So beautiful, Dandello. So moving.
When I first realized that you were going to give us poems at Superman's funeral, I just hoped you'd give us a poem that I could only remember two words from - "burning blue". And you did! Oh, those two words are so wonderfully appropriate. I have always been fascinated, someimes hypnotized, by the color blue, and the way the intense color of the sky sometimes seems to draw you in, overwhelm you, engulf you. But if we now add Superman in his brightly colored suit, and the way the blue of his suit plays off of the blue of the sky, when he is flying, soaring, dancing, almost cascading, against the sky - oh wow. So incredibly beautiful. And so intensely poignant to read a poem like that at the flying man's funeral. A man, a human being, even a Kryptonian human being, can soar against the sky for only so long. But during that short time when he did so, it was magical. Compelling. Hypnotizing.
And thank you for quoting the entire poem to me. So beautiful. And to think that it was written by a nineteen-year-old boy who loved to fly, like Icaros, and who would plunge to his death soon afterwards, also like Icaros.
I also loved that you had a man with bagpipes play Amazing Grace for Superman. I used to be a Star Trek fan, but more than anything else, I was a Spock fan. I was so upset and heartbroken that I almost couldn't bear to see the movie where Spock died, but just before the film stopped playing at a theater here in Malmö, I saw it nevertheless. Scotty played Amazing Grace for Spock on his bagpipes at the funeral. Oh man, how I cried.
One more thing that I absolutely loved here was that an orchestra played
Fanfare for the Common Man for Superman. Oh, how beautiful and appropriate. That was Superman all right: the humble farm boy, raised by two honest and warm-hearted farmers from Kansas to believe in the inherent equal worth of all human beings everywhere.
Oh, there was another particularly poignant moment, too. Last year a beloved Swedish maverick died at only fifty-four - Hans-Uno Bengtsson, physicist, popularizer, expert on Chinese, beer and humourous southern Swedish writers, wild style icon, general renaissance man and an aviator. He flew an airplane from 1944. During his funeral, his aviator friends honored him by flying over the church where the funeral was taking place in a "missing man" formation. When I read about it in my local newspaper, it absolutely choked me up.
"Missing man formation" in Sweden For me, who find it so hard to enjoy any sort of deathfics, this is very different, because the man who was Superman is still alive. And I'm so looking forward to the rest of this splendid tale!
Ann
