B1016-1 Funeral Verses

Every now and then, a youngster stands up during a funeral service and reads a poem specifically written for the occasion. Usually, it is a sincere encomium of a deceased relative - generally a grandparent. It is almost always delivered in a rapid and unintelligible sewing-machine cadence to an uncomprehending audience of indifferent adults. And those adults, as adults are most wont to do, often tell the youngster afterwards just how wonderful the poem was, even though they haven’t understood even a single word. Yet, any objective observer would think otherwise if pressed about the quality of the child’s “poem” as a poem.

That is not to say that something sincerely spoken should ever be confused with something well-composed. There is, after all, a categorical and substantial difference between “sincere” and “good.” But it strikes me as surprising that almost never do we hear estimable poetry read at a funeral. Instead, we are treated with mere doggerel and tears. And always - always - someone will be standing there in the receiving line with the icing bag in her hands, waiting to trace a pink and cursive “LOVELY” on the forehead of that unsuspecting youngster, like a decorator frosting roses on a wedding cake.

It would be beside the point for me to comment here on an educational system that would allow students to filter out into the streets without the slightest concept of what - precisely - constitutes a poem. So much is scribbled today that calls itself poetry that I’m convinced that the “language arts” no longer teaches the subtleties of that medium. But, just as Warhol could paint soup cans with impunity and call it art, so too a desultory handful of words cast onto a page can masquerade as poetry - even at a funeral service.

It is to the point, however, to comment on the habit of the present age of pouring raw sentiment down the sewer in the giddy expectation that doing so will water the wilted flowers of one’s would-be admirers. I speak, of course, of the excesses of J-land.

Journaling, to be sure, is a narcissistic gaze into the mirror of oneself, and no amount of pious pitter-patter will disguise that fact or change its self-reflexive nature. The observer who looks over the shoulder and sneaks a glimpse into that journal will notice that the hand that paints the portrait of self is connected to the arm of the very same person. The portrait and the portrait painter form a single, common tautology, unconfused with boundaries of “otherness” or whispered contradictions that might suggest a smoldering, dissenting view.

And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Each gaze into the mirror reveals yet another thing that wasn’t seen there the day before. Each gaze into the mirror reveals something that now appears as more than it was just a moment ago. Each look daubs a dab of paint on the canvas that constitutes what we really are. Little by little a picture emerges, not of the semi-conscious world of the dreamer, but of the realist looking at the truth of himself. In the end the narcissist sees, not the paramount and dazzling image of himself that he imagines himself to be, but rather, the first faint outlines of his own shortcomings as he really is.

Journaling seems to be much like those radio telescope transmissions years ago that broadcast an endless brood of clatter into the ether in the high expectation that intelligent life somewhere would reply. To my knowledge, none has ever seen fit to reply to those fitful radio emissions. And why would we expect them to do so? A narcissistic noise foisted upon a quiet and peaceful universe? To reply to that babble would surely encourage more of the same. One hardly replies to a child plunking on a piano. Why would intelligent life elsewhere answer a very similar - and annoying - electronic plunking?

So too with journaling. Often the plunkings in J-land take the inane form of tiny fonts dotting a blackened background: indecipherable and unreadable texts each vying for the smaller amount of notice. Who could reply to that? How is it possible to comment on what cannot be seen?

Or, often the plunkings take the form of endlessly variable color schemes from one line of text to another. It is almost as if their fabricators were still chained to the chairs in their third-grade classrooms and forced to explore the entire chromatic spectrum sliver by dreary sliver. Who, I ask, could follow a sustained argument that’s all alight with Las Vegas’ bubbly glow? Indeed, those plunky colors defy comprehension for those with thinning hair and less than the full compliment of natural teeth.

Did I mention those endless menageries of pets that somehow confuse photo albums with written journals? It seems that if those pictures of dogs and cats were left out, some would have absolutely nothing to say. And what about all that glittered deckle edging?

I do profess a personal alienation when looking at a woman’s journal that’s flowery and glittery and filled with the 21st-century equivalent of antimacassars that one might have seen plastered all over Victorian furniture. So many of these journals look like my grandmother’s parlor: a mysterious room I was forbidden to enter as a child. Her parlor was filled with large and ponderous furniture, with everything arranged just so, and reserved exclusively for “company.” As a five year old, I sneaked into the parlor when no one was looking and discover the joys of jumping up and down on grandma’s couch. Those joys were short-lived when grandma pulled me from the parlor into the kitchen, squalling and shrieking (her - not me), and made me sit on a hard wooden chair next to my grandfather, who was being disciplined himself for some irregularity or another that same afternoon. The two of us sat there like Death Row inmates awaiting the arrival of the chaplain. I was never to enter grandma’s house again until well after her death. Sic transit gloria mundi.

An unstated need so often in journals is the need to be recognized by others. It is not to say that one writes merely for the adulation of others, but rather that in the final analysis one desires to be heard. Most of us have seen a certain arm’s-length sexism tainting these journals, in that the women, by and large, comment and stroke other women’s journals and ignore the journals of men, and vice versa. There are, of course, notable exceptions to this rather rash corollary.

I write and post in this journal to beat my daughter at her own game. She looks upon my writing with disdain and contempt, and I find the prospect that she might press my collected works to her bosom to be remote in the extreme. I would delude myself to think that anything I may have written is worth preserving for posterity. And so, I’m quite sure that she will cart my opera to the curb when I’m cold and moldering in the grave without so much as a second thought. The landfill will become my library, awaiting those archeologists in the future, who will wonder greatly at the extravagant expanse of forest cleared to print such palpable dribble. If they listen very carefully, I’m sure they will hear my daughter murmuring in the background: Daaaad!