I find the modern funerary culture undelightfully perverse. There is, I think, that unrelenting pretense of making death seem distant and mundane, like some minor incident that can be brushed off with a kind of flippancy and a sense of cheap urgency.
It is, not unlike all our other modern "institutions", a banalization of what used to be an interesting, characteristic set of rituals. Freud was quite correct when he noted that society could be judged by its repressions, and by sheer sterile tackiness, death is one of ours. Sexuality has become a kind of mediocre, mediated orgy of stunts; the mystery of sexuality has completely gone in favor of tawdry celebrity tabloids, Paris Hilton photographs and a slew of other unmentionables.
Indeed, I think the most egregious examples of the homogenization and repression of death within our society is the trend of look-alike cemeteries. The Modern Cemetery is a thing of great ugliness--instead of interesting headstones and monied follies in the form of familial mausoleums, we have uniform headstones, or even worse, ground-stones.
Such aesthetic statements are then able to be personalized by little mass-produced religious tokens so cheap and undistinctive in their significance, it's eminently hateful. I recently saw a crudely made crucifix--looked rather like a party favor-- and it was made in India. I couldn't imagine anything more tragic.
However, I'll reserve my special contempt for those photographic "cells" which are in reality a kind of digital image process on a piece of oval porcelain. One can get one's loved one's image printed onto a kind of plaque which is then affixed onto the marker. They are perfectly hideous and mildly disturbing for all the lack of effective emotive enunciation. They positively look numb, like a family album being sold at a rummage sale.
The death industry, like so many of our industries, has become an avatar of corporate identity, a beacon of hope only for those who aspire to Power & Money at its most base.
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On the other hand, is this not the most absurd and thus greatest piece of furniture?
