A blackbird struts behind my car. I sit at Rockport Harbor. A young Russian girl holds out her hand saying, "It's snowing!" Her brother, a few inches taller than his sister, asks the parents ahead of them pushing a stroller, "How could it be snowing in Spring?" They drive away. And, yes, it is snowing!
I've been reading and reflecting on the writings so far on this epilogue. They are wonderful and evocative!
And I think of my friend who died forty years ago, the one I just learned about last week. His daughter, I discover, has written a book of poems, many of which give a glimpse of the experience 40 years ago.
Here's one:
The Door Flies Open
There’s my mother at the kitchen table
with a bowl of soup.
I’m around the doorframe
where she goes to talk on the phone, twisting
the cord into the other room.
My dad is upstairs with the nurse.
A thread of steam
pulls up from the soup. The spoon
stays on the table. Sometimes
you have to watch the icicles in the windows,
check for movement in the clouds.
We can hear the nurse walking on our ceiling,
the toilet flushing in the wall, the cuckoo clock
that my dad brought back from Florence.
See how my mother has pulled back, like a sticker?
The world keeps falling into her
like the trees in the car windows.
She loves the names of the streets here:
Cedar, Walnut, Ash, all going north to
Priest Lake where they spent the week
Nixon resigned, sat in the car to listen to the news,
said Why are we here in these evergreens,
one after another? This isn’t New York.
They don’t have to clomp their shoes down hard
on the sidewalks, carry sandwiches
and umbrellas. This is no longer
the blue-mountained future.
She dips her spoon in the soup, cool enough now.
(-- from, Instructions for My Mother's Funeral, by Laura Read, c.2012)
Truth be told, I don't understand death -- not what it is, nor the things that are said about it, what happens after it occurs, nor the thinking that suggests, either way, it is a good thing or it is a bad thing.
But this is what I am learning:
- It is a fact.
- Just about everything dies, eventually.
- It is poignant.
- We either think about it, or we don't think about it.
- It evokes deep and profound feelings.
That's the learning. Now, I ask myself, what about the education?
A few weeks ago I defined (for the 2000th attempt) what education might be: "To emerge out into presence."
Having watched Wit last week, I am struck again that perhaps it is the process itself of experiencing life that death is about. Said differently, death is less about the cessation of life than it is about the living of life as life unfolds itself.
What we call 'death' is the curtain drawn between what we know and what we don't know.
This wording suggests to me that what we don't know is what we are afraid of. And this, I suspect, is true. We do seem to fear what we don't know (e.g. the stranger, the foreigner, the immigrant, the different sex, gender, the unknown other).
And yet, the unknown, and that which we don't know, are as much a part of us as our toes, the hair on top of our heads, and the thumb that scratches our chin. I wriggle my toes, I (used to) brush my hair, and I do a 'thumbs up' to express approval of this or that.
In other words, I engage what I don't know, I interact with it, I respect it for what it is -- the unknown.
The snow falls heavier. I still have my snow tires on. The blackbird has flown off. I turn engine on to heat up car -- there's a chill.
I've long wondered what it meant to dwell in the between.
- There's an easier version: to dwell within what is said or takes place between you and me.
- And there's a more difficult version: to dwell in the place between the known and the unknown.
- Then there's a meditative, reflective, contemplative version: to dwell in the veiled/unveiling space that is the curtain -- that revealing wonder -- crossing borders, straddling boundaries, stepping into the thin place between everything and everything.
Ranciere and Jacotot spoke of the panecastic vision -- everything in everything -- suggesting, it seems to me, that there remains yet a marvelous field of exploration that might diminish our hesitation and fear about the between place of life in death/death in life.
I'm going to think a little further about 'death' as curtain drawn between what we know and what we don't know.
Aristotle began his writings on Metaphysics with:
Part 1
"ALL men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things.
He might be right, that everyone of us desires to know. That we long to emerge out into the presence of what is true, good, just, loving, and real. That there seems to be a curtain we must put our hand to.
And draw it.
Inch by inch.
Letting light through.
To see and feel what is there.
To share with one another.
