There was a dream of death

What appealed to James was a sense that the questing human spirit could be in contact with a realm greater than oneself and the material world, a domain outside and beyond ourselves that we only suspect exists. Moder-day scholar William Kastenbaum has talked of an "emergent quality" that people seek--a sense that the soul could feel liberated, somehow continue to develop, and be part of an evolving relationship between life and death--as a great potential comfort. Perhaps this is why some grieving patrons seeking to memorialize their loved ones in the Gilded Age cemetery chose to do so with a combination of aesthetic beauty and mystery. They sought and generated a form of funerary art in which the great Unknown, the riddle of life and death, was embraced. They wanted monuments that moved visitors in new ways--not with cloying sentiment and confidence about man's place in God's heaven, but with a sense of perfect wonder, a sense that a veil could be lifted for a momentary glimpse here on earth of the meaning of death. There was a dream of a death that was not terrifying and grim for their lost one but that was transformational, performed with a mystic experience, a profound sense of beauty, love, and understanding, and a connection with the larger universe in some form, somewhere, somehow. For the imaginative and sensitive viewer with these sophisticated goals, three-dimensional statues in the sensory landscape of the cemetery provided a focus for highly private meditation, psychic exploration, and reflection about the hereafter.

--Cynthia Mills, Beyond Grief: Sculpture and Wonder in the Gilded Age Cemetery (2015)

 

They became lords of sounds and lesser things

The people all saw her come because it was sundown. The sun was gone, but he had left his footprints in the sky. It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.

Seeing the woman as she was made them remember the envy they had stored up from other times. So they chewed up the back parts of their minds and swallowed with relish. They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without masters; walking altogether like harmony in a song.

--Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)