There is no escaping.
As I grow older, the landscape
of my friends is flattening out.
Where there used to be a small hill,
a stand of trees, a distant cathedral spire
there is now no definition.
Or, to change the metaphor;
on a rocky out crop, I watch
as, little by little, the waves encroach
until, in the end,
the ocean engulfs me.
Now, didn’t I do well?
I talked about flattening,
loss of definition,
disappearance.
I invited you to imagine an artist
painting from different vantage points.
You neither cringed
nor turned your head away.
I never once mentioned the word “death”.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
Hopefully
Recently a friend asked me what I felt about my own dying.
I fluctuate between three responses to the idea of my own dying and death: fear, acceptance, hope. Several of my poems deal with the threshold between acceptance and hope, but I know many people are allergic to poetry so I will risk repeating myself.
The fear relates more to the dying than to the death and it relates more to the effect of the multiple sclerosis. Because I cannot turn over at night, I have to take a pill to get to sleep which doesn’t work gradually. Rather, I am lying there fully awake and then I am still fully awake but it is morning and in the missing bit I must have fallen asleep. I have become anxious that I will stay awake all night. So I lie there, virtually in rigor-mortis; sometimes my legs feel as if I’ve been standing in a glacial lake; it is pitch black and I am waiting. On the worst night of all I felt as if I was already dead: ram-rod stiff, bitterly cold, it was dark with an eternity of waiting. It was only the cat’s warmth against my shoulder that reassured me that I was still alive.
Even after the bad night, the fear had diminished in daylight, but I still live with its residue.
My usual state is acceptance. I have no trouble with the physical body being mulched into the earth and coming up next spring as grass, explored by birds and insects; the minerals and salts of my body becoming part of the world as long as our planet exists.
This idea of the cycle of existence has been very much part of belief systems for centuries. For me, it was Loren Eiseley who pointed out that Christianity changed our thinking by introducing a linear perspective. There is a beginning, a middle and an end. A human life is the middle and we know nothing definite about the beginning or the end. Shakespeare describes it as “undiscovered country” which still suggests co-ordinates of place and time. We have no language to describe the unknown and have to resort to the familiar.
All the great religions have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to find words to describe this unfamiliar experience for which we have no words, the experience that our human life is but the middle and that the beginning and the end go on for ever.
I have experienced moments when time has seemed to stop, or there has been another dimension of light, or that I am so much in the present moment however mundane the activity I am engaged in, that I am fully focused. These moments of awareness are not something which I do myself; they always feel like gifts.
From my own experiences and what I have read about other peoples’ I have glimpses that this life is not all there is. The acceptance is always with me, occasionally darkened by fear and, more often brightened by hope.
The Unknown
In the days when the earth was flat
was it considered limitless
infinity backwards and forwards?
Or did the sailor set out
into the unknown
unsure whether he would arrive
at an ultimate boundary?
As I approach my final years,
I am facing the same ambiguity:
where is my beginning, where is my end?
My ancestral beginning
is lost in the mists of time.
Of my caesarean birth
I have only a fictionalised account;
my mother's pain
and my own outrage
at the abrupt eviction
have been edited out.
As for my ending:
like the sailor venturing
into the unknown, I do not know
whether I will achieve a landfall.
I fluctuate between three responses to the idea of my own dying and death: fear, acceptance, hope. Several of my poems deal with the threshold between acceptance and hope, but I know many people are allergic to poetry so I will risk repeating myself.
The fear relates more to the dying than to the death and it relates more to the effect of the multiple sclerosis. Because I cannot turn over at night, I have to take a pill to get to sleep which doesn’t work gradually. Rather, I am lying there fully awake and then I am still fully awake but it is morning and in the missing bit I must have fallen asleep. I have become anxious that I will stay awake all night. So I lie there, virtually in rigor-mortis; sometimes my legs feel as if I’ve been standing in a glacial lake; it is pitch black and I am waiting. On the worst night of all I felt as if I was already dead: ram-rod stiff, bitterly cold, it was dark with an eternity of waiting. It was only the cat’s warmth against my shoulder that reassured me that I was still alive.
Even after the bad night, the fear had diminished in daylight, but I still live with its residue.
My usual state is acceptance. I have no trouble with the physical body being mulched into the earth and coming up next spring as grass, explored by birds and insects; the minerals and salts of my body becoming part of the world as long as our planet exists.
This idea of the cycle of existence has been very much part of belief systems for centuries. For me, it was Loren Eiseley who pointed out that Christianity changed our thinking by introducing a linear perspective. There is a beginning, a middle and an end. A human life is the middle and we know nothing definite about the beginning or the end. Shakespeare describes it as “undiscovered country” which still suggests co-ordinates of place and time. We have no language to describe the unknown and have to resort to the familiar.
All the great religions have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to find words to describe this unfamiliar experience for which we have no words, the experience that our human life is but the middle and that the beginning and the end go on for ever.
I have experienced moments when time has seemed to stop, or there has been another dimension of light, or that I am so much in the present moment however mundane the activity I am engaged in, that I am fully focused. These moments of awareness are not something which I do myself; they always feel like gifts.
From my own experiences and what I have read about other peoples’ I have glimpses that this life is not all there is. The acceptance is always with me, occasionally darkened by fear and, more often brightened by hope.
The Unknown
In the days when the earth was flat
was it considered limitless
infinity backwards and forwards?
Or did the sailor set out
into the unknown
unsure whether he would arrive
at an ultimate boundary?
As I approach my final years,
I am facing the same ambiguity:
where is my beginning, where is my end?
My ancestral beginning
is lost in the mists of time.
Of my caesarean birth
I have only a fictionalised account;
my mother's pain
and my own outrage
at the abrupt eviction
have been edited out.
As for my ending:
like the sailor venturing
into the unknown, I do not know
whether I will achieve a landfall.
Monday, May 3, 2010
1 + 1 = 3
In January 2009 I acquired a rabbit. I am the year of the rabbit so I called himby the Chinese word for a rabbit: Tuzi, the first syllable pronounced like the whoo of tu-whit-a-whoo, the 'z' pronounced as if tz and the 'i' becomes a mute e. Initially Tuzi was contained in a smallish hutch but more recently, in a larger wire enclosure. A few weeks ago, he discovered that with judicious digging or biting through wire, he could escape back over the road to where he came from. My neighbour has several other rabbits. After a week where Tuzi was getting out twice a day and then again the following morning, I enquired at a pet shop and was told rabbits like soft toys for company so I dutifully bought him a soft green dinosaur which he had the good taste to ignore. So my neighbour bought over one of his rabbits to keep mine company. I have called her Tuzilina.
When Tuzi wasn’t escaping he was mooching rather a lot, so I was expecting to have twice the mooching. Instead, there is a great deal of rabbit activity now that he has his sister for company. He has heard that people breed like rabbits so he wants to too, but at the moment, he is not humping her, just chasing her energetically. So I have discovered that one rabbit energy plus another rabbit energy does not equal two; they equal three.
The world of mathematics has been turned upside down.
When Tuzi wasn’t escaping he was mooching rather a lot, so I was expecting to have twice the mooching. Instead, there is a great deal of rabbit activity now that he has his sister for company. He has heard that people breed like rabbits so he wants to too, but at the moment, he is not humping her, just chasing her energetically. So I have discovered that one rabbit energy plus another rabbit energy does not equal two; they equal three.
The world of mathematics has been turned upside down.
Post Script
This is in the nature of a post script; the last two journal entries came about because of my feelings after my friends’ son died. I chose to talk about my grief for Paul but could also have dwelt upon the daily attrition which comes from living with a consummate burglar, multiple sclerosis.
I wanted to share my belief that grief belongs with other inexpressible human feelings, feelings that require us to use an ‘as if’. I have to say: “I ring with joy” when I enter a great cathedral. In the same way my poem stated that I was hurled, winded on to the beach. Both experiences require metaphor.
So here is another metaphor: A life full of grief need not be stunted or maimed. I have a very tall garden where almost all the trees compete upwards for the sunlight. But one of my trees, unexpectedly called a smoke bush, has chosen a different journey. The trunk is only about 20 feet high and from it extend at a 45° angle to east, north and west, branches that are 20 - 40 feet long. At this time of year, the tree is turning dramatically, so along these extended braches there are red-gold, orange, yellow and green leaves. The area of colour is greater than if the branches had gone upwards.
So, in a life that contains the poignancy of grief, the growth may still be dazzling.
I wanted to share my belief that grief belongs with other inexpressible human feelings, feelings that require us to use an ‘as if’. I have to say: “I ring with joy” when I enter a great cathedral. In the same way my poem stated that I was hurled, winded on to the beach. Both experiences require metaphor.
So here is another metaphor: A life full of grief need not be stunted or maimed. I have a very tall garden where almost all the trees compete upwards for the sunlight. But one of my trees, unexpectedly called a smoke bush, has chosen a different journey. The trunk is only about 20 feet high and from it extend at a 45° angle to east, north and west, branches that are 20 - 40 feet long. At this time of year, the tree is turning dramatically, so along these extended braches there are red-gold, orange, yellow and green leaves. The area of colour is greater than if the branches had gone upwards.
So, in a life that contains the poignancy of grief, the growth may still be dazzling.
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