809
River School luminary Jasper Francis Cropsey, American Federation of Labor
founder Samuel Gompers, Audubon’s chief engraver Robert Havell, Jr., a son and
daughter of Alexander Hamilton, and Central Park Commissioner Moses Grinnell,
to name just a few of the lucky ones who lie quietly and shaded, seemingly forever.
Like other charismatic cemeteries, Père-Lachaise in Paris, Cimitero Monumentale
in Milan, Sleepy Hollow has its share of flamboyant tours (“murder and mayhem”
by lantern light, etc.).
6
Not the case with more solemn idylls of eternal return, monuments to living sparks, like the old Jewish cemetery in Prague from the fifteenth
century, or that of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, dating back at least 3000 years.
But more provocatively, the Sleepy Hollow concedes an intrinsically peaceful
dénouement, a vision of that final union of art, nature, and death which has so
wooed the living for so many tens of thousands of years from entropic life into a
state of metabolic, ecological liberation: constructivist lives and deaths.
Washington Irving himself had written, “The grave should be surrounded with
everything that might ensure tenderness and veneration”—a concept inherent to the
largest cemetery in the world, Wadi-us-Salaam, Valley of Peace, in Najaf, Iraq
(1485.5 acres). In his ode to “Cemeteries of the Future: Permanent, Unpolluted,
Inviolate,” W. Robinson intoned a heaven of the “best climbing roses…sweetbriar,
or honeysuckle.” And went on to advise how “Our old city churchyards could all be
easily converted into oases of trees” and every conceivable embellishment of life
presiding in tune with death that might preserve “a national garden in the best sense”
“God’s Acre Beautiful,” Robinson summarized.
7
We are universally reminded of the
ineluctable mating of life and death when we observe the festival of colors and
pixel-strength dominating forest composition every mid-October from Maroon
Bells, Colorado, to all of New England’s Eliot Porter or Jackson Pollack-like orgies
of hue upon every leaf.
Not surprisingly, those same colors have imbued the varieties of mourning attending upon the rituals and pomp of a funeral, as complexity turns back to its humblest
origins, biologies perdurably protected—of the colors in which life is perennially cloaked, declared in rich metaphor. In ancient Greece and Rome, “Black,” for
“midnight gloom”; “greyish brown – the colour of the earth” for those mourning in
Ethiopia; “pale brown – the colour of withered leaves” as befit all those who have
sustained loss in Persia; “Sky-blue” draping those en-route to an afterlife in “Syria,
Cappadocia, and Armenia”; “Deep-blue in Bokhara”; violet in Turkey; “scarlet”
among Renaissance royalty in France; “white” for “white-handed hope” in China;
and “Yellow -the sear and yellow leaf” in “Egypt and Burmah.”
8
The colors, resplendent, soothing foliage, park-like settings, the long-dissolve into that unfathomable
6 See http://visitsleepyhollow.com/historic-sites/sleepy-hollow-cemetery/. Accessed March 9,
2020.
7 See God’s Acre Beautiful or the Cemeteries of the Future, by W. Robinson, The Garden Office,
London; Scribner and Welford, New York, 1880, p.28; See also, Beautiful Death – Art of the
Cemetery, by David Robinson with a text by Dean Koontz, Penguin Studio, Viking Penguin
New York, 1996.
8 See History of Mourning by Richard Davey, Jay’s, Regent Street, London 1880, p.104.
93.1 Constructivist Lives and Deaths
River School luminary Jasper Francis Cropsey, American Federation of Labor
founder Samuel Gompers, Audubon’s chief engraver Robert Havell, Jr., a son and
daughter of Alexander Hamilton, and Central Park Commissioner Moses Grinnell,
to name just a few of the lucky ones who lie quietly and shaded, seemingly forever.
Like other charismatic cemeteries, Père-Lachaise in Paris, Cimitero Monumentale
in Milan, Sleepy Hollow has its share of flamboyant tours (“murder and mayhem”
by lantern light, etc.).
6
Not the case with more solemn idylls of eternal return, monuments to living sparks, like the old Jewish cemetery in Prague from the fifteenth
century, or that of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, dating back at least 3000 years.
But more provocatively, the Sleepy Hollow concedes an intrinsically peaceful
dénouement, a vision of that final union of art, nature, and death which has so
wooed the living for so many tens of thousands of years from entropic life into a
state of metabolic, ecological liberation: constructivist lives and deaths.
Washington Irving himself had written, “The grave should be surrounded with
everything that might ensure tenderness and veneration”—a concept inherent to the
largest cemetery in the world, Wadi-us-Salaam, Valley of Peace, in Najaf, Iraq
(1485.5 acres). In his ode to “Cemeteries of the Future: Permanent, Unpolluted,
Inviolate,” W. Robinson intoned a heaven of the “best climbing roses…sweetbriar,
or honeysuckle.” And went on to advise how “Our old city churchyards could all be
easily converted into oases of trees” and every conceivable embellishment of life
presiding in tune with death that might preserve “a national garden in the best sense”
“God’s Acre Beautiful,” Robinson summarized.
7
We are universally reminded of the
ineluctable mating of life and death when we observe the festival of colors and
pixel-strength dominating forest composition every mid-October from Maroon
Bells, Colorado, to all of New England’s Eliot Porter or Jackson Pollack-like orgies
of hue upon every leaf.
Not surprisingly, those same colors have imbued the varieties of mourning attending upon the rituals and pomp of a funeral, as complexity turns back to its humblest
origins, biologies perdurably protected—of the colors in which life is perennially cloaked, declared in rich metaphor. In ancient Greece and Rome, “Black,” for
“midnight gloom”; “greyish brown – the colour of the earth” for those mourning in
Ethiopia; “pale brown – the colour of withered leaves” as befit all those who have
sustained loss in Persia; “Sky-blue” draping those en-route to an afterlife in “Syria,
Cappadocia, and Armenia”; “Deep-blue in Bokhara”; violet in Turkey; “scarlet”
among Renaissance royalty in France; “white” for “white-handed hope” in China;
and “Yellow -the sear and yellow leaf” in “Egypt and Burmah.”
8
The colors, resplendent, soothing foliage, park-like settings, the long-dissolve into that unfathomable
6 See http://visitsleepyhollow.com/historic-sites/sleepy-hollow-cemetery/. Accessed March 9,
2020.
7 See God’s Acre Beautiful or the Cemeteries of the Future, by W. Robinson, The Garden Office,
London; Scribner and Welford, New York, 1880, p.28; See also, Beautiful Death – Art of the
Cemetery, by David Robinson with a text by Dean Koontz, Penguin Studio, Viking Penguin
New York, 1996.
8 See History of Mourning by Richard Davey, Jay’s, Regent Street, London 1880, p.104.
93.1 Constructivist Lives and Deaths