Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

So, Thursday before last I saw Will Smith previewing his Edinburgh show, "10 Arguments I Should Have Won". It was good - very good, in fact, although needed a bit of polish. If you are Fringing, I recommend it, for the Bergerac argument alone.

Last Thursday, I attended the funeral of one of my old tutors. I hadn't seen him for years, but listening to the eulogies reminded me how much we had in common - left-wing, geeky (although his geekery was film), opinionated, morbid, interdisciplinary... it's odd how little of your tutor you see when you are spending an hour a week in their company.

Funerals are strange events. They say that they are for the living, but who among the living would choose to spend an afternoon at a funeral? This one, in many ways, did succeed in celebrating the man - there were plenty of knowing chuckles as mourners recounted his idiosyncrasies - and his tendency of giving his first years the same essay on the Caliimachean aesthetic, when they had no idea who Callimachus was or in many cases what an aesthetic might be. I was good on both counts, but then I was a big geek. Nonetheless, it was a fantastic tactic both for challenging your new students and for reminding them that the world they are about to enter is vast and often alien. Besides, at 18 nobody has told you that you can't deconstruct aesthetic philosophy from a standing start.

But for all that, the person whose life is being celebrated is still also the person lying in a box just forward and to the right of the person celebrating his or her life, and it is that that I can never quite get the hang of. And at the end of the ceremony, when that person has been commemorated, that box still has to be dealt with. It's as if the body is the guest that hasn't left even as the washing up begins. In this case, Michael had a plot reserved in Highgate cemetary. Close to Karl, he apparently enjoyed saying. The strangely hurried, silent ceremony of that might have amused him, down to the butcher's window grass they put down to stop people slipping in, the rain, the flowers, the need to trample over the graves of others to pay respects. I remember studying Propertius with him, and the visit of the dead Cynthia, her bones grinding, the reference to the unburied Patroclus. He didn't believe in an afterlife, but one thing classicists are always taught is the importance of a good grave.

tu Stygias unhumatus aquas amnemque severum
Eumenidum aspicies, ripamve iniussus adibis?

The service began and ended with Ennio Morricone. It was a good fit. He was a good teacher.

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