(I find no point in being bashful about naming the awards, ladies and gents.)
Glorias will be awarded to anyone and everyone who at any time on this or any other blog I frequent:
- contributes significantly and originally to our understanding of mortality, either with "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed," or with a fresh insight
- helps us deal with our own mortality and our fears about death
- comes up with significant new information about the Dismal Trade which enlightens us all
- helps us deliver better funerals with insights, references, writings, recommendations (music or words, ways of proceeding)
- makes us larf with a merry quip, gag or jape related to the Grim Reaper and his camp-followers (us lot)
- helps us deal well with bereaved people
I can hear mutterings already about a singularly deserving candidate, but rest assured that the committee is currently considering the award of a Lifetime Gloria.
Incidentally, Glorias can be won more than once by the same person.
Anyone may nominate anyone else, by comment here or by email to me. Anyone is welcome to draw my attention to blogs and web-pages where potential Gloria-winners are at work.
Correspondence will not be entered into, legal proceedings ditto.
The judge's decision (note position of apostrophe please) is final, but bloggers and commenters may well be asked for a view.
The prize? No glittery bauble, no vulgar fat cheque - the honour of being glorified by Gloria and celebrated by her myriad reader. (-s, on a good day.)
We often read a lot of guff about "internet communities." Let's see if we are one, or if we fall apart in jealousy and discord at the prospect of winning/losing this magnificent honour.
Is it just petty of me to want to design my green funeral as if I were coming to it? I mean I don't care if other people don't want want to sit through Neil Young's long and passionate "Will to Love." It was a theme song of mine for years.
ReplyDeleteAnd I insist that any living siblings and/or friends prove their loyalty by playing George Clinton and The Parliament Funkadelics' "Paint the White House Black" played at 11, and I'm not talking about from some tacky little, cheesy CD box player. I want auditorium-sized speakers for both numbers. (Give my mother my foam rubber earplugs if she insists she can't stand it. They're in my junk drawer in the kitchen to the right of the stove.)
Some of these people and how maudlin and creepy they get, pulling out the crusty old "Danny Boy" and "Amazing Grace" again and again. And I can think of nothing but Dylan Thomas' aunt and her mourners in "After the Funeral":
After the funeral, mule praises, brays,
Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap
Tap happily of one peg in the thick
Grave’s foot, blinds down the lids, the teeth in black,
The spittled eyes, the salt ponds in the sleeves,
Morning smack of the spade that wakes up sleep,
Shakes a desolate boy who slits his throat
In the dark of the coffin and sheds dry leaves,
That breaks one bone to light with a judgment clout,
After the feast of tear-stuffed time and thistles,
In a room with a stuffed fox and a stale fern.
What was it the poet said as death approached? "Is this to be the little I've done?" or some such nonsense. Why do alcoholics have such low self-esteem? Why I would have performed disgusting sex acts in back alleys full of rats to keep the man drinking for one evening. I love him and from first reading "Do Not Go Gentle" I knew something important. But I could not have guessed that later in life in my green funeral plans would come a hemp wrapper for my "coffin" and a bright silk paisley kimono as my forever in infinity garb. I hope God, my angels and saints, mentors and teachers, loved ones who beat me there, damn them, think I look ready for anything because I will be.
So after lighting up my brain with your blazing prose, you want an answer to your opening, probably rhetorial, question? Well, if you do, come back to me on that, when I've finished rotating.
ReplyDeleteBIG thanks for the energy, the deadeye sharp aim of your quotation (how about "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower/drives my green age, and I am dumb to tell the crooked rose I am bent by the same wintry fever?")and the drive of your underlying thought.
Over here (UK)we sometimes get "Amazing Grace," but how, I think, you would curl at some of our favourites: "Time To Say Goodbye," and worst ever, "My Way."
Power to your themes. And - strange, but true (well, not so strange but unlikely enough) my partner and I were in SIU for one year 1969 - 70, helped, in a very, very small way, to close it after Kent State. High days.