Another mental holiday image. Maybe I do need sedatives. Not exactly the happiness of the season...no kookie skulls with christmas trees and lights. I am focused on the temporal and spiritual. I am working with brains and spirit effigies to see if I can get something going. Right now, everything looks like a puddle of black ink...but some clarity is coming out of the mess. But, to be honest, I am a bit dispirited with the work coming out the pen (my temporal brain is in freefall). So, maybe I just should take a little Memento Mori holiday and not push things too much and work on skulls like the above--a bit of decorating and no story/or symbol work. A bit of mental eggnog.

I think I have chugged through Graven (Allen Ludwig) by reading back and forth, top and bottom given the density of the work. No linear reading of that book. I love it..but when you begin to get deep into Puritan beliefs in angelography...whoa. I am now re-reading things I have read before--so I am seeing this as progress. Now, I need to give that a break...unless I read a bit about the various identified carvers. I am fascinated with the stone carvers who sign their stones, and often may do as many as 70 stones in a year...and some move to a different place and take their style which is so keenly identified with a locale...and it migrates. John Bull and the Stevens family (father, son and grandson) are some of my favorites.

Going to get a little chunk of cash out before the end of the week to the U of Hartford to begin to pay for future fun and degrees. I have been really impressed with the smart, can-do attitude that comes across the phone with Hartford. I figure if the "back up band" (the admins) are great...imagine the lead act! This all is very promising after the shoddy scene with the Orange. Need to close out whatever we need to before the end of the week with the business as there are quite a few things outstanding that could end us up to our knees in unhappiness if we don't resolve or at least come up with a strategy to do so. I am wondering if I have the time for the House of Health tomorrow as time is tight...and the people are all in one place tomorrow morning. Right now, I am thinking not...but we will see.

We have a concert at the High School this evening. One for the Middle School on Thursday. Luckystone is going to lunch at Dijon (a break from our tradition at the Heights Cafe) and then back to the grind.

Then laundry, packing and more laundry. What is Christmas? and When is it? In three weeks or a month? (I wish.)

From Graven Images:

"The burial procession itself was a spectacle as grand as the Puritans could offer. The horses pulling the coffin were often draped with cloth painted with the "scutcheons" of death, probably winged death's heads, crossed bones, picks and shovels, imps of death, and coffins.....The mourners were equally resplendent. Many of them wore long black "Mourning Cloaks" with large white scarves around their necks, and "good gloves" on their hands. Often gold rings were worn under the gloves....rings still exist. They are sometimes ornamented with coffins, angels, or winged death's head and engraved with names or initials. The funeral procession moved from the meetinghouse where a sermon ws read to the burial grounds where more orations and players were read....While the coffin was still in the meetinghouse, it was usual to be surrounded by six mourning women traditionally garbed in black. After the burial the family conducted an "open house"for freinds where large quantities of food and wine were consumed."

"Before the day of the funeral itself, the rituals of invitation were hard and fixed and certainly symbolic. Gloves were traditionally sent as invitations to funerals....Gold rings were also sent out....they were only distributed to family and close friends. Rings, of course, were traditional at marriages. But the interweaving of rings and gloves and feasts at both rituals leads one to the conclusion that death ws conceived as a spiritual marriage between Christ and the soul,while corporeal marriage was its earthly counterpart."

Wow. Rings. Gloves. Food. Decorations for the horses. Food and Drink for everyone. I love the simple tradition here married with the printed materials and stones that surround this final send off. The Victorians took these trappings to a high baroque level..but the pared back version, to me is far more appealing..and interesting as these traditions were the roots of the insanity that happened a hundred years later.