Lamentation 6: nothing could come to you

Someone we have known who has passed away often remains startlingly present for us. We may, for example, suddenly be reminded of them by a smell or a view, or by an activity we had shared with them, such as eating – or preparing – a particular dish. Or, in moments of accomplishment or success or transcendence, we may feel the urge to share our thoughts and feelings with them, only to be overcome (yet again) by the realization that it is no longer possible.

More profoundly poignant, however, is a circumstance that the brilliant Spanish author Javier Marías describes in his story Dark Back of Time: “It's frightening to think of hours – soon distant and forgotten, yet so slow and negligible while they're going by – during which our friends and relatives think we're alive when in fact we are dead...” (179)  He captures this from the point-of-view of the person who has died, but consider the implications for those of us among the friends and relatives. We go about our lives assuming that those we know are out there, going about theirs, and we may even have them in our thoughts or plans or actions, only to discover later that at that moment they were no longer among the living.

It can happen in so many ways: I have sent a letter to a friend that came back marked ‘deceased’; Christmas greetings from my family and from me arrived for my grandmother just days after she had passed away; you are awakened from a deep sleep, on a night seemingly like every other, to a call that your mother has died; the truly heart-rending thought of parents planning after-school activities with their children who they don’t yet know won’t be coming home…

In Three Poems for James Wright, the marvelous poet Mary Oliver captures the utter finality of such moments, while also reminding us of the accompanying beauty of the larger, ineluctable cycle of nature, carrying on without us in its own eternal rhythm. 

it was the time
the willows do what they do
every spring, so I cut some
down by a dark Ohio creek and was ready
to mail them to you when the news came
that nothing
could come to you
in time
anymore
ever. (225)

 

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I have taken the selection above from Mary Oliver’s collection New and Selected Poems, Volume 1, my review of which is linked to at right.

Other quotes from Javier Marías’s Dark Back of Time can be found here; I read the book before I began doing these reviews, but I can highly recommend it.  My reviews of others of Marias's works can be found here.

Another entry in an occasional series of posts of lamentation. (The introduction to this series can be found here, and links to the complete series here.)

Lamentation 5: A golden cup his mistress // Gave him, with parting breath

Midway through Goethe’s Faust: Part One, Margareta returns home unsettled by a first meeting with Faust on a nearby street. Ruminating on her uneasiness as she undresses in her room, she absentmindedly begins singing a lament that tells of a king who has lost his wife. To his dying day the king keeps the memory of his beloved alive through a golden chalice she had given him, a gift he holds dearer than all else he has.

In Thule there reigned a monarch,
And he was true till death.
A golden cup his mistress
Gave him, with parting breath.

That was his dearest chalice,
No other did he prize,
And ever, as he raised it,
The tears stood in his eyes.

Then came his time of dying,
His wealth of state was told;
He left his heir his treasure,
Except his cup of gold.

Surrounded by his vassals
A royal feast held he,
High in the castle’s state-room,
Ancestral, by the sea.

There stood the royal master,
Drank, in life’s sunset glow,
And hurled the sacred goblet
To the ocean, deep below.

He saw it plunge and founder
And sink deep in the sea.
The light sank from his vision,
And never again drank he. (126)

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Another entry in an occasional series of posts of lamentation. (The introduction to this series can be found here, and links to the complete series here.)

Lamentation 4: we are such stuff as dreams are made on

I found this when sorting through my mom's things, after she passed away last year.  On a loose sheet of paper from almost a decade earlier, she noted

4/5/09 found in: John Cleever - The Wapshot Chronicle:
Shakespeare: Prospero's speech -

"Our revels now are ended.
These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air.  We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

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The full quote, from <u>The Tempest</u> (Act 4, Scene 1) is

Our revels now are ended.  These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.  We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

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Another entry in an occasional series of posts of lamentation. (The introduction to this series can be found here, and links to the complete series here.)

Lamentation 3: the reflection that her life left behind

In Ernst Wiechert's novel The Simple Life (Das einfache Leben), the main character, Thomas, keeps company with his wife at her bedside, as she succumbs to the inexorable ravages of an incurable disease.  In the hour after midnight she dies, and Thomas sits with her body, observing it as the hours pass, contemplating the fragility of what she has left behind.

The poor form passed away … and that which they call immortal remained in what is frail.  In [their son's] blood, in memories, in the reflection that her life left behind.  One part he himself would preserve, one part [their son], but most of it would fade away like the sunset. One would know that she had been, and that people, animals and plants had welcomed her, but the dawn snuffed her out, and the new day covered her up. (220)

Die arme Form verging … und das, was sie unvergänglich nannten, blieb im Gebrechlichen.  In [dem] Blut [ihres Sonnes], in Erinnerungen, in dem Widerschein, den ihr Leben zurückließ. Einen Teil würde er selbst bewahren, einen Teil [ihr Son], das meiste aber würde vergehen wie eine Abendröte. Man würde wissen, daß sie gewesen war, Menschen, Tiere und Pflanzen hatten sie empfangen, aber das Morgenrot löschte sie aus, und der neue Tag deckte sie zu. (220)

For mom, 29 January 2019.

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Other reviews / information:

The translation of the quote from the original German is mine.

My review of The Simple Life (Das einfache Leben) here.

More quotes from the book here.

Another entry in an occasional series of posts of lamentation. (The introduction to this series can be found here, and links to the complete series here.)

Lamentation 2: the pointless dawn that will never have know you

In his book The Man of Feeling, Javier Marías evokes the heart-breaking loss of watching a lover die, and the acutely inescapable reality it brings with it of one's own mortality.

When you die, I will truly mourn you. I will approach your transfigured face to plant desperate kisses on your lips in one last effort, full of arrogance and faith, to return you to the world that has rendered you redundant. I will feel that my own life bears a wound and will consider my own history to have split in two by that final, definitive moment of yours. I will tenderly close your surprised, reluctant eyes and I will watch over your white, mutant body all through the night and into the pointless dawn that will never have known you. I will remove your pillow and the damp sheets. Incapable of conceiving of life without your daily presence and seeing you lying there, lifeless, I will want to rush headlong after you. I will visit your tomb and, alone in the cemetery, having climbed up the steep hill and having looked at you, lovingly, wearily, through the inscribed stone, I will talk to you. I will see my own death foretold in yours, I will look at my own photo and, recognizing myself in your stiff features, I will cease to believe in the reality of your extinction because it gives body and credibility to my own. For no one is capable of imagining their own death. (169)

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Other reviews / information:

My review of The Man of Feeling here.

Another entry in an occasional series of posts of lamentation. (The introduction to this series can be found here, and links to the complete series here.)

Lamentation: hammer the sky

In Khalil Gibran’s “On Joy and Sorrow” (from The Prophet), the poet describes the two emotions of his poem’s title as ‘inseparable’ from one another. Persuasive though his arguments may be regarding the shared source and strength of these feelings, I have generally found myself more enduringly affected by profound expressions of sorrow than of joy.

It has been lamentations that have stuck with me, well beyond the moment I first encountered them in my reading or elsewhere. For while joy seems fleeting, its emotional high ephemeral, sorrow and its origins maintain a powerful and lasting presence in my memory.

With that introduction, I begin an occasional series of posts of lamentations that have had such a deep impact on me.

The selection below comes from Annie Dillard’s wonderful book For the Time Being. I must first offer apologies to Dillard, for although I have accurately quoted the selection below, I know that I have taken it out of the context of her engaging book on what it means to be alive. Nonetheless, her image of a man hammering the sky has remained with me, a visceral expression of rage against the heavens.

On the shore beyond me I saw a man splitting wood. He was a distant figure in silhouette across the water. I heard a wrong ring. He raised his maul and it clanged at the top of its rise. He drove it down. I could see the wood divide and drop in silence. The figure bent, straightened, raised the maul with both arms, and again I heard it ring just as its head knocked the sky. Metal banged metal as a clapper bangs its bell. Then the figure brought down the maul in silence. Absorbed on the ground, skilled and sure, the stick figure was clobbering the heavens. 

I saw a beached red dory. I could take the red dory, row out to the guy, and say: Sir. You have found a place where the sky dips close. May I borrow your maul? You maul and your wedge? Because, I thought, I too could hammer the sky --- crack it at one blow, split it at the next --- and inquire, hollering at God the compassionate, the all-merciful, WHAT'S with the bird-headed dwarfs?

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Other reviews / information:

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf