Prose: Themes in Yellow
I have this vision of a funeral. It is less of a recurring dream than it is an imprint of a scene in my mind. I see a service at an old cathedral. The cathedral is grand, tall, with light grey stones on the outside and rows of wooden pews and a very high ceiling on the inside. It must be winter because it seems cold, and the light is faintly growing all around – the day is just beginning to dawn. I love old churches. Especially the Catholic ones in old Europe, or the ancient Coptic or Russian orthodox ones, all the history, all the scents, all the careful architecture and colour. I thought this one was Catholic, could be, but the most similar one I can think of in real life is the old Presbyterian one down on the east side of town. That church is made of light grey stones, almost white, and it’s near the river and the memorial park where the old-world war two planes and monuments stand solemnly watching.
Inside the funeral has just ended. The service has been conducted, the memories of family and friends have already been reminisced upon, the prayers and the reading of holy texts has occurred and all that is left is for the music to play and the people to walk out. I get the impression it is not a full funeral. Though it’s a grand setting there are relatively few mourners, and all are wearing traditional black. I see two women, both in full length traditional confirmation service dress like the one wore by Inger in Munch’s painting Inger Munch in Black. They are just leaving, and they are talking with each other and walking on a gravel path that leads out from the big wooden church door. Who are the two women? The mother of the dead? A sister perhaps? No, I think they are too young, more likely they are lover’s, or one is the now widowed wife of the man in the casket and the other is a friend.
And it is a man in the closed casket, that I feel I am sure of. It’s a traditional mahogany wooden casket and it’s lying sideways at the front of the church by the altar. Where the mortal meets the divine. It is closed, the figure, the person inside is unknown.
Since its very early morning I can imagine there are candles burning around the building that are becoming less bright as the rising sun outside starts to shine its light more and more through the huge stained-glass windows. It’s foggy outside and there’s an element of the mysterious but also hopeful as the light brings in the new day so the clouds begin to disappear and fade.
The one other thing that is clear is the flowers. Inside the church, on large stools of some kind, near the coffin and lining the outside edge of the rows of pews, or around the walls of the cathedral are great big bouquets of flowers, all yellow. They are bright and wonderful and filled with all sorts of different types: some yellow gladiolas, yellow roses, yellow daises, yellow chrysanthemums and yellow sunflowers all arranged neatly in brown funeral urns.
It’s a strange vision to have. I wonder what it means. It’s an incredibly sad scene, just a few silently weeping mourners in black, a solemn priest, the dark of the early dawn, the fading candles, the dead man and the yellow flowers. Sad as it is there is an element of beauty all around. The closed coffin speaks of the end, a final brutal cut off from life that cannot be reversed or changed. But the beauty of the cathedral, the hope that the altar claims of an eternal destiny, the wonderful yellow flowers speaking of all that is true and good in this world, and though the life of the candles fade and burn ever less so the sun grows brighter by each passing moment. Each morning brings new hope.
This reminds me of Van Gogh’s tragic funeral, where they placed him in the centre and put his paintings all around him and filled his open casket with bunches of sunflowers. How sadly beautiful that scene would have been…the flowers, the painter, the man who has reached such a broken-hearted state …
At first, I thought that I was perhaps a mourner, a participant at the funeral, sitting quietly in one of the empty pews by myself, watching it all happen. But then I realised that the logical conclusion is not that, but I am in fact the man in the coffin. This is the end, this is when the curtain falls, I take a bow and receive the flowers. But why the yellow flowers? Flowers are beautiful, and part of their beauty is their frailty and shortness of life. Here one day, blooming in glory and gone another, wilting and sighing as each fragile petal curls over and falls back to the earth it sprung from.
Yellow is a tragic colour. It is both joyful and hopeful, representing everything good that might be, and yet at the same time it is a little off-centre, a little melancholic and strange. It feels misunderstood, innocently tragic and immensely filled with grief and suffering.
So, I am dying? We all are. We all are dead people walking. We all are future flowers ready to fall, we all are candles yet to flicker and burn out. Yellow, the hopeful yet weeping flower, that’s what I am.
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Marcus Brooking is a student at Carey Baptist. Artwork by Jaimee van Gemerden.
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