Poetry, too, is a mortuary practice. Elegy—poetry written to, for, and about the dead—offers consolation because it is an act of tending to a dead person, a gesture of intimate care-taking. Elegy offers language itself to the dead as both tribute and shelter, a symbolic burial ground to hold a person’s name and story, if not a body. In elegy, grief is measured into lines and transmuted into images, a way to make mourning less quiet and lonely. I taught a course last semester, at Brandeis University, on elegy and contemporary death practices. This humanities practicum was entitled “Inventing Farewell” because every modern generation must re-invent its relations to the dead. It was a pedagogical experiment. The students in this workshop read contemporary poems to discover what they have to offer a modern world searching for meaningful ways to hold vigil, bear witness, care for corpses, and create zones of felt contact between the living and dead. I taught the course out of an emphatic belief, with a polemical edge: that poetry of mourning is a powerful, if neglected, resource for asserting agency in the face of death today. Immersed in this writing, students were challenged to think of imaginative solutions to real problems. They designed a necropolis or memorial park, brainstormed commemoration practices that could gather the bereaved, proposed neighborhood historical exhibits, wrote their own poetry, created maps of funerary spaces. By the end of the semester, students had portfolios of original work involving the mortuary imagination. Students came to realize that we need not be passive in the terrible challenge of another’s dying. These students were brave. The assignments were weird. One of the first: Assignment: develop a draft proposal for a burial ground, city of the dead, or related mortuary or memorial site. Your proposal should be for a distinctive, uncommon place to remember dead people or to be in the presence of their remains. This might be a sort of cemetery, graveyard, necropolis, crematorium, laying-out (corpse preparation) facility, or otherwise. Your goal is to imagine a combination of landscape, architecture, handcraft, technology, visual art, or other resources to invent a city of the dead or memorial space that dynamically engages the worlds of the living. In other words, this city of the dead should refuse their obsolescence or social death, and could be directly connected to other sorts of useful places and institutions. As you develop your proposal, work through several questions: how does your design affect one’s experience of time and space? What do people do here, how does movement flow here? Is there some stance toward mortality, memory, or history communicated by your design? Is there some aspiration for the future embedded here, or some other commitment? What about the place creates a persuasive sense of value for past lives? Your draft proposal can take any of several forms: a formal proposal, with detailed descriptions of your design elements; a visual art project, with brief commentary; a narrative, fictional or non-fictional; an essay or piece of creative non-fiction; or another form that will allow you to develop your idea for this place. Due in class. One of my inspirations for this assignment was Italo Calvino’s novel Imaginary Cities, in which he describes, among so many astonishing hallucinations, the city of Eusapia, in which “the inhabitants have constructed an identical copy of their city, underground. All corpses, dried in such a way that the skeleton remains sheathed in yellow skin, are carried down there, to continue their former activities.” Only a select few from Eusapia can descend into city of the dead. They observe the changes there and return with news of the ancestors. I take the idea of the mortuary imagination seriously. Death is a sphere, not only of debilitation, but of deep creativity, where emotional courage meets aesthetic invention. As members of the The Order know, mortuary practices are a lightning rod for tensions between tradition and innovation, cultural legacy and cultural renewal. Death positive groups recognize how vital young people are for working through this tension and re-creating symbolic practices around death. Classrooms should be an important space for engaging these tensions and possibilities. Poets offer emotional and practical ways forward; they help us see into obscure situations and name aspects of loss. Someone dies in an armchair, book in hand, it is as if “a snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room.” As she dies, we’ve arrived at “a time between times, a flowerless funeral” (Mark Strand, “A Piece of the Storm”). In Elegy for a Broken Machine, Patrick Phillips seeks an image for his father’s corpse before professionals arrive to remove it. Soon the undertaker’s sons will come and lift this strangest of all strange things: a palimpsest of what we loved, a nest in the brittle leaves (“The Body”) Elizabeth Alexander, in Crave Radiance, looking clear-eyed at her mother, gives us to see “the miraculous dying body, / its greens and purples…. even as it falls apart, the body / that can no longer make fever / but nonetheless burns // florid and bright and magnificent / as it dims” (“Autumn Passage”). Elegies help us speak to the dead, to hold them in our language communities. In rhetorical terms, apostrophe is the figure for directly addressing an absent person or inanimate object. Discussing apostrophic elegies, my students observed that many writers use these poems to tell dead people the story of their own last moments and funerals. These are a sort of explanation of what is beyond explaining, a way of creating continuity in rupture. From Joy Harjo’s “Death Is a Woman,” to her father: I walk these night hours between the dead and the living, and see you two-step with Death as if nothing ever ended. We buried you in Okmulgee, on a day when leaves already buried the earth in scarlet and crisp ochre. Kevin Young begins “Exit Music,” also to his father, with the harsh cityscape they still ambiguously share: In Baton Rouge bridges end in midair, arms reaching for the other shore The lights & reek of the cracker factory, refineries seeping into the dark I drive Cancer Alley to the highwayside where you will be buried Poets offer compelling forms for speaking to the dead. Doing so is rife with emotional risks; such an address requires bravery and care. In another assignment in “Inventing Farewell,” students are challenged to play on this serious ground: Assignment: in a paragraph or two, propose a materially rich medium, place, or action for directly addressing the dead, in a ritual or lyrical act. This invention of apostrophe can include architectural or technological design, a particular landscape, exposure to the wilderness, or basic elements such as wind, earth, water, fire. Your idea can include impossible or fantastical features, if you approach this as an imaginary exercise or hypothetical invention. You can think of this proposal as helping us imagine a zone of felt contact between the living and the dead. Due in class. Reader, what would you design? When I consider my own response to this assignment, I find only a jumble of images: railroad tracks, water pump, hourglass, footbridge over a river, ink on birch bark…. How do these come together? What is their posthumous logic? I may have some otherworldly courier service in mind, but I don’t know yet. The history of elegy is an immense mortuary workshop. A storehouse of vivid images, existential equipment. The poets of the dead offer a usable eloquence for those learning the new languages of farewell.
David Sherman is faculty in Brandeis University’s English Department. His first book, In a Strange Room, is about cultural responses to the modernization of death practices around the turn of the twentieth century. He is now finishing a far less academic book, Inventing Farewell, about contemporary artists, activists, and writers trying to create new cultural spaces for dead people. He lives in Cambridge, MA, near lots of old burial grounds and old libraries, often confusing the two.
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Perhaps one of the most magical things about spring in Texas is the seemingly instant bloom of the Texas bluebonnets. The vibrant petals and stems are eye-catching reminders that spring has sprung, so families everywhere ready their cameras and coordinating outfits for that perfect photo. The bluebonnets are so iconic that they are the Texas state flower and if you visit Houston this spring, you shouldn’t miss this spectacular bit of nature on full display. We just ask that anyone enjoying the Houston in Full Bloom: Where to Find Bluebonnets In and Around Houston post syndicated via Tumblr Houston in Full Bloom: Where to Find Bluebonnets In and Around Houston PLAY | 5 Weather Science Experiments!! post syndicated via Tumblr PLAY | 5 Weather Science Experiments!! Residents of colonial New York knew they were in for bad news when the aansprekerappeared at the door. Dressed all in black, from his dark knee-breeches and long cloak to a three-cornered hat adorned with black crepe streamers, he carried one message: someone was dead. The aansprekerwas a tradition brought to the 17th-century Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam from Holland. Aansprekermeans speaker in Dutch, and what the appointed figure spoke was death. Before printed obituaries, or today’s digital options, the announcement of a person’s departure was often the job of a specific person. In ancient Rome, a town crier might share this somber news among other public business, while in England, a funeral bidder would often go to home-to-home, offering a sprig of rosemary as a form of invitation. Before his arrival in New Amsterdam, the Dutch aanspreker was sometimes accompanied by the huilebalk, or weeper, a figure who dramatically cried at the completion of each delivered message (and supposedly flowed more tears when well-tipped). Yet while the aanspreker survived into 20th-century Holland, the huilebalk did not.Blair Jaekelwrote in the 1912 travel book Windmills and Wooden Shoes that the huilbalk had “wept himself out of existence, probably on account of a simple dearth of apprentices.” In the colonial iteration, the aanspreker worked alone. In the 1896 Colonial Days in Old New York, historian Alice Morse Earle described what unfolded immediately following a death. After a slow tolling of the church bell, the aansprekerwould set out into the streets, knocking on doors and informing relatives and friends of the time and place of the funeral. This “inviting was a matter of most rigid etiquette; no one in these Dutch-American communities of slightest dignity or regard for social proprieties would attend a funeral unbidden,” writes Earle. Because it was unheard of show up to a Dutch New York funeral without invitation, the aansprekerwas important. How did he impart this sober information? Anyone who has come across a social media post sharing a person’s death alongside the noise of memes and status updates knows how jarring it can be when not given the appropriate sensitivity. In his 1905 A Wanderer in Holland, English writer Edward Verrall Lucasrelates how a woman from Hilversumformally received this jarring aansprekermissive: “”Please ma’am, the baker’s compliments, and he’s dead.” Lucas, being a famed humorist for such publications as Punch, may have been being a bit satirical. Nevertheless, the aanspreker’s job was a heavy one, and some were more skilled at it than others. So how did one become an aanspreker? Within the small population of New Amsterdam, the appointed funeral-inviter was often also the gravedigger, bellringer, schoolmaster, and chorister. (And by recorded accounts, always a man.) We can get an idea of the breadth of this person’s responsibilities from one aanspreker who fell short. In the 2004 New Netherland: A Dutch Colony in Seventeenth-Century America, historian Jaap Jacobs includes an 1661 admonition by the burgemeesters, or mayors, of Claes van Elslandt, who was told he should not only take better care of the graves in the churchyard, but also to: look after the bier being fetched and brought back to the proper place; to invite according to old custom everybody to the funeral to announce the death, to walk steadily before the corpse, and to collect, demand, and receive pay only for his service, without demanding and requesting more money on this account. As of 1691 they were public officers licensed by the mayor, with a man named Conradus Vanderbeck, according to city records, being “appointed and confirmed in the place of inviter to the buyriall [sic] of deceased persons.” Fees could vary due to distance traveled, with the inviter of Flatbush (in today’s Brooklyn) receiving 12 guilders for invitations to the funeral of an adult, and an additional four if he went to New York (today’s Manhattan), not great pay for a long row across the East River. The especially wealthy dead might demand a whole troop of funeral inviters. Harriet Phillips Eaton writes in the 1899 Jersey City and Its Historic Sites that for the elite “there were often ten or even twenty Aansprekers employed to announced the death, and one, usually an old servant of the family, went in the middle of the street, walking slowly with bowed head and face buried in a large mourning handkerchief and led by two aansprekers.” Later, in 1731, a law passed in New York mandated that these “inviters to funerals” receive 18 shillings for announcing the death of someone over 20 years old, 12 for those between 12 and 20, and 8 for children under 12 years old. (Perhaps the lower charges were an effort not to further burden a grieving family.) Dutch New Yorkers took the rituals of dying and death very seriously. Before there was a doctor or clergyman in what would become Manhattan, there was a kranck-besoecker, or consoler, who attended to the dying. Friends and family were expected to watch over a person before and after their passing, a solemn task that helped with ample drink and food. Rooms were draped in black; mirrors turned to face the walls. Special foods like doed-koecks, or dead cakes, were made, and either consumed or kept as mementoes. The aansprekerwas just one part of these elaborate rituals, which encouraged every person in the community of the deceased to pause and mark their passing. It may all see complicated and overly formal now, but in the 17th century these traditions, transported over the Atlantic Ocean to this new home, linked people together, and kept them connected to the place they’d left behind. After the English takeover of New Amsterdam in the late 1600s, these traditions began to fade, as the Dutch Reformed Church was overtaken by the Anglicans, and English eclipsed Dutch. The first Dutch cemetery, located on the west side of Broadway in today’s Lower Manhattan, is gone without a trace, with colossal office towers looming in its place. In Holland, the aansprekerendured in the early 1900s, still stalking the streets with his dark attire and grim tidings, until he, too, eventually became obsolete. Print obituaries became standard, followed by their digital equivalent. Yet no matter who is tasked with this work, the announcement of death remains sensitive. Whether social media, a phone call, or an email, we’ve all become the modern aansprekers, attempting to soften some hard news in these messages, and create a moment of connection for that person’s memory.
Allison C. Meier is a Brooklyn-based writer focused on history and visual culture. Previously, she was a staff writer at Hyperallergic and senior editor at Atlas Obscura. She moonlights as a cemetery tour guide.
Colonial New York’s Door-to-Door Messenger of Death Colonial New York’s Door-to-Door Messenger of Death post syndicated via Tumblr Colonial New York’s Door-to-Door Messenger of Death On Wednesday, April 3, noon to 3:00 p.m. Gail Rubin, CT, presents “Kicking The Bucket List: Downsizing and Organizing Things to Do Before You Die.” The event takes place at at the Reston Community Center, 31 Colts Neck Road, Reston, Virginia. Lunch is included for $15/residents, $23/non-residents. via Tumblr April 3: Kicking the Bucket List Talk in Reston, VA This Friday, March 22, 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., kick end-of-life planning off of your bucket list with Gail Rubin’s Laughing and Learning End-of-Life Workshop. via Tumblr March 22: Laughing and Learning End-of-Life Workshop MEG | DAY IN LIFE | Weekend in the Snow post syndicated via Tumblr MEG | DAY IN LIFE | Weekend in the Snow The fine china, towers of finger sandwiches, delicate sweets, and delicious beverages make afternoon tea a luxurious and elegant experience. Whether you’re celebrating a special occasion (hint: Mother’s Day is right around the corner) or just want a unique afternoon out, Houston has several places that offer this English tradition. Read on to discover five places that offer afternoon tea service in town. (Note: All of these places require advanced reservations so make sure you call before you 5 Places To Enjoy Afternoon Tea in Houston post syndicated via Tumblr 5 Places To Enjoy Afternoon Tea in Houston |
ABOUT MEMy family owns a funeral home and I am married to a funeral director. Raising 2 kids while taking care of the dead provides for an interesting family life. I like to do crafty things with bright fun colors to keep our life happy and light in my down time. ArchivesNo Archives Categories |