La Toussaint, Dia de los Muertos, All Hallows

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Costumes, Death, fun, graves, halloween, Keppoch, life, PEI, traditions

Today 1 November, we are approaching the end of the year, only 60 days left and Christmas is only 55 days away. Every first of November in Mexico we use to visit the cemeteries as Mexicans do to honour their dead by making beautiful flower decorations over their graves. Graves became carpets of flowers and small candle lanterns were also placed by the tombstone to shine at night. The display at night was stunning, hundreds of candles flickering in the dark and all those multicoloured carpets of flowers often in a pattern was a sight to behold. The work that went into it was impressive, it required often to clean the grave area and prepare it for the display. Whole families came to work, showing that their dead meant something to them despite being gone to the Spirit world. Of course all these Mexican tradition came with a lot of sweets, sugared skulls, chocolate coffins, on wedding cakes a male and female skeleton replaced the figurines of the bride and groom. It is not Halloween but instead a celebration of Death which will come to all of us.

People decorate graves with flowers and candles but also bring food, fruits and sweets for their dead. This is a tradition we also found in our cultures like Vietnam. These Mexican women also spend time at the graves of relatives, it is a social event.

This tradition also held in Poland but it was more a display of lanterns and a bouquet of fresh flowers. Then on Remembrance Day, the military would invite all the military attaché of the different Embassies in Warsaw to participate in commemoration at the grave of their soldiers. The Polish military would on that day have an honour guard at various military graves. Canada has military graves in Poland, mostly airmen who were shot down by Nazi occupiers. We also have one memorial on a street and in this case a large plaque on a building wall recalls the event. In this case the Ambassador had to climb a ladder since the plaque was about 15 feet up and place a great wreath on a hook below the plaque. I was always afraid His Nibs would fall off in the process. The weather in Warsaw was always bitter cold on that day and sometimes it rained, but nonetheless attendance by Embassy staff was de rigueur, it was all very official.

Now in Charlottetown for Halloween we were invited to Keppoch (pronounced Kepic) for a Costume dinner party last night. This area is across the river from us on the point at the entrance of the Strait, it is a narrow passage taken by all ships in and out of Port Charlottetown. It is a very green rural area with affluent houses and a few lighthouses to guide ships through the water channel.

VIew from Keppoch, the other side is Rocky Point and Fort LaJoy

Everyone had a really great costume and it was loads of fun. A good dinner and good conversation. The film shown after dinner was Rocky Horror Picture Show, made in 1975 that was 45 years ago and looking at it now after many years I suddenly thought how dated it is, almost embarrassingly so. Another world and another time, loads of social and political messages in the camp goings on a reference to that time in history. I had never noticed on the costume of Dr Frank-N-Furter the red triangle, a reference to political prisoners identification badge in Nazi concentration camps.

It was a great evening with good people all around and we had a blue Moon last night.

A crow, a safari huntress and Count Dracula enjoying a drink.

So today being Sunday 1 November, our clocks went back one hour and suddenly it is dark at 04:45 pm. strange really.

One Thousand Posts

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Britain, graves, I claudius, majorca, Poetry, Spain

WordPress tells me I have now written one thousand entries on this blog. I use to be with Blogspot and I am sure I wrote a few hundreds on that site also.

I just finished reading Wild Olives by William Graves, written in 1995 for the centenary of his father author and poet Robert Graves, it is a biography and a family story of their life in the small mountain village of Deia in Majorca. Robert Graves lived most of his life there before and after the Second World War and the Spanish Civil War. A strange book, full of family recriminations and regrets. William was the oldest surviving son of Robert Graves and one of 8 children his father had with his two wives, Nancy Nicolson and Beryl Pritchard. Robert Graves also had loads of young nymphette his muses he called them, girls as young as 17 who moved in with him, his wife and the kids. Drugs, wild parties and celebrity lifestyle spanning the period from 1946-1985. The English would say that Robert Graves was eccentric, E.F. Benson in his book called them Freaks.  You feel no attachment to these people and frankly found the whole book strange, somewhat distateful.

Yes Robert Graves was probably the English Poet of the XXth century and he is best remembered for his book I Claudius and Goodbye to all that. The book also covers at lenght the life of a bunch of ex-pats in Majorca, friends of R.G. which is not endearing. Though to the credit of Robert Graves and his children, they all spoke several languages including Spanish and Catalan with the Majorcan accent. The children went to school in Palma and in England. University for them was Oxford.

Robert Graves was the big alpha male type, he justified seducing young women he fancied as a need for his inspiration for his poetic prose, developing the theme of satisfying the White Goddess. He did write celebrated poems and his books became required reading in the UK school system. His second wife Beryl Pritchard was 20 years his junior and put up with it, paying little attention to the muses and befriending some of them. William Graves in his book narrates his own childhood and the many difficulties he and his siblings had living with a world famous father who expected everyone to obey him in everything. A man who held Court at his house Canellun receiving many other famous people of the period an endless stream it seems. What did the people of Deia think of all this, William tells us that they were in awe of his father who could make things happen in the village and surrounding area in the years of the Fascist dictatorship of General Franco.

W. said to me do we really need to know all the imperfections of a famous person? We enjoy their work so why not leave it at that. When William Graves wrote this book, his mother Beryl was still alive, a person he describes as very private, she died in Deia in 2003. William as executor of this father’s Estate now runs the Robert Graves Literary Foundation at Canellun, the family home in Deia.

At the end of the book William Graves warns the reader that the village of Deia and the Isle of Majorca are no longer as he wrote about them. He spoke of a period in time whose actors are all gone now. From a simple village Deia in the 1960 and 70’s became first a hippie stop over and then a retreat for the wealthy German and British ex-pats. As he says the rustic Deia I knew no longer exist.

His father after 1975 suffered from senile dementia and became with time a confuse and then quiet vacant figure in a wheelchair and the celebrity seekers continued to come to Canellun to see the great man and get a photo.

Robert von Ranke Graves, 1895-1985.

An interesting site

Tags

France, graves, kings, queens, Revolution, tombs

Well today was a stay at home day and eat your storm Chips day. Yes we got 30 cm of snow and blowing winds, so this morning around 7am it was announced that everything was shutting down for the day. There was no cars to be seen on the street and one or two people occasionally walking a dog. The City has not really cleaned anything yet so driving is difficult at best and the sidewalks have disappeared. So it is best to stay at home. Here is a photo of Queen street, a block from the water,  a veritable winter wonderland. 

Our two little ones Nicky and Nora did not want to go out at all. Though Nora loves to sample freshly fallen snow. I should ask her what it taste like.

There is a site on the Internet I have been following for some time, it is in French and comes from France, the author Marie-Christine Pénin does a lot of research on the sepulture of famous people and churches, cemeteries and catacombs which may contain the tomb of people who have made a mark in time. Her work takes her back often some 600 years or in some cases more recently in the last 90 years.

Reading her blog is fascinating, she researches all kinds of people, from Kings to actresses and even murderers. She gives background on the life of the person and how they died and were they are buried, in many cases the tombs may have disappeared because of urban renewal, demolition of churches or closing of cemeteries.

What I did not know was the amount of attacks on the dead perpetrated by the French Revolution or what Simon Schama like to call it, the French Civil War in his book Citizens.

Often Marie-Christine Pénin will write about a Paris neighbourhood and how it has changed in the last 400 years. The Paris of today has little to do with the Paris of pre-1870. She provides maps and the old former name of streets. Photos also of what the street or buildings look like today. It is fascinating to discover how the dead fared in the years after they were buried. Today she was writing about the famous church of La Madeleine in Paris, many thousand of tourist visit it each year. She started by telling us that the parish of Marie-Madeleine hence La Madeleine has existed since the year 800 AD. The current church we see is rather new and gave us a brief history of its construction and the people involved. But in that story she introduces the story of the Revolution and the guillotine and where the bodies of the victims of the summary revolutionary justice were buried.

There use to be 3 cemeteries in and around La Madeleine, during the revolution specifically 1792-1794 the years of La terreur (the terror) thousands of people from all walks of life were executed, simply being suspected of some kind of wrong doing and off with your head. The grave diggers could not keep up with the mass arrivals of dead bodies and heads to be buried, it was mayhem and the resident of the neighbourhood would complain of the terrible odour coming from the grave site, no coffins were used and bodies were quickly disposed of.

Each person who was guillotine was transported in a cart pele mele with other unfortunates. Once at the grave site, corpses would be unloaded, any personal object was taken and entered in a ledger to be given to a caretaker. Bodies were stripped naked and tossed into a common grave, heads and all. After the revolution, in 1815 at the Restoration of the Monarchy under Louis XVIII there was a search for missing members of the French Royal Family. Louis XVI and his wife Marie-Antoinette were found easily, they had been buried in a designated spot in one of the cemeteries and today you can see the Chapelle expiatoire built on the site of their original graves. However Madame Elizabeth, the sister of Louis XVI was executed in 1794 and buried in a common grave with hundreds of others, her body was never found.

Kings of France and Princes and Princesses and great Officers of the Kingdom were buried at Cathedrale of Saint-Denis. At the revolution mobs descended on the church and violated the tombs dragging the remains of the Kings and others and dumping the corpses into a common pit on the side of the Church. At the restoration in 1815 much work was done to recover the royal remains and place them back inside the church. A new mausoleum was erected for Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. They are now buried in St-Denis.  Another body that was never found was that of Philippe Duc d’Orléans known during the revolution as Philippe Egalité, he was the cousin of Louis XVI.

Philippe had a huge grudge against the King and voted at the trial for his execution, surprising Robespierre and others. However just to make sure 48 hours later a second vote was taken, the revolutionaries were not so sure they wanted to execute Louis who was not a bad fellow just a bumbler, again Philippe voted the death of his cousin. He himself was arrested later and executed buried in a common pit a few steps from his unfortunate cousin Louis and sister-in-law Marie-Antoinette.

If you are interested by French history here is the site link  http://www.tombes-sepultures.com/crbst_52.html    The site is in French.