By-weekly topic for Jan. 1, 2004
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20051219222803/www.magpienest.org/scgi-bin/wiki.pl?CemeteriesAndPlace
Cemeteries
By Write Out Loud
I've always loved them because they're all about stories. In any cemetery, you've got stories all around you: names, and dates of birth and death (plus places if you're lucky). How much can you figure out about a person if you just know a name and when they were born and when they died? Quite a lot, actually. You can think about their lives; you can "remember" something you don't really know.
Examples:
--in a small, rural town in Oregon, formerly a lumber boomtoom, a woman born there in 1885 died there in 1950. Her name was--I'm not kidding, here--you can't make stuff like this up--Lulu Sophie Detroit. Lulu? Lulu? Not Lucille Sophia--Lulu Sophie! And Detroit! What do you suppose our Lulu did for a living? No husband, no children buried nearby. Just Lulu, everybody's gal.
--in a neglected country burial ground in southern New Hampshire, a woman who died in 1870 is identified as the "consort" of the man buried next to her, who died eight years later, both of them in their 60s when they passed. What's the story there, I have to wonder? Were they living in sin? Why didn't they marry? Was she his housekeeper? He seems to have had several children but no wife--was she their mother? What's with "consort"?
--a man who was born in Boston in 1835 and died there in 1895 only lived to be 60 years old (actually, a pretty good age for that time), but he also lived through the Civil War. If he fought in it, his rank and unit will usually be engraved on his headstone. Was he an officer or an enlisted man? Cavalry or infantry? Are his wife and children buried around him? Yup, there they are. Oh, look--they lost four babies, three of them during the war--in 1862, 1864 and 1865. If he fought, was he away in the war when his children died? What must his wife have gone through? One of the markers is an tiny, empty stone cradle, with a little dent in the pillow where the child's head lay. Not morbid, but so sad, I get a lump in my throat.
I'm hardly ever sad in cemeteries, though. Quite often, I'm laughing. My passion for cemeteries, always lively, really kicked in when Pica introduced me to the granddaddy of them all, Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. Along with a compulsion to let the dead tell us their stories, P. and I have shared some hearty yuks in that enormous, lovely place where there was, and is, always something new to discover. One day we absolutely fell over laughing when we found Curtis Burt buried next to his wife, Bertha, and I said, "Oh, look--there's Curt Burt and Bertha Burt!" Say it yourself, real fast; see if you can not laugh. I dare you. Or maybe you had to be there. I'm so glad I was.
Or the simple, solemn, imposing stone monolith, at least 8 feet tall, that draws you to it all along the little path marked by my favorite Japanese maple. "Must be somebody Important," we said the first time, for there are many Important People buried in Mt. Auburn. This one rates the big rock because he is "BARNABAS BATES FATHER OF CHEAP POSTAGE." with the little period at the end; so droll. When we quit laughing, I took several photos which I later used as postcards.
And Emerson's gravestone in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, in Concord, Mass.: everybody else in Author's Row has tasteful, modest grey stones with their dates and names--Louisa May Alcott, Bronson Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau. And then you get to the end of the Row and off by itself, up higher on the hillside, with its nose in the air, is this enormous uncut, unpolished chunk of pink granite--pink--with just a brass plate that declaims, in enormous yet solemn capitals, "EMERSON." I distinctly remember standing there with Pica, shaking our heads and snorting our disdain: "Well, THERE's Waldo, huh?" "It just figures, doesn't it? I mean, he would, wouldn't he?" "Eugh, it's vulgar." I guess you can tell we're Not fans, enough Not to stand there and sneer at the gravestone Waldo probably had nothing to do with, but was probably carefully selected by his adoring fans. And we were into it enough to get all worked up.
We got worked up in other ways about other Important People. Robert Gould Shaw's memorial sent us on a rampage, reading his published letters, seeing Glory again, studying the memorial on Boston Common that appears behind the closing credits in the film. We wondered at the teddybear cult centered on John Wilkes Booth's brother's grave. Nearby, we commiserated with Senator Charles Sumner, featured speaker at the dedication of Gettysburg Cemetery; he spoke for two hours, but it's Lincoln's words we remember. We were all but hypnotized by a collection of life-sized books, worked in bronze, scattered around atop the tomb of a 19th-century school superintendent who must have been quite a guy, in his day.
Occasionally, we were into it enough to make complete fools of ourselves, as for instance the time we blundered into a tomb whose gate stood invitingly open, only to blunder right back out again because although there was nobody (alive) inside, there were gravediggers' implements scattered around, and one of the crypts gaped at us; it was being prepared for imminent occupancy.
And then there was the very early morning when Pica was birding, I lumbering along behind her, dutifully squinting wherever she pointed but seeing not much more than rustling leaves. We trudged up the road to the entirely authentic Gothic Revival funeral chapel swathed in mist, with its tall grey stone towers disappearing into the trees, total D-Minor Fugue atmosphere. As we arrived, so did a hearse. The driver got out and opened the back. Like morons, we both wondered What could be in there? and scampered right over to have a look. What-was-in-there: a plain--very plain--cardboard box, with a loose lid just set on there, about the size of a refrigera . . . oh. Yikes. We spun on our heels and were outta there, pronto, having fetched up against more reality than we'd bargained for.
And then, of course, there was the time we were standing by the pond, revering Isabel Stewart Gardner's handsome green marble tomb with the tasteful Art Nouveau detail. Suddenly, some machinery (pond filter? cryptic airconditioning?) started up right behind us, whooshVROOM! Scared us so bad, we shrieked aloud, nearly stepped on a goose in her nest, and burst out laughing, silly geese that we were.
So that's how I feel in cemeteries--alive, and listening. And laughing.
Comments
Barnabas BATES is the father of cheap postage, dear Doc; how could you forget?
Waldo's pink granite, on the other hand, I'd forgotten about, so am happy to be reminded.
Where's Waldo. Don't you just knock yourself out some time? You goonies.
The story of the tiny grave markers reminded me of this - when we were visiting the little family graveyard next to my grandparents house one time I asked what the little stones off to the edge of the graveyard were for - my uncle told me they were markers for my paternal grandparents children who had died of an infuenza outbreak. The story finally came out - my father's parents had lost three children at this time - then they started over and had four more - my father and his siblings. By the time I found this out, both my grandparents were dead. They just never talked about it and I often wondered how they had coped and carried on.
Cemeteries are very provocative story books, aren't they, but with most of the pages missing! I also wonder what the story was behind a configuration of family deaths and names. And the nameless graves..... Enjoyed the post.
I too find cemeteries places of entertainment. I've very relieved to know I'm not the only one.
Posted by: Trey | February 14, 2004 08:22 AM
Virtual Cemeteries
By Feathers of Hope (Numenius)
This is an entry for the Ecotone Wiki's joint blogging topic on Cemeteries and Place.
Not far from where we live, down the road past fields and out to the east, is the Tremont Street Cemetery, an idyllic little rural cemetery with the interments starting from the 1870s. It's a good destination for a short bicycle ride from here. None of our ancestors are buried there. In idle moments, we entertain the thought of transcribing the gravestones there so that genealogists from elsewhere might be able to look up information about deceased relatives online.
We dabble in genealogy and too have benefited from online cemetery transcription projects. In virtual explorations of my ancestral roots in Lorain County, Ohio, I came across this page of Lorain County cemetery transcriptions, and found maybe a dozen relatives listed in the publication. It's not as gratifying as making a gravestone rubbing, but visiting an ancestor's virtual cemetery is still a form of homage.
Posted by Numenius at December 31, 2003 10:04 PM | TrackBack
Comments
The title makes me think that it's just a matter of time before we buy virtual burial grounds. Or at least before someone tries to *sell* us a virtual burial ground.
Posted by: Coup de Vent at January 13, 2004 10:42 AM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2003/12/31/virtual_cemeteri.html
Cemeteries: Between Epitaph and Epilogue
By Fragments from Floyd
"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." C. S. Lewis
Some things are incomprehensible to me. The expanding edge of the universe. The particles within particles that are not matter but energy that make up this paradoxically immaterial world. Some of those particles have become sentient and clever and occasionally wise in a state we call conscious life. This is incomprehensible and the odds are overwhelmingly in favor that such a thing should never have happened at all.
But the two most incomprehensible facts of all are 1) I know I am going to die, and 2) for all our knowing we can know nothing more of this state just after the moment of death than we do of the instant before the Big Bang. Our minds cannot go there behind the veil. While this is true, the vast majority of the most enlightened ones who have lived on this planet through time have told us that death is a transition between states. It is not the empty end of all things that it appears to be from the perspective of the living-- that instant when a person takes his very last breath and the heart beats its last beat. Death seems alien and wrong like a terrible cosmic mistake, and we feel in our deepest selves that death of the body is not the end.
To ponder the incomprehensibility that I am here at all, alive, conscious and corporeal, I go to a cemetery. There, under the polished rocks and plastic flowers and cold sod lie those who have passed to the other side of this greatest of mysteries and know what I cannot know standing there with my hat in my hand. But I will someday know. Cemeteries are the green and flowered surface dedicated to the memory of the dead who disintegrate below, a faint tribute to their lives and gesture of hope for their eternal spirits, elsewhere. No other place on earth can bring me closer to the reality of my own finitude than a cemetery. All cemeteries regardless of their aesthetics or geography bring me to the day of my own death. But not all have had the impact on me as that one beautiful and horrible cemetery from years ago. It was just the other side of my garden fence.
Our first country home shared a border with church yard and its cemetery. We were assimilated into that little church as members, even though most of the congregation consisted of four or five extended families living in the area for generations. Over time, we came to recognize the family names on the grave stones and connect them with living church members. In a few more years, we knew the person that had been buried under the fresh dirt over by the maple tree; we had sat behind them in church the week before and watched from our barn while the back hoe made a place for their bones. Some stones bore names and birth dates only. The granite surface was ominously smooth where the date of death would some day be chiseled in the standing stone. One day I was out in my vegetable garden bent over hoeing potatoes, and looked up. A person I recognized was in the cemetery, silhouetted against the sky, standing at the foot of their own grave. I knew that they were pondering the polished rock, wondering what date would appear there some day to mark the day of their death. It could be tomorrow. Just like that.
Our son's favorite climbing tree was on the edge of the graveyard. For hours I watched him play happily above the dead. This cemetery, like most, was a still and very quiet place. On that rounded knoll by the little brick church I once guessed that the view took in more than three hundred square miles. The scene spread in all directions, out and down. Below and far away, the angular shapes of church steeples and silos accented the smooth smear of clearings; wooded ridges brooded over pastures dotted with black and white cows. Ridge after ridge receded in paler shades of blue and gray into the distance to the horizon, and in the lowlands ragged mists often rose from countless creeks, lifting like prayers, carried off slowly by soft winds. In winter and summer, snow and storm, I watched the world from that high place.
From that ridge pricked by stony markers of known and anonymous lives, I shouted for joy with raised arms for the glory of the good earth at sunset. And from that same ridge in a cold rain I wailed into the wind and shook my fist at God in the deepest agony I have ever known, grieving and in pain from unjust or self-inflicted wounds that would not heal. It was as if the presence of death all around me made every countenance of life more poignant and more real in that place of death. It was as if the story came together-- the comedy or the tragedy-- when the last chapter was known and so very near, under my feet. All this suffering, and I will die. All this beauty, and then still I will surely die. There among the dead-- not the abstract dead but the dead with faces-- a person is forced to confront the last chapter of the story and consider what can be made of those precious lines to be written between the now and that certain end.
I had thought then that I wanted to be buried in that graveyard just up the hill from our first country place on that windswept hill of tears and joy, of endless vistas and impenetrable fog. Now, I am not so sure. I haven't given much attention to the matter of the disposal of my body or my ashes. The 'where' will be no matter to my spirit that will be occupied after death elsewhere with higher things. Still, for the sake of those who might visit some simple marker (my only wish is that it NOT be polished but rough so as to be a ready surface for lichens) I want the final resting place of my borrowed matter to be a beautiful place for them. The soft humus below a certain rock outcrop at the end of our valley will be my cemetery-- a moss-covered rock comfortable to sit on, a place under arching basswoods and tulip poplars near enough to Nameless Creek that they can hear in its waters my voice and laughter. There they may reflect back on the joy and peace I knew among those hills. It was a remarkable and beautiful world, but it was only the beginning.
The biweekly topic at Ecotone is Cemeteries and Place. New entries will trickle in over the next week, I'm thinking.
Comments
Beautiful. How wonderful to begin the New Year with a awed, not-at-all-morbid Memento Mori. That little churchyard sounds like a blessed place to find rest: I wonder if it was chosen as a cemetery because of this quality or if it acquired this quality after lending solace to the souls who found their way there?
Happy New Year, and thanks for the wonderful writing.
Like you I have more curiousity about death and what lies beyond than fear, of course that may change when faced with the fact. I've always found cemeteries to be interesting, compelling, peaceful places...especially very old or pioneer cemeteries.
A marker near Gran's always makes me smile: "She was our mother and she wasn't slow".
You continuously interchange beginnings and endings, yet still leave a trail of malleable permanence. Delectable resonance.
I long to have known such a place, yet here I am - still among those within the borrowed time - so perhaps I shall still see such a place and known it as my own. Alternatively, I may find myself fortunate enough to follow the path of those who know, and share their vision. Either way, I revere this place. I look down and embrace the lives of those that came before, and welcome the lives of those yet to be lived. I see myself hovering somewhere between the beginning and the end, or more appropriately, within site of the end that marks my beginning.
But does the end truly signify our beginning? Or are we so damaged by endings that we must convince ourselves otherwise? Either way, your glimpse is a truly appropriate way to enter into a new year. Thrust forward ... always forward.
Happy New Year.
It's an opportune time to look forward.
What you wrote has great validity for some people:
"we feel in our deepest selves that death of the body is not the end."
Can you imagine how different life becomes as one gains certainty on that point?
Thanks for the good thoughts to begin another year.
A wonderful, beautifully-written, deeply-felt and hopeful post, Fred, that I'm grateful to read on this first day of the year. Thanks.
Howdy,
I just wanted to let you know that I've been reading your blog for a couple of weeks now and I think it's great! As a matter of fact, I'm adding it to my 1% list-- meaning 99% of all blogs are crap, but yours is of the 1% that stand head and shoulders above the rest.
By the way, I've visited Floyd many times and know several people up there. If you see Amy at Floyd County Dry Goods, tell her that Billy Jones, author of CARROT ON A STICK said howdy. Who knows, maybe I'll run into you at Oddfellas or the Pine sometime, maybe kick back on a glass of Black Dog or something from Willis Winery?
-Billy Jones--Billy The Blogging Poet 'tm', Publisher IdleHandsMag.com, 'cause there's nothin' better to do...
From Wendell Berry's "A Native Hill," in "The Art of the Commonplace," a wonderful Christmas present:
Every man is followed by a shadow which is his death - dark, featureless, and mute. And for every man there is a place where his shadow is clarified and is made his reflection, where his face is mirrored in the ground. He sees his source and his destiny, and they are acceptable to him. He becomes the follower of what pursued him. What hounded his track becomes his companion.
I long to feel connected with a particular space in which I could predict my dead future! My mother has booked her plot. I enjoyed reading your piece. It was suitably provocative around a subject that I probably do want to think about some more. In particular I enjoyed the description of your son 'playing happily above the dead'. I'm so sure that's how it should be....
Source:http://www.fragmentsfromfloyd.com/fragments/2004/01/cemeteries_between_epitaph_and.html
Sermon in Stone
By P.
I can't think of a better topic for the first week of a new year. A cemetery is a reminder that there's a full stop on all of our sentences -- but looking through the inscriptions or just absorbing the environment, you can also feel that it's not really the end that matters as much as the infinite variety of clauses and phrases you've already written, and the equally rich text that is yet to come.
Some time before President Kennedy was elected, the route to my second-grade classroom took me through the Episcopal church cemetery in my hometown. Of course, I have walked through it hundreds of other times, but that must have been the first time I walked that way regularly, by myself.
I certainly wasn't afraid of it, with its casual rows of old stones lounging informally among the trees. It had a long wrought-iron fence with sharp-pointed pickets on three sides. The fourth was open to what must have been fields 150 years ago, when the fence was built. Later, the fields became a ball diamond, and the dead lost their solitude. We all gained something, though -- even though there were attempts from time to time to chain the gate at the east end.
There are dark pines -- I never walk over there -- and some ordinary hardwoods, and a couple of arbor vitae trees in the middle. The thin, papery stripes of their bark never fail to catch my eye. Over on my right there once were a couple of elm trees at least as tall as the church itself, but they are long gone, and the church has built a columbarium in the corner they shaded.
I recognize some of the names on the stones along my path as those of my hometown's founders, and I always wonder a little about what it must have been like to have lived so long ago, long enough to have died in the 1830s. Probably the stones woke my abiding interest in history, for I could see they had stories to tell that I simply wasn't learning about in school.
Everyone I know seems to love the old pioneer cemeteries. They're easy to love, with their quaint stones and picturesque locations on the tops of hills or under the wings of old churches. New ones aren't.
Grief still hangs on over the places of the more recent dead -- near my mother-in-law's grave in upstate New York there is a stone dedicated to a little girl whose relatives have left a set of sad little plastic shelves crowded with tiny, weathered gifts; small toys and decorations, plastic flowers, rain-splashed messages. Even though I don't know the names or the circumstance, the pitiable scene never fails to bring a lump to my throat.
There doesn't seem to be a place for that sort of thing is most cemeteries. In fact, many are quite specific about not permitting it. The great fields of dead I drive past around Cleveland often restrict themselves to flat plates in the ground: Labels, like the fronts of filing cabinets -- pull at this drawer and you have Isaac; pull here for Amy.
The flat stones create a parklike look, the brochures say. It's true -- and it's also much easier and cheaper to mow the grass. Such a place is too sterile and formal and controlled for raw sorrow, though, and that may be why departments of transportation tear their hair over the growing practice of placing memorials to the dead at the scenes of accidents, or, in the city, whereever an innocent has been killed.
Myself, I'd rather be cremated than filed away in a park. My personal preference would be to create some mischief, perhaps by having my ashes dropped from 2,000 feet to a spot just outside Jacobs Field in Cleveland, about 5 p.m. on a summer weekday. Someone who intended merely to be scattered over a California ballpark came down all at once like that in 2001, setting off a full-fledged terrorist-attack scramble that gave everyone some exercise even if it wasn't rush hour or a game day. It would be something to look forward to.
Out of respect for my kin, I will most likely niche out in a columbarium in some quiet spot someday. To be sure, they're even more like file cabinets than memorial parks -- well, maybe I can swing making a contribution to a sunny garden somewhere.
It's not an issue I spend a lot of time with. There is so much else outside the gates, after all.
Source: http://my.core.com/~pzicari/text/cemeteries.html
Sweet Auburn
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)
Another joint blogging entry for the Ecotone Wiki on Cemeteries and Place.
DocRock has written about the fun involved in wandering around cemeteries, mostly in connection with the stories that are told--and made--in these places. My own passion for cemeteries originated in a passion for birds, which are often found in profusion in cemeteries, where there are often trees and water, just the thing for a 2-ounce warbler exhausted by the northward migration. Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge is full to bursting with birders in May, but since they mostly arrive at 6:00 am and leave to go to work by 8:00, they don't get in the way too much of mourners.
Hanging around gravestones for this long was bound to have an effect on me, though, and like it or not, the stories started coming. Here's one I haven't finished telling, yet. Lizzie died in 1869. Her stone bears the inscription "Lizzie." (period at the end) with a garland of flowers. On the back of the stone is more information: Lizzie died a few days after giving birth to a son, Matthew; he died a month later and is buried with her. Her husband and parents lie nearby; also Lizzie's sisters, and her husband's new wife.
So my made-up add-on to this rather sad tale (her father's memoirs are in the Law Library here at Davis, he being a Somewhat Important Person, yet he never mentions her at all) is that, in fact, she didn't really love the man she married; she was torn between two brothers, who are buried up the hill where I saw my first ever Cape May warbler, and who both got killed (really, not fictionally) in the Civil War. At left is a drawing of the effigy of their dog, a sculpture encased in glass. The dog has no name; the inscription simply reads "Their favorite." Period. It's hard from three thousand miles away, but someday I mean to finish this novel.
For now, though, the verb "to Lizzie" means to wander around a cemetery, usually Mount Auburn, where the focus is NOT birds. (I peek anyway.)
Posted by Pica at January 1, 2004 07:54 PM | TrackBackComments
STILL nothing moves me like Lizzie's stone. I'm so glad I can see it in my mind. I do that a lot.
Posted by: Doc Rock at January 1, 2004 09:28 PMMount Auburn is one of my favorite cemeteries (yes, I have several!) I have many fond memories of riding my bike from Central Square to go on Brookline Bird Club walks, then stopping at the Greenhouse Cafe in Harvard Square for breakfast on the way home.
I remember the dog sculpture but never knew any of this family's story. Thanks for evoking fond memories & for adding new ones.
Posted by: Lorianne at January 2, 2004 03:26 AMI enjoyed that story and those images. We are very spolied with cemetaries in the (dis-)UK. It's one place where the landscape speaks its age in vaguely worn out ways. But I too love the wildlife in cemeteries. The old and 'new' Highgate Cemeteries in North London are awash with greenery and the secrecy of paths long since lost to humans but known to critters.
Are you serious about this story linking to a novel you have in mind? Your passion comes across.
Posted by: Coup de Vent at January 13, 2004 10:10 AMSource: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2004/01/01/sweet_auburn.html
buried in memory
By alembic
This post is my response to ecotone's (January 1, 2004) biweekly topic: Cemeteries And Place
This may sound odd, but some of my happiest childhood memories have grave connotations -- that is, they come from time spent by gravesides. I grew up in Transylvania, you see, best known in the world for its glamorous expat vampires making a killing on celluloid in the sunny movie world of California.
I dont know how it goes now, but back then when I was a child, in Transylvania, like in many other Eastern European regions, the dead rarely relinquished their power, and the past, like that warm and capable hand the dying Keats holds out to his lover, gripped the living in the icy silence of the tomb, compelling them to always look backward (yes, like Benjamins angel of history to pile on the literary allusions.)
As a child, though, I knew nothing of Hollywoods vampires or Keats or the icy grip -- that frozen bitterness -- of the past. The fact was that the towns cemetery was a stones throw from my school. In the afternoons, after school let out, many of us headed there to ditch the constant heat of authority breathing down our necks. The dead didnt tell us to sit up straight, nor did they care about our grades.
The cemetery, that city of the dead within the city, had a lot of its own neighborhoods. In this, it was much like any city of the living. Death did not abolish history here; nor did it blur class lines. If anything, the cemetery in our town safeguarded the records of bitter and bloody division, and like an adept tutor, it teased us with its secrets, promising us powers we could hold over each other. So, in a way, yes, you could say that the dead here were vampires, feeding off the bitterness of the living ... but I knew nothing of this back then. The cemetery was just a quiet place to go to after school.
Small subdivisions of simple graves lined the grid of paths connected to the wider, chestnut tree-lined avenues of the cemetery at the bottom, by the entry way. Up along the hill, among the fir trees where my friends and I usually headed for the secret rituals of preteen girls, the stone angels and cherubs perched on increasingly grander headstones gave way, here and there, to gothic and baroque crypts that kept generations together and, in the end, dissolved all their petty differences in the dark dense loam underneath.
Somewhere in the maze of paths on the cemetery hill was the Jewish section, overrun with weeds, stones tilted, some sunken deep into the ground. When I wanted to be completely alone -- to read, write or brood -- this is where I went. I knew little about our family history in those early years of the 1960s, so the exotic arabesque of the Hebrew letters meant nothing to me then, nor did I care about why no one came to care for this patch of ground.
The last time I set foot in the cemetery of my childhood town was with my father sometime in the late 1960s. I was already living in Budapest with my mother then, though I was still ignorant of our family history and the true chemistry in the fresh brass on the few crosses we possessed in our household, including that on my grandparents grave. On this occasion, when I went to the cemetery with my father, there was something new on the headstone of our family grave. Engraved in gold and under the names of his parents, there it was, his own name with the date of his birth, a dash, and the first two digits, 19 with the last two left to be chiseled in after his death, which he knew was near.
I duly posed for a picture for him to snap. My face, I believe, was appropriately somber. Then, obviously one of us decided that it was my fathers turn -- I imagine he must have suggested this. Shrunken by his illness -- the year of tuberculosis and the countless operations -- he still tried to stand tall, gripping the headstone casually.
He knew that I was on my way halfway across the world, which meant that come All Souls Day, I would not be in the throngs of people arriving to the cemetery at sunset with white chrysanthemums and candles, a ritual that brought the town together every year and kept the gates of the cemetery flung open late into the night.
For as long as I could remember, we all went -- my parents, who bickered a lot, but never on these outings, and I. Along the way to the cemetery and inside on the paths, we joined people we knew. There were children everywhere, dressed in their Sunday best, too.
My friends and I used to beg for money to buy the enormous gingerbread men from vendors strategically hawking their spicy wares along the road. For as far as you could see, there were candles burning on graves of every size, dotting the hillside with light. To this day whenever I smell gingerbread I also catch a whiff of chrysanthemums and I find myself flushed with an odd sense of happiness.
If the skies were clear on the night of All Souls Day, after paying respects to our dead and gossiping with the living, we made a detour on our way home, heading up the hill across the cemetery for a last look. And there it would be, the horizon ablaze with light where the gleaming flames of candles met the distant flicker of stars.
NOTES:
In my search of facts about the Jewish cemetery in Cluj, Romania, I came across this web site of photos from the Cluj cemetery.
I did write a poem about this some years ago, but I cant post it just now, as I have submitted it for a competition a few months ago -- and who knows, this might be the one time that I would win something ... then would have to relinquish the prize because the poem is suddenly previously published!
Posted by maria at January 02, 2004 12:37 PM | TrackBack
Comments
Oh, Maria, this is a wonderful post. The picture and description of your father, the trip to the graveyard, and the enormous gingerbread men brought tears to my eyes. Thank you for this remembrance and its controlled but very effective tone. (And good luck with the poem!)
Posted by: beth on January 2, 2004 07:25 PMWonderful, wonderful. Your prose evokes vivid imagery that the photo of your father then deepens. I love the "layering" of awareness as you re-interpret as a literary adult the pure innocent experience of your youth. Thank you!
Posted by: Lorianne on January 3, 2004 04:40 AMI love that you found Benjamin's wonderful "angel of history" online, Maria. It is such an incredible image, and hair-raising in its almost Russian "making strange."
And I can really understand your love of cemeteries. Even in the rinky-dink German village of Immendorf near the Dutch border, where I lived from age 3 to 8, there was a beautiful (imo) cemetery that left an indelible mark on me, even though I never went to church. But ooh, those Nov.1 candle-lighting rituals: magic, and truly thought-provoking. As you said, it brought everyone out: some to gossip, some to commune, some to parade. As a kid, the claustrophobia of the religion didn't hit my imagination, mainly because I wasn't participating in it. Just the candles, the night, the mystery.
Victoria has a pretty good "old cemetery" (Ross Bay), but while the various Christian sects have managed to accomodate themselves on this choice bit of oceanfront real estate, the Chinese and the Jewish cemetery are delegated to more obscure locales (the Chinese though is on the ocean; the Jewish is more inland). However, no one here has candle-lighting rituals. The only remotely mystical thing going on are the reverberating echoes of "Michelle Remembers" ( or is it "Remembered"?), a psycho-babble book about Ritual Satanic Abuse (RSA) that supposedly (in the fertile imagination of the authors) took place at Ross Bay Cemetery. Hey ho.
For real abuse (historical lessons, illustrations of same) and concommitant soul-shock, a trip to Berlin's Jewish cemetery is in order. I've only gone once, but it's astonishing, on the order of Cluj, I would guess. See http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~sampras/friedhof1/ for more information.
Anyway, good luck with the poem and the press and all that, and thanks for this entry! And let's hear it for the power of the cemetery.
Yule, thanks for that great photo link in your comments. There certainly was quite a lot of warmth ... and a lot of life ... in those candles burning festivities on November 1. I assume that the Mexican Los Dias de Muertos would be its best (and somewhat extended) version of it here.
As a footnote, and in response to your comment, I was also remembering another cemetery that left quite an impression on me. This one was in Umbria, on a hillside dotted with olive trees outside the small town (or village, really) of Trevi. The area next to it -- obviously once the cemetery (the graves I seen in Italy never seem to be older than 100 years or so) -- had these big signs about truffle hunting.... Made me stop in my tracks, wondering about what it is that gives truffles that distinct taste which is infused with hints of another world....
Laugh out loud!! Truffles, oh that's wicked! So, let's correlate some data: Japan, mostly cremations, no? Do they have a thriving truffle industry? Hmmm?? I think you're on to something...
Posted by: Yule Heibel on January 4, 2004 11:04 AMWonderful... thank you. I particularly liked the dissolution of differences in the dark sense loam.
Your truffle thought has brought to mind a Kenyan friend who used as a child to steal mangos from a tree which grew in the Muslim cemetary in the village in which he grew up.
He said they are still the best mangoes he's ever tasted, and he wondered if this was because of the lack of coffins which meant the fertilizer was rich, ready and plentiful.
He said he was beaten terribly if he was caught, but the threat of punishment only made him quicker, stealthier and more agile!
Posted by: qB on January 4, 2004 02:38 PMThanks, Maria, for this wonderful post. A very engaging piece of writing. I loved the stories about what you did as a child in the different parts of the cemeteries. I was moved reading about your dad too....
Posted by: Coup de Vent on January 13, 2004 10:18 AM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20040516033656/http://www.ashladle.org/archives/000271.html
A memory from 23 years ago...
By older and growing
's for the Ecotone bi-weekly topic of Cemetaries and Place
I have an old photo in front of me; the date on the back is June 1981. It’s not a particularly good quality photo, rather the reverse in fact, that’s why it has sat for the intervening 23 years in a box of miscellaneous prints. They’re not good enough to do anything with, yet have some attachment that binds them to me still and prevents me throwing them away.
The photo is taken from the top of a hill, not high but steep, on the island of Bressay, just off the East coast of Shetland, to the North of Scotland where the North Sea and the Norwegian Sea meet the Atlantic Ocean. The hill looks out over the straight that separates Bressay from the “mainland” of Shetland; the sea is grey, a jagged white line marks the breakers at the foot of low cliffs on the far shore, surmounted by pastures that on a clear day would be lush green, but on that day, as on so many, a thin grey mist lies over everything giving the view a sombre, monochrome appearance.
At the foot of the hill, at the seaward edge of a relatively level patch of green between the rough slopes of the hill and the low cliffs bordering the sea, is a small graveyard. Just a stone perimeter, the ruins of a small stone chapel and maybe two dozen headstones.
It’s a wild spot; anything less than a thirty mile-an-hour wind here is considered calm. A few people still live on the island, mostly gaining their livelihood from the tourist trade. There’s a small harbour where the ferry from Lerwick docks, one hotel and several cottages, mostly on the coastal fringes. But there’s little to indicate the community to which the graveyard was once attached. It stands almost alone on the inhospitable clifftop, looking out to sea, just a couple of ruined cottages marking the spot where once a little community existed.
I doubt that their life was much more than an existence. I’d guess most of their livelihood came from the sea; the land surely could not have supported many crops, only provided peat for the fires in those simple homes. Most of the food cooked over those fires would have come from the sea, and I imagine that is why the graveyard is located in that spot. Shetland may be politically part of Scotland, but the ancestry of its people traces directly back to the Vikings. The sea would have been in their blood; they may have made their homes on the land but it would have been on the sea where they made their living; the sea that was the source of tales told round the smoky peat fires on cold winter nights; and so it was natural that they would be buried at this border of land and sea where their souls might still gaze out over the waters where they had lived so much of their lives.
Now the graveyard is all that is left. The land has little value for anything else; no-one lives near this spot, few come here, just the occasional tourist. The stones may yet stand for many hundreds of years, lashed by horizontal rain and salt spray, undisturbed except for the crying of the gulls that ride the wild winds and waves.
// posted by andy @ 10:31 PM permalink
Beatiful post, Andy. It seems appropriate that weather-worn souls would find rest in a weather-worn spot. Aren't we all, spiritually speaking, caught "at this border border of land and sea," frozen in time between this difficult & beautiful world and the sea of eternity which is our home? Thanks for transporting me for a time to a peaceful if not "hospitable" place.
Thanks Lorianne. I wasn't expecting such positive feedback. Am I allowed to comment on my own post? I confess I wrote that as an exercise, almost like class homework; I'm still getting to grips with this idea of "being" a writer and the discipline of writing to someone else's theme seemed like a good test. But the experience was 23 years ago and I felt rather rather dissociated from it...
But that apart, the rest of your comment resonates strongly with me. Some wise soul once said "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience" or something like that. It may have Teilhard de Chardin? Whoever, your words capture that feeling beautifully.
Andy,
Neat article. Found you via Jack R.'s Gassho. Your post here sounds a lot like an experience I had in Pecs, Hungary in 1993. I posted a short article about it, which provides a picture link to Pecs.
Here is the link: http://www.conscious- living.blog...09_14_conscious living_archive.html#106404394116409176
While most of us are busy living in the past or dreaming about the future, it's very satisfying to look back upon our life experiences. It's good to remember and rediscover the experiences that shape us.
All the best in 2004!
Don
Thanks Don. I tried following the link but it can't be found. Anything missing from the url?
Yes, you are allowed to comment on your own blog. It takes us one step further. Your blog - your rules!
Isn't it exciting to find out that even when "exercising" you manage to produce something that resonates? All writers will be asked to write about things that may not particularly move them in any significant way ... but the point is, did you move the reader?
Yes, you did. I wanted to be huddled just to the left of the picture, observing the expanse, yet feeling the salty wind in my hair. To touch the stones, if only to leave the memory of my touch for hundreds more years to come.
Whether you acknowledge it or not, you already "are" a writer. We're the proof -- we're your readers!
I agree with ntexas99. I also felt like I wanted to be there, looking over your shoulder or some such.
And I don't care what your cv says.
Andy - your gift is clear.
Get a coach, get an agent, whatever - IMO, you go get writing, and waste as little time as possible (actually, none of my business - just wanting to cheer you on). Unless you believe in reincarnation and think that the experience, if held in your consciousness, will improve your writing, your time to write is .... now?
Source: http://olderandgrowing.blogspot.com/2004_01_01_olderandgrowing_archive.html#107316908846385844
Sandgate Cemetery, Newcastle
By Mulubinba Moments (Geoff)Ecotone topic: Cemeteries And Place
The earliest inhabitants of what is now Newcastle buried their dead in a burial ground which is now under the CBD shopping mall. The arrival of European culture brought Christian burial customs and church-ground cemeteries. Until 1881 Anglicans were buried in the grounds of Christ Church (now the cathedral) beautifully situated on the hill above the city. This site has magnificent views across the Hunter Estuary, to Nobby’s Island and of the Pacific Ocean. However it was not a wise choice for a cemetery as many local people obtained their drinking water from wells in the lower lying areas beneath the hill. After several outbreaks of disease it was realised that the drinking water was being contaminated by groundwater seeping through the graveyard. A search was made for a more suitable site and Sandgate was chosen. Newcastle Council declared that no burials should take place within the city, so there was no alternative to the new Sandgate Cemetery. A rail link was established and each religious grouping was allocated a segregated area. The expanding population of Newcastle and the lack of alternatives (a crematorium was established in 1937) meant the Cemetery had to be extended in the early 1900s. Areas that had been set aside for landscaping were reallocated and many groves of mature trees were removed to make room for more grave sites. The result is a barren lifeless landscape. Too hot in summer, too cold in winter, desolate all year round.
Yet a cemetery is more than just a place to dispose of corpses, it is a place where lives can be remembered and celebrated, where histories are recorded:
"Every grave stone has a story to tell, and each would be a vignette of this region's history. Many themes of society's activities are represented in the cemetery: the world of home life, the spiritual, the world of work, the city's industries, public life, the mines, the entrepreneurs, the professions, war, sport, music, conflict ......"Nevertheless, I’d prefer to avoid Sandgate Cemetery. You can scatter my ashes in a place that lifts the spirit. The grounds of Newcastle Christ Church Cathedral will do nicely.
from Sandgate Cemetery,'The History and the Restoration'
Source: http://mulubinba.typepad.com/mulubinba_moments/2004/01/sandgate_cemete.html
Park Street Cemetery
By under the firestar
Ecotone's current blogging topic is Cemeteries. Here's my contribution:
Park Street Cemetery was inaugurated in 1767, the oldest cemetery in Calcutta. Inside the gate the maintenance staff, three or four men, sat idly on a charpoy. The mausoleum nearest the exit was being lived in. It was furnished with a cot, a plastic water pot, a few pieces of cloth.
Mausolea shaped like houses were crowded together amid tall crotons and palms. It was like coming upon ancient ruins in a jungle. There was a skyline of domes and flat roofs and towers, all the same brown cement with chunks fallen away to show the red brick structure, built for the most part along wide paths. Everything was green and damp. The tops of monuments, urns and such, were broken off and lying on the grass. Shouting boys played cricket among the graves. There were cawing crows, and intermittent sounds of traffic from Park Street.
One of the biggest tombs - pyramid above pediment - contained the body of "Elizabeth Jane Barwell - 'the celebrated Miss Sanderson' aged about 23."
The most elaborate tomb belonged to Rose Aylmer, who died in 1800 aged 20. The poet Walter Savage Landor wrote a poem to her, which was inscribed on her tomb:
Ah, what avails the sceptred race!Mrs. Martha Goodland, 21 March, 1785, aged 23:
Ah, what the form divine!
What every virtue every grace,
Rose Aylmer, all were thine...
If ever Tears deservedly were ShedI liked the home-made verses - they made me feel that real people had written them and grieved. As in all British cemeteries in India, there were too many graves of young wives, and very young children.
If ever Grief was due to Virtue Dead
Thy Merit Martha and thy Spotless Ways
Claim Tears from all, for all allowed them praise
Thy Strength of Mind we scarce shall meet again
Shewn through a long, most agonising Pain
Thy warm affection as a Wife or Friend
Make all who knew you weep your cruel End
Cruel Alas - but this one thing were sure
Those Virtues that in life you held so pure
Will be repaid - This Thought and this alone
Your friends have left to mitigate their Moan
Whose Heart is torn is wretched while he lives
And only prays one day to reach that shore
To meet his Martha and to part no more.
When I left, a gang of young boys was half in and half out of the gate, shouting and laughing. An old Anglo-Indian man drove them out and said to me, "They won't listen! They're animals!"
Discussion
To those who worried about topics attracting enough interest, I think it's worth mentioning that the last couple of ideas have attracted some very nice writing! -- P.