(for Philip Larkin)
My ego prefers
an obit published
by the NY Times.
But anywhere else
will do, even etched
into a headstone
that nobody reads
in a cemetery where
nobody ever goes.
I don’t know why
I care, but I do.
I don’t know why
anyone should care,
but it’s the custom to.
—JH
Who knows? Perhaps your poems will be better than a NYT obit. “The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.” –Marcus Tullius Cicero
Thanks for the thought. It’s the longest of long shots. Actual living memory lasts — pace, Cicero — maybe three generations? The rest is recorded. And mostly forgot.
To see it positively, what is recorded is a form of memory, no?. But I think in the world of fragile and ever obsolescent digital media, what is “recorded” won’t last long. At least poems can be put on paper, which is very durable by comparison.
Yes, paper is very durable, indeed. It is one of two quite durable media currently in reach.
The other of the pair is film and a third or fourth may appear sometime, but I haven’t noticed any of those yet.
Of course there is stone, marble, granite and such, but those media totally lack portability in contrast with standing strong as monuments. That stuff looks great in cemeteries.
I recently encountered an article by Hollis Frampton on film as a medium of expression — cinema film, that is — and found what he wrote about the environmental impacts of the necessary chemistry needed to make the film product affecting natural resources in disturbing leaps and bounds.
It all suggested “unsustainable” in bright, flashing neon, phonetic alphabet letters.
However, paper still has a somewhat cleaner record in terms environmental impacts and that perhaps due to the recycling programs that have come into being over the last couple of decades.
I rate paper as possibly sustainable and perhaps moving towards probably sustainable.
Perhaps, we are in need of an entirely new medium? The present state of networked digital media doesn’t work and the serious problems with cloud computing are beginning to appear.
All that just seems like a run-a-way train to me, and contemplating the stones found in cemeteries is something I find to be more soothing to my mind, a mind troubled about the state of durable media..
Here’s a voice from an Oral Tradition:
“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero
Interesting. And why worry when life has been placed in the memory of the living dead.
My favorite headstone inscription, from an old bookful of them,
and apart from WC Fields’s legendary but apocryphal one…
“On the whole it’s better than playing Philadelphia”… is
“I can see up your skirt.”