Poetry Posted by Oaktown Girl, 18 Apr 2007 05:32 am
Somber Limerick of Death
By Amanda French
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The coffin lid shut with a thud.
The pallbearers clomped through the mud.
The requiem started.
The dearly departed
Was dead as a dodo or dud.
******
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Responses to “Somber Limerick of Death”
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on 18 Apr 2007 at 9:39 am 1. Oaktown Girl said …
The Minister of Justice declares this thread to be a non-judgmental place to share your thoughts, feelings, grief, joy, stories, poems, or anything else regarding the subject of death.
Amanda would like also like to pay special attention to how easy it is to treat death lightly when it’s not “real”.
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on 18 Apr 2007 at 10:21 am 2. Amanda French said …
I have some comments.
I wrote “Somber Limerick of Death” a few weeks ago; it’s a very silly poem, basically just a joke about the limerick form. The Virginia Tech murders have been much on my mind the last few days, and I’m not really in the mood for jokes, especially those involving death. But I decided to let it be posted today anyway, because part of what is precisely so disturbing about the murders is how out of place they seem in the trivial and frivolous world of a college campus. That’s a world I’ve inhabited for about twenty years now. Don’t you always think that’s what’s serious is somewhere else? I do.
If there’s anything at all appropriate instead of merely insensitive about the “Somber Limerick of Death” this week, it might be summed up in the several possible interpretations of the phrase “cruel joke.”
Anyway, here’s part of a more appropriate poem to consider today:
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born. -
on 18 Apr 2007 at 10:53 am 3. James Killus said …
In the days and weeks after Sept. 11, I deliberately avoided all media coverage of that event. Later, after both introspection and observation of those who had not done this, I concluded that I had been trying to preserve my sanity, and that those who had immersed themselves in the available 24/7 coverage had driven themselves insane. That conclusion was underscored by the later anthrax letters reactions, which had people across the country literally afraid to open their own mail.
The Columbine incident resulted in a crackdown and further ostracism of high school students who were attracted to Goth fashion, plus more calls to ban various computer games, etc.
Because the VT incident involves someone of Asian descent, it is inevitable that there will be an increase in suspicion, and the sorts of actions that follow suspicion, directed against Asian Americans. I wish that weren’t so, but I long ago learned that my wishes amount to nothing in the broad scheme of things.
We’ve already seen suggestions on this very blog, that there is something to worry about in engineering schools/students per se, even to the extent of someone wondering if they should discourage their child from studying engineering.
The fact is that it is easy to treat death lightly when it isn’t personal. What is strange is not that we treat these things as not being “real,” what is strange is that somehow having people die on television makes them more personal, especially if they look like us.
This has something to do with narrative. The list of disasters of far greater magnitude that produced barely a ripple in the American collective consciousness is very long and very depressing. Alternatively, there is the “dead white girl” phenomenon, where a single individual of the right age and ethnic group seizes control of the media imagination for days or even weeks on end.
I have no answers to any of this, of course, and precious few decent questions for that matter. And I know that I risk the accusation that I am not being properly respectful of the dead. But the dead are dead and beyond our comfort, and those for whom their deaths were truly personal now have their grief broadcast to the world, with the attention that their grieving brings then turned to the tasks of selling soap and drugs, to the benefit of various people who would be very angry if they were said to be profiting from death and grief. And I honestly do not see the point of it, and I’m just once again trying to avoid driving myself insane.
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on 18 Apr 2007 at 11:31 am 4. Amanda French said …
It certainly gives me pause to see the many highly detailed profiles of the VT victims right alongside reports that at least 146 people have been killed by bombings in Baghdad today and to know that those 146 will undoubtedly remain, as though they were visible only from the front and in two dimensions, without a profile.
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on 18 Apr 2007 at 11:36 am 5. Amanda French said …
By the way, James, I don’t know if you’re aware that the killer was an English major.
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on 18 Apr 2007 at 11:42 am 6. Seattle said …
Dark Cloud here. I’ve been told by those who should know that I focus on the negative and my humor has been known to be pretty dark. Which can be difficult when it’s one of my best ways of dealing with problematic situations. Today my son is going to his first war protest march in Seattle which I believe I brought up a few weeks ago. As a parent I tend to dwell on the amount of work I’ve put into my kids and what a waste it would be if they died for some reason before their time. In fact that was my first thought about the RA at Virginia Tech-a triple major just a few weeks away from graduating-what a waste. I’ve been struggling with the protect your offspring urge versus the let them face the world urge. So my son goes to his much anticipated protest rally/march with a permission note from the concerned parent in his pocket… LOL And the Virginia Tech shooting just reinforces the pointlessness of trying to control my son’s fate. He’ll be what he choses to be, study what he wants to study and go where he wants to go.
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on 18 Apr 2007 at 1:05 pm 7. The Constructivist said …
My department listserv back home has been home to a flurry of postings on the ways the VA Tech shooter’s creative writings have been analyzed in the popular media and the ways his teachers and classmates have been blamed for not seeing this coming. Perhaps an understandable approach to point fingers in the face of incomprehensibility, but it’s troubled many of my colleagues, especially the creative writing professors.
Maybe Plato was right. I doubt it.
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on 18 Apr 2007 at 2:21 pm 8. Oaktown Girl said …
Amanda – your poem is great, especially the title – so wonderfully counterintuitive. I really appreciate you letting us use it at this time. It’s a wonderfully creative and original way to open the floor to a discussion around death and the larger (and smaller) issues related to it. Therefore, I don’t think it’s inappropriate at all. Just the opposite, in fact.
I agree with a lot of what James said, and I will say more later when I’m not at work.
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on 18 Apr 2007 at 2:37 pm 9. James Killus said …
I was 16 when Charles Whitman climbed the tower at U.T. Austin and shot 46 people, 15 of whom died.
I was at that time, among other things, establishing to my own satisfaction that, whatever other writing abilities I might possess, the writing of poetry was not among them. Later scrutiny suggested that the closest I could get to adequate involved doggerel, and that I might, with extreme effort, occasionally manage song parody.
I am also grateful that there was no ‘net for foolish postings and that I never submitted this as a class assignment:
Not that I’m Serious or Anything
Wanna be a psychopath
Get a gun, shoot everyone who laughed at me.
Wanna be an ex-marine,
Above the town, gun down the clowns who’re mean to me.Wanna be a psycho-killer
Him I hate, but I love her
Never mind, they’re all the same,
Just a few want to play this gameWanna go on a killing spree?
Ditch him, girl, just you and me.
Wanna go for a little thrill ride?
Prob’ly die but I’ve got my pride, you wanna see?Killing’s the American way,
Everyone come out and play,
Skin the cat with a baseball bat,
Why’d you look at me like that?Wanna be a psychopath
Blow ‘em up they’ll never laugh at me again.
Wanna be a major item,
In the news; and it’ll frighten those that win.They say it’s war and I’ve seen it.
You don’t think I really mean it.
Just wait and see me on TV.
Just wait and see.Whitman had a brain tumor, and some have speculated. I don’t, not really. The cause of that great an insanity is always ideopathic. Whitman was insane; Cho Seung-hui was insane. What matters is not the how but the how many. Not the why, but the when, where, and who. He had a gun and a movie in his head. That’s enough.
And no, Amanda, I didn’t know his major. As you can probably tell, I already have more information than I really want to know.
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on 18 Apr 2007 at 4:01 pm 10. Seattle said …
But what is interesting is how certain of our insane society members can function well enough to pass under the radar of all the socially accepted groups we have set up to protect both us and them. The man made it through almost 4 years of college courses. That isn’t easy for the sane, let alone the insane.
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on 18 Apr 2007 at 5:46 pm 11. JP Stormcrow said …
and that those who had immersed themselves in the available 24/7 coverage had driven themselves insane.
Indeed our technological ability (and willingness) to continuously bombard ourselves with simulacra of the most emotionally-charged and horrifying experiences is pretty much the equivalent of an uncontrolled mass experiment in self-torture.
[… or wait am I confusing it with experience of living under the Bush administration.]
…is yet another uncontrolled mass experiment in self-torture.
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on 19 Apr 2007 at 2:25 am 12. The Constructivist said …
I’ve had no idea what to write at Mostly Harmless since I heard about the shootings. Or rather, I shelved various ideas for posts out of respect for the dead at VA Tech, Iraq, Nagasaki (whose mayor was shot and killed by a yakuza boss).
Today, I tried to come up with something that was true to the blog. I decided to try to start a meme by asking people what they held off from writing this week (and then listed what I shelved). This connects directly to JP’s comment in that one of the posts I didn’t write was about my showing clips from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Volume I to my Representing Japan class the afternoon after I first heard about the killings–it would have been about compartmentalization and desensitization, contrasting my reactions to some of my students’. And yet, another post would have satirized the “blame video games” meme that is no doubt rocketing aound the blogosphere (but I don’t have the heart or guts or whatever to be reading what anyone is writing about it, actually). Thanks, Amanda, for your post.
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on 19 Apr 2007 at 8:44 am 13. JP Stormcrow said …
I will say, that as much as I have admired Tarantino’s work, I find it troubling as well. For some reason, when I imagine meeting him, the next unwilled image is of me beating the crap out of him while yelling something like: “So you want to be tough little man!?”
I suppose it is because at some level his work does truly “scare” me, as it so aptly illustrates some dark violent vanity within us all. (Or then again a scene of his that really haunts me, is when the kid sleeping on the bed gets plugged without ever waking up in Pulp Fiction. I find myself over-identifying with the situation.)
Or maybe it’s just because he’s a dick.
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on 19 Apr 2007 at 11:51 am 14. spyder said …
I am always reminded in moments like these, that people in the US sure have a strange sense of disconnecting from death. The only event in our lives that will, with 100% absolute surety, happen to us, and yet so many seem to believe that it just won’t. And then there are all those phrases: “it wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” “they were too young to die,” “you don’t get to choose when you die,” “you are supposed to live a long fulfilling life,” “children aren’t supposed to die before their parents,” “they had so much promise and so much to look forward to,” etc. et al, ad absurdum, ad nauseum. Well, if all that were true, then so do the kids in the Middle East, and Africa, and Southeast Asia, and China. If all that were true, then so do women whose very well-being in dire emergency situations, should not be determined by protracted litigation in Federal Courts (so says SCOTUS). If all that were true then we would be able to choose the moment of our deaths.
This thought:
Whitman had a brain tumor, and some have speculated. I don’t, not really. The cause of that great an insanity is always ideopathic. Whitman was insane; Cho Seung-hui was insane. What matters is not the how but the how many. Not the why, but the when, where, and who. He had a gun and a movie in his head. That’s enough.?Maybe we should also keep in mind, just for some sort of longer term perspective, that there are currently something between 8k to 10k veterans of the US military occupations in the Mid East, who are suffering from TBI. Not counting those with PTSD, traumatically brain-injured military personnel are now trying to cope with their shattered minds as citizens in this country. Is it any different if 30 of them kill just one person each, versus another untreated, psychotically-damaged person kills 30??? All i can think of in response is Desi Arnez suggesting that we “got some ’splainin to do” to our children and grandchildren.
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on 19 Apr 2007 at 5:53 pm 15. Oaktown Girl said …
JP said: Or maybe it’s just because he’s a dick.
Heh, heh!
I really like what folks have shared here. James – I wish all the TV news media would just read your poem and be done with it. It’s certainly a hell of a lot more insightful and enlightening than any of the other post-VA Tech shootings “coverage” and “analysis” crapola they’re spewing (from what I’ve seen, anyway, which is very minimal).
Amanda – I know when you were writing the limerick you were thinking “joke”. But as a reader, I don’t interpret it as a joke. To me, it’s just a witty and wry observation of what is, and I really appreciate that. I have a very matter-of-fact feeling about death in general. I’m not saying I don’t grieve a terrible loss, or that I would not be traumatized if I were to see someone get blown away right before my eyes. I don’t really know how to explain or express it without sounding callous, because that’s not it at all. Death “is what it is”, to use a much overused phrase. Someone could have given me your limerick on the very day of my mother’s memorial service (and she died what I view as a horribly tragic and unnecessary death), and I would have appreciated it and not thought it insensitive at all. It’s like walking and chewing gum at the same time. Not that hard. I realize I’m a bit out of the mainstream on this, however.
spyder: I am always reminded in moments like these, that people in the US sure have a strange sense of disconnecting from death.
Agreed. I’d go even further and say overall we have a very unhealthy attitude about death. I think a great (and very sad) example of this is people who want to clone their pets, and to a lesser extent, people who try to find pets as close in physical detail to their previous (dead) pet as possible. (I saw a lot of this to the extreme, having worked in a big city animal shelter). To me, this is a clear illustration of what I find to be a very immature and unhealthy denial of the basic cycle of life and death. And that relates back to everything that spyder said about people in the US being disconnected from death, and all the resulting ramifications thereof.
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on 19 Apr 2007 at 8:04 pm 16. Jams said …
I think there’s a tension between the dire and the trivial that permeates death as an event. What could be more trivial than death? We all do it. When death happens close to us, rituals can seem as trite as they seem surreal, and when it’s far off, death can seem ridiculously macabre like an infinite line of lemmings can-caning off a cliff. So we bury and burn and bleet and hope it couldn’t really be as trivial as it seems. After all. Our lives are all we have to give and lose. What could be more dire than that?
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