Went to a reading at the Poetry Project & ended the night by exploring St. Mark’s Church cemetery; a former Vice President, a Dutch family vault, the oldest grave I could find, & the Barclays. Flat Puritan headstones, but they’re inlaid, so the crypts are probs in the church basement catacombs

I’m at the folk art fair, I’m at the cemetery, I’m at the combination folk art fair cemetery (weeping)

I’ve seen it. The best grave in the world. The number one; the one they don’t want you to see, because its beauty will ruin you forever. Guard yourself from perfection:

Local guide told me that Fes is the only city in Morocco where the graves aren’t all facing Mecca. Most Muslim cemeteries here aren’t open to non-believers but I saw the graves, facing every which way. No one knows why. Everyone forgot. It’s a truth we lost; Fes is full of secrets like that.

Visited ONE (1) cemetery in England & it wasn’t Highgate but a churchyard in Hackney, crumbling & overgrown. Struck by: the new church & the old one, how looking at someone else’s end always portends ur own, the way cemeteries are a technology that lets you see the future & the past simultaneously.

Also at PL is my fave painting in the world, cast in bronze on the artist’s tomb. Raft of the Medusa, Théodore Géricault spent 18 months researching the Medusa’s wreck, studying corpses, interviewing survivors & having them model for him on a life-size replica of the raft he built in his studio (!!)

Loved Abelard & Heloise’s tomb at Pere Lachaise, the Medieval Gothic arch, how much light was let into the top of the structure, the gargoyles at each corner to drain runoff, a perfect structure, the first tomb in the first planned rural cemetery in the world, a romance buried centuries ago

From one of my high school interns