SNC

Living and Dead

It seems to me that there are only the living and the dead. Once I thought there were exceptions—namely, that which has not ever lived. But I do not know that it is possible to experience anything as never having lived. I learnt of the the Miskito kingdom lately, and read a little about its pre-Christian pantheon of gods: Lapta in the sun, Kati in the moon, Slilma in the stars, and so forth. I do not know how accurate these assignments are, since what I have read in other sources has seemed much more confusing and ambivalent. But reading it, about spirits who are no longer believed in by a people which is largely Moravian and Catholic, made me feel much the same. I also do not believe that the sun, the moon, or the stars have an ongoing life. They are present in the world, yet they are not present to themselves. The sun has no sensuous experience of being the sun which it is bound to protect, any more than a corpse has a stake in holding together the image of what was once its face, with the tongue it tasted with and the eyes it saw with. The decay of the sun lasts much longer greater than my own lifespan, billions of years yet to come. Once this existence was seen by human eyes to be a lifespan, to be Lapta crowned in the glory of the sky. When I look at the sun, I cannot help but see that this life is not there: knowing as I do how contingent life is—on the maintenance of cytoplasm and membranes, of organelles and proteins, hyphae and spores, xylem and phloem, fat and bone and nerves, I see nothing of the kind going on in the sun. But that does not mean that I have the capacity to look and see other than god’s corpse.

What does it mean to me to be alive? When I am alive, I am as yet not totally undone. I am permitted to have a stake in things, not to be indifferent to things, to take in the wonders that surround me. I have a sensuous project in the world. Other creatures, both living and dead, appear to me, and I am not indifferent to them and to the effects they have on me; I am not indifferent to my gladness or to my sorrow, to my desire being filled or thwarted, to waxing or waning. All the time I experience this profound involvement, and through it, I experience not being alone, since there are so many others just like me. To be alive I must experience being undone again and again, but not a complete undoing; I suffer, but not yet to death, and so there is room for future joy, and even for finding what was once my cause of suffering to be my cause of joy. Yet I know also that this experience is contingent, and I must investigate the causes of that contingency. My perspective is profoundly shaped by what I have been taught about myself: that we know that these portions of flesh, these organs and these nerves, are involved in producing the manifold of experience that I am privy to, and we know that these decay in time. As it has yet to happen to me, I cannot learn it for myself, but I find the message credible and terrifying, since I do not know what it means to cease in this manner. And since my life is a perpetual encounter with other creatures, I am also led to determine the implications for these others, to find what is ongoing in them.

Oh beautiful sun, you who support me every day, wouldn’t I be happier to see you as alive? But I do not know of any way to be alive without the absurdly specific and contingent matter of life. If you at least had cells, perhaps I could think that you at least had a lifestyle, a way of existing in a niche which you had inherited from your forebears, which you were preserving and adapting, and which you could pass on to the future. I would like to give you something of myself, like you have given me so much of yourself. But if I were to believe that, I would lose what I have learnt of myself and my own contingency. I have received hard-won knowledge that one day I shall lie in the dust, and God will seek me, and I will be gone. If I could hoist you into my being by my own will, I could hoist myself out as well, since I could hoist my skull and other bones into serving as a living being. Do you think I feel no temptation to do so? It is the most tempting thing in the world! But how can I give you something of my own condition if I refuse to be as honest as I can about what my condition is? I would be giving you a lie.

I feel that my being is ecstatic, because I cannot find anything in myself which is anything but another’s ecstasy. My whole mode of life is the inheritance of billions of years of lives, working this planet into the biosphere in which I live, giving me both my setting and my tools for adapting to it. I speak in borrowed words, borrowed grammar, borrowed inflections in a borrowed language, combining borrowed thoughts. I see with borrowed light. Neither is there any creature who seems to have made the first loan, since it all came from the very dust to which I return, which is mute and senseless and has nothing to say for itself. My life is borrowed from death. How can it be, since life precedes death? In fact, it is impossible for me to feel, in truth, that there is no death before life, or else I would again be dishonest to myself, and not be honest to anyone else. It is the nature of a living being to experience undoing as death; it is not in the nature of a dead being to experience undoing as anything else. Therefore the great undoing which precedes my doing is a great expanse of the dead, in which there always lurks the suggestion of a prior life, of the gods of the heavens, lands, seas, and caves.

I cannot help but consider fire. Fire is not alive; still, fire has a prior life. Earth is the only planet we know of with fire, because it is the only place we know of where there is biological material to burn. But fire is indifferent to having been alive, as all the dead are. Fire is not in a different category from lightning just by virtue of its material components having once had a life to live. Neither do corpses have any yearning to claim special treatment because once they were persons. It is not in the nature of death to have any care for prior life. All of the dead are as fire. The gods, to me, are fire, and they are in all places, filled with a deathly indifference to whether they ever were alive. But because I am alive, and I am not indifferent to the indifference of death, there is no hope for me to thoroughly see fire as simply unconnected with life. The dead, and death, matter to me, and so I cannot honestly perceive them as other than dead.

To whom was St. Francis speaking when he spoke the Canticle of the Sun? He spoke of the sun, the moon and stars, the wind and clouds, water and fire, the earth, those who forgive and sustain tribulations and live in peace, and of death herself. He spoke of them as siblings, but he did not speak to them, but only to God. Remarkable how, while he speaks of how all these creatures sustain life, he does not speak of any living creature in his list of creatures, except those who forgive. And those who forgive and sustain tribulation are also the dead: this is the image of the saints and of Christ, that they go to the grave. Francis says that the second death does not touch them, but also, that none who are alive escape the first death; they are dead once over. Likewise the sun, moon and stars, winds and clouds, water and fire, and earth are dead once over. They are not doubly undone, but they are undone. Francis, too, is undone now, and when he spoke the canticle, his undoing was not far off.

Can you be siblings, or friends, with the dead? Can the dead be your parents or your children? It cannot be like befriending or loving the living, because to be a friend in life means to deal with people who are not indifferent to you and to what you do to them. This is undone with death. But part of friendship is not that one is not indifferent to one’s friends, but that one’s friends are not indifferent to you. And these two parts cannot wholly be put asunder. When I have been most desolate, and most driven to my own death, my joys and sorrows have been carried greatly by other people. I did not seek my good, but because they loved me, their good was in a sense my good. I lived in them. And still, I live in my friends, each of whom cares for me in their own way, each of whom has my imprint upon them in a manner which is not quite the same as anyone else. They would be my friends even if I died, because their life could not be separated from my life, nor their good from my good. And this is also what it means to be dead, and not merely to be not-alive. The sun has no sensuous experience that I can fathom, and is indifferent to what that would mean. Still, I cannot be indifferent to the sun—which I must view with St. Francis as brother sun, giving the day, by whom God enlightens us, beautiful and radiant in great splendour, bearing the likeness of the Highest. What I am is borrowed from the sun, and what I am is loaned to the sun in this commitment. Am I not then a friend to the sun? Yes, but within limits, and restrained from the right to any enthusiasm or extremism. If the sun is to have some of my life, I must have some of the death of the sun, and the image of the sun which I love and am must be one of a sun who does not have my nerves and sinews, whom I cannot please and who stands indifferently toward me. When this is lost or ignored, I no longer encounter the sun, and I become false and a liar.

You can imagine that the same applies to the more conventional dead. I love Faustus—the image of Faustus supports me and sustains me and has shaped me. I am commited to adoring him and speaking well of him, and remembering him. But I can only adore the version of him who has decayed and does not know me. I love my many siblings who die in factory farms, for whom I am profoundly grieved, and I think of them daily. But I can only think of them who I have not met in the flesh, and who cannot meet me, being slaughtered. I love my friend who once loved me deeply, who has died. But I can only love her and be her friend with the recognition that once she was not indifferent to what I could do for her, including to all my failings, and now she is indifferent to my attempts to repair them. Still I will claim to be her friend, because I owe her my life and my capacity for friendship, as she also gave her life and then her death to me, to shape my existence and to be my companions, until I too shall die.

And what then? What of that day, when I am shut up in the grave together with all other creatures? Life on Earth has a limited scope—it does not last forever. How can there be friendship between the dead? How can they even be dead, if there is no one living to consider them dead? Not even death, it seems, considers the dead to be dead. I cannot, with my living thoughts, define the meaning of my death; it is beyond my rights and jurisdiction, and I will not care for it when there is no “I” to care. That would itself be unfriendly and dishonest, and impede my capacity to befriend the dead, if I thought that I could for even one dead creature define the meaning of their deathly state for them, now that they have no voice to dispute me. I play the living creature, as we all do, but there is an end to the playing—but there is no “I” which stands before play and can be extracted from it. I cannot speak coherently.

Still I hope for the sign of Jonah: a vomiting fish. I hope for what is described in the last of the Odes of Solomon: “Sheol saw me and was in misery, and Death vomited me up and many together with me.” In this line, at least, it seems that God is an emetic. God, the life of the world, goes to die. And the effect of that death is to abolish the dividing wall, to render the cavern which is sealed with no exit into a stomach in the process of vomiting. God, the life of the world, is not indifferent. God, as love, rejoices to bear and believe in and hope for and endure all things, which is not indifference. This grand sensitivity, also, is my friend among the dead, and dies to reassure me. Come ahead now, step forward, toward the mountain of skulls which has taken me and takes your beloved again and again. Good creature, come ahead now—let it in—let this death dwell within you. Yes, you will die and be undone. Your love for the dead will not keep you from dying any more than your callousness would. But don’t be too afraid to love them. Why should you be? The ending is not the same as the beginning. As it is above, it is not so below. Come into the bowels by which I am swallowed and scoured with acid. I am also thrown up. We shall not all die, but we shall all be changed. Cowardice is the most terrible sin.