Graceland

Facebook's so-called news feed mostly consists of "top stories" like "That Girl From High School You Were Never Really Friends With, Who, In a Weak Moment, You Friended ("friend" is a verb and this is our culture) Just So You Could See What Her Wedding Dress Looks Like is now friends with Some Other Girl That Who Cares." But the other day it served me well by alerting me that my friend Dustin had removed "the macabre" from his interests, which reminded me that the macabre is, contrary to Dustin apparently, one of my interests. I was obsessed with and terrified by ghost stories as a kid and most infamously once made my parents throw away one such book that had scared me so deeply I didn't want it in the house. They had bought the book for me when we were on vacation in Scotland, a place that does the macabre with such verve that the bookstore we got it at was called The Witchery. In yet another example of that not serious but not insignificant lack of parental foresight that I love about them, they let their overimaginative, bookworm seven year-old daughter delve into the book unsupervised, probably enjoying the silence in backseat of the rented Rover rather than the surely irritating but popular is-it-a-fight-or-is-it-a-game? my brother liked to start by stealing my blanket and then informing me that, to get her back, I would have to orally fill out an "application" of his own improvised devising (somehow at age ten he had a cutting wit when it came to bureaucratic formalities. Another in his repertoire involved claiming that, any time I won a staring contest, it didn't count because he was "the proctor" and had the final say...an early lesson in why fascism is so annoying and maybe, combined with the threat of filling out imaginary forms in triplicate, why I dislike rules I don't see the point of). The book's purchase unfortunately coincided with our staying at Borthwick Castle, a hangout of Mary Queen of Scots allegedly haunted by not one ghost but multiple ones, including one of a man who had been burned alive. No doubt my parents told me this story, myopically encouraged by my budding interest in the macabre and unaware that I had just read a story in my evil new book about a disembodied ghost head floating through a wall. And so I spent the whole night at Borthwick Castle awake and terrified to the core, when probably the only scary thing that was going on was a wide-eyed child staring for hours into the darkness. After we got back, I was still so afraid of the book that I finally made them throw it in the trash--a child's pared-down version of an exorcism.

Most of my relationship with the macabre, however, is more manageable and basically means that I love 'Alfred Hitchcock Presents' and Vincent Price (although even his appearance [and Nietszche quoting! WTF?!] in the Elvis movie "The Trouble With Girls" can't save that piece of shit) and believe that a perfect October date is walking around Wicker Park and determining which houses are the spookiest-looking. The latest manifestation has been a longing to spend an afternoon in Graceland Cemetery here in Chicago. I go past it every morning on the train and always imagine it being spring and me being down on the paths I see from above, alone among the beautiful, strange, silent monuments. And today it was finally nice enough to go! It was also an appropriately sobering and reflective activity after a night of debauchery on the sad and cringe-inducing, rather than toasting to freedom and throwing your glass over your shoulder, end of the spectrum. Plus there's something about being in a cemetery on a day that feels like the first of spring, not only because a lot of the smaller graves are unexpectedly standing in water but because of the more obvious life and death paradox that this blog seems to be focused on lately.

One of the things I was thinking about while I was there was the different physical representations of mortality and how the graves and monuments reveal what someone thinks or once thought about death. Of course, there are the normal "Rest in the Lord" inscriptions (weirdly, I didn't see one "Rest in Peace" in the two hours I spent there), which are so common that we don't stop to consider what that actually means. But when you add the fact that not a few graves look sort of like beds, it starts to beg the question of what death is supposed to be. Like, death is sleep? And life is toil? In my unscientific observation, I noticed that the small, presumably working class graves seemed to like this theme a lot, which I guess makes sense--if your life is all hard work, then death's reward is rest, although that seems to imply that life is more tragic or at least harder than death. I guess this can be either depressing or not, depending on what you want to believe about life or about death.

Then there are the bigger, fancier monuments. Even the mid-sized ones didn't seem to need much in the way of comforting Bible(ish), Gothic script verse, let alone the "he's not dead, he's just sleeping" idea. Instead, it was as if the owner of this, shall we say, Mercedes E-Class of grave had been successful (er, rich?) enough that there was no need to describe his death as an escape from the difficulties of life. And, in the case of the grave of Allen Pinkerton, founder of the Pinkerton detectives and enemy to all us IWW fans out there who learned at a young age how cruelty is perpetrated by the mighty, whether they be robber baron hired guns or self-appointed proctors of staring contests, not only is there not a word of King James English to be found but instead there's a huge plaque detailing the man's accomplishments, including founding "a noble profession in the hour of the nation's peril." Now, should we blame Pinkerton for being proud in death? Unless he dictated what his epitaph would say, I don't know if we can. So should we judge his grieving survivors for making a laundry list of why he was great and tacking it up on his grave? Again, probably not.

But it is interesting to see how one's social position influences the physical commemoration of their life forever. Obviously this also extends to the really big monuments, most notably Potter and Bertha Palmer's Greek temple/grave that looks over the pond on the northern side of the cemetery. Not only are there no Victorian God references--not only is there not even the brash self-made man's list of reasons why he, too, gets to have a biggish monument--there is nothing except impressive and truly beautiful Classical columns, two sarcophagi and a few torches for good measure, creating an effect of spare grandeur that seems to say more about these people's impact on the world of their lives and even ours than the "RIP" sentiments of the tiny graves in its shadow. Meanwhile, the latter are plain for a different reason, with only "Mother" or "Father," the person's name, dates, and maybe something about never being forgotten, the price of which probably having gone up for every extra "eth" and "thee." There are also those older graves you occasionally pass that have become so smoothed with time that the name is lost and the grave is really just a stone. Does this happen to the big ones, too, eventually? I hope so. Then, despite the barriers created by wealth, race, gender, and class, in the end everyone would just be an anonymous, fragile and perfect human being, having briefly appeared and now gone. Although it would take a glacier to smooth the Palmers' "grave" down.

Still. One mustn't take life or even death too seriously, so after all these, er, monumental reflections today, I ended up at a party where the hosts' cat chased a laser pointer beam around the room until it puked. It was one of the funniest things I have ever seen.