Nor Shady Cypress Tree

"Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs."
--The Secret History

Today, as I was walking home from class in the very grey, very chilly Seattle weather, I was thinking about songs I would like to be played at my funeral, which may seem rather morbid for a twenty-three-year-old on a Tuesday morning, but then I share Richard Papen's longing, though I think my own fatal flaw is my deep-set ambivalence. So you can leave the song up to your family, they will be the ones in mourning after all, but there's a large chance they will choose "Wind Beneath My Wings," which is fine for some. If you would like to choose your own song though, you must let your family or someone know.

We had bagpipes at my Grandma Burbank's funeral as they were her favorite instrument. We are also Scottish. I, too, like the bagpipes, and so it might be nice to have them play "Taps" or something (is "Taps" even allowed for a civilian?) at the burial. Unless I decide to be cremated. Hrm.

At the funeral though, I have been toying with two Tori Amos songs, surprise, surprise. Neither are top favorites of mine; in fact both are pretty deep cuts in both my own collection and the Tori Amos catalog at large. The first is her cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Her acoustic piano arrangement is properly mournful and her ethereal voice loses Cobain's grunge screamo making the song very haunting. "With the lights out it's less dangerous / Here we are now entertain us / A denial, a denial, a denial..." The second song I think is even more fitting: "Upside Down." Here are some of the lyrics: "I said I found the secret to life / I found the secret to life / I'm okay when everything is not okay / is not okay / Oh, we turn and we turn our little blue world upside down / I said don't we love to turn our little blue world baby upside down."

I like the juxtaposition of life and death (in addition to being upside down--my natural state). My latest entry into my wisdom journal is from Virginia Woolf's fine novel Mrs. Dalloway (exceeded only, in my estimation, by To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts). It's the passage I always think of immediately when I think of Mrs. Dalloway: "Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party, here's death, she thought."