The older Kierkegaard has entered his front
door and is creakily attempting to lock himself in when it comes over
him all at once, one last great wave of gloomy illumination: what if
God’s greatest blessing is to render a person’s existence so
intolerable, so completely unendurable that the next time he [or she]
happens to grope for the familiar fear of dying, he [or she] discovers
it is gone, is nowhere to be found, has in fact been replaced by a
simple weightless sense of well-being and peace he (or she) had long
forgotten he (or she) was capable of feeling.
Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay. –Pat Barker Regeneration
As soon as we are born, we are dead. Our birth and death are just one thing.
It
is like a tree: when there is a root there must be twigs. When there
are twigs, there must be a root. You cannot have one without the
other.
It
is a little funny to see how at a death people are so grief-stricken
and distracted, tearful and sad, and at a birth how happy and
delighted. It is delusion; nobody has ever looked at this clearly.
I
think if you really want to cry, then it would be better to do so when
someone’s born. For actually birth is death, death is birth, the root
is the twig, and the twig is the root. If you’ve got to cry, cry at the
root, cry at the birth.
Look closely: if there were no birth there would be no death. Can you understand this?
At 19, I read a sentence that re-terraformed my head: "The level of matter in the universe has been constant since the Big Bang." In all the aeons we have lost nothing, we have gained nothing - not a speck, not a grain, not a breath. The universe is simply a sealed, twisting kaleidoscope that has reordered itself a trillion trillion trillion times over. Each baby, then, is a unique collision - a cocktail, a remix - of all that has come before: made from molecules of Napoleon and stardust and comets and whale tooth; colloidal mercury and Cleopatra's breath: and with the same darkness that is between the stars between, and inside, our own atoms.
When you know this, you suddenly see the crowded top deck of the bus, in the rain, as a miracle: this collection of people is by way of a starburst constellation. Families are bright, irregular-shaped nebulae. Finding a person you love is like galaxies colliding. We are all peculiar, unrepeatable, perambulating micro-universes - we have never been before and we will never be again. Oh God, the sheer exuberant, unlikely face of our existences. The honour of being alive. They will never be able to make you again. Don't you dare waste a second of it thinking something better will happen when it ends. Don't you dare. –Caitlin Moran hidden shores
After her father’s sudden and soul-splitting death, Macdonald, a
seasoned falconer, decides to wade through the devastation by learning
to train a goshawk — the fiercest of raptors, “things of death and
difficulty: spooky, pale-eyed psychopaths,” capable of inflicting
absolute gore with absolute grace. Over the course of that trying
experience — which she chronicles by weaving together personal memory,
natural history (the memory of our planet), and literary history (the
memory of our culture) — she learns about love and loss, beauty and
terror, control and surrender, and the myriad other dualities
reconciling which is the game of life.
Macdonald writes:
Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian,
meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob.’ Robbed. Seized. It
happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be
shared, no matter how hard you try.
Out of that aloneness a singular and paradoxical madness is born:
I knew I wasn’t mad mad because I’d seen people
in the grip of psychosis before, and that was madness as obvious as the
taste of blood in the mouth. The kind of madness I had was different. It
was quiet, and very, very dangerous. It was a madness designed to keep
me sane. My mind struggled to build across the gap, make a new and
inhabitable world… Time didn’t run forwards any more. It was a solid
thing you could press yourself against and feel it push back; a thick
fluid, half-air, half-glass, that flowed both ways and sent ripples of
recollection forwards and new events backwards so that new things I
encountered, then, seemed souvenirs from the distant past.
Rippling through Macdonald’s fluid, mesmerizingly immersive prose are
piercing, short, perfectly placed deliverances, in both senses of the
word: there is the dark (“What happens to the mind after bereavement makes no sense until later.”), the luminous (“I’d halfway forgotten how kind and warm the world could be.”), the immediate (“Time passed. The wavelength of the light around me shortened. The day built itself.”), the timeless (“Those old ghostly intuitions that have tied sinew and soul together for millennia.”), and the irrepressibly sublime (“Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don’t get to say when or how.”).
Choosing a goshawk, a creature notoriously difficult to tame, became
Macdonald’s way of learning to let grace come unbidden, a letting that
demanded a letting go — of compulsive problem-solving, of the various
control strategies by which we try to bend life to our will, of the
countless self-contortion and self-flagellation techniques driving the
machinery of our striving. Recounts the frustration of failing to get
her goshawk, Mabel, to obey her commands — frustration familiar to
anyone who has ever anguished by any form of unrequited intentionality —
Macdonald writes:
I flew her later in the day. I flew her earlier. I fed
her rabbit with fur and rabbit without. I fed her chicks that I’d gutted
and skinned and rinsed in water. I reduced her weight. I raised it. I
reduced it again. I wore different clothes. I tried everything to fix
the problem, certain that the problem couldn’t be fixed because the
problem was me. Sometimes she flew straight to my fist, sometimes
straight over it, and there was no way of knowing which it would be.
Every flight was a monstrous game of chance, a coin-toss, and what was
at stake felt something very like my soul. I began to think that what
made the hawk flinch from me was the same thing that had driven away the
man I’d fallen for after my father’s death. Think that there was
something deeply wrong about me, something vile that only he and the
hawk could see.
Macdonald peers directly into the black hole of fury, a familiar rage directed as much at the rebuffer as at the rebuffed self:
The anger was vast and it came out of nowhere. It was the
rage of something not fitting; the frustration of trying to put
something in a box that is slightly too small. You try moving the shape
around in the hope that some angle will make it fit in the box. Slowly
comes an apprehension that this might not, after all, be possible. And
finally you know it won’t fit, know there is no way it can fit, but this
doesn’t stop you using brute force to try to crush it in, punishing the
bloody thing for not fitting properly. That was what it was like: but I
was the box, I was the thing that didn’t fit, and I was the person
smashing it, over and over again, with bruised and bleeding hands.
And yet somehow, Macdonald unboxes herself as she trains Mabel into
control and Mabel trains her into the grace of surrender, of resting
into life exactly as it is rather than striving for some continually
unsatisfying and anguishing version of how it ought to be. She captures
this beautifully in the closing vignette — an earthquake, quite an
uncommon occurrence in England, rattles her house and sends her
panic-stricken into Mabel’s quarters, terrified at the thought that
earthquakes alarm wildlife and often cause animals to flee. Macdonald
writes:
I race downstairs, three steps at a time, burst through
the door and turn on the light in her room. She is asleep. She wakes,
pulls her head from her mantle-feathers and looks at me with clear eyes.
She’s surprised to see me. She yawns, showing her pink mouth like a
cat’s and its arrowhead tongue with its black tip. Her creamy underparts
are draped right down over her feet, so only one lemony toe and one
carbon-black talon are exposed. Her other foot is drawn high up at her
chest. She felt the tremors. And then she went back to sleep, entirely
unmoved by the moving earth. The quake brought no panic, no fear, no
sense of wrongness to her at all. She’s at home in the world. She’s
here. She ducks her head upside down, pleased to see me, shakes her
feathers into a fluffy mop of contentment, and then, as I sit with her,
she slowly closes her eyes, tucks her head back into her feathers, and
sleeps. She is not a duke, a cardinal, a hieroglyph or a mythological
beast, but right now Mabel is more than a hawk. She feels like a
protecting spirit. My little household god. Some things happen only
once, twice in a lifetime. The world is full of signs and wonders that
come, and go, and if you are lucky you might be alive to see them. I had
thought the world was ending, but my hawk had saved me again, and all
the terror was gone.
Don’t move. Just die over and over. Don’t anticipate. Nothing can save you now because you have only this moment. With no future, be true to yourself and express yourself fully. Don’t move.
I wished for death often
but now that I am at its door
I have changed my mind about the world.
It should go on; it is beautiful,
even as a dream, filled with water and seed,
plants and animals, others like myself,
ships and buildings and messages
filling the air -- a beauty,
if ever I have seen one.
In the next world, should I remember
this one, I will praise it
above everything.
Begin again to the summoning birds
to the sight of light at the window,
begin to the roar of morning traffic
all along Pembroke Road.
Every beginning is a promise
born in light and dying in dark
determination and exaltation of springtime
flowering the way to work.
Begin to the pageant of queuing girls
the arrogant loneliness of swans in the canal
bridges linking the past and future
old friends passing though with us still.
Begin to the loneliness that cannot end
since it perhaps is what makes us begin,
begin to wonder at unknown faces
at crying birds in the sudden rain
at branches stark in the willing sunlight
at seagulls foraging for bread
at couples sharing a sunny secret
alone together while making good.
Though we live in a world that dreams of ending
that always seems about to give in
something that will not acknowledge conclusion
insists that we forever begin.
I like it with nothing. Is it what I was? What I will be? I look out there by the hour, so clear, so sure. I could smile, or frown—still nothing. Be my father, be my mother, great sleep of blue; reach far within me; open doors, find whatever is hiding; invite it for many clear days in the sun. When I turn away I know you are there. We won’t forget each other: every look is a promise. Others can’t tell what you say when it’s the blue voice, when you come to the window and look for me. Your word arches over the roof all day. I know it within my bowed head where the other sky listens. You will bring me everything when the time comes. —William Stafford
now, listen, when I die I don't want any crying, just get the disposal under way, I've had a full some life, and if anybody has had an edge, I've had it, I've lived 7 or 8 lives in one, enough for anybody. we are all, finally, the same, so no speeches, please, unless you want to say he played the horses and was very
good at that. you're next and I already know something you don't, maybe.
confession
waiting for death like a cat that will jump on the bed
I am so very sorry for my wife
she will see this stiff white body shake it once, then maybe again
"Hank!" Hank won't answer.
it's not my death that worries me, it's my wife left with this pile of nothing.
I want to let her know though that all the nights sleeping beside her even the useless arguments were things ever splendid
and the hard words I ever feared to say can now be said:
Everything that is dead quivers. Not
only the things of poetry, stars, moon, wood, flowers, but even a white
trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street …
Everything has a
secret soul which is silent more often than it speaks.
PARABOLA (magazine) celebrated the birthdate of American jazz singer, Sara
Vaughan (March 27, 1924 – April 3, 1990).
This particular track, “The
Mystery of Man” was recorded in 1984 as part of the album The Planet is Alive, Let It Live, a
symphonic piece composed by Tito Fontana and Sante Palumbo on Italian
translations of Polish poems by Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul
II.
Here are the lyrics:
We come from a distant past that we’ve forgotten And now we look up and aspire to the stars We are the mystery that even we can’t decipher The mystery of man
The story is told in stone and broken arrows In traces of cities unknown lost in sand In colours and castle walls silent and unseen statues The mystery of man
The wind stirs in the trees likes voices in dreams And then just when it seems we know what it means Simply its gone
The miracle is the mind asking the questions Seeking to find itself if it can Only to see itself endlessly echoed in mirrors The mystery of man
Aurelius, translated here by Gregory Hays, considers how befriending
this eternal interplay of life and death can inform and ennoble our
existential priorities:
Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter. Cold or warm.
Tired or well-rested.
Despised or honored.
Dying … or busy with other assignments. Because dying, too, is one of our assignments in life. There as well: “to do what needs doing.”
In another meditation, he revisits the question of our inescapable impermanence:
Some things are rushing into existence, others out of it.
Some of what now exists is already gone. Change and flux constantly
remake the world, just as the incessant progression of time remakes
eternity. We find ourselves in a river. Which of the things around us should we value when none of them can offer a firm foothold? Like an attachment to a sparrow: we glimpse it and it’s gone. And life itself: like the decoction of blood, the drawing in of air.
We expel the power of breathing we drew in at birth (just yesterday or
the day before), breathing it out like the air we exhale at each moment.
With breath-stopping simplicity, Aurelius crystallizes the inevitable
and indiscriminate nature of this inhale-exhale cycle that is life:
Alexander the Great and his mule driver both died and the
same thing happened to both. They were absorbed alike into the life
force of the world, or dissolved alike into atoms.
But rather than being dispirited by this awareness, he suggests, we
can find it in an enlivening force of moral solidity in the face of our
ephemeral existence:
Keep this constantly in mind: that all sorts of people
have died — all professions, all nationalities. Follow the thought all
the way down to Philistion, Phoebus, and Origanion. Now extend it to
other species. We have to go there too, where all of them have already gone: … the eloquent and the wise — Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Socrates …
… the heroes of old, the soldiers and kings who followed them …
… the smart, the generous, the hardworking, the cunning, the selfish …
… and even [those] who laughed at the whole brief, fragile business. All underground for a long time now. And what harm does it do them? Or the others either — the ones whose names we don’t even know?
From this he extracts the ultimate moral:
The only thing that isn’t worthless: to live this life out truthfully and rightly. And be patient with those who don’t.
