Tag: D.H. Lawrence

“No More Dying Then” – Resurrections of All Kinds

 

Spring is full of resurrections.  We watch trees come back to life and flowers peek through the dead leaves.  Spring brings Easter, of course, with its stories and promises of resurrection.  This Easter, I reread D.H. Lawrence’s novella, The Man Who Died, an alternate spin on the empty tomb, a lovely counter-tale about the missing body of Jesus.  In its way, it is as sacramental as the Biblical version.  Lawrence’s Jesus lies in a farmer’s yard, healing and thinking about his second chance at life, about the trap of language (“The Word is the midge that bites at evening”), and about the release of being reborn (“How good it is to have fulfilled my mission, and be beyond it.  Now I can be alone, and leave all things to themselves, and the fig-tree may be barren if it will, and the rich may be rich”).  As Jesus hides in the farmyard, he befriends a feisty cock (rooster) that throbs with life – and he heads out for his next chapter with the cock under his arm.  (A little symbolism there!)  Another kind of resurrection.

And there are resurrections closer to home.  After the close call of a cardiac arrest this winter, my husband has taken to calling this his “bonus time.”  Unlike many heart attack victims, he has not seemed to suffer depression, but rather seems to bask in this resurrection time with gratitude.  One more spring.  His appreciation of life has rubbed off on me.

Of course, resurrection does not always happen.  Our granddaughter had the hard experience this year of working over the body of a fellow choir member when he fell beside her as they processed down the aisle. She had been trained in CPR, and if he had survived it might have been a wonderful experience for her.  As it happened, he did not and the death was very hard to process.  But isn’t that why resurrections are so joyful – because they might not have happened?

There are many kinds of resurrections.  In his autobiography, G. K. Chesterton said that he became a Roman Catholic because he adored the rites of confession, penitence, and the washing away of sin, a weekly process for the resurrection of the soul:

Well, when a Catholic comes from Confession, he does truly, by definition, step out again into that dawn of his own beginning ….  He believes that in that dim corner, and in that brief ritual, God has really remade him in his own image.  He is now a new experiment of the Creator.  He is as much a new experiment as he was when he was really only five years old…. He may be grey and gouty; but he is only five minutes old.

That last bit is lovely with the vision of an oldster facing the world anew, feisty as a young lamb.

Shakespeare, as usual, has his own take on resurrection and immortality.  We think of his sonnets as love letters, but there are a very few that tackle other challenges of life.  I think most often in this regard of Sonnett 146, one of my favorites:

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
[Fooled by] these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more.

So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And, Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

I like Shakespeare’s form of “resurrection” because it is an awakening to a new way of life, that not only frees us from the hold of the body and other earthly possessions, but simultaneously frees us from fear of death.  The imperative, “Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross,” could be a touchstone for one’s entire life! I love the way the final couplet takes a sharp turn from fear of death (“that feeds on men”) to a kind of immortality where death has no sting (“no more dying then”).  I might note that there was an error in the second line of the original printing of this poem, so we are left to guess what the Bard meant to say.  You will see many versions out there, but I prefer this one.

So, may we all have a resurrection of sorts this spring.  May we value properly our “hours of dross” and wash away our sins and cares.  Do you remember, as Chesterton seems to, what it felt like to be five years old in a field full of daisies and dandelions?

For perhaps real resurrection – enlightenment, peace, whatever you want to call it – comes not from rising from the dead, but from escaping from the fear of death and all the death-like things – past mistakes, regrets, losses and future fears of all kinds.   Old age brings us both closer to the brink and possibly closer to acceptance. Once we get past our terror of the end, we are the (resurrected) fearless five-year-old again.  May it be so for you.

For other kinds of resurrection, you might try my tales, “Hallelujah, It’s a Mouse” or “A Balm in Gilead.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Old Folks and Tales of Climate Catastrophe

We watched Don’t Look Up last night, which led to some interesting discussions and dreams (nightmares?) at our house.  The movie would seem to be an allegory for the way the world is (or mostly isn’t) dealing with climate change.  Old characters – other than a pathetic old general who runs an abortive mission to save the world – do not have much of a role, but the movie got me thinking about some recent novels about our future and climate change in which the old are integral to the plot.

The character of old Grandy in High House by Jessie Greengrass is a good example.  Grandy is raising his granddaughter in a summer community; Grandy takes care of everyone’s cottages while they are away, knowing how to do almost everything from repairs to gardening. The climate scientist in the book seeks him out because she has a “high house” nearby – a house presumably safe for a while from storms and ocean elevation – and is preparing the property to harbor her young son and teenage stepdaughter when the apocalypse comes.   The scientist knows the house will eventually be surrounded by water, so the huge stockpiles she has amassed will (hopefully) not be stolen or plundered.  The scientist herself intends to stay in the battle until the end; she does not foresee herself surviving to get to the high house.  Close to the beginning of the major devastation, she convinces Grandy, now in a wheelchair from a broken hip, to move into the high house with his granddaughter and help her children survive.  Grandy complies; his house will flood. He has no choice.

So we are left with a high house, two teenage girls, a very young boy, and Grandy – who cannot do much but knows everything about how to get the generator going, feed the chickens, harvest the garden, thresh the wheat.   Grandy is the fountain of both wisdom and knowledge.  He delivers instructions patiently from a chair in the kitchen, as the younger folks tend livestock, plant vegetables, and salt fish.   At first their isolation and wholesome lifestyle at the high house seems idyllic, and then the generator stops working, the storms get worse, and the full impact hits.  It ends with the thoughts of one of the young women.  Caro says “the high house isn’t an ark.  We aren’t really saved.  We are only the last ones, waiting.”  There is no doubt, though, that they would not have lived as long as they had without Grandy.  There is also no doubt that had the world had Grandy’s wisdom, the predicament might have been averted.  I highly recommend The High House.

I do not recommend Joy Williams’ Harrow.  First is a hard book to read – although this in itself is not a reason to avoid it.  Sometimes hard books are needed to address hard topics – but not in this case.  The Atlantic calls Williams “the great prophet of nothingness.” Harrow gives us no such redeeming characters or situations as we have with Grandy and his charges at the high house.  We sometimes empathize, but we do not identify with these people, nor do we admire them.  The main character (Christen, nicknamed Lamb), in a search for her lost mother in a time of civil dissolution and “conservative” politics (meaning in this case actually waging war on what remains of nature), stumbles on a dilapidated resort/conference center full of old people who are, by turns, giving up their lives in what seem to be futile acts of ecoterrorism.  They cannot bear to live without doing something, but there is almost nothing they can do but die with great futility.  They fail to even comfort each other, and their acts of self-immolation are often misdirected.  If Grandy tried to help with his old-fashioned knowledge about how to live a primitive life, these folks are just trying to figure out the best way to die.

These two novels are climate dystopias, but they somehow reminded me of Margaret Drabble’s much more conventional book of a few years ago about ways to be old, The Dark Flood Rises.  Drabble’s book (highly recommended) touches on climate change only incidentally, with the main character being an older woman, Fran, who works on housing issues for the elderly, cares for her ailing ex-husband, and tries to make some sense out of what remains of her life.  Most of the other characters are also old, and we get an array of ways people arrange the ends of their lives – physically (much discussion of old age homes and such) and psychologically.

“Prepare your ship of death” Fran tells herself over and over – which is a phrase from “The Ship of Death” by D.H. Lawrence from whence Drabble got the book’s title:

Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul

has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.

Lawrence is talking about the “dark flood” of death; these books enable us to also read it as the dark flood of global warming.

I have written about old folks and environmental issues before (see “Failing Bodies and the Failing Planet“).  Our role is an open question that these books address – do we have wisdom to offer?  Should we risk death (so close anyway) to help in some way?  What to do? 

This week’s story, “Three Women,” does not seek to answer these questions, but just to look at some ways we pattern our lives and see (or fail to see) ourselves.

 

A Different Kind of Bucket List

 

I have been thinking (and reading) about a different kind of bucket list.  Merriam Webster defines bucket list as “a list of things that one has not done before but wants to do before dying.”  The books I am reading – The Bright Book of Life  by Harold Bloom and Horizon by Barry Lopez –  are about the things or places or books that the authors wanted to revisit before they died. Both authors died within a year of writing their books.  Bloom wants to reread the books he has loved one more time; he says he is desperately lonely in his old age (having outlived so many friends) and goes “back to reread novels to find old friends still living and to make new ones.”    Barry Lopez, one of the great travelers of our time, is interested in going back to some of his favorite places (in mind if not always in body) to determine whether his journeys taught him anything: “Having seen so many parts of the world, what have I learned about human menace, human triumph, and human failings and fallibilities?”  Bloom and Lopez both invite us to come on their final journeys and to plan one of our own – back through experience, physical or textual.

A few years ago, Bloom published an anthology and commentary on late poems by various poets:  Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems.  Bloom looks for comfort, for answers, in these late poems, but says in the end: “Confronting illness, pain, and dying, we learn quickly that eloquence is not enough.  Neither are even the most authentic poems of consolation.  Still, the beauty and wisdom of these poems reverberate into the coming silence.”  However, he expects more from the novels that he reviews in his last book.  Its title (The Bright Book of Life) comes from an essay by D.H. Lawrence:

The novel is the one bright book of the life.  Books are not life.  They are only tremulations on the ether.  But the novel as a tremulation can make a whole man alive tremble.  Which is more than poetry, philosophy, science, or any other book-tremulation can do…. To be alive, to be man alive, to be the whole man alive: that is the point.  At its best, the novel, and novel supremely, can help you.  It can help you not to be a dead man in life.

One of Lopez’s abiding concerns is the state of the world we live in and the degree to which it has deteriorated in his lifetime.  He is a genuine and literate environmentalist, and not unaware that his own physical deterioration is natural, but that of the places and indigenous peoples he loves on the earth is not.  He can accept his mortality; he has trouble accepting what we have done to our home. 

Going back is not easy.  That place we loved when we were twenty may now be overdeveloped and all serenity replaced by noise and concrete.  The book that meant so much to us, that changed our lives, when we were adolescents may somehow now feel…  juvenile.  And yet it is a brave venture and one that might assist us in making some sense of the path of our lives.  Barry Lopez puts it very well:

There is no originality in this, of course.  We, all of us, look back over our lives, trying to make sense of what happened, to see what enduring threads might be there.  My further desire in planning this book was to create a narrative that would engage a reader intent on discovering a trajectory in her or his own life, a coherent and meaningful story, at a time in our cultural and biological history when it has become an attractive option to lose faith in the meaning of our lives.  At a time when many see little more on the horizon but the suggestion of a dark future.  

I have long been intrigued by the idea of limiting myself to rereading in my old age.  I have often thought old age would be a good time to revisit my favorite movies and television shows.  Maybe, if my memory is bad enough, I will laugh just as hard at reruns of The Office as I did the first time.  If my memory is good, maybe I will remember the laughter of the first time, and that will be a joy in itself.

 I even visualized this as a kind of spiritual practice in my story “Nothing New,” where one of the characters strikes anything new from her life in order to relish the old.    But that was probably going too far.  Yet, when I read Bloom and Lopez, I find myself making lists of books, music, drama, and places I want to revisit (at least) one more time.  Most of these intentions will never be realized; however, just creating the list is a useful exercise.  Try it.  And think about ignoring the best seller list in favor of something you already know is wonderful.