Eerie synchronicity

[koganbot]

In two unrelated incidents, Chuck Eddy and I mention Metropolis Records within the same 24-hour period.

http://www.thesinglesjukebox.com/?p=2678

http://community.livejournal.com/poptimists/786913.html

Comments

DEATH AND FUNERALS

[joshlanghoff.livejournal.com]

Ug. I need to download that new Birthday Massacre, but I can never seem to find the time.

Tangentially related--I was trying to figure out why I don't like Janelle Monae, and she lives in Metropolis or something--I heard this guy Thomas Long speak at a liturgical conference last spring. He was talking about funerals, and specifically white suburban protestant funerals, and how they've lost their symbolic mojo. The shape of his idea reminded me of your "symbol standing in for the event," which is why Monae brought it to mind. Here's my summary--any errors of history or application are mine, not Long's:

Funerals used to serve a practical purpose: how do we get the deceased from here to there, to prevent the rotting corpse from stinking up the place and spreading disease? Well, we gather a posse of family and friends, pick up the body, and travel from the deceased's home to the trash heap (cemetery, incinerator, log raft, etc.), carrying the deceased along the way. Maybe we'll sing some songs while we walk. Maybe the Holy Man will say some words, read some Bible, to imbue this event with cosmic significance; because remember, the deceased isn't just traveling from here to there, he's also traveling from Here to There, from this life to the afterworld. Surprisingly, people keep dying on a semi-regular basis, so the Holy Man gets a script, or a set of scripts from which to choose, and we build up a repertoire of songs, and all of this lends symbolic significance to our dead colleague's journey. It ALSO lends symbolic significance to OUR CONTINUED PRESENCE; we're still here, we're not taking this journey yet, we get to come back from the trash heap. But all the while, we're preparing ourselves for our own Final Journeys.

Over centuries and millennia, shit occasionally happens, as shit does: the deceased's body is destroyed at death, and we're left without a physical body to carry. Since we still need to do SOMETHING, we meet at the deceased's house, or at the Holy Man's place, and the Holy Man sez his words and we sing our songs, and we consider how whatshername is still taking her spiritual Journey, even if she's not taking the normal physical journey. We notice that we still derive some comfort from this gathering, despite the absence of the deceased. After several such ritual gatherings, and especially after the advent of Families Living All Over the Place, the body's physical journey becomes less practically important, while the ritual is just as comforting as ever.

Before you know it, the symbolic side-effect of the ritual--our comfort at the deceased's spiritual journey--has claimed the foreground, while the body's movement is secondary. We have more and more memorials without the body present, at the first convenient opportunity to get the extended family together. Since there's no body present, nobody really knows what to do with themselves, so we sing songs and hear words and sometimes show home movies and hear family and friends share memories, and the whole operation becomes about our grief. The symbolic spiritual Journey of the deceased is still a theme, but the star of the show is the grief of the living. As a consequence, the deceased (and sometimes the living) become mini-celebrities at their own funerals. (He loved rummy and had long conversations with Jehovah's Witnesses. She served that school faithfully for 50 years, and she inspired me to become a poet.) We still acknowledge this journey as one we all take, and we note its significance far beyond its visible parameters; but those meanings have become secondary to the grief of the here-and-now, and to the significance of the deceased (and of us) within the parameters of normal everyday life, now ended. Much is lost.

(Long's own summary is at http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=7852.)

Anyway, I THINK Janelle Monae is the grief, and I want her to be the Journey. But I'm still trying to figure that out.

Re: DEATH AND FUNERALS

[koganbot]

Don't think I buy the argument (as you've summarized it) that the memorial service etc. is no longer about the Journey. But even if it is, that doesn't make it a symbol standing in for an event; it's just a different event: a memorial rather than adding significance to Aunt Mildred's Journey.

As you pointed out a while ago, my notion of "symbol" when I was writing "symbol stands in for the event" isn't the richest notion one can use. In any event, it's more along the lines of "By using the word 'marketing' he thinks he's making a socioeconomic analysis, but all he's doing is waving a buzzword." My concept is actually pretty crude.

Re: DEATH AND FUNERALS

[joshlanghoff.livejournal.com]

"But even if it is, that doesn't make it a symbol standing in for an event; it's just a different event: a memorial rather than adding significance to Aunt Mildred's Journey."

Totally, and I should've specified they're not exactly equivalent. But that may also be what's bugging me about Janelle Monae: her music isn't symbolizing what it says it's symbolizing. But then, in the history of failed musical aspirations, what else is new? I'll go mutter to myself now.