Brandon Irvine Presents: Boston-area cemetery reviews

["Michael McGeachie" <mmcgeach@>]

GSB is fortunate to bring you the insight of special guest writer Brandon
Irvine this week:

The greater Boston area has two expansive cemeteries: Forest Hills and Mount
Auburn. I've visited Mount Auburn a couple of times, and it has a similar
feeling to Forest Hills--with so much ground to cover and such an old
history, it becomes an odd lot of the historical and the gimmicky, the new
and daring plopped down among the old and traditional, the fantastic near
the dull, a kind of flea-market of the deceased.

I have particular associations with cemeteries that I'm guessing aren't too
different from most others'--a vague, deep sense of the passage of the cycle
of birth and death. Standing there I can somehow feel cosmically bonded to
these imaginary people. In this skein of associations, there's a lot of
colonial imagery of the sort exemplified by Mel Gibson's The Patriot and a
soundtrack drawn from recordings of Appalachian music done in a string
arrangement.

I imagine that these people, through the sheer brutality of life, must be
restricted to some of the more strident emotions: anger, passionate love,
desire for revenge, a connection to the land. None of the existential
neuroses or enervating self-consciousness that plague me and the people I
associate with. I can almost empathize with these vague sketches of
imaginary people who were sure of themselves, who I think of as having an
intuitive understanding that life is short, tough, and eminently meaningful.

Some aspects of the cemetery can work with this narrative. The older the
graves, the more I can feel bonded to the great birth-death cycle, the more
the temporal distance between me and them enhances the effect of
timelessness.

But in other spots the narrative is undermined by the cemetery. Beyond all
the things you wouldn't find anywhere else but Forest Hills (and which
probably don't belong in a cemetery), there are genuine bits of the past
that don't work into the story. Certain stones seem like relics of their
period, and not in any very meaningful way--artifacts that clash with the
cemetery narrative, although in practice I'm only sort of dimly aware of
this interference.

There's a type of stone from the 19th century where a sculpture of a tree
stump is used as the upright portion of the holy cross, or just stands
alone. My initial impression of this stuck with me even after I learned that
it has a significance (viz. the breaking off of life)--that it was a hokey
naturalistic effect like a plastic animal sculpture in your front yard.


Read more of Brandon's Boston-area cemetery review here:
http://www.excitablemedia.com/brandx/cemetery.htm


This literary interlude is brought to you by the GSB committee on art and
culture, the letter L and the number 5.  Support your local GSB at this
week's...

            +-                                                  -+
              girl scout benefit -+-  5:30 pm  -+- 32-G9 lounge
            +-                                                  -+

               For those coming from elsewhere: Building 32 is
                <http://whereis.mit.edu/map-jpg?selection=32>
           Once you are in 32, just take the G-elevator to the 9th
       floor and we will be in the lounge that you will be looking at


_______________________________________________
Csail-related mailing list
Csail-related@
http://lists.csail.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/csail-related