Tag: James Baldwin

Why Are We Avoiding Paradise?

This past weekend was full of endings and beginnings.  Friday was Halloween, which – of course – marks the end of my favorite month, but is also the Eve of All Saints Day, when we remember the saintly dead.  That is followed by All Souls Day, when we remember all the dead. And, of course, it was the beginning of a new month, and the time when we turned back the clocks.  A propitious time for self-reflection.  November is the time of year which corresponds (metaphorically) with my age.  I have a few challenges ahead of me in the next few weeks, but both the young trick-or-treating ghouls and the thoughts of lost souls remind me of how good it is to be alive.  We somehow left Paradise behind as we grew up; can we regain it in old age?

That we are already in Paradise is something that is hard to comprehend and easy to forget.  I think often of the words of Joko Beck in her wonderful Everyday Zen (where she seems to talk directly to John Milton!):

There is no paradise lost, none to be regained.  Why?  Because you cannot avoid this moment.  You may not be awake to it, but it is always here.  You cannot avoid paradise.  You can only avoid seeing it.

You cannot avoid paradise.  You can only avoid seeing it.   Can it be true that the pathetic work of our long lives has been to hold paradise at bay?

Did we have paradise once and lose it?  Or did we just push it into a corner and place a fierce angel to guard the gates?  James Baldwin is much taken with such thoughts of paradise.

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden.  I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword.  Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it.  Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. (Giovanni’s Room)

Wordsworth is sure that, as infants, we brought paradise (trailing clouds of glory) into the world with us, but lost it, forgot it, along the way:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

But why should we forget?  From “The Old Fools” by Philip Larkin, one of the most miserable and cynical poems about old age there is, comes this remarkable passage:

At death you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower
Of being here.

“The million-petalled flower of being here.”  If that is not paradise, if just the possibilities and potentialities of “being here” is not paradise, I do not know what is. And yet, I forget.  We all forget.  As Frederick Buechner puts it, we allow “Too good not be true” to turn into “too good to be true.”  In other words, paradise is all around us; we ourselves have put up the barriers, the angels with their shining swords are hired by us and paid a monthly wage to stop us from going back to where we belong.  Is that it? 

Beck implies that being old, being closer to death, should help us along with this process, if we let it.

When people know their death is very close, what is the element that often disappears?  What disappears is the hope that life will turn out the way they want it to.  Then they can see that the strawberry is “so delicious” [even though there is a tiger below] – because that’s all there is, this very moment.

No one but we, ourselves, can dismiss the flaming swords. It is our paradise to take or to leave. No teacher needed, no secret key.  Here is some more advice from Joko Beck:

I’ll tell you how far I’d walk to see a new teacher: maybe across the room, no farther! It isn’t because I have no interest in this person; it’s just that there is no one who can tell me about my life except—who? There is no authority outside of my experience. There is only one teacher. What is that teacher? Life itself. And of course each one of us is a manifestation of life; we couldn’t be anything else. Now life happens to be both a severe and an endlessly kind teacher. It’s the only authority that you need to trust. And this teacher, this authority, is everywhere.

Old people have seen a lot of life.  If there is one thing that we have, it is experience.  We need to trust ourselves, dismiss the shining swords, and enter the paradise that is ours by right.  What are the odds that we would even exist?  That we should persist over all these decades?  We beat those odds; we should be glad to collect the prize.  Or, at least, that is what I keep telling myself. 

I’ll end on this bright November day with a quote from Emerson:

It is so wonderful to our neurologists that a man can see without his eyes, that it does not occur to them that it is just as wonderful that he should see with them; and that is ever the difference between the wise and the unwise; the latter wonders at what is unusual, the wise man wonders at the usual.  (from “New England Reformers”)

In our old age, let’s storm the gates of Paradise.   Jesus said that the kingdom of God is in your midst.  Beck and Emerson tell us all we have to do is to change our perspective.  Change is hard in old age, but perhaps we could at least try.  Time is short.

Several years ago, I wrote a story about a woman’s misguided attempts to create paradise on earth, rather than just opening her eyes to it.  You can find it here.  I also posted a strange story about one last trip “Back to the Garden,” about finding paradise at the very last minute. 

Looking Back on Childhood’s Eden

There is much debate in Buddhist circles (at least among the unenlightened) as to what enlightenment or nirvana would look like.  There is a similar debate in Christian circles about the nature of heaven.  Carl Jung had no doubt that it consists of going back to the childlike wonder we had about the world when we were very young, and Jung maintains that this is particularly important in our elder years.  “Proper development in the last part of your life is to rediscover the child you left behind when you commenced your apprenticeship.”

Who is the “child you left behind” before you embarked on your apprenticeship of fear and sophistication? How far back do your earliest memories go?  Psychologists used to say it was four or five years old, but now have pushed it back as early as two and a half.  Lots of us have what we think are very early memories, but turn out to just be recollections of experiences we were told about in our childhoods.  A more important question might be: what did your earliest memories consist of?  For most of us, the world of our childhood was full of bright colors and smells and fascinating experiences. While childhood is a world that fades, it is surely worth recalling.

Wordsworth famously struggled with this in his “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood:”

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

       The earth, and every common sight,

                          To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

            The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

                      Turn wheresoe’er I may,

By night or day.

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

Novelists too have tried to grasp what has been lost in the accumulations of time.  In the beginnings of both Great Expectations and David Copperfield, Dickens has his main characters struggle to recoup old memories:

This may be fancy, though I think the memory of most of us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose; just as I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown men who are remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it; the rather, as I generally observe such men to retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their childhood. (from David Copperfield)

Then there is James Joyce at the beginning of Portrait of an Artist, talking about memories of “moo cows” and recalling his earliest sensations: “When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it is cold.”  Recently, I read Donal Ryan’s Queen of Dirt Island, which begins with the major character’s earliest memories, when “she was four…, or maybe just turned five.”  The memories then presented are technicolor scenes of grass and cherry blossoms.  Early memories are often magical in sight and sound.  The world was new to us.  In many ways, children are all Adams and Eves waking up to the delights of Eden.

And then there is a story in Sigrid Nunez’s new book, The Vulnerables, about a mother who started to act differently just before her totally unexpected death, in her premonitions acting in a childlike manner:

Whenever I [her daughter] came to visit, we usually took an afternoon walk, and that’s when I noticed something else…Mother kept stopping to point things out – Christmas lights on a neighbor’s house, clouds, squirrels scampering – as if she had never seen such things before.  It reminded me of going out with the kids when they were small and all the world, even the most ordinary things, made them gape. (31)

How wonderful to return to a world where everything can make us gape.  But how to do it?  We all, sometimes, want to return to our childhood Eden, but it is not easy.  James Baldwin puts it best in Giovanni’s Room:

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden.  I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword.  Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it.  Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both.

Jung says it is worth the effort to remember. He claims it is the way we were meant to live – not in childish ignorance, but in child-like wonder.  As Wordsworth goes on to say:

 Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

                      We will grieve not, rather find

                      Strength in what remains behind…

It is there, this child-like wonder, in all of us.  It sometimes surfaces in dementia, sometimes a brain injury loosens the gears.  I knew a middle-aged physics professor who had a bad bicycle accident and suddenly began singing the Polish lullabies of his very early youth, before Hitler’s Nazis drove his family out of Europe.  But it is not entirely a matter of memories, I think.  It is a matter of attitude, of what stance we take in this world.  Or refuse to take.

My story, “Like Heaven,” is about an old woman conflating her childhood with her current situation.  Perhaps, in her case, childhood turns out to be the better place to be.