Author: Charles

World without East Ender?

10 February 2010
Charles
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Categories: Uncategorised

 

 
From the Independent on Sunday, 07 01 10:
 

Eagle-eyed viewers of EastEnders have been left scratching their heads after spotting Archie Mitchell standing at the back of his own funeral. Archie’s murder on Christmas Day – he was bludgeoned, quaintly, with a bust of Queen Victoria – has been the source of much buy cialis in riyadh excitement but maybe he’s not as dead as we thought. A BBC spokesman explains: “It’s true that he was there. Sadly we can’t claim it was a sophisticated Hitchcockian joke. Larry just happened to be on set that day and joined in as an extra.”

Final turn of the screw

10 February 2010
Charles
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Categories: coffins

Here’s a bit of fun, for which I thank my excellent friend Tony Piper. It’s a self-boring coffin, hermetically sealed, with built-in flower and flag receptacle. Two people can (er, theoretically) screw it into place like a capstan. It was patented in 2007, since when there seems to have been little uptake (wrong noun, surely?).

Like all the best ideas, it is limpidly beautiful. Contemplate the detailed plans here.

Words, words, words

9 February 2010
Charles
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Categories: celebrants, ceremony

Following my post about the ineptitude and ineffectiveness of words, I stumbled on this piece in the Sydney Morning Herald. It’s actually about citizenship ceremonies, but you’d never guess it from the way I’ve plucked the extracts:

Traditionally, ritual, including rites of passage, is embedded in our religious culture. And it is true that religion seems to have a competitive advantage when it comes to this stuff. Religions have been practising their liturgy for a long time. The godly are very good at all of the non-verbal aspects of ritual from bells and smells to crazy cozies to speaking in tongues. Great ceremony is about an absence of speeches and many faiths get this.

Moreover, the godly have the advantage that they feel that they are consecrating their rites in the presence of their transcendent God. That ineluctably gives an ineffable power to the ceremony. The godless will obviously struggle to match that attribute of faith. And we need to get better at the non-verbal stuff. We atheists can talk the leg off a chair but we can’t sing or chant or dance the leg off an amputee.

Now a real rite of passage doesn’t just rejoice in change. It is the change. A ceremony which merely celebrates but doesn’t cause the change is not strictly a rite of passage. Graduation ceremonies from university are rites of passage because you don’t get the damned piece of paper without enduring the ceremony. On this definition, school graduations strictly aren’t rites of passage because the exam marks after the ceremony are the life-changing event, not the school graduation or valedictory service. So funerals aren’t strictly rites of passage because unless you’re a time traveller, your funeral won’t end your life, just celebrate it.

We, of the secular world, often fail to employ those non-verbal rituals that make a ceremony. You can easily cock up even the most moving event by speeches. During my days of municipal service, these ceremonies meandered between inspirational and pedestrian. The pedestrian bits were inevitably the speeches. The best bits were non-verbal – the Mayoral handshake, the familial hugging, the singing of the national anthem, the presentation of the symbolic wattle and the giving of certificate. All of these had no words merely music or actions.

Religions don’t have a monopoly on rites of passage but they do them better than us. The secular world needs to learn more about celebrating without speeches. We need to have rituals we perform together and not passively watch. I think we are still a century or so away from really learning these skills.

At the heart of great ceremony is performance that is not normal. Normal is pedestrian. Words are dull. We need transforming ceremony and that requires anything but speeches.

Read the whole article here.

Norm

9 February 2010
Charles
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Categories: Uncategorised

I don’t know if you have ever discovered Norm, humane, genial and wise, over at either of his blogs, Extraordinary Expectations or When Death Breaks in… The latter is suspended, now, or fulfilled. On EE, be sure to click all three tabs at the top.

Here’s a taste of Norm. I hope he won’t mind. These are some beautiful words he spoke at the funeral of a man with Down’s Syndrome:

He helped us understand in new ways.

He gave people a new view of patience.

He helped us feel compassion for others.

He made people rethink their priorities.

He helped us realize God’s love for the overlooked.

He reminded people of their frailties.

He cautioned us of our pride and dependence on material things.

He taught people how to love simply and unconditionally.

And now, he has taught us the truth of “ . . . the last shall be first.”

The ineptitude and ineffectiveness of words

9 February 2010
Charles
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Categories: ceremony

Interesting, thought provoking piece about Irish funerals in today’s Irish Times. The writer, Marie Murray, makes this observation: The extent of funeral attendance in Ireland often bemuses our neighbours in England.

She says: Funeral attendance is a statement of connection, care, compassion and support. It encircles those who grieve and enriches those who attend because it connects each person there to the profundity of living and the inevitability of death. Funeral attendees witness the raw emotions of grief and the extraordinary capacity of the human spirit to love.

And: Traditional Irish funerals have their own tone, history and vocabulary well documented in Irish literature, verse, story and song. They have their past and present rituals. They are comforting in their predictability.

And: There is consciousness in that line of sympathisers of the ineptitude and ineffectiveness of words.

I like that bit about the ineffectiveness of words. So many of our secular ceremonies are wall-to-wall words.

And: The funeral is the place where the details of the death are recounted, where memories are revived and connections made.

Lastly, There is psychological reason, social solidarity and cultural cohesion in funeral attendance

Read the entire piece here.

My Way sucks? No, it KILLS!

9 February 2010
Charles
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Categories: music

 

I am indebted to Pat McNally for this. And while I might have added it to my post about My Way, I feel it’s too good to bury.

Over in the Philippines, it seems, karaoke is a popular pastime. According to the New York Times, after a hard day’s work, there’s nothing a weary person likes more than to find a bar, glug a beer and belt out a classic or two.

This is not a matter of audience indifference. You’ve got to be good or you get stabbed: In the past two years alone, a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads.

One song is strictly off limits everywhere. Simply too dangerous. My Way. The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling My Way in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”

Why?

Butch Albarracin, the owner of Center for Pop, a Manila-based singing school that has propelled the careers of many famous singers, was partial to what he called the “existential explanation.”

“‘I did it my way’ — it’s so arrogant,” Mr. Albarracin said. “The lyrics evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer, as if you’re somebody when you’re really nobody. It covers up your failures. That’s why it leads to fights.”

The song never leads to carnage at polite British funeral. But I wonder if it leaves a subliminal bad taste in the mouth?

Read the entire New York Times piece here.

Stand up, speak up, shut up

8 February 2010
Charles
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Categories: eulogy

Here’s a nice, to-the-point eulogy:

My 91 year old Dad died on the morning of January 9th, 2010. Prior to his death, we had many discussions about the funeral arrangements, eulogy and his final interment. He wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered along the Charles River in Newton, but my Mother was very uncomfortable with that and preferred the more conventional path of a funeral service and burial. So it was to the 80 people gathered at the funeral home that I was able to deliver the last words that my father, Albert Kramer, wanted spoken on his behalf. He had told me…”Just tell them: To those of you that knew me, well, you knew me. To those of you that didn’t, you missed something.” I knew him, and I miss him.

From a Weekend Competition in the New York Times. See the rest of the entries here.

And what did you want?

8 February 2010
Charles
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Categories: ceremony, funeral poetry

There’s a sprightly piece about funerals in this week’s Spectator. Its content is not available free online, so I’ll transcribe the best bits and hope that I’m not infringing copyright but, rather, advertising the magazine.

It’s by James Delingpole.

If I’d written a film it would have been called Four Funerals and a Wedding, because personally I find funerals much more fun. Not all funerals, obviously. But the funeral of someone who’s not a close relative and who’s had a good innings can be a very splendid occasion.

…

God I hate weddings. The only one I’ve really enjoyed was my own, because I got to decide on the food and the music and all the speeches were about me … It’s the trappedness I loathe and fear most … At least with funerals you don’t go with any high expectations of fun and frivolity – whereas at weddings you do, setting yourself up for almost inevitable disappointment. And there’s an unspoken assumption at weddings that, as a guest, you’re privileged to be there and should be grateful to have made it onto the invitation list, which puts pressure on you to be on your best behaviour. At a funeral, on the other hand, you’re thought to be putting yourself out slightly. The family are touched and appreciative that you’ve made the effort. Also there’s no best man, no sit-down food ordeal, you don’t have to bring a present, and if you do behave badly no one minds or even notices because everyone’s on one of those weird, faintly hysterical, ‘it’s what he would have wanted’ post-funeral highs.

Then there’s death. I don’t think nearly enough of us think nearly often enough about this and what it means … I think that we might all be inclined to live better, more fruitful lives. I thought of this as [the daughter of a man whose funeral he had attended] read out a homily attributed to RL Stevenson (though more likely to be a variant on something written in 1904 for a poetry competition by an American woman named Bessie Stanley). It goes: ‘That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it. Who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had…’ When spoken right next to the coffin containing the body of someone who’s course is run, those words have quite an impact.

On a similar note, this is the poem short story writer Raymond Carver had inscribed on his grave:

LATE FRAGMENT

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

Cosmic laughter

5 February 2010
Charles
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Categories: Humour

If people cry at weddings why should they not laugh at funerals? If the person who has died made them laugh when he/she was alive, then laughter is a very proper way of commemorating them.

We find all sorts of things funny because humour is not just a way of expressing jollity, it is also a way of dealing with pain and suffering. This is why the trenches of the first world war bred so many jokes. This is why the emancipated inhabitants of countries lately under the yoke of the Soviet empire have stopped laughing so much.

All sorts of things make us laugh. But do you ever laugh at the Cosmos? Why would you do that?

Here’s an extract from Vedprakash Sharma’s blog. He’s a teacher in Delhi with a taste for music. He says:

You laugh at the whole situation as it is. The whole situation, as it is, is absurd — no purpose in the future, no beginning in the beginning. The whole situation of Existence is such that if you can see the Whole — such a great infinite vastness moving toward no fixed purpose, no goal — laughter will arise. So much is going on without leading anywhere; nobody is there in the past to create it; nobody is there in the end to finish it. Such is whole Cosmos — moving so beautifully, so systematically, so rationally. If you can see this whole Cosmos, then a laughter is inevitable.

He goes on to tell a very charming story about three Buddhist monks, and the funeral of one of them. Read it here.

 

FUNERIA

4 February 2010
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: ashes, memorialisation

Aesthetics. Taste. What’s naff, what’s ravishing? We’ve been there before in this blog and we’ll go there again. Bandit country.

The clothing, merchandise and interior decor of death is dignified, is magnificent, is horrible. It’s whatever you think it is. Undertakers’ frock coats.Traditional coffins with their sonorous names: Arundel, Chatsworth, Montacute. Chapels of rest. Hearses. ‘Floral tributes’. Headstones. ‘Memorial items’. Ashes urns. Cremation jewellery.

Coffins have become a lot more eye-friendly. What of the rest? It is notable that, in the matter of memorialising, some Brits, rather than be seen dead in a conventional cemetery, take themselves off to natural burial grounds where they can be sure to have none of it. That’s a strong reaction.

I’ll declare my own position on all the ashes urns I’ve ever seen: With the exception of the ARKA Acorn Urn I don’t like them. This one in particular.

But I really like these, above, from a group of artists based in California. They’ve even made me rethink the desirability of keeping ashes at home.

They’re called FUNERIA. Click through and see what your eyes think.