going to the chapel and we're going to get married

In Minneapolis, we went to the cemetery to see HHH's grave. While wandering and trying to find it, we passed the mausoleum. My companion said we should go in and see it, as it is quite beautiful. Outside, there are women in pale purple floor length dresses standing around, waiting. There is a big car with the hood up and two men wrapping matching purple streamers everywhere. They're preparing for a wedding. How strange, I thought. How cyclical, my companion thought.

Yesterday, I was rereading Foucault's "Of Other Spaces." There is a section, which I am going to replicate here, that speaks of the cemetery:

"It is a space that is ... connected with all the sites of the citystate or society or village, etc., since each individual, each family has relatives in the cemetery. In Western culture the cemetery has practically always existed. ... Until the end of the 18th century, the cemetery was placed at the heart of the city, next to the church. ...It is in a time when civilization has become 'atheistic,' as one says very crudely, that Western culture has established what is termed as the cult of the dead. Basically, it was quite natural that, in a time of real belief in the resurrection of bodies and the immortality of the soul, overriding importance was not accorded to the body's remains. On the contrary, from the moment when people are no longer sure that they have a soul or that the body will regain life, it is perhaps necessary to give much more attention to the dead body, which is ultimately the only trace of our existence in the world and in language. It is from the beginning of the 19th century that everyone has a right to her or his own little box for her or his own little personal decay; but on the other hand, it is only from that start of the 19th century that cemeteries began to be located at the outside border of cities.In correlation with the individualization of death and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery, there arises an obsession with death as an 'illness.' "

What a throwback, then, to be having a wedding at the cemetery. Sure the space is lovely, but aren't you terrified, newlyweds, that the dead are going to infect you? Aren't the dead bodies, rotting in their own little personal boxes with their own little personal decay, going to, as Foucault would make us believe, kill your marriage preemptively. How positively liminal and retro of you!