M.C. GARDNER
In a skit by the 2nd City comedy troupe, a reporter interviews a priest whose has returned to life after a near-death experience.
Reporter: “Father could you give us the particulars of your experience?
Priest: “Well, me heart stopped. I saw the doctors below from the vantage of the ceiling. They were trying to revive me. Then I was enveloped by a white light and joined thousands of othes journeying through a lengthy tunnel. At the end of the tunnel we arrived at a full bar in the middle of a happy hour. The drinks and sushi were on the house. After a few well-heeled libations we were all in pretty good spirits, so to speak.. The happy hour concluded and then we board on a bus and we’re told to say goodbye to our egos. The next stop was to be our final baptism, our total immersion into the nothingness from which we came. It was at that point the doctors got my heart going again and I returned to the hospital.”
Reporter: “Well gee, Father, that’s really fascinating. But there are a lot of people that were kind of counting on life after death.
Priest: “Oh no, me lad, I’m afraid there is none of that, no life after death. But there is this really great cocktail party.
Speaking of Death in Ulysses, Joyce asserts that “the gravediggers in Hamlet show the profound knowledge of the human heart … People talk about you a bit then they follow (you) dropping (as well) into a hole one after another.” He imagines the sentiments of the dead: “As you are now so once we were.”
In the context of Homer and Joyce I want to direct this essay to three major worldviews of life and death. Are there only three? No. These three, however, comprise the majority opinion of the last five thousand years.
1. Judeo-Christian-Greek nexus. The WorldView of Man as an artifact. A clay vessel in whom the breath of life was breathed by the artificer. Bound by the caprice of a creator, man endeavors to do the will of his God or gods. Death in the Levant was a shadowy affair. Witness chapter 28 of 1st Samuel.. King Saul consults an oracle to conduct a ghostly interview with the dead prophet Samuel.
a. Witch of Endor.
Witch: “What shall I bring up out of the ground?”
Saul: “Bring up Samuel… ”
Witch: “I see a spirit coming out of the ground — an old man wearing a robe.”
Samuel: “Why have you disturbed me bringing me up out of the ground?”
Samuel sounds less than sanguine and his was the fate of those beloved of Yahweh.
b. Further to the West, Homer and Hesiod relate the history of the gods in their respective masterworks. Hesiod’s Theogony speaks of the ascendance of Zeus over the nature gods Heaven and Earth. During a visit to the land of the shades, Homer encounters Agamenmnon, Oedipus, Achilles, Prometheous, Tantalous and Sisyphus. It is this journey that will inspire the underworld itineraries of Virgil and Dante. After meeting with Tiresias, Odysseus sees the shade of his recently deceased mother:
Mother: “Child how could you cross alive into this gloom at the world’s end?”
Odysseus: “Mother I came here, driven to the land of death in want of prophecy from Terisias’ shade… but come tell me this and tell me clearly, what was the bane that pinned you down in death?”
Mother: “Your father lies now even so, in Ithaca , with aching heart, and longs for your return, while age comes upon him. So I, too, pined away, so doom befell me, only my loneliness for you, Odysseus, took my life away.”
Odysseus: “O my mother, will you not stay, be still, here in my arms, may we not, in this place of Death, as well, hold one another, touch with love, and taste salt tears’ relief … or is this all hallucination, sent against me by the iron queen, Persephone, to make me groan again?”
In Christianity death steps out of the shadows and into total darkness. Man is a created being who, therefore, has a beginning but given the artifact of an immortal soul, it is imagined that he has no end:
c. From Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist.
Priest: “Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. It is a never-ending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. All the fifth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer … Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse prey to flames… giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then image this sickening stench, multiplied a million fold and a million fold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of Hell.”
2. Indian World View: The Christian nightmare becomes the Hindu dream.
a. Life is viewed as a cosmic dream – but there is essentially only one dreamer. Brahman is by himself in the universe. He falls asleep and dreams the world. Each being that he dreams believes the dictates of their dream ego but that is maya – the measurement of oneself against the infinite – this is an illusion, because one is the infinite – the one without second. Tat Tvam Asi – thou art that. This is reiterated in Buddhism where all things are seen as Buddha-things. An ignorant man is no less the Buddha than an enlightened one. Reincarnation is a popular answer to death in both faiths but to the adept in either, such is not readily apparent:
b. .Ananda Coomaraswamy: “the notion of a reincarnation in the popular sense of the return of deceased individual to rebirth on this earth represnts only a misunderstanding of the doctrines of heredity … and regeneration.”
c. Alan Watts: “I wish, therefore, to commend what to many students of these doctrines may seem to be a startling thesis: that Buddhists and Vedanists who understand their own doctrines profoundly … do not believe in reincarnation in any literal sense.”
d. Sogyal Rinpoche ( of the Dali Lama’s circle) comments on the search for reincarnated leaders or Tulkus: “What continues in a Tulku? Is the Tulku exactly the same person as the figure he reincarnates? He both is and he isn’t. He motivation and dedication to help all beings is the same, but he is not actually the same person. ”
If we come to identify ourselves with the preceding generations the fact of our birth will seem a fable. If in approaching oblivion we believe the eye of a newborn to be our own, our seeming twilight will be the foundling of the dawn. Our identity is not bound irrevocably to flesh. The exterior world is a landscape of the mind. So formulated the wind is breath and a river, blood.
2. Chinese World View.
1. Chinese World View.
a. Taoism – Organic Universe. The universe is alive. The Tao embodies the male and female principle. All features of life and death resolve themselves into the infinite singularity of the Tao: “The knowledge of the ancients was perfect. In what way was it perfect? There were those who believed that nothing existed. Such knowledge is indeed perfect and ultimate and cannot be improved.”
b. The nothingness of the Tao merged nicely with the Shunyata of the Buddhist. It crossed into China during the century of India ‘s Nagarjuna. Nargarjuna is the great genius of Indian Buddhism and with the exception of the Buddha, revered over all others. His influence is transplanted and flowers in China as Hua Yen, in Tibet as Vajrayanna and in Japan as Zen. Nagarjuna preached the Middle Way . Reality is beyond words. The middle way is between opposing notions. A luminous interpenetration accords every moment. Existence is a dialectic between the singular and the infinite. The one encompasses and reflects the other. The discord of our mental assertions prevents us from experiencing its fundamental explicitness.
“The entire ocean is embodied in one wave, yet the ocean does not shrink. A small wave includes the great ocean, and yet the wave does not expand. Though the ocean simultaneously extends itself to all waves, it does not by this fact diversify itself. When the great ocean embraces one wave, nothing hinders it from embracing all the other waves with its whole body. When one wave includes the great ocean, all other waves also include the ocean in its entirety. There is no obstruction between them… Shih is completely identical, and not partially identical, with Li. Therefore, without causing the slightest damage to itself, an atom can embrace the whole universe.”
After moving from the individual circles of the Inferno and Purgatorio, Dante adopts this stance in the Paradiso of the Divine Comedy:
“I saw that in its depths there are enclosed bound up with love in one eternal book, the scattered leaves of all the Universe – substance, and accidents, and their relations, as though together fused in such a way that what I speak of is a single light.”
Whitman sees it the face of a dead solider in a daybreak gray and dim. The corpse is covered by a government issue army blanket. Whitman uncovers the face, it is:
“a face not child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory; Young man I think I know you — I think this is the face of the Christ himself, dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.”
Nietzche believed all the names of history where himself. The poet Taliesin reported a Universal memory: “I have been a sword in the hand … a star… a tree … I was bewitched into sea foam … I have been a word in a book.”
In a stunning reversal of this sentiment, Borges imagines the dialectic from the standpoint of the absolute:
My eyes saw what they had never seen–/ night and its many stars, / I knew things smooth and gritty, uneven and rough, / the taste of honey and apple, / water in the throat of thirst, the weight of metal in the hand; / the human voice, the sound of footsteps in the grass / the smell of rain in Galilee .
Joyce seems to reiterate all these sentiments at the close of “The Dead.” Gabriel’s wife has related the memory of a sickly youth that loved her and died shortly after he came to say goodbye on a rainy evening in Dublin . His wife has fallen asleep and then Gabriel senses, as well, a gentle sleep descending upon all the world:
“One by one they were all becoming shades… Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes… in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling… A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight… his soul swooned slowly as heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
The epiphany of Joyce is also that of Schopenhauer:
“This separate thing which in that general stream has been but the least vanishing particle, becomes, when so regarded an epiphany of the whole, equivalent to the entire unending manifold of time.”
Joyce calls it the “the whole Jingbang lot.” Also from Ulysses: “Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the Gods…That lies in space which I in time must come to, ineluctably… and “no one is anything … the hangman God is doubtless all in all in all of us … (we are) All or not at all…. we are the Logos that suffers in us.”
In Tibetan Buddhism this witness is called the View: “What is the view? (It is reality) looking at reality with its own eyes… it is the face of Rigpa … the face seen upon the dissolution of the conceptual mind. Proust sensed it in a cup of tea. It is the face Joyce glimpsed on a summer day in Dublin . Bloom sees it while looking at the stars: “By God, I was lost in the Milky Way.”
Henry Miller glimpsed it in a Parisian brothel —
“… the legs are holding me like a pair of scissors… a deep fissure in my brain opens up: all the images and memories that had laboriously or absent-mindedly assorted, labeled, documented, filed, sealed and stamped break forth pell-mell like ants pouring out of a crack in the side walk; the world ceases to revolve, time stops, the nexus of my dreams is broken and dissolved and my guts spill out in a grand schizophrenic rush, an evacuation that leaves me face to face with the absolute… I feel the whole world beneath me, a world tottering and crumbling, a world used up and polished like a leper’s skull… Clearer than all I see my own grinning skull, see the skeleton dancing in the wind… the great circuit which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh… I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that bring us back to the beginning where there is never an end, the milk of the breast and bitter honey that flows from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution. The image of the beyond with the here and now…”
Near the end of Eliot’s Little Gidding, the final Quartet of Eliot’s four, we find:
We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know it for the first time.
In a work of art; be it in Homer, Joyce, Miller or Eliot we find that every moment brings us back to the beginning: where each separate thing is equivalent to the entire unending manifold of time, the whole Jingbang lot, the beginning where there is never an end.