HOMER, PART THE FOURTH: A GATHERING OF SHADES
M.C. Gardner
In a skit by the 2nd
City comedy troupe, a reporter interviews a priest whose has returned to life
after a near-death experience.
Reporter:
"Father could you give us the particulars of your experience?
Priest: “Well, me
heart stopped. I saw the doctors below from the vantage of the ceiling. They
were trying to revive me. Then I was enveloped by a white light and joined
thousands of othes journeying through a lengthy tunnel. At the end of the tunnel
we arrived at a full bar in the middle of a happy hour.
The drinks and sushi were on the house.
After a few well-heeled libations we were all in pretty good spirits, so
to speak.. The happy hour concluded
and then we board on a bus and we're told to say goodbye to our egos. The next
stop was to be our final baptism, our total immersion into the nothingness from
which we came. It was at that point the doctors got my heart going again and I
returned to the hospital.”
Reporter: “Well gee, Father, that’s really fascinating.
But there are a lot of people that were kind of counting on life after
death.
Priest: “Oh no, me
lad, I’m afraid there is none of that, no life after death. But there
is this
really great cocktail party.
Speaking of Death in Ulysses, Joyce asserts that "the gravediggers
in Hamlet show the profound knowledge of the human heart ... People talk about
you a bit then they follow (you) dropping (as well) into a hole one after
another." He imagines the sentiments of the dead: "As you are
now so once we were."
In the context of Homer and
Joyce I want to direct this essay to three major worldviews of life and death.
Are there only three? No. These three, however, comprise the majority
opinion of the last five thousand years.
1.
Judeo-Christian-Greek nexus. The WorldView of Man as an
artifact. A clay vessel in whom the breath of life was breathed by the
artificer. Bound by the caprice of a creator, man endeavors to do the will of
his God or gods. Death in the
Levant
was a
shadowy affair. Witness chapter 28 of 1st
Samuel.. King Saul consults an oracle to conduct a ghostly interview with
the dead prophet Samuel.
a.
Witch of Endor.
Witch: "What shall I bring up out of
the ground?"
Saul: "Bring up Samuel… "
Witch: "I see a spirit coming out of
the ground -- an old man wearing a robe."
Samuel: "Why have you disturbed me
bringing me up out of the ground?"
Samuel
sounds less than sanguine and his was
the fate of those beloved of Yahweh.
b. Further to the West, Homer and Hesiod relate the history of the gods in
their respective masterworks. Hesiod's Theogony
speaks of the ascendance of Zeus over the nature gods Heaven and Earth.
During a visit to the land of the shades, Homer encounters Agamenmnon, Oedipus,
Achilles, Prometheous, Tantalous and Sisyphus. It is this journey that will
inspire the underworld itineraries of Virgil and Dante. After
meeting with Tiresias, Odysseus sees the shade of his recently deceased
mother:
Mother: "Child how could you cross
alive into this gloom at the world’s end?"
Odysseus: "Mother I came here, driven to
the land of death in want of prophecy from Terisias’ shade… but come tell me
this and tell me clearly, what was the bane that pinned you down in death?"
Mother: "Your father
lies now even so, in
Ithaca
, with
aching heart, and longs for your return, while age comes upon him. So I, too,
pined away, so doom befell me, only my loneliness for you, Odysseus, took my
life away."
Odysseus: "O
my mother, will you not stay, be still, here in my arms, may we not, in this
place of Death, as well, hold one another, touch with love, and taste salt
tears’ relief … or is this all hallucination, sent against me by the iron
queen, Persephone, to make me groan again?"
In
Christianity death steps out of the shadows and into total darkness. Man is a
created being who, therefore, has a beginning but given the artifact of an
immortal soul, it is imagined that he has no end:
c.
From
Joyce's Portrait
of the Artist.
Priest:
"Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of
that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into
existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. It is a never-ending storm of
darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies
are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. All the fifth of the
world, all the offal and scum of the world, shall run there as to a vast reeking
sewer … Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and
decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption.
Imagine such a corpse prey to flames… giving off dense choking fumes of
nauseous loathsome decomposition. And
then image this sickening stench, multiplied a million fold and a million fold
again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the
reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus.
Imagine all this and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench
of Hell.”
2.
Indian World View: The Christian nightmare becomes the Hindu dream.
a.
Life is viewed as a cosmic dream - but there is
essentially only one dreamer. Brahman is by himself in the universe. He falls
asleep and dreams the world. Each being that he dreams believes the dictates of
their dream ego but that is maya - the measurement of oneself against the
infinite - this is an illusion, because one is the infinite - the one without
second. Tat Tvam Asi - thou art that.
This is reiterated in Buddhism where all things are seen as
Buddha-things. An ignorant man is no less the Buddha than an enlightened one.
Reincarnation is a popular answer to death in both faiths but to the adept in
either, such is not readily apparent:
b. .Ananda Coomaraswamy: “the notion of a reincarnation in the popular
sense of the return of deceased individual to rebirth on this earth represnts
only a misunderstanding of the doctrines of heredity … and regeneration.”
c.
Alan Watts: “I wish,
therefore, to commend what to many students of these doctrines may seem to be a
startling thesis: that Buddhists and Vedanists who understand their own
doctrines profoundly … do not believe in reincarnation in any literal
sense.”
d.
Sogyal Rinpoche ( of the Dali Lama's circle) comments on the search for
reincarnated leaders or Tulkus: "What continues in a Tulku?
Is the Tulku exactly the same person as the figure he reincarnates?
He both is and he isn't. He
motivation and dedication to help all beings is the same, but he is not actually
the same person. "
If
we come to identify ourselves with the preceding generations the fact of our
birth will seem a fable. If in approaching oblivion we believe the eye of a
newborn to be our own, our seeming twilight will be the foundling of the dawn.
Our identity is not bound irrevocably to flesh.
The exterior world is a landscape of the mind. So formulated the wind is
breath and a river, blood.
2.
Chinese World View.
1.
Chinese World View.
a.
Taoism - Organic Universe.
The universe is alive. The Tao embodies the male and female principle.
All features of life and death resolve themselves into the infinite singularity
of the Tao: "The knowledge of the ancients was perfect.
In what way was it perfect? There
were those who believed that nothing existed.
Such knowledge is indeed perfect and ultimate and cannot be
improved."
b.
The
nothingness of the Tao merged nicely with the Shunyata of the Buddhist. It
crossed into
China
during the century of
India
's
Nagarjuna. Nargarjuna is the great
genius of Indian Buddhism and with the exception of the Buddha, revered over all
others. His influence is transplanted and flowers
in
China
as
Hua Yen, in
Tibet
as
Vajrayanna and in
Japan
as
Zen. Nagarjuna preached the
Middle Way
.
Reality is beyond words. The middle way is between opposing notions. A
luminous interpenetration accords every moment. Existence is a dialectic between
the singular and the infinite. The one encompasses and reflects the other. The
discord of our mental assertions prevents us from experiencing its fundamental
explicitness.
"The
entire ocean is embodied in one wave, yet the ocean does not shrink.
A small wave includes the great ocean, and yet the wave does not expand.
Though the ocean simultaneously extends itself to all waves, it does not
by this fact diversify itself. When the great ocean embraces one wave, nothing
hinders it from embracing all the other waves with its whole body.
When one wave includes the great ocean, all other waves also include the
ocean in its entirety. There is no
obstruction between them… Shih is completely identical, and not partially
identical, with Li. Therefore,
without causing the slightest damage to itself, an atom can embrace the whole
universe."
After moving from the individual circles of the Inferno and Purgatorio,
Dante adopts this stance in the Paradiso of the Divine Comedy:
“I
saw that in its depths there are enclosed bound up with love in one eternal
book, the scattered leaves of all the Universe – substance, and accidents, and
their relations, as though together fused in such a way that what I speak of is
a single light."
Whitman sees it the face of a dead solider in a
daybreak gray and dim. The corpse is covered by a government issue army
blanket. Whitman uncovers the face,
it is:
"a
face not child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;
Young man I think I know you -- I think this is the face of the Christ
himself, dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies."
Nietzche
believed all the names of history where himself. The poet Taliesin reported a
Universal memory: "I have been
a sword in the hand … a star… a tree … I was bewitched into sea foam … I
have been a word in a book."
In a stunning reversal of this sentiment, Borges imagines the dialectic
from the standpoint of the absolute:
My eyes saw what they had never seen--/ night and its many stars, / I knew
things smooth and gritty, uneven and rough, / the taste of honey and apple, /
water in the throat of thirst, the weight of metal in the hand; / the human
voice, the sound of footsteps in the grass / the smell of rain in
Galilee
.
Joyce seems to reiterate all these sentiments at the close of
"The Dead." Gabriel's
wife has related the memory of a sickly youth that loved her and died shortly
after he came to say goodbye on a rainy evening in
Dublin
. His
wife has fallen asleep and then Gabriel senses, as well, a gentle sleep
descending upon all the world:
“One by one they were all becoming shades… Generous tears filled
Gabriel’s eyes… in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a
young man standing under a dripping tree. Other
forms were near. His soul had
approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.
He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward flickering
existence. His own identity was
fading out into a grey impalpable world: the
solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was
dissolving and dwindling… A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the
window. It had begun to snow again.
He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the
lamplight… his soul swooned slowly as heard the snow falling faintly through
the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all
the living and the dead."
The epiphany of Joyce is also that of Schopenhauer:
"This separate thing which in that general stream has been but the
least vanishing particle, becomes, when so regarded an epiphany of the whole,
equivalent to the entire unending manifold of time."
Joyce calls it the
"the whole Jingbang lot."
Also from Ulysses: “Any object, intensely regarded, may be a
gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the Gods…That lies in space which I
in time must come to, ineluctably… and "no one is anything
… the hangman God is doubtless all in all in all of us … (we are) All or not
at all…. we are the Logos that suffers in us."
In
Tibetan Buddhism this witness is called the View: "What is the view? (It is
reality) looking at reality with its own eyes…
it is the face of Rigpa … the face seen upon the dissolution of the conceptual
mind. Proust sensed it in a cup of tea. It is the face
Joyce glimpsed on a summer day in
Dublin
. Bloom sees it while looking at the stars: "By God, I was lost in the
Milky Way."
Henry Miller glimpsed it in a Parisian brothel --
"… the legs are holding me like a pair of scissors… a deep
fissure in my brain opens up: all the images and memories that had laboriously
or absent-mindedly assorted, labeled, documented, filed, sealed and stamped
break forth pell-mell like ants pouring out of a crack in the side walk; the
world ceases to revolve, time stops, the nexus of my dreams is broken and
dissolved and my guts spill out in a grand schizophrenic rush, an evacuation
that leaves me face to face with the
absolute… I feel the whole world beneath me, a world tottering and crumbling,
a world used up and polished like a leper's skull… Clearer than all I see my
own grinning skull, see the skeleton dancing in the wind… the great circuit
which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh… I love everything
that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that bring us back to
the beginning where there is never an end, the milk of the breast and bitter
honey that flows from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and
dissolvent, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution. The image
of the beyond with the here and now…"
Near the end of Eliot's Little Gidding, the final Quartet of
Eliot's four, we find:
We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know it for the first time.
In a work of art; be it in Homer, Joyce, Miller or
Eliot we find that every moment brings us back to the beginning: where each
separate thing is equivalent to the entire unending manifold of time, the
whole Jingbang lot, the beginning where there is never an end.
