Pants on Fire, Howling at the Moon?

I'll get back to my lupine pal above in a moment, but my point is that a very popular choice of reading (not a poem) is from Canon Scott-Holland, and it seems to me that, no doubt from good intentions, his pants are well and truly on fire fire liar liar.

OK, so I do (not often enough) the mindfulness meditation. I read the good grown-up books about mortality. I reflect long and deeply on those deaths that I learn about. I read the poems, take the long view, feel the symbols.

And sometimes I could just howl at the moon about death. I mean, how can it be? The world is all around us, we move through it and it moves through us, in ways we are only just beginning to understand. Life is an energy, our memories build and build and then. Nothing. Gone. Despite all our understanding, a huge mystery. The life closes down, a body is cared for (or not) and dealt with in a way that creates (or not) some meaning for those still alive. A bereaved person back a year or two phoned me weeks after the funeral and said "Where is he? I don't understand."

I understand, I understand. But I am not reconciled, as the poet said.

And that's why I turn now on this miserable drivel:

Death is nothing at all.

I have only slipped away into the next room.

I am I and you are you.

Whatever we were to each other

That we are still.

Death is very far from nothing at all, you old liar, with your narcotic platitudes. The most devout believer in an afterlife ("the next room...") will tell you that being separated from someone by death hurts, and that hurt has to be accommodated and lived through, and then lived with. We may still love those who have died, but that hardly means that whatever we were to each other, that we are still.

And you are not in the next room, dead dear one. You may be in heaven, you may be about to be re-incarnated, you may simply not be in existence, but you are bloody well not in the next room. If you were, I'd put the kettle on and we've have a nice chat.

I thought briefly and with contempt of the Canon's words as I helped with the funeral of a young woman recently. I was on the edge of tears myself some of the time, and I didn't even know her. And the reason I was upset - well, two reasons. One, to be honest, is a little over-tiredness, it being the season it is. But the other was because the people who'd lost the woman had the honesty, emotional truth and courage - and love for her - not to pretend. That was very moving.

It's not that particular pain that leaves me howling at the moon. It's the canonical nonsense above that does it. How can we deal with the power and mystery of death, how can we enrich our lives by understanding our mortality, if we put ourselves to sleep with this stuff?

I'm really sorry if the Canon's words have helped you recently, in a bereavement or a funeral. It's your choice, and if it works for you, I'm pleased, really I am. I also appreciate that he goes on to say more useful and true things later, about speaking of me as you always did, not being mock-solemn - but then he blows it.

"What is death but a negligible accident?"

It's not an accident, Mutton-Chops. It happens to all of us. Stop selling us a dummy, stop swerving about and dishonouring your noble profession. Listen to this mad/sane old man, holding his daughter in his arms:

"Howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones!

Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so

That heaven's vault should crack. She's gone for ever!"

Polwart's Darwin

Quote from the sleeve note of the CD "Darwin Song Project, Shrewsbury 2009":

"Darwin's daughter Annie died in 1851 at the age of 10. Not only was it a massive personal blow, it cemented in the most painful way possible, many of his ideas about the cruelty and struggle at the heart of natural selection. Many of the song's images are taken from Darwin's own writings."

We're All Leaving

There is thunder on the skyline
And it tears her breath away
Like the twilight steals the day

A father's kind hand could not command her
To return to him once more
Like a soldier from the war

We're all leaving
Even the ones who stay behind
We're all leaving in our own time
We're all leaving in our own time

Each night surrenders to a morning
But beneath the April sky
He can hear an endless cry

On smiling fields there's a battle raging
And for every bloom he knows
Another flower never grows

We're all leaving …

And he has no Ark to bear him from this Flood
Just a broken vessel wrought in flesh and blood
Though the riptides pull him under
He will not cease to wonder
At the beauty, beauty, beauty, beauty

He brings her mother to the church door
And while she prays for what will come
He walks those woods alone

And there he builds his own cathedrals
And on every whirring wing
He can hear the whole world sing

We're all leaving …

Carpe Diem part 2

In part 1 I was worrying that maybe a fear of the dissolution of the self with no belief in an afterlife, or only a vague hope that there might be one, could be beneath some self-destructive and socially dangerous behaviour which otherwise I find hard to understand. The idea - which may be nonsense! - is that you may seize the day with a vengeance as a way of avoiding the truth about your own mortality. Blot it all out.

Here's a poem about a different attitude to "Carpe Diem." It's by a very popular Amercian poet, Billy Collins, and it seems to me eloquent and helpful in the way that good popular poetry can be.

Picnic, Lightning

It is possible to be struck by a
meteor or a single-engine plane while
reading in a chair at home. Pedestrians
are flattened by safes falling from
rooftops mostly within the panels of
the comics, but still, we know it is
possible, as well as the flash of
summer lightning, the thermos toppling
over, spilling out on the grass.
And we know the message can be
delivered from within. The heart, no
valentine, decides to quit after
lunch, the power shut off like a
switch, or a tiny dark ship is
unmoored into the flow of the body's
rivers, the brain a monastery,
defenseless on the shore. This is
what I think about when I shovel
compost into a wheelbarrow, and when
I fill the long flower-boxes then
press into rows the limp roots of red
impatiens -- the instant hand of Death
always ready to burst forth from the
sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then
the soil is full of marvels, bits of
leaf like flakes off a fresco,
red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick
to burrow back under the loam. Then
the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the
clouds a brighter white, and all I
hear is the rasp of the steel edge
against a round stone, the small
plants singing with lifted faces, and
the click of the sundial as one hour
sweeps into the next.


You dig? as people used to say a long time ago - if you have a clear apprehension of your mortality it may make your life clearer, and the ordinary things you do filled with more meaning. Knowing your life will come to an end - I mean really knowing the truth of it, living with it, not just accepting it intellectually and theoretically - can help you to "look well to this day." And enjoy it.

That's surely the point of "memento mori." It was not to scare themselves that people had a skull on the desk, it was to make them realise the value of now. (Also of course to be good so they wouldn't burn in hell, but I hope you feel able, with me, to ignore that whole vicious bit of social control!)

Of course, it's perfectly possible simply to say "I'll worry about it when it happens, till then, sod it, mine's a double Jack Daniels on ice." That's saying a version of Woody Allen's joke "I don't mind dying but I don't want to be there when it happens."

Well, that might be OK if you go out like a light in your prime (though this may not be ideal for those who care about you...) but it won't help much if you decline slowly, and need some way to deal with it. It's ignoring and denying our mortality and it's a long way from Billy Collin's poem.

Whatever, we can only live in our days. Another poem for you:

Days

What are days?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

Philip Larkin

What a trap he springs on us in this seemingly innocent and simple little poem. That final image I find the very stuff of a nightmare. It scares me back into today. Something to do with the long black coats, and they are running very fast and silently straight at you, over the fields. They aren't going to ring the bell and be shown into the lounge...

Carpe diem. Look well to this day. Be mindful of the present moment. Simple to say, hard to do.

cast a cold eye on life, on death

One response to mortality has long been a deliberate and carefully-worked out stoicism. I don't only mean the sort of "grin and bear it" response to life's temporary pains and difficulties, I mean stoicism as a way of living, and a way of facing death.

Without going too far into the Stoic school of ancient philosophers (a very worthwhile thing to do, no doubt), let's stay with the usual meanings around the word "stoical." I mean a resolute indifference to the continual ups and downs of life: comfort/discomfort, pain/pleasure, success/failure. And therefore a resolute indifference to the fact of our deaths. Keep doing what you do until you can't. Endure until it is no longer possible to endure, because it is ended.

It's a very worthwhile approach to lots of life's trials; we often seek to distinguish whingeing from real pain, making a fuss from real distress. After the Paddington rail disaster, an American who was on the train and escaped injury said he was impressed by the way people showed "grace under pressure" as they went to help others, even though they were shocked and suffering minor injuries themselves. That description of stoicism, compassion (and style, even) was moving.

Or the way those exhausted fireman went on trying to force their way up the doomed towers on 9/11 - they must have known they were unlikely to survive, to put it mildly. That sort of stoicism - endurance of desperate circumstances whilst a human duty is to be done - we at once understand and respect, even whilst doubting we could do anything like it ourselves. (Except that no-one knows how they would respond until they have to.)Do you recall the man on the capsized ferry "Herald of Free Enterprise" who made a human ladder of himself so that passengers could climb over him and escape through a window? That stuff. The right stuff.

Most of the time, you hope, you won't have to help people escape from capsized ferries, burning trains or collapsing buildings. But we all have to depart this world. Can a stoical indifference to mortality help us to do so?

Possibly, it seems to me, if that's our temperament. But cultural change influences individual ways of thinking and feeling. Stoicism related to duty - staying at your post, doing what you should, not making a fuss etc - was characteristic of imperial cultures and warrior castes. I don't mean unique to them, of course - but the Romans valued in their ruling class what they called "gravitas." Allowing for cultural translations, so did high Victorian Brits. Public schools, naval and military training, produced a warrior caste and a ruling class of people who were expected to stay at their posts and do their duty, according to various codes. We like to satirize all that stiff upper lip stuff, but that is now, not then.

Doing your duty when a broader view of human responsibility was needed, beyond duty to the Empire, produced some people who we now know were monsters. Eichmann said he was only doing his job, i.e. his duty to the Third Reich. What about his duty to other human beings? Any vile torturer could claim to be preserving public order, defending his country, doing his duty, doing his job.

Maybe stoicism as duty is difficult to sustain in a climate of moral relativity and complexity. Life is more often shades of grey than black and white, "my country right or wrong" won't really do, we all have to deal with apparently conflicting loyalties and duties. So stoicism in the pursuit of duty to one's country is not above qualification and examination. And this growth of a more flexible and relative view of duty could perhaps be part of changes in us at the individual level - we talk more directly about our feelings, we express our own needs and priorities more firmly, than we used to. We show less "gravitas," less stoical reserve.

Maybe as technological developments in, for example, heating, pain control, the manufacture of cheap warm clothing, public hygiene and nutrition, gave us more comfort, they also made "grin and bear it" a less important survival response. So perhaps stoicism at the basic daily level is less easy to deploy.

We all vary of course - someone close to me is more stoical about pain and illness than I am. I don't know if that is because things hurt her less than they do me, or because she makes less fuss about the same level of pain (though I've a sneaky feeling it's the latter.) Such things are unknowable.

Some people are perhaps more inclined to a stoical view of the end their lives, whatever their beliefs, and that may help them. I'm heartened by the families I meet who have lost someone to a painful and unpleasant illness, who tell me that "she/he never/rarely complained," "we didn't realise until the last two days how ill he really was, because he didn't tell us." This isn't just an affectionate enhancement of their view of the deceased by the bereaved family; sometimes, as in the last statement, they unintentionally supply evidence for their relative's stoicism and concern for the family's well-being.

As Alan Bennett says, "illness is a bore," but it's difficult not to talk about it. The consideration for others that generates a stoical reserve is admirable, surely - provided it's not a version of "I don't want to be a nuisance," which can, unfortunately, result in a great deal of unintentional nuisance! "But if you'd only told us, then we could have done..." Recently, some family members had a difficult job getting back from the other side of the world for the funeral because they had no idea how ill their relative was, even though they knew it was terminal.

My summary: if we can manage it, stoical indifference may help us face our own mortality, both at the level of enduring suffering, and also at a higher level of thought: facing the end of your life. But I suspect many of us may look for and need more than that. Stoical indifference, "cast a cold eye on life, on death," as Yeats ordered up for his nown gravestone, might only suit some of us.

I'm going to leave stoicism there for now - I may return another time.

in my end is my beginning

In recent years, I've learned a great deal about the variety of ways people deal with losing someone close to them; it's been moving, informative and - I hope this doesn't sound exploitative - endlessly fascinating. I want to try to share some of the thoughts this experience is giving rise to.

Organising and leading funeral ceremonies has really speeded up the development of my thinking about human mortality - not least, of course, my own. As we move away from childhood and youth, we naturally become more aware of the fact that our lives - yours, mine - will end. If we live through this growing awareness instead of trying to ignore it, it will enrich our lives.

I hope I may write things that help recently bereaved people, but I'm not a counsellor - CRUSE are the people for that. It's likely I'll pass on any sensible thoughts about the practicalities of funerals, but there is a lot of advice on the net already about How To Run A Funeral, The Good Funeral Guide etc, and much of it looks very useful. I want to take the branch lines, not the main intercity routes, and see if any of you out there find these journeys as interesting and rewarding as I do.

I think this is ultimately a serious topic, and I don't mean in the obvious sense. It may be that one cause for some of our social ills is that very many of us don't know how to deal with the fact of our own mortality. It may be that developing a more productive and calm view of the prospect of the end of one's life is increasingly important to all of us. If this is so, I'd like to be part of that, and I'd be interested in your views. Apparently the Dalai Lama once said that the problem with Westerners is that they don't think about death until they are dying - and it's a bit late then. There is a contrary view I'll go into in a future blog - but it struck me quite forcibly when I read it ten years ago.

I'm not a morbid person, so I don't intend to be gloomy in this blog, and I don't intend it to be about me. I will try to be thoughtful, and I hope not too solemn or pompous. So if the intercity route is the one that takes you thundering along from the midwife to the funeral director, welcome aboard the slow train that takes the time to meander through interesting landscapes, which may yield helpful thoughts and prompt some discussion amongst the passengers.

A Note on religion vs atheism: I'm not greatly interested any more in this argument, though I may dip into it. Why people believe what they believe, and what they do to themselves and others because of their beliefs, seems much more important now to me, than the actual internal fabric of their beliefs. I don't have a religious belief system myself, just to get that out of the way, but you won't find any crusading for or against in this blog. What I've learned from spiritual explorers - now that's a different matter. But - isn't the language of belief difficult? - neither does "spiritual explorers" mean this is a new age sort of blog.

Enough introductory generalities, down to business soon.