Saturday 14 October 2006

Pic of the day: Even supermen can't always win over death.

Smallvill(ag)e burials

The DVDs with season 5 of Smallville are still being sent from Great Britain, but in the meantime I have downloaded the whole series over BitTorrent. (It also has the benefit that I can take screenshots of it, which I was not able to with my DVD player software last I tried.)

Watching Clark at the funeral in episode 12 was strange. It kinda reminded me of when I was in my mother's funeral. Except of course I was much older than Clark, and so it didn't make the same impression as it would on a teenager (or whatever he is now, not much more at least). But the people and the way they look, I guess it is kinda universal.

The irony is that I was watching this and not going in my uncle's funeral back in the village where I grew up. Then again, as I've said before, we were far from close. There is an irony in this that I know the people in Smallville better than the people in the small village I came from.

Of course, the people in Smallville don't know me. But then again, no one does these days. I wonder, once in a blue moon, what will happen to my body if I die. (As opposed to if the world implodes in a black hole in 2007, I mean, in which case there will be no such considerations.) I assume that I will be buried at the nearest churchyard, or perhaps cremated in the city. I dislike cremations personally, but of course it won't matter to me anymore at that time, so I guess they'll do what they find most convenient, whoever "they" may be. Surely someone will be charged with the distasteful job of getting my remains out of the way, but I have no idea who.

I guess it would have been kinda cool if I could be buried back home with my family. It would make it kinda convenient for relatives who come to look at the family graves, there are quite a lot of them there already. But if I hang on long enough, there will be precious few who remember me even among my relatives. And for me, of course, it won't matter anyway. I do not believe in ghosts as such. When the hardware stops working, the software stops working too, until or unless it is installed in a new and hopefully better hardware. I won't be looking down on my grave and waiting for people to put flowers on it, that is a promise.

But the song they play during the burial scene in Smallville is really beautiful. I have kept playing that sequence over and over. Unfortunately there is no hint as to what the song is called or who performs it. But it is good to see that there are more who see it the same way I did: "Now there's no one home" in this flesh and bone. I always knew, well since childhood at least, but I never felt it so starkly as on that day. The body is just a container. By the grave it is too late. Too late for everything, except moving on for those who still move.

We must say all the words that should be spoken, before they are lost forever.