thanatopsis

The always excellent podcast Hidden Brain boldly tackles a subject that is usually avoided or talked around in polite company if not suppressed to the point of being a social taboo: death.
Approaching the topic via the broad and non-empirical idea that fear of death drives every decision we make and informs and limits our agency with some evidence-based psychological experiments, we see that although we think we are avoiding the matter of our own mortality and legacy in not articulating it, we’re always practising terror management in one form or another, and couched as we all are in the comforts of convention, we remain unaware of these instigations until confronted with its unforgiving finality. Necessary and human as the anxiety is, we cede more power to a nebulous and unnamed fear that serves to reinforce the judgments and opinions it covertly influences. Ibidem the same source as above, we are treated to another podcast—from Vox magazine—that correlates well with the theme of memento mori but this time musically. Four close and dark notes from a Gregorian mass intoned at funerals—Dies Iræ, Reckoning, the Day of Wrath—still resounds and is hiding everywhere in popular culture. The same tones cue us (perhaps steel us) to something grim approaching and is sampled in scores of film and television soundscapes. Cultural hegemony being what it is, I wonder how universal these impulses and signifiers are.

thanatopsis

Though perhaps wholly conjured up in my head, I seem to recall a ban (at least a seasonal one owing maybe to the impenetrability of the ground in winter) on death on parts of Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, we nonetheless this overview from Futility Closet on other places where dying was or is currently prohibited, under threat of severe punishment. While some sacred spaces exclude both birth and death to maintain the purity of the place, most cases are enacted when room runs out at local cemeteries and graveyards. Unfortunately, the ban is repealed once the municipalities can secure more land to expand their grounds reserved for burial.  Visit them at the link above to learn more.

ferryman or necropolis junction

Via the always intriguing Nag on the Lake, we learn about a morbidly strange but practical rail line in operation from November 1854 until bombed during the London Blitz in World War II that was in the exclusive service of transporting the departed and their mourners to a sprawling necropolis, a convenient journey from central London but also not close enough that the graves might pose a public health hazard.
Conceived as a way to alleviate severe overcrowding in ancient urban cemeteries, the living population having doubled from the beginning to the mid seventeenth century and an outbreak of cholera completely overwhelmed the struggling funeral system, the trains going to Necropolis Junction were segregated by animate/inanimate, class and confession and travel along a picturesque route daily. After the war, the railway was not rebuilt, the scheme proving less palatable (not in keeping with due solemnity) and profitable than the backers had hoped, and the motorised hearse had already fulfilled that need.

ashes to ashes

Rather jarringly but with the message that last rites should not be nihilistic—or pantheistic—the Vatican has issued a prohibition against the scattering of cremains to the winds or dividing the ashes among family and friends as final keepsakes.
Although Church doctrine—just since 1963—allows cremation burial is preferable and earthly remains should be deposited on consecrated grounds and the grave-goods ought not kept in an urn on the mantle. Having lived in Germany for a long time, such morbid license that’s allowable in America does seem a little strange and quite other. What do you make of all this? As many amongst us are loathe to shuffle off this amortal coil, it is an uncomfortable thing to think about how we’d like to be celebrated.

art funéraire

While touring the Île d’Oléron and stopping to explore the village of Saint-Pierre, we were struck by this significant though rather mysterious monument from the Middle Ages.
This model so- called lantern of the dead (lanternes des morts oder Totenleuchte) dates from at least the 1150s appear throughout western France, and though the oldest and highest at twenty-eight meters, inland, it was not visible for great distances—mostly on the periphery of cemeteries, as this one is, probably was kept as an eternal flame or lit to recall the parish to funerary rites. No one knows for certain to their custom and origin, however.
Most presume that these free-standing spires were early dedications akin to wayside shrines (Weg- oder Bildstöcke) that commemorate accidents or escapes on pilgrimage routes, but given their sturdiness and clean polygonal symmetries (the church of the village had similar early gothic angles), people entertain all sorts of influences (cheminées sarrasines they are sometimes called perhaps as a memory from the Battle of Tours) and forgotten rituals, perhaps even originally to purpose as warning of quarantine or danger, despite the continuance of history.

epitaph

Ahead of its planned field-trips on its founding day (we all ought to arrange our own outings as well to showcase the places for which we could be expert tour-guides), Atlas Obscura features a bitter-sweet, maudlin memorial to the struggles and triumphs of the gay community with a locus in the Congressional Cemetery securing of its own special corner.
Dishonourably discharged from the US armed forces for being a homosexual (against the advice of the court-appointed psychologist), Vietnam veteran Leonard Matlovich, sadly in anticipation of his imminent demise from AIDS related complications, devoted himself to making a statement for the ages. Within view of the resting place of self-loathing J Edgar Hoover, whose witch-hunts perpetuated discriminatory practises, and his suspected lover, Matlovich purchased a pair of plots and designed his nameless headstone, to be etched for the silent and anonymous sufferers whom had to hide their love away. Since his funeral, Matlovich has been joined by many others in repose and symbolically in victory as well, with several military same-sex weddings, legal and wholly vetted, held before Matlovich’s grave.

5x5

first rule – don’t talk about fight club: bacterial cock-fighting may lead to new antibiotic therapies, via Dangerous Minds

don’t pay the ferry man: mysterious figuring punting in an Australian lake dressed as an undertaker, traveling via open casket

nightmare of dishpan hands: vintage laundry shaming

disrobed, disarming: 3D printed model of the Venus de Milo allows art history scholars to guess what she might have been doing with her hands

gravity assists: a thoughtful explanation and reflection of the slingshot effect in space propulsion via BLDGBlog 

necropolis or flying circus

Having learnt that Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen—better known as the Red Baron, the accomplished dog-fighting ace of World War I, has his final resting-place just around the corner here in Wiesbaden, I took the afternoon to investigate and explored the peaceful and expansive grounds of the Southern Cemetery (Südfriedhof).

Walking down the pathways, not rushing and wanting to properly pay my respects to the graves less famous—to me, at least, I noticed that quite a few tombstones bore a pasted on, rather tasteless notice, which read something to the effect, “The lease has expired – please see the cemetery administration.” Later H confirmed to me that indeed plots in Germany are generally rented for a period of twenty years, with the option of extending. What happens to the remains, I asked, and was told that they are usually gone by then. Embalming and chemical preservatives are not used here, nor expensive time-capsule coffins, so everything has decomposed a few a couple decades. I wondered what became of the headstones, beautiful and austere markers meant to last an eternity, but did not ask.
I didn't think people took them home (though the Roman practise was genuine parlour culture, burying their dead in their houses) or stored them somewhere off-site, like winter-tyres. It seems irreverent but I suppose space is at a premium and very soon there would not be room for anything else besides the grave. I noticed that the more modern epitaphs usually bore ones profession also. The architects had the most inspired grave-sites—I wondered what it meant to carry ones job into the here-after (jenseits) and hoped that all really had been proud enough of their careers to make that sort of statement. Other beautiful monuments abounded, like this bas-relief tombstone of a cavalry unit from 1914 that depicts some of the sad and terrible equipage of the war, gas-masks and bayonets. I was unsuccessful in locating the von Richthofen plot, noting that such infamy is usually something buried itself, and wondered how the aeronaut and son of the Prussian elite ended up in far western Hessen. It turns out that the Red Baron was disinterred several times since his final battle: von Richthofen was first put to rest with a military funeral not far from where he was shot down, near Amiens, France in 1918.
During the interbellum years, his brother attempted to bring the body back to be buried in the family crypt, but as the ancestral home now lay in Poland and convinced by Nazi authorities just then coming into power who hoped to exploit the rockstar status von Richthofen had attained through real and attributed victories, re-interred him in Berlin, with fanfare courtesy of the new government. During divided Germany, as the graveyard straddled the border, the headstone was often victim to a stray bullet fired at people as they tried to escape into West-Berlin, and in the mid-1970s a decision was made to transport the body to Wiesbaden and reunite him with the rest of his departed family. I don't want to regularly wander the necropoleis of the city as that's morbid but was glad I took the time to search it out and now that I know it literally is just around the corner, I will look around another day.

BAföG

The English Daily the local features an article about a unique academy, at least in Germany, that's not too far from Bad Karma, our fair city, that specializes in training in the funerary arts. Surely there are other trade schools and apprenticeships but this sort of hybridized vocational college does not seem to be part of the European educational model of apprenticeship and rigour.

I have been by the campus--the buildings and the mock-graveyard, and it does not seem like a fly-by-night organization--I am sure it's a fine and respectable institution but it just bothers me how the exceptionalness of the place was stressed.  Death and disposition certainly are regulated by deeply personal and cultural norms as well--the climate for mourning and expression of grief as well as celebration and remembrance. Though any local mention is a bit noteworthy, the piece probably caught my attention more so because we are right now slowly making our way through the series Six Feet Under, whose method is genius, for its macrabe and morbidness and quirky professional insights into to both the business and people's attitudes towards it. This miniature diorama of the show is from a Belgian network's prime-time line-up promotion. Must see TV.