Look at the Light

Favorite. What does that mean, when you love almost everything you see at a place like Mount Auburn Cemetery? I'm always kidding Kris about pointing our her "favorite" tree or stone or house or public space. I love people with lots of favorites. I can say a bluebird is my favorite bird and then up hops a Carolina wren and the whole thing falls apart. It's like that for both of us at Mount Auburn.

But there are some stones and inscriptions that are singular. Poet David McCord graced this earth for a century, and left us with this verse:

From this gorgeous couplet I gather that Mr. McCord suspected that Mount Auburn would be his last stop; that he didn't expect to be hopping from cloud to cloud in his celestial reward.  I get that. Might as well go out with a good poem.

He wonderfully honored his mother, who lies beside him. It's a little hard to read, so here it is:

Whenever she spoke or laughed or sang or read aloud

There was music for a long time...

Kris took me to the Cambridge Public Library, perhaps her favorite renovation and one which I regret not photographing. Edward Lifson did it so very well on his blog; see his tribute. The exterior is a perfect meld of bricky ponderous old and floaty glassy new, and the interior is heart-racingly glorious. There's a dedicated young adult reading room, stuffed with just the kind of books (I call them shoe books) that Phoebe loves--and many others. You know, the kind with a high-heeled shoe on the cover. The children's section, Kris pointed out, is on the top floor, not buried in the dank basement as it so often is in public libraries. It's bright and spacious and colorful. And there in the high-ceilinged, sunlit space, she found and showed me a book of verse by David McCord, with his epitaph right there on the page. Kris, a Friend of the Cambridge Public Library, says she burst into tears the first time she entered the renovated space. "My tax dollars at work," she thought. Standing in the library's vast stacks, in a place I would gladly live, I could only drool. I'll probably never be able to afford to live in a place with a library like that, and besides, Cambridge is short on box turtles, morel mushrooms and Kentucky warblers. We all find our places. 

photo by Hodge

As a college student, I used to curl up between this sphinx's paws to read. Kris just sent me this week's view. Man, Cambridge can be gray in the winter, but Hodge climbs over the miniature glaciers in between parking spaces, navigates the multicolored pack ice of the sidewalks; keeps walking and noticing. She knows it won't be long before lilacs, and besides, she's genetically cold-adapted, an insanely talented skier.

All right then, I'm coming back to the concept of "favorite." I do have a favorite stone at Mount Auburn Cemetery, and once again, Kris brought it to me. It's the stone of poet Robert Creeley, born about when my mom was, give or take six years. Friend of Jack Kerouac, Jackson Pollock, Allen Ginsberg. I like this 1972 photo, where he's surrounded by breakfast clutter in what looks like student housing, everything scrounged from somewhere.

photo from Wikipedia.org

 Writer of 60-plus books and mentor to many. I'm not familiar with his writing...yet.  Except for one couplet.  There's a lovely passage in his Wikipedia entry:

In his later years he was an advocate of, and a mentor to, many younger poets, as well as to others outside of the poetry world. He went to great lengths to be supportive to many and he had great sympathy for 'ordinary' people. Being responsive appeared to be essential to his personal ethics, and he seemed to take this responsibility extremely seriously, in both his life and his craft. In his later years, when he became well-known, he would go to lengths to make strangers, who approached him as a well-known author, feel comfortable. In his last years, he used the Internet to keep in touch with many younger poets and friends. He was rather shy, somewhat cautious, but he was not at all afraid; he would stand up in situations where many others would not.

photo by Hodge

Which brings me to the other side of his stone.

The simplest of stones, the simplest of sentiments, and yet the one, of all of them, that moves me the most. 

Perhaps it's because, much as I love a good gravestone dog or winged death's head, there's no frippery in between the reader and the power of the poet's word. It's his advice, in seven words, for living in the moment and nowhere else. Kris and I, we look. My two babies know how to look, too. When they come back from a walk and drag me outside to look at the light of the hour, I know they are learning how to live. 

 Thank you, Mr. Creeley.

Rose Shadows and Cowpox

All aboard the S. S. Sleeper! She sails tonight. Or perhaps tomorrow, or in the next century or so. Very, very slowly.

There are so many lovely and poignant moments in a walk through Mount Auburn, it's hard to pick favorites. Here's a monument to a man lost at sea. I liked the verse. It's about the lack of closure that goes with such a tragic event:

He sleeps beneath the blue lazy sea

He lies where pearls lie deep

He was the loved of all, yet none

O'er his low bed may weep.

Everywhere, you see graven evidence of people searching for closure, for a way to be at peace with losing the ones they love. It's hardest, perhaps, for people who lose young children, but there was a terrible lot of that going around in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Influenza epidemics, typhoid, cholera, yellow fever...they took an awful toll.

I could hardly look at this little sculpture of two children sleeping, imagining the loss behind it,

for they were often lost in twos and threes as an epidemic swept through a household. The idea of such a thing happening today is very remote to us, but was very real then.

Climbing roses, planted so many decades later, cast a beautiful shadow, a shadow of remembrance and sorrow, and life blooming perhaps again, somewhere.

And here is the grave of someone who did something about it all. Benjamin Waterhouse, of Harvard College, introduced to the United States a vaccine for the devastating disease of smallpox. English physician Edward Jenner had noted that milkmaids seemed to have an immunity to smallpox, and went from there. He hypothesized that their exposure, in the course of their work, to the biologically similar cowpox virus armed their immune systems against the human variant of this horrid virus. My father loved to tell us about Jenner, as a way of telling us that we must notice things, connect things that seem unconnected, and thereby do much good. (Thanks to Tim who gracefully and quietly corrects the S.S. Sleeper's course from time to time).

Waterhouse's stone reads:

In 1800 he introduced to the New World 

the blessing of vaccination,

overcame popular prejudice and distrust

by testing it on his own children,

and thus established a title 

to the gratitude of future ages.

This memorial was erected by his wife, who doubtless appreciated more than anyone the sacrifice he'd made in testing it on their own children.

But I'm getting too ponderous; these stones haunt me. So I'll leave you with the monument Kris calls 

The Celestial Wedgie. Ow! Lemme go!

Mt Auburn Cemetery: Laughing at Funerals 3

Styles in epitaphs are as varied as the careers and worldviews of the interred. Kris, ever irreverent in her reverence, delights in showing me the ones who got a bit carried away as they were being carried away.

Give me the most complex Celtic cross you can carve. Really pull out the stops on this one. Hang the expense.  I happen to love its complexity. But there's also something kind of painful about the font. I imagine chiseling it all out of granite and it makes me sigh.

 There are graven resumes everywhere. Now, I have held a few jobs for one or two years, but I'm not going to commit them to marble. Wow. Seems to me Mr. Everett bounced around a bit. All right, he bounced in high places. But he still bounced. President of this, professor of that, minister of this, senator of that.

I wish you could hear Kris' helpless laughter as she shows me this one. I know it's hard to read, so here's what it says:

"An eminent American Inventor

whose great mind conceived

ideas and brought into operation

works of art that will live for ages."

Which is not, in itself, that funny until you walk around the stone and see the carved depictions of his works of art.

No explanation needed, apparently; we'll all know what that is. For ages.

 And that? Oh, there's one in every...shoe factory? I don't know why this delights me and Kris so, but it does. No disrespect to Thomas Blanchard or his descendants intended, but this monument cracks us up.

 As does this one, which I call LEMME OUT TEBBETTS!! I think they're trying to prevent noselessness here, protecting it from acid rain, but it's just sooo creepy to see Mr. Tebbetts fogging up the Plexiglas with his cold breath.

Stones of Mount Auburn

By no means are all of Mount Auburn Cemetery's stones perfect. Some, with all apologies to the interred, are perfectly hideous.

I don't know what the hot cross buns of stone are meant to represent, but I'm missing it.  Poor Sister. Just a hop-skip away from the elegant ammonite. I am so designing my own headstone. 

Kris and I looked long and hard for the metamorphosis stone she'd found and saved to show me. I was a little crestfallen to find the butterfly and caterpillar clearly rendered innocent of any reference to their true appearance. Still, a nice concept, even if the larva's prolegs and adult's segmentation and wing overlap are all so, so wrong. Being a Science Chimp can seriously get in the way of appreciating such things. Mostly, it enhances, but sometimes it hinders.

I was delighted to find this stone on the ridge near Spectacle Pond, where I saw my first of a lifetime of great binocular-fuls. It was a May morning, probably 1978. I was focused on my first-ever (life, in bird parlance) summer tanager, an orangey-green immature male with patches of red molting in. I was already hyperventilating when a male ruby-throated hummingbird flew into the scene and stabbed at the young tanager. Little did I know one day I'd live where summer tanagers sing lazily as they masticate yellowjackets in late June; where I'd have to swat the hummingbirds away to get in the front door. I felt my life was complete with that one vision; didn't know it could get any better. 

That's living in the moment.

Some stones are heart-grippingly beautiful in their simplicity and hidden meaning. I took an introductory humanities course with William Alfred, and this tabula mysteriosa is perfect. It's perched unprepossessingly on the flank of "Harvard Hill," where the University's nearest and dearest rest. Kris found that, too, when she found our beloved former Dean Archie Epps' stone, and noticed that everyone around him had a connection to Harvard.

 Kris remarked as we marveled that she had never seen God described as a deep but dazzling darkness--isn't He supposed to be the Light?-- anywhere but on Alfred's stone. Oh, the sun blowing its celestial trumpet, eyes crossed in effort! And that banner: DEATH IS UNDONE BY LOVE

Well, if you've ever lost someone who lives in your heart and thoughts every single day (DOD) what can you do but wipe your eyes at that?

 William Alfred, who left us in 1999, just as my bright spirit Liam entered. I like his choice of "Teacher" instead of "Professor."

For those who have trouble deciphering, it says:

There is in God (some say)

 A deep but dazzling darkness-

O for that night! where I in him

Might live invisible and dim.

Right up there with my favorite stones in this magical place.

There is the stone of a woman who was a book illustrator in the 1960's--so clearly indicated by the stylized birds that dance across her slate. Very Leonard Baskin, by my appraisal. Very beautiful. It overlooks Spectacle Pond, where I first heard the burbling song of a ruby-crowned kinglet.

Birds are everywhere in Mount Auburn; this is why I first came here, to watch them. I could barely see the stones for the warblers, vireos and tanagers.  Now, having seen a surfeit of birds, I still come here for them, and everything. 

Oh look. Who's been here?

Last spring's robin, of course. A robin would do that.

My Mount Auburn

One of the places that got me through college was Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was my quiet place, my green open space, and the beautiful monuments were part of a landscape that inspired peace and contemplation in me--something I sorely needed as a break from dorm life. Now, when I visit Cambridge, I leave a day to walk there with my dear dear friend Kris, who gathers up all the best little bits of the cemetery and gives them to me as she hurries from stone to stone, lightmoment to lightmoment.

Now Kris is very camera-shy, and she has perfected a quick sidestep when one is pointed even remotely in her direction, but I lured her into a photo under the pretense of showing her what the Canon G-11 (now G-12) can do. Hah. Gotcha, little elf.

I have been to Mount Auburn in almost every atmospheric condition; fog, rain, summer light and autumn gold; even winter's monochrome, but I never want to go there again without Kris. It would be like going with my eyes closed.

We always visit the argonaut. No, ammonite, says the ever alert Boneman. Science Chimp, Chimped! What a lovely thing to make of stone.

Here it is in October. His spouse, with oak leaves and a shamrock. All these recurring natural motifs have meaning, much of it lost on us modern mortals. I love looking at them and wondering, knowing there are years of study in unraveling it all.

I love Mount Auburn in all seasons. But  my October visit there was beyond perfect. Kris and I were skipping all our Class of 1980 activities, all the panels and encounter groups, to make our own kind of  spiritual journey, and pay homage to our favorite space in this fairest of fair cities. It had to be done. The bluegold day, the shaded passages, the glimmering leaves were calling us.

I pressed my lens up against stone Mary, her delicate features protected by her rock-hard hood,

and clucked over poor noseless Jesus. Acid urban rains have not been kind to him. There is a sense, looking at these monuments so clearly meant to last forever, that they will not be here that much longer. A sense that they need to be appreciated now, while they still may be read and deciphered.

For here are some of the finest examples of the stonecarver's art, standing out in the hard rain and snow. This Civil War tableau ripples with fluid, artfully draped life, yet is hard, frozen to the touch. I borrowed this winter shot from an earlier visit, because I love this so much.

And the dogs. The faithful graveyard dogs. I always well up as I lay my hand on their cool stone craniums, murmur my greeting to them.

A fool for animals, whether living or graven.

Especially ones that wait alert for their loved one's return, all year round. 

Perhaps one day there will be a Boston terrier of stone on a little plot in Whipple, Ohio. Or, as I think about it,  a stone Zick, recumbent but alert, on an even smaller plot. Come on, Baker. Let's go for a run, see what's doin' in the Whipple cemetery.