouds as God “thinking aloud.”
I don’t know if clear skies inspire as much poetry as cloudy ones. But I suspect not.
QOTD: what’s better for contemplation: cloudy or clear skies?
I had to comment on a couple stories I saw on TV this morning.
One was on The Early Show on CBS, where Harry Smith interviewed a woman who sat several rows in front of John Mark Karr, the sad clown in the never-ending JonBenet Ramsey circus, on his flight back to the US.
(I think Karr’s real motive is to finally get his sex-change operation–he’s hoping, like foxy Michelle Kosilek, formerly Robert Kosilek, who’s serving a life-sentence for killing his wife, that once in prison the taxpayers will foot the bill for it.)
The somehow aptly-named Natasha Fagel (who looked like she’d fenagled her share of bagels), that random passenger who happened to be on the same flight as Karr and looks nothing like a six year old beauty queen (except maybe for the teased hair, rouge, and tiara she was sporting for the interview), says she didn’t know who he was until after she deboarded, but when she found out… she was terrified. Sort of retro-terrified, I guess you’d call it.
Could this be any more pathetic? Not only is she retro-terrified, but she is retro-terrified of John Mark Karr. People. Please. Unless you’re six, you have nothing to fear.
The other story was on the hipper, always acronymized GMA. They played a YouTube video (”Fireman in a Spin“) of a fireman who had climbed into a frontloading clothes drier and had his buddies turn it on.
You couldn’t even see what was going on in the video, really, but all four hosts were sitting on their big ugly couch snickering at it, for some reason. I could not for the life of me figure it out. I mean, morning shows are only minimally informative–so it’s not like I was expecting hard news during the segment–but this was not even remotely entertaining. I mean, you want to see something really funny? Check out this hilarious YouTube video! Now, that’s entertainment!
The funny thing about YouTube is it actually just struck a joint-marketing deal with NBC. According to CNET, “NBC has plans to upload promotional video clips of some of its TV shows, including ‘Saturday Night Live’ and ‘The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.’ The entertainment company, owned by General Electric, will advertise on YouTube and promote the site on some of its TV shows. Financial details were not disclosed.”
But thank goodness we can look forward to more quality content like “Man Thinks He’s a Cat” and “Fireman in a Spin”! (By the way, only as an afterthought did the giggling hosts at GMA caution, “kids: don’t try this at home!”–I see a future tragedy unfolding.)
As for NBC. They couldn’t compete with the business class passenger sitting three rows in front of the cross-dressing pedophile, and they certainly could not match a fireman in a drier. In desperation Today did a piece on “female sex-drive,” and how it “plummets” after marriage.
Of sex in marriage, one woman said, “after awhile it gets a little boring.”
Ladies. I want to clear something up. Just for the record. Guys don’t do it because it’s particularly interesting. I mean, the average duration of coitus is 7.9 minutes with 100 to 500 thrusts per encounter. There’s really not much time, what with all that thrusting, to make it all that interesting for you. Sorry. Look at it like this: eight minutes of friction, and you’re free for the rest of the day!
