i went looking for Houdini‘s burial site today, and it seems appropriate that weird things happened. as i neared the Machpelah Cemetery i already expected the place would be closed. Machpelah is a Jewish cemetery, as are most of the graveyards in that area, and Jewish burial grounds are closed on Saturdays. Just like B&H! it somehow eluded me that today was saturday. it eluded me that houdini was jewish. it eluded me that Machpelah is a Jewish cemetery. i just saw it was a beautiful day and i hit the rails and the buses to glendale, where i was earlier this week on my first travels through mt. lebanon cemetery. i did not much care that i would likely not gain entry to the grounds or to Houdini‘s site. i‘ll be back another day, per my initial plan, because there are a *lot* of cemeteries there in the “cemetery belt“, and i‘ve managed to avoid seeing much of them until now.
as i approached Machpelah i expected its gate would be closed. strangely,it was opened. every other cemetery on cypress hills avenue was closed, per custom, but Machpelah, where Houdini is buried just inside the front gate (according to sources) was opened. i stepped in, thinking something was amiss, why are these gates opened? i saw some activity in front of a mausoleum, i snapped a few pictures, and then i turned and saw that a police car had arrived. out of not-unrealistic paranoid scenarios that flew through my mind i thought “crime scene?“ and i imagined i had just walked in to something i should not have walked in to. i turned back and noticed that the activity in front of the aforementioned mausoleum
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(continued from yesterday, stopped writing to interact with someone)
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the activity at the mausoleum was not, as i had assumed, funereal. these were not family or mourners but NYPD officers, and a lot of them, inspecting the mausoleum for whatever reasons. evidently something had happened and the police had been called. i turned to leave and a police officer in the car that had just pulled up said something like “Hello sir, canI help you?“ at first i thought he mihgt have asked it in such a way as to imply that i should not be there, which was true, i should not have been there but the gate was opened and nothing instructed me to keep out. i just kinda laughed at the police officer and said i was just passing by and did not know what was going on here. he laughed and said something like “no worries, we get calls like this all the time.“ i still don‘t know what was going on but i assume it was osmething about a mausoleum being robbed or vandalized, or perhaps a corpse rising from the crypt, or maybe Houdini made the mausoleum disappear, but the cops showed up to find it still there. whatever the case i got outtat there and figured i‘d find Houdini some other day. i milled around that area, thick with cemeteries, and pretty much just saw what i could through the fences and gates, since all of them were closed. i ventured into Cypress Hills Cemetery, which is way more gigormous than i realized. expansive. comprising a broad array of funerary art and styles of tombstone.
that was yesterday. today i felt the bug again and went back to cypress hills, intending this time to find a ocuple of famousfamousfamous people just for the hell of it. i really do not make a habit of finding famous people in cemeteries. i usedto think the hobby was tacky, and i still do in a way, but i think i changed my mind when i happened to hit leoonnard bernstein‘s site at Green-Wood, and as i stepped up to it i felt that senseo fawe at how this one man‘s life could have meant so much to so many, and how much he did in life, and standing in front of it i thought wow, this is really him! i felt inspired by it, but similar feelings do not arise when i spot just any old famous person‘s grave, save for the fact that it really is kinda cool to mill through a vast cemetery speckled with thousands upon thousands of anonymous souls and then to spot one among them that rises above obscurity, whose name is mumbled throughout the world any day of the year in any number of unknown corridors.
today i stepped up to Piet Mondrian‘s grave and imagined his name floating through halls of colleges and universitiies, his works being assayed in museums and books, his reputation and significance assailed and harangued by congniscenti and dilletante alike for decades past and centuries to come. and here he lay, a tombstone identical in style to hundreds that surround him on the hill, only his name and years of birth and death, nothing more.
i moved on from Mondrian to try and find Jackie Robinson, the baseball player who changed more than sports, he helped change America by being the first african-american to play professional baseball in the major leagues. i often find that, unfortunately, his significance is dismissed by many who regar baseball as a waste of time and life, and who regard professional sports as the realm of hte wifebeater. i am not the baseball fan i used to be. i used to clock countless hours listening to and watching Yankees games on the tv and the radio. over time i tired not of the game but of the outsize amounts of money funnelled to these players, and the ludicrous salaries they earn compared to the value they contribute to society. every swing of the bat earns some of these players more money the annual salary of half the people in the stands at the stadium, and for what? for some escapism, some feux religion, some pasttime.
still, as i often tell people myself, not in defense of baseball and not in aggrandizement of professional sports, not in the spirit of anything but a cultural observation which i think is as valid now as in the days of Caesar: whether you like basball or not, you can not deny that a public gathering of 50,000 people at a regularly scheduled event is a significant cultural event, and one which will sit in the histories of the culture alongside, oh, piet mondrian and the presidents and the elvises that come and go. woodstock was a big deal for many reasons, but i think that on account of the sheer massiveness of the crowd the event took on a significance that without it would have made it a footnote. baseball, by that standard, does one up on woodstock and other mass gatherings by drawing huge crowds on a regularly scheduled basis. i remember how, in the week safter september 11, a yankees game was described by the newsies as “the first mass gathering“ of new yorkers since 9/11, a reference to the cultural significance of that particular game in this particular time. whether it is all a vacuous illusion (as i think it is) is of no merit to objectivity in recognizing its significance.
but forget all that. none of this is to do with Jackie Robinson, whose site i found today, much to my surprise. i did not htink i was going to find it after i compared the location coordinates i had to the reality of the map in hand and the naming of the sections around which his grave is located. he was allegedly in “Section 6, West Half of P“, which sounded close enough for jazz when i saw it on paper, but when i got to section 6 i found there was no Section P. there was a “Peace“ area, so i guessed that might be it, but i walked up there and found fields and fields of tombs with Asian people buried, tombs with either Japanese or Chinese epitaphs (i don‘t know chinese from japanese when i see it, though i really really should know the difference by this stage of my life), and i was skeptical that Jackie Robinson would be buried in a field that seemed pretty clearly reserved for individuals from the far east. still, there was no Section P, and the “Peace“ area seemed like the closest thing to a seciton P, and it was in the shadow of the Jackie Robinson Parkway, and I have read that the man‘s burial was near the highway named for him.
long story short, i turned around and there he was, Jack Roosevelt Robinson, 1919-1972, with a plot i found similar to the Leonard Bernstein site at Green-Wood, but with a surprising (to me) quote, and a more surprising (to me) flourish: Jackie Robinson‘s autograph was etched onto the tombstone. The quote is:
“A LIFE IS NOT IMPORTANT EXCEPT IN THE IMPACT IT HAS ON OTHER LIVES“
followed by his signature.
this made me think of my mother. why? my mother lies unknown and anonymous in a military grave, a military cemetery, and jackie robinson‘s tombstone quote made me think of her, not on account of their mutual state of no longer being alive but on account of the “IMPORTANT“ word that he used in his quote. did he choose this phrase for his grave? did someone else choose it? did the sports writers choose it? it is a lofty sentiment but is it even true? i spent much of my youth and early 20s urgently shedding the influences of my mother, of my father, even of the fact that i came from a family. i guess Robinson‘s statement holds true, then, that those maternal and paternal lives had “impact“.
bah, my thoughts are trailing through a comet-trail right now.
i was too tired and it was too late to find find Eubie Blake or Mae West. i was uninspired to find Mae West but interested in Eubie Blake and I will be back to find his marker.
Cypress Hills is different from Calvary, different from all the Calvary Cemeteries, different from the Jewish Cemeteries. this is an everyman cemetery. palatial in that respect. all are welcome. and the place is huge. bigger than my pants. all manner of funereal ritual occurs here. today i saw a woman huddled against a tombstone, holding an umbrella to cover her head from the sun, reading a book and taking calls on her cell phone. i imagine she was sititng with her deceased beloved, but who knows, maybe she was just hanging out by some random grave on a beautiful day. yesterday i saw a shockingly beautiful woman strolling around a very old burial site in a pummelled corner of Cypress Hills, pummelled meaning that the area had had its bridges destroyed by the city, and its roads blown up to dirt, but the graves remained intact. up atop a hill, in a fenced in grave that looked like it might be 140 years old, a Hot Babe stomped around, yelling into a cell phone, talking to who I do not know, but maybe the dead, maybe no one, maybe herself.
what have i been doing at calvary all these years?