The pope will be buried. The fallen prince will be married.

It might be sacrilegious but The Pope on his Platform looks exactly like Santa Claus would look at his funeral, laid out in red and white, with his tiny gnarled Wicked Witch feet. Yes, Santa ought to have a beard. And yes, I’ve heard the pope actually has quite big feet. And yes, I’m quite certain that would qualify as sacrilegious. Meanwhile, and I know that it’s a longstanding tradition, the Swiss Guard attendants really need a change of costume with their red feather coxcombs and their outlandish blue and orange stripes. I mean, come on, how can I take this seriously? Well it looks exactly like playing card jesters are attending the funeral of a clean-shaven Santa Claus.

Yes, I suppose, sometimes I ought to think things I don’t say or rather don’t say some things that I do think. The garishly rich colors of the procession reminding me, as well, of the villains in Star Wars. There were the black ones and the white ones with bad aim and the red ones too.

I can’t merely enjoy the ceremony. Or rather respect the ceremony. We have stolen and corrupted too many of the signifiers.

And the pilgrims pass with their telephone cameras, with their handheld no-shake video cameras. More zoo than funeral. These are not mourners. They are toursits. Chasing natural disaster, chasing the death of an historical man. I was there. I saw his dead body. I outlived the pope. I spit on death. I survived the pope. He’s dead. Look at him, yes, quite dead. And meanwhile I’m quite alive. And what’s more, I have a video camera. Tourist death chasers. They can run, they can hide, with their telephone cameras and their video cameras and their piety too, as you like it, but death will still catch them. And if there is justice, some faithful or some faithless, either way, some yokel will be there to video tape the corpse.

I suppose it matters not at all to Carol Wojtyla. He is departed. He is, one must presume, with his maker. But notwithstanding, I would want no procession. I do not want to lie in state. I cannot think of a thing quite as useless as a corpse. It is a likeness, I suppose, but a cheap and wretched one, like a blank page might represent a book.

The hero of Les Miserables, Jean Valjean, knowing that God can find it, asks to be buried in the first plot of earth that can be found to be marked with a stone with no name.

SS