Ah no, the years O

Here's a beautiful and terrifying poem. But it could jolt, or help, us into working at a better understanding and acceptance of our own mortality. That's a big journey to embark on - bon voyage. 

"During Wind and Rain" by Thomas Hardy
 

They sing their dearest songs—

       He, she, all of them—yea,

       Treble and tenor and bass,

            And one to play;

      With the candles mooning each face. . . .

            Ah, no; the years O!

How the sick leaves reel down in throngs!

       They clear the creeping moss—

       Elders and juniors—aye,

       Making the pathways neat

            And the garden gay;

       And they build a shady seat. . . .

            Ah, no; the years, the years,

See, the white storm-birds wing across.

       They are blithely breakfasting all—

       Men and maidens—yea,

       Under the summer tree,

            With a glimpse of the bay,

       While pet fowl come to the knee. . . .

            Ah, no; the years O!

And the rotten rose is ript from the wall.

       They change to a high new house,

       He, she, all of them—aye,

       Clocks and carpets and chairs

          On the lawn all day,

       And brightest things that are theirs. . . .

          Ah, no; the years, the years; 

Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs.

Helen Dunmore

In amongst the raucous cut and thrust, the sneers and groans and cheers of the run-up to the general election, the poet and novelist Helen Dunmore died, aged 64. 

It's easy not to notice her quiet voice amongst the self-advertising noise of our literary media. She wasn't a particularly fashionable writer; I'm quite surprised how many of my well-read friends have hardly heard of her (no point-scoring intended.)

The best of her writing has a grace, a lightness of touch, that I'm going to be cheeky enough to recommend to you. It's a kind of enlightenment. And it works so well because of the clarity of her gaze at the physical world about her.

In her novels, her imagination often worked very successfully through historical settings; her last novel is set in Bristol, amongst a group of radicals, in the days of the French Revolution. Its use of history - the tensions between public and personal - I find highly effective. 

She didn't find out she was dying until she was editing the novel, but in an afterword, she wrote that she must have known subliminally because the novel was “full of a sharper light, rather as a landscape becomes brilliantly distinct in the last sunlight before a storm." 

Her last book of poems, "Inside the Wave," is full of that sharp light. The title poem in particular, gives me what Eliot illuminated for us: the intersection of time with the timeless moment. It uses the story of Odysseus; I'll not bang on about it, though I might in a separate posting. Here it is for you:

"Inside the Wave"

And when at last the voyage was over
The ship docked and the men paid off,
The crew became a scattering
Dotted, unremarkable,
In houses along the hilltop
Where the lamps flamed in welcome
And then grew dim, where a woman turned
As if from habit to the wall.

In the bronze mirror there was a woman
Combing what was left of her hair
And beside her, grimacing,
A dirty old mariner.
He swore and knocked back the chair.

Yes, then Odysseus opened his mouth
And all that was left
Was the sound an old man makes
Between a laugh and a cough.
His toenails were goat's hooves
His hair a wild
Nest of old stories,

He straddled the tiles
As a man of the sea does
But she would not touch
His barnacled lips.
From the fountain, pulse by pulse
Came gouts of blood.

Everything stayed as it was,
There was no unravelling
Of wake behind him,
No abandoning
Uwanted memories and men.
Besides, the earth stank.

He went down to the black rock
Where the sea pours
And the white sand blows,
He turned his back to the land
And thought of nothing
For the voyage was over,
The ship dragged by a chain
Onto the ramp for inspection.

The waves turned and turned
Neither toward nor away from him,
Swash and backwash
Crossing, repeating,
But never the same.
At the lip of the wave, foam
Stuttered and broke.

It was on the inside 
Of the wave he chose
To meditate endlessly
Without words or song,
And so he lay down
To watch it at eye-level,
About to topple
About to be whole.

"Morbid" thought for the day?

I don't think it is morbid to write about human mortality, and how our understanding of it affects the nature of our living.

Anyway, here is my Thought for the Day: There has been a lot written about near-death experiences. I don't mean narrow squeaks - you've probably had one of those on one of our roads. I mean people who flat-lined and were brought back to tell us about their mental and emotional states. People who lay dying and to some degree conscious until intervention saved them. 

(drum-roll, please)

Life itself is a near-death experience.

There you are. That's it.

Not because, or not only because, it is in physical terms more fragile and vulnerable than we sometimes like to pretend- in our part of the world, at least.

Because  we are substances that are energised into processes that live and then dissipate into other energies and processes. Former process = conception and birth, latter we call death.

That doesn't mean to say death isn't a huge mystery. But acknowledging that mystery, that power; living with death-awareness in your life; understanding and feeling the indissoluble nature of that relationship - I find that helps. It illuminates and enhances living, and helps us move towards the end of life. At least, that's what I'm finding.

Health warning - it's almost fashionable these days to write about death, funerals, grieving...I don't see that as the same as living in full awareness of the nature of life and death. It can be helpful, or it could be a subsitute for the Real Thing.

There are people who seem to live on outside of any sort of death awareness, and then keel over. Which they would need to do if their perceptions about living and dying were not to be rudely adjusted. By a lengthy terminal illness, for example.

I think for most of us, developing a relationship with the reality of our deaths is valuable and necessary as we grow older, if we are to live fully and well into old age.

There are, of course, limits. During a very busy period of my work as a funeral celebrant, I was reading bits of "The Tempest" again, following the live screening of the RSC's superb production. 

I reached Prospero's lines about going home to Milan and retiring, and he says "when every third thought shall be my grave," I caught myself thinking "only every third? Lucky old sod." 

H'mmm. Time for a rest and a little less work.

Billy Collins on Mortality via Drowning

 

This isn't really, or only, about actually drowning..

What the fire said

This is the little church up our lane. Plenty of gravestones, plenty of memento mori. The churchyard is gearing up for its full-on spring burstings of celandines and primroses, and of course some daffs too.

 What, I hope you will soon be asking, has the coming of spring to do with this photo of our kitchen stove?

 (Can't hear anyone asking very loudly yet.....so I'd better carry on whilst you're still awake.)

In my work I encounter grieving people, and I'm dealing with some ongoing sadness myself at present. Grief, when it comes, is natural, and we would do better to go through it and accept it, than try to stifle or avoid it. (nb especially British chaps...)

So how best to live with the inevitable sadness of our human mortality? How to live with the impossibility, the raging unfairness and seemingly impossible fact of our extinction (to put it bluntly.) How - why - should we "put up with" the fact that it all comes to an end?

We might say, a little piously, that living with the awareness of death in our lives enriches them, makes them vivid and real, helps us live in the moment. True. Still, and all.....

So after walking up the lane and mementoing a spot of the mori, whilst at the same time enjoying the early spring springing, I sit down by the kitchen stove. I'll just be with the fire, look at the flames and think of nothing much.

Immensely calming. The fire is busy transforming substance into energy, heat and light. Feels lovely, looks lovely, feels...right. Part of me and my life. 

It's what the sun is busy doing, every star, the entire universe. Transforming, changing. If it didn't do that, nothing - you, me, the moons of Jupiter, the cat, daffodils - nothing would exist.

So yet again, feeling the reality of constant change as what life is, helps me with accepting mortality as what life is. This isn't so much an act of will or analysis, as it is the product of a sort of meditative state, I guess. Just being with it all, on its own terms, not mine.

It all feels right. Spring, gravestones, primroses - and the fire in the stove.

 Hope spring offers you some lovely moments, as the seasons' wheel turns, wherever you are.

David Eagleman's curious paradox/error: immortal mind stuff

I greatly admire David Eagleman for his little book "Sum" and for his excellent TV documentary series about" The Brain." He's a deep thinker, a neuroscientist and an excellent communicator.

But "here's the thing," as he likes to say when he unleashes another fascinating insight upon us. At one stage in his documentary, he talks about the demonstrable fact that many of our actions by-pass the conscious self, either because we respond too quickly, or it's an instinctive reaction beyond the reach of conscious thought. My example comes from cricket: a batsman facing a fast bowler has 1/5th of a second to "decide" what stroke to play after the ball bounces. He has no time to think about anything much, it's all in training and preparation, and stroke selection before the ball lands in front of him. 

Eagleman uses a scarcely believeable sequence of a young boy doing tricks with plastic cups, and afterwards the boy says no, he doesn't think about it at all, he's just trained himself to do it, speeding up bit by bit until it's automatic.

Eagleman describes how a child's brain develops, and becomes an individual consciousness, a mind. And how each morning when we wake up, we re-build, super-fast, our self-awareness, our sense of self. 

And how our memories are not a storage cabinet, but are also re-built from established patterns of connections between brain cells. So a mind isn't a thing, it's one of the things a brain does, all the time when we are awake. We are, as I have banged on about before, processes, always changing. We change our memories as we revisit them. The idea of the self as a thing, a constant, is a misleading illusion, as a north Indian sage realised in the sixth century BCE. And now neuroscience seems to be backing him up.

So far so good. Our brains and our bodies are a continuous system, cycling stuff around, and sometimes - often - our conscious minds are unaware of stuff we do. 

Our emotions are an essential part of this brain/body cycling. He showed us a woman who as a result of a brain injury (motor-bike accident) lost most of her emotional capacity in the area of decision-making. She suffers a lot because of it, because the smallest decision is extremely disturbing for her. We need our emotions to help us decide things. Reason plus emotion = a decision. That's why pure and absolute objectivity is impossible.

He also shows us how our bodies respond to emotions before our conscious minds do; an emotional response is rooted in our bodies. We may sweat, the electric conductivity of our skin may change, our eyes may show widening irises when someone attracts us, and "we," our conscious selves, our egos, know nothing of this. It's a body/brain response, not a mind/self-aware ego thing.



But I think he contradicts himself. In the last episode he did some stuff on how difficult it is to create truly humanoid artificial intelligence in a computer system. (I'd be interested to know what he thinks of the recent news that a Google "Deep Mind" AI has defeated the world's best (human!) Go player.)

But in this final last episode, he starts down the road of ways in which we could re-create the entire neurological activity of a brain. (Watch it on iPlayer if you are interested, it's good stuff.) If a brain is what it does, not what it is, maybe we could capture that unbelievably complex neurological totality and upload it. We wouldn't need "the wet stuff," as he so charmingly calls it! We would have immortalised a brain.

We could defeat death....Oh dear me no, did he really say that? Now we are surely talking misleading illusions again. 

Firstly, you might upload the totality of neural patterns, but that isn't a brain, nor a mind, nor a person, because all those bodily interactions aren't there. He's shown us that earlier in the series. We may be no more than a vast complex of tiny electro-magnetic interactions, but those interactions need to be in a body if they are to be a person.

And secondly, people - us - are built in time and end in time. I can't imagine what it would feel like to be a mind (of a sort) in a machine that wasn't time-bound. 

Or maybe I can: it would be called hell, it would be a kind of eternal madness. 

We, the people, are life, we are death. Or we are not people. Who wants to be a brain that isn't a person?

You said it, David! My mind is all of me, not merely the pattern of my neurons - it works both ways.

Give me life, give me death.

Let's separate the sci-fi from the wonders of reality. Let's accept the miracle of our mortality. Let's stop pretending that we won't die. If we can do that, we can really live. Now. In this moment.

The fear of death and the power of meditation

Many people will have heard of mindfulness in recent years, since it has become fairly widespread.

So I won’t say too much about what it is – a way of learning to meditate that derives from Buddhist thought and practice, but which can be practised whatever you do or don't believe. It has no religious content or spiritual reference. You could call it tactful Buddhist meditation practice for people of any or no religious faith. 

When I asked a Muslim friend of mine, a follower of Sufi, what he made of the course when it was over, he said that it was fine as far as it went, but it was only a gateway. I agree, and maybe more of that another time, but for now, I would like to say something about one of the many ways in which I think meditation of this sort can help any of us.

The most pressing need for mindfulness meditation is often expressed by people suffering chronic pain (a bad back might be an example) or depression and anxiety.

I came to it for different reasons.

I’m a funeral celebrant, and although my training was good at the practical level of organizing and delivering ceremonies, managing procedures and so on, it did almost nothing to prepare me for the realities of regular contact with bereaved people. Listening to them, and looking at a coffin once or twice a week, naturally tends to make one a bit thoughtful about mortality in general and about the obvious but not always welcome awareness that one’s own life will come to an end.

As we grow older, it seems to me natural to consider the end of life more frequently and perhaps a little more intensely than in younger years. What may come up is, simply, the fear of death. This is arguably a biologically-driven and perfectly sensible fear; animals are death-averse; I suppose in evolutionary terms it’s so that they can produce young.

But us lot (homo allegedly sapiens) have a blessing and a curse: we know our lives will end. It’s a fair guess that the antelope does not worry about when and how she will die until the cheetah actually lands on her. She may twitch a bit if she thinks a cheetah is in the area, but that's not the same as worrying about her death years before it happens.

Our death awareness gives rise to lots of good things, I’m sure. Unlike the antelope, we can make plans and wills, projecting our care for those we love into a future without us; unlike the antelope, our mortality awareness results in great artistic expression, which nurtures us. But our death awareness sometimes needs managing, so that it does not become an overwhelming anxiety.

There’s much said and written about attitudes to death and dying, different forms of ritual and ceremony to help those who have been bereaved and, within belief systems, to help souls on to a better world; be that as it may, I simply wanted something to stop me getting gloomy, and to help with the tension of running a ceremony that has to be right first and only time.

Mindfulness meditation has been a big help, in this and many other ways too. It’s not so much that I meditate about, or on, the area of mortality. It’s more that the practice of staying in the moment, and returning to the present moment when my thoughts want to skip on, has given me more balance, a greater sense of accessible calm. It’s indirect, and cumulatively powerful.It's there when you need it.

My guess is that meditating regularly would help many people if they suffer from anxiety about the inescapable fact of human mortality. Not at once, not as if by magic, but gradually, over time - and the more regular the practice the steadier the progress.

A poet takes tea on January 1st.

Don't you just love the way he develops his thought and his feelings in counterpoint with the actuality of making his breakfast tea as the day dawns? He is a poet of the profound within the ordinary. And what about the toughness and density of the final image?



NEW YEAR'S DAY
by Billy Collins

Everyone has two birthdays
according to the English essayist Charles Lamb,
the day you were born and New Year’s Day—
a droll observation to mull over
as I wait for the tea water to boil in a kitchen
that is being transformed by the morning light
into one of those brilliant rooms of Matisse.
“No one ever regarded the First of January
with indifference,” writes Lamb,
for unlike Groundhog Day or the feast of the Annunciation,
this one marks nothing but the passage of time,
I realized, as I lowered a tin diving bell
of tea leaves into a little body of roiling water.
I admit to regarding my own birthday
as the joyous anniversary of my existence
probably because I was, and remain
to this day in late December, an only child.
And as an only child--
a tea-sipping, toast-nibbling only child
in a colorful room this morning--
I would welcome an extra birthday,
one more opportunity to stop what we are doing
for a moment and reflect on my being here on earth.
And one more birthday might be a consolation
to us all for having to face a death-day, too,
an X in a square
on some kitchen calendar of the future,
the day when each of us is thrown off the train of time
by a burly, heartless conductor
as it roars through the months and years,
party hats, candles, confetti, and horoscopes
billowing up in the turbulent storm of its wake.

from the book, "Ballistics," © Random House 2008

mortality and the turning seasons

There can be a frisson of melancholy as autumn turns towards winter, especially after such a wonderful late September as we have just had. One of these photos was taken in late May and one on October the first. The October day had a delighftful chill to it towards evening, but otherwise the two days had a similar feel.

One is a beach on Pen Llyn, the other on Ynys Môn; I'll leave anyone who knows North Wales to work out which is which, and which is when.

Watching the subtle delight of autumn colours emerging day by day might remind me of time's wingéd chariot; however golden the autumn of my life may feel, it's still my autumn.

In truth, I don't often feel melancholy about autumn; that's not to claim any great effort of will or general self-bracing. I am hopelessly addicted to the cycle of the seasons. I once lived in a place with no real seasons, and I didn't like that aspect of the place. It felt wrong.

I love the process of seasonal change, and being in amongst it all.  Feeling the low vibrations of the turning wheel makes me belong, whether it's on a beach, or in the garden, where colour continues right on into autumn, against the backdrop of the changes in the hedgerows and trees all around us.

And if I'm lucky enough to have a few quiet minutes on a Llyn cliff-top, to hear the sea below, then I am in the moment, able to accept the turning of the years. 

I have been fortunate, come what may.

"Acceptance of mortality yields an expansion of being"

From Rilke:

"I am not saying that we should love death, but rather that we should love life so generously, without picking and choosing, that we automatically include it (life’s other half) in our love. This is what actually happens in the great expansiveness of love, which cannot be stopped or constricted. It is only because we exclude it that death becomes more and more foreign to us and, ultimately, our enemy.

It is conceivable that death is infinitely closer to us than life itself… What do we know of it?"

 by Joanna Macy:

"In the face of impermanence and death, it takes courage to love the things of this world and to believe that praising them is our noblest calling. Rilke’s is not a conditional courage, dependent on an afterlife. Nor is it a stoic courage, keeping a stiff upper lip when shattered by loss. It is courage born of the ever-unexpected discovery that acceptance of mortality yields an expansion of being. In naming what is doomed to disappear, naming the way it keeps streaming through our hands, we can hear the song that streaming makes."

All from:

http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/12/10/joanna-macy-a-year-with-rilke-death-mortality/

via Annee, to whom big thanks.

The fear of death - Hildilid's Night

If you are much troubled, more than average, by the thought that life will end, I want to see if I can say anything that might be useful to you.

Maybe the first thing to say is that you are not alone. We are people, but people are animals, life forms, and our bodies are vehicles for the force we call a human life.

Because we are alive, we are naturally death-averse; most of us most of the time try to avoid death, the only exceptions being desperately unhappy and self-destructive people. Even people who seek out dangerous activities don't actually want to die doing them, they just want the thrill of getting close. Being death-averse is how a life preserves itself, whether it's a sea-slug or a duke. So it’s perfectly natural, at a biological level. 

So being death-averse works at the level of instinct and action. But being aware of one's own mortality is a different matter. Antelope become particularly death-averse if they sense a cheetah stalking the herd, but they don't, we can be pretty sure, worry about the fact that one day their life will end.

It seems certain that human beings are the only creatures on the planet who know, in advance of the event, that their lives will end. This can be seen as a blessing (we can plan our lives, at least to some degree, and value them because we know they’re limited) or a curse (most of us fear death) or most likely a mix of both.

In any case, we have to live our lives with this knowledge, however we feel about it. It's not just that people die, which makes us aware that we are not immortal; it's also that knowledge of our mortality tends to make us strive against it rather than accept it. Particularly now, in our culture.

Did you ever see an illustrated book for children called "Hildilid's Night?" Hildilid lived "high in the hills above Hexham," and every night she tried to get the darkness of night out of her little house. She would try to sweep it out, wash it out, slam the door against it - in the end, in her frustration, "I'm sorry to say," wrote Cheli Duran Ryan, she spat at it.

The night, of course, was unmoved. It stayed dark until the dawn. That is what nights do. But by the dawn, Hildilid was so exhausted by her futile struggle that she fell asleep, and slumbered right through the day until - nightfall, when once again, she battled in vain against the night....

Poor Hildilid. We're all Hildilids to some extent, because it's natural to be wary of the dark, if not to fear it. It's natural to have some fear of death, but it makes life difficult if we are Hildilids about our mortality, tiring ourselves out by fighting something that can’t be fought, instead of simply living our lives.

I’ll return to this business of our mortality (by which I mean the fact that life ends.) But a thought occurs to me: maybe what is really troubling you is loss, rather than the simple fact of mortality. That is, maybe it’s not death itself that’s troubling you, maybe it’s the thought that you might lose someone close to you. Big stuff, isn't it? I'll listen to the water and get back to you on that....