But you won't get away from the tune that they play to the bloomin' old rag over'ead

[sovay]

I caught a fragment of the funeral this morning: a black hearse at a slow march on a green field, a bell tolling and drums, bystanders watching through their cellphones. It is not really that the jokes about the Queen celebrating her cybernetic jubilee—Charles having expired of frustration in the interim—were more plausible than the fact of her death in the course of mortal time, but why else do we believe in fisher kings? I hadn't known she was married in a dress embroidered with ears of wheat, as though spelling for fertility. One of the commentators spoke of seasons of death and renewal, as if all the newly televised pageantry were some enormous mummers' play. I don't think I am used to seeing ritual on such a scale; that is the point of it. I keep thinking about people as links in time, as memory palaces. I wish it did not come so automatically paired with the thought of unmoored futures. Far enough down that way lies trying to glue time in place, to hold back the earthquake.

Comments

[sovay]

It was "The Last Post" that got me, and then seeing her pony and her dogs so very clearly waiting for her to come home. It's such an end to an era sort of feeling.

*hugs*

It is, though. Just because time passes willy-nilly doesn't mean its passing doesn't mark something real. One of the broadcasters kept saying that most of the viewers would never have seen anything like this funeral in their lives and it wasn't celebrity hyperbole, unless you saw the funeral of her father in 1952 it was true. And even if it weren't a line across history, it's still a death. I know you don't get chevrot kadisha in the Church of England, but I found myself hoping that people were kind with her body, my disappointment in the lack of chanteys notwithstanding.