Funerailles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=lRNy4pUTgWQ

The "Original Seven"

The "Original Seven"

NASA's first group of Mercury astronauts (the "Original Seven") pictured here at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), now Johnson Space Center, in Houston, Texas (June 1963) included Naval aviators, Air Force pilots and a Marine Corps aviator.
Conceivably any one of them could have been first man on the moon some five years later, but each were integral parts of the team that spectacularly achieved that effort. They’re all gone now* but what a fantastic legacy they left in their wake.


* (left to right):

Cooper 2004 (77) [heart failure]
Schirra 2007 (84) [heart attack]
Shepard 1998 (75) [leukemia]
Grissom 1967 (41) [testing accident]
Glenn 2016 (95)
Slayton 1993 (69) [malignant brain tumor]
Carpenter 2013 (88) [stroke]

The man who filled his own life and all our existence with bright light.

‭“‬If there is life hereafter,‭ ‬or if there is none,‭ ‬it does not matter.‭”

“Everything on earth depends on will. I never had an idea in my life. I’ve got no imagination. I never dream. My so-called inventions already existed in the environment—I took them out. I’ve created nothing. Nobody does. There’s no such thing as an idea being brain-born; everything comes from the outside. The industrious one coaxes it from the environment; the drone lets it lie there while he goes off to the baseball game. The ‘genius’ hangs around his laboratory day and night. If anything happens he’s there to catch it; if he wasn’t, it might happen just the same, only it would never be his.”

… Thomas Edison (1847-1931),  American inventor and businessman

Obsequy

… the unavailing gestures of impotent hopes are sealed in earth overset with rock

There is inestimable companionship in graveyards
Where the unavailing gestures of impotent hopes
Are sealed in earth overset with rock, and many dead
No longer fret and fume, but rest ; while the knowledge
Of the life their corpses once have housed
Is breathing on the granite and the marble slabs
When the atmosphere about is conscious, if with vainest grief.

… Robert McAlmon (1895-1956), American author, poet and publisher.

Author of many plays

supported socialism and tempted by fascism

“What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day.”



George Bernard Shaw (1856-1956)
an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist, political activist

Gone with the wind

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
    Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
   Within a dream.



... Ernest Dowson (1867-1900),  English poet

An inescapable condition presaging non-existence

Self educated and self taught

"We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone".


   ... Orson Welles (1915-1985), american actor, director, writer, and producer

Interpretive renderings of a realist artist

His favorite thing was painting sunlight on the side of a house

"At fifty you don't think of the end much. But at eighty you think of it a lot.
Find me a philosopher to comfort me in my old age".

             ... Edward Hopper (1882-1967), american realist painter.

Hotel by a Railroad (1952)

The Recalcitrant Neighbour

They don’t let you feel anything else but contempt.

I tried to find a way to respect the man. I prefer to respect someone ... it’s a lot more trouble to feel contempt. But the world is full of people who want something for nothing, and they will take you if you let them. They don’t let you feel anything else but contempt.

O, what a fall was there, my countrymen! Then I, and you, and all of us fell down, Whilst bloody treason flourish'd over us

"I have fought a hundred battles for France"

"Soldiers, when I give the command to fire, fire straight at my heart. Wait for the order. It will be my last to you. I protest against my condemnation. I have fought a hundred battles for France, and not one against her ... Soldiers, fire!"

le Brave des Braves 

Marshal Ney (1769-1815), was a great French military commander during the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. He was one of the original 18 'Marshals of the Empire' created by Napoleon. He was known as Le Rougeaud ("red faced") by his men and nicknamed le Brave des Braves by Napoleon himself. When Napoleon was defeated, dethroned, and exiled for the second time, Ney was arrested, tried for treason, condemned, and promptly executed by firing squad in Paris near the Luxembourg Garden. He refused to wear a blindfold and was allowed the right to give the order to fire. He was 46.

Bury Me in a Free Land

Frances Harper (1825-1911)

Make me a grave where'er you will,
In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill;
Make it among earth's humblest graves,
But not in a land where men are slaves.
I could not rest if around my grave
I heard the steps of a trembling slave;
His shadow above my silent tomb
Would make it a place of fearful gloom.
I could not rest if I heard the tread
Of a coffle gang to the shambles led,
And the mother's shriek of wild despair
Rise like a curse on the trembling air.
I could not sleep if I saw the lash
Drinking her blood at each fearful gash,
And I saw her babes torn from her breast,
Like trembling doves from their parent nest.
I'd shudder and start if I heard the bay
Of bloodhounds seizing their human prey,
And I heard the captive plead in vain
As they bound afresh his galling chain.
If I saw young girls from their mother's arms
Bartered and sold for their youthful charms,
My eye would flash with a mournful flame,
My death-paled cheek grow red with shame.
I would sleep, dear friends, where bloated might
Can rob no man of his dearest right;
My rest shall be calm in any grave
Where none can call his brother a slave.
I ask no monument, proud and high,
To arrest the gaze of the passers-by;
All that my yearning spirit craves,
Is bury me not in a land of slaves.

Frances Harper was an African-American poet who was involved in the movement to abolish slavery. Her poem "Bury Me in a Free Land" very popular in its day evokes of the horrors of slavery.

The notion of irreversibility

"The entropy of the universe tends toward a maximum"

"Within a finite period of time past, the earth must have been, and within a finite period of time to come the earth must again be, unfit for the habitation of man ..."
　

... Rudolf Clausius  (1822-88), German physicist and mathematician, one of the central founders of Thermodynamics. In 1865 he introduced the concept of entropy.

 

I shall not care ...

... overdosed on sleeping pills.

WHEN I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
 
Tho' you should lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.

I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful
When rain bends down the bough,

And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted
Than you are now.



                      

... Sara Teasdale (1884-1933), American lyric poet

... the scum of mankind

... comments on the historic guilt of European colonizers

 

"Who can describe the injustice and cruelties that in the course of centuries they [the coloured peoples] have suffered at the hands of Europeans? ... If a record could be compiled of all that has happened between the white and the coloured races, it would make a book containing numbers of pages which the reader would have to turn over unread because their contents would be too horrible."

 

  

... Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), theologian, organist, philosopher, physician, and medical missionary in Africa

Bizet's 'Carmen' a significant historical marker for women's suffrage

Bizet's widow of three years at 29

"That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said
“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself They turned (since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus".

                                   ... Robert Browning (1812-89), English Poet

A woman, clothed in black, sits in a high-back wooden chair. She stares directly in front of her somewhat insecure it seems as suggested particularly by her hands. Her left hand positioned in her lap appears nervously rigid, while the other lays a tad awkward on the chair's arm rest. This remarkable portrait by Jules-Élie Delaunay (1828-91) is of Geneviève Halévy (1849-1926), later Geneviève Bizet and Geneviève Straus. She was to become a French salonniere of some notoriety. She inspired Marcel Proust (1871-1922) as a model for the Duchesse de Guermantes in A la recherche du temps perdu.

Madame Halevy´s main claim to fame was as the wife of Georges Bizet (1838-75), a famous French composer, mainly of operas (notably Carmen). She is pictured here at 29, his widow of three years, after barely six years of marriage with one son. But what tumultuous years those were!

Carmen

This was a time of massive social upheaval in Paris where the couple had decided to live, just on the heels of the French Revolution which precipitated into terror and then Napoleonic despotism preparing the way for the pan-European revolutions of 1848. These were short-lived but they ushered in the Paris Commune,  an epochal experiment in socialist government that briefly ruled Paris in 1871. Even though it lasted only a few months and thousands of socialist enthusiasts lost their lives in a brutal supression by federal imperialist forces, it did establish an important planning framework for Lenin in the October revolution of 1917. And in the midst of this chaos in Paris emerged Bizet's Carmen, now one of the most frequently performed operas in the world.

Depression is a sickness



... get it?

"When asked about my bouts with clinical depression 'what have you got to be depressed about?' in light of  fame,  fortune, and professional success, the proper answer is 'what have you got the flu about or asthma about? It’s a sickness, and you can get it'".

          ... Dick Cavett (b. 1936), a former 
television talk show host known for his conversational style and in-depth discussions.

Cry "Havoc!", and let slip the dogs of war

Opium and aspiration led him on

  "The Home-coming"

      ... Ralph Cheever Dunning (1878-1930), poet.

SCENE: A room in a house half demolished by shell-fire on a deserted battlefield. Indistinct figure of an old woman. Enter another figure, like a young soldier, through a half-open door.

Old Woman. Is that you, Charles?

Young Soldier. Yes, Granny—where are you?

Old Woman. I am here in the corner, Charles. How did you escape from the battle?

Young Soldier. I do not know; but here I am, as you can see.

Old Woman. I do not see you very plainly, Charles.

Young Soldier. I cannot see you at all, Granny.
Old Woman. I tell you I am here in the corner.
Young Soldier. Very well, Granny; I begin to see you now.
Old Woman. Please close the door behind you. I would not
have it open for a minute with all those strange noises about.
Young Soldier. I cannot close the door, Granny. It must have
 been jammed by the explosion.
Old Woman. But it has been swinging in the wind.
Young Soldier. Yes, but I cannot close it. Where are all the others?
Old Woman. They went away in a big cart.
Young Soldier. Is Margaret safe?
Old Woman. She went away in the cart.         
Young Soldier. Why did not you go?
Old Woman. I am too old to leave the house where I was born.
I hid myself, and your father said they could not waste time looking for me.
Young Soldier. How long before the firing began did they leave?
Old Woman. About an hour, I think.
Young Soldier. Then they must all be killed.  
Old Woman. Yes, perhaps.
Young Soldier. They might have hidden in the hills.
Old Woman. They did not have time. War is terrible for poor people, Charles.
Young Soldier. It is, indeed. If you could see the things I have seen!
Our field and the old barn are all torn, and the bridge over the brook is blown up.
Old Woman. It is very terrible to think of.        
Young Soldier. Granny!
Old Woman. Yes, Charles.
Young Soldier. If I tell you something you must not be frightened.
Old Woman. I will try not to be.
Young Soldier. I am only a ghost, Granny. I am lying dead out there
with my eyes open. I could not close them any more than I could close the door.         
Old Woman. Now I can tell you, Charles: I am only a ghost, too; my body
is lying in the cellar.
Young Soldier. You were killed when the shell blew the house to pieces?
Old Woman. Yes, Charles.
Young Soldier. What shall we do now, Granny?
Old Woman. We can do nothing but linger now. Perhaps when the war
is over we shall die completely.

The King of England is dead. Long live the King.

"I wonder what he meant by that?"

"I shall be delighted, if the information I have to give be of any use to you. Some say the King of England is dead; others, that he is not dead: for my own part, I believe neither the one nor the other. I tell you this in confidence, but I rely on your discretion."


... Charles Maurice de Talleyrand (1754–1838), French bishop, politician, and Napoleon's chief diplomatic aide in the conquest of Europe. This remark was reputedly proffered up to a banker, hoping to make a profit from inside information about whether rumours that the King of England was dead were in fact true.

"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine,' and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody".

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754

This be the verse you grave for me

"sick and well, I have had splendid life of it, grudge nothing, regret very little"^[

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:

Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

 ... Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94), Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer.

Stevenson's tomb on Upolu island in Samoa