"The sweet remembrance of the just shall flourish when they sleep in the dust" - anonymous

I happened to be in lower Manhattan this morning and wandered into the graveyard at Trinity Church from the stairwell entrance on Trinity Place. Often I forget about this small urban oasis simply because for the most part, my life right now doesn't take me to lower Manhattan, and perhaps also because of the post 9/11 hoards of tourists that never seemed to frequent the area much when the twin towers were still standing.

Regardless, there I was, weaving through the mostly 18th century markers and recalling some of the old burial grounds in Boston - Kings Chapel, Copp's Hill, the Granary, and the Dorchester North. When I was in undergraduate school I took a class in Tomb Sculpture and wrote about "The Sun in Word and Stone." Basically, the sun, sometimes with a face, and usually sporting wings, represented renewal and regeneration, something like this:














Sitting on a bench and writing in my journal, I looked up while searching for a word and there was the face, not the clearly incised face of a puritan winged sun, but the almost blur of the face of a child. It seemed faded and distant, and barely in relief. I got up and walked over to it, and the closer I came to it, the more faded and distant the image of the infant face appeared to be. Standing back from it seemed to throw it in relatively higher relief.

It's a romantic (and Victorian) vision, and I mean romantic in the sense that what can be read into this face is fictitious, and also infinite. My mind wandered and conjured up thoughts, and even sounds that neither belong to my own history, or to anyone else's in particular. An face like this can elicit a quiet escapism that can take you out of yourself and transport you to somewhere more entertaining than a novel or a movie, many of which could be inspired into existence by it.