by Ingrid Alyston
It was a cool, grey morning. A fresh layer of snow had fallen the night before. Ideal conditions; yet were the weather sultry, it would not deter her. She had attended such ceremonies in climes polar and tropical, torrid and frigid, tempestuous and tranquil. She would attract more suspicion at the lonelier ceremonies, but it was those above all she prized. Apart from those ritually necessary, there were two other participants. With so few people, had the first two stages of the ceremony occurred at all? No pomp was visibly spared, yet this version of the ceremony had, properly speaking, three stages, the first two of which would appear to require a great mass, or at least a family. Indeed, other versions, with other rites, by nature abhorred the isolation that was nevertheless not entirely avoidable. She would not know; she merely observed. The cold object at the centre was unknown to her. But if the announcement had reached her, surely it could have reached others? This version of the ceremony had much to recommend it. The text was undeniably grand, even to one who could not accept its dogma; the music, magnificent; the cold, sombre manner appropriate and admirable. It would be provincial to admire this version to the exclusion of others, where the object had been transfigured into dust and ashes, precluding all preservation, and indeed those others, as sombre and stately as this, had an honesty that the words and actions of this form could not hope to match. The most honest would be those that would maintain not the slightest pretence of persistence: an immediate transformation with no external marker of the object, whose specificity had already left. It was the loss of that particularity which was lamented and denied in all other forms; a drop returning to the ocean is a loss, even if merely transformed. So it was not this transformation that served as the basis for meaning, for individuality, for possibility; it was itself impossible, but it happened every day; the path towards it, inexorable, bearing that individuality, was nevertheless radically other from it. She could not expect a ceremony of this, or any other, sort when her time came. No one remained to organise it, and she had not set aside any money for it. She was dressed in a black crêpe stole, atop an asymmetric, oversized, ankle-length silk-wool coat—also in black. Her face was hidden by a veil suspended from a hat that resembled a biretta. She bought at least one article of clothing every season for the ceremony. Leopardi noted the kinship of the two daughters of decay. It was not her intention to create any spectacle at the ceremony. She held back from the participants. If they inquired as to her relation with the object at the centre, she would confess freely her ignorance. It was no use confecting a story when one’s interlocutor was the likeliest on Earth to realise its falsity. She would accept without complaint rejection from the ceremony; it was well within the rights of the participants and the celebrants. Yet she would resist any implication that her presence desecrated the ceremony, insulted its subject. Funerals were not for the dead but for the dying.
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Ingrid Alyston is a Brooklyn-based writer. She is currently writing a novel.