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Seeing
the Difference
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Session One: Silence, Art and Ritual Sandra
Gilbert, Ph.D. Paris. November 1, 1999. Today is All Saints' Day, and tomorrow will be the day of All Souls, also called the Day of the Dead. Once, before the Church embarked on a program of sanitizing and sanctifying, these days marked the Celtic Samhain, a holiday when, according to some, the walls between this world and the "other" are "most transparent," the souls of the dead driven toward us in multitudes, like swirling leaves. But even now Christian festivals preserve a trace of the old mysterious connections between "here" and "there," between the realm of the flesh and the realm of invisible spirits, that shaped this time for centuries. All Saints' Day, writes one cleric, "commemorates the holy ones of all ages and stations whose names are known only to God," while All Souls' Day celebrates "those who have died but not yet attained the presence of God." And there is "an old Scottish belief that anyone born on All Souls' Day will have 'double sight': he will be able to see the spirit world about him and have command over the spirits he sees." On this feast of All Saints it's exactly eight years, eight months, and twenty-one days since the sunny February morning when two orderlies arrived to wheel my husband of thirty-three years into the northern California operating theater where he had a routine prostatectomy from which he never recovered. Though he was in robust health apart from the tumor for which he was being treated, Elliot died some six hours after my children and I were told that his surgeon had successfully removed the malignancy. And for the first six months after he died, death suddenly seemed plausible--not a far-off threat but urgently close--as if the walls between this world and the "other" had indeed become transparent, or as if a door between the two realms had swung open. For the first six weeks after he died, death even seemed not only rational but right, or at least appropriate, as if I were already standing in its doorway and needed merely to keep walking toward where my husband now was. If he who had been bone of my bone, sinew of my sinew, could do this mysterious thing called "dying," then so could (and clearly should) I. Not, I have to add, as a ceremonial acknowledgment of widowhood, a form of sati--or a heroic gesture like the act said sometimes to have been chosen by a bereaved wife in imperial China, "who arranged to hang herself publicly on the death of her spouse"--a self-immolation "not regarded as suicide but as a heroic victory over death."1 No, my surprising sense of the plausibility of death had little in common with a "heroic" leap toward oblivion or even, indeed, with any fantasy of suicide, as I understand the term. It was more, I think, like a move in a board game, an eerily competitive mirroring of another player's strategy: "If you can do that, so can I." But without the hostility implied by the word "competitive"; with, instead, a kind of eager, helpless mimicry. As in, "Oh I see, so that's what's next!" Or perhaps, to offer an alternative explanation, my necessitous sense of the nearness of death was akin to the protective feeling reported by the journalist Lisa Schnell, a grieving mother who notes that just after the death of her eighteen-month-old daughter she and her husband "wanted to be with Claire right then, cradling her perfect soul as we had cradled her imperfect little body all her brief life. We wanted to be dead with her." Adds Schnell, "I wasn't suicidal--I didn't want to make myself dead--I just wanted to be dead with Claire. I raged at the injustice of the fact that though she had needed me to give birth to her, she didn't need me to die with her." As soon as I read Schnell's words, I recognized their uncanny logic. Of course! Elliot and I traveled, shopped, ate, slept, dreamt together. Wasn't it perfectly rational to suppose, just after he died, that we should be dead together? And now, as All Saints' Day draws to a close here in Paris, soon to blend into its close cousin, All Souls' Day, I'm reminded again of the close, invisible threshold toward which so many mourners are drawn. The streets are almost sepulchrally still this afternoon. "Toussaint" is a jour de fete throughout most of Europe. Almost everything's shut today, with no bread to be had in the usually baguette-laden quartier where I live. According to a Web site I just found, medieval priests instituted the feasts of All Saints and All Souls because they feared the charisma of Samhain, a harvest festival whose acolytes celebrated this primordial Hallowe'en and the next day, "All Hallows Day," as the doorway into "the season of death revels, the period of misrule from dusk on October 31 to the Winter Solstice." Celebrants of such morbid revels hung lanterns, perhaps the ancestors of our jack o' lanterns, to guide wandering spirits. To nourish the ghosts there were "soul cakes," maybe the forerunners of the "treats" we give today to would-be tricksters. Since an event so resonant couldn't be entirely repressed, the Catholic clergy had to transform it into something less threatening. Samhain acknowledges the power of death and the dead over us. The Church had to convert this holiday into its opposite, a day when we have power over the dead, for, as always, the Christian mission is to conquer death. Where the ancient Celts are said to have sought to honor (and perhaps appease) the dead with offerings of "soul cakes," the Church's attitude toward those on the "other" side is both more austere and more ambitious. Declares the Catholic Encyclopedia, the "theological basis for the feast [of All Souls] is the doctrine that... souls which are not perfectly cleansed from venial sins... are debarred from the Beatific Vision, and that the faithful on earth can help them by prayers, alms, deeds and especially by the sacrifice of the Mass." Perhaps in keeping with this injunction some of my neighbors are going now among the tombs of Pere Lachaise with flowers and prayers. A misty grisaille--damp gray--with a hint of winter in its breath unfolds a chill in the little court I'm looking out on, though there are still impatiens cascading out of the tubs flanking the doorways. And with its belated blooms, its wintry mist, the court itself seems an emblem of the "transparence" between the worlds of the living and the dead that supposedly defines these days, whether they're Christian or pagan feasts. At such a time, in such a place, it seems right to try to understand what it meant for death, suddenly, to seem "plausible," as if it had out of nowhere, unnervingly, opened itself to me. "Death opened, like a black tree, blackly," Sylvia Plath wrote, brooding on the shock of her father's death when she was seven. A bereaved adult, I too was shocked and astonished when my husband's death opened and unfolded itself like the chill in the court, as if it must now be part of a quotidian "season of death revels" leading to the winter solstice. Well, not exactly revels! When my daughters and I were led into the small, pale, shiny hospital cubicle where Elliot lay after what must have been a terrible six-hour battle to survive the surgery that killed him, we found ourselves at first, as we stared at the silent stone version of himself that he had become, in a space that was bleakly filled by corporeal substance. This death that had suddenly, gigantically, opened around us--opened perhaps rather more like a huge black umbrella rapidly unfurling than like a stately black tree unscrolling its branches--this death was hardly the soothing presence that Walt Whitman describes in "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," his great elegy for Abraham Lincoln, as a "dark mother always gliding near with soft feet," a "strong deliveress." Serious and material rather than maternal, this death forced me, horrifyingly, to confront the metamorphosis of a body I had loved into a dead thing that now appeared to be the material of fate itself. Yet at that first shocking moment in the shiny cubicle, gazing at the uncannily familiar image of Elliot--not at what had been "Elliot" but at what still seemed to be "Elliot"--death itself was made eerily plausible by my husband's lingering presence in the midst of it: by the slight rueful smile on his face (that might have been the relic of a grimace of pain or fear); by the tilt of his head that was even now (after what we later learned had been a tracheotomy performed by the "Code team") so customary, so comfortingly known; by his shaggy eyebrows, as unruly as ever; by his hands (carefully folded on the white coverlet, maybe by a thoughtful nurse) that were still, though so frighteningly motionless, his hands. He wasn't there, but he was there. And his thereness, his presence at the center of massive absence, was what made death plausible, what flung it open like a door into an all-too-easily accessible space or like a black umbrella defining an indisputably real circle of shadow into which it would be astonishingly simple to step. Meditating today on this curious sense of the plausibility of death that my husband's utterly unexpected and therefore quite implausible death paradoxically bestowed, I realize that such a feeling must account for traditional images of dead people "living," as it were, on "the other side" of a sometimes permeable, at least semi-transparent barrier. So and so is "gone," we say. But gone where? When one "goes," one goes somewhere. Somewhere plausible, which is to say feasible, practicable, indeed (paradoxically) livable. Death opens--and one goes into it, as into a place. The kingdom of the dead, the underworld, the "other side": it doesn't matter how one imagines the place, what's important is that it's a place and that, given the weird familiarity of the body of the dead one--its quality of both being and not being the beloved--the place where the dead one has "gone" must also be weirdly familiar. Geographically, I now think I rather obscurely felt, at that moment of deathly nearness, that death must be as plausible as any hitherto foreign country to which one might move--not travel, but move with all one's goods of memory and stores of thought and trunkloads of hope. As if, in other words, "going" into death were like uprooting oneself and resettling, say, in France--death being after all "just," in Hamlet's words, another "undiscovered country." And in that case, given the logic of the metaphor, death-as-plausible-country must also be or have a language that one might struggle to learn, the way one struggles to learn French. If (or, rather, when) you move to death, you'll learn its language through the educational process known as "total immersion." Prayer, the Church would say--especially on this jour de fete of Toussaint--is the tongue in which one addresses the dead and the tongue in which one speaks of them, whereas the celebrants of Samhain would argue that we signal those on "the other side" of the frontier between here and there, our country and their misty place, with pumpkins and turnips carved into lanterns or with hilltop bonfires and perhaps rattling calabashes. For in many cultures, "mere noise"--"explosions, the firing of guns, the beating of gongs"--is considered the proper way to talk to the dead, either to invoke them or to still them.2 Whether one whispers prayers, shouts imprecations, tolls a solemn bell or bangs a drum loudly, though, one is seeking to speak the language of death, to address those who seem so indisputably there on what George Eliot, writing of the nonhuman world, called "the other side of silence." The dead were once of the human world, yet now they too are on the other side of silence--right there, like trees, fish, flowers, butterflies--to be addressed in solemn apostrophes or to respond in what rhetoricians call "prosopopoeia," the imagined speech of those who may appear to be absent or unreal but are truly there because they are present to poets and other, perhaps more pious, interlocutors. On the midnight richly described in "All Souls' Night," the verse epilogue to his mystical prose work A Vision, William Butler Yeats sought to invoke the dead by offering them "two long glasses brimmed with muscatel," whose aroma a ghost might drink,
Yeats longed for the dead to visit him at the solemn hour when he heard "the great Christ Church Bell/And many a lesser bell sound through the room," because he was certain he had learned the secrets of the spirit world, had "mummy truths to tell/Whereat the living mock[ed]." And on that night of the old Celtic Samhain the Irish poet struggled like a neophyte sorcerer to summon the spirits of dead friends. Yet perhaps because death hadn't plausibly opened itself to him, he seems to have been left stranded among the living, disconsolately confessing that he'd be willing to confide his "mummy truths" to any ghostly listener. The truly bereaved are far more certain of deathly presences and hence of the plausibility of death itself. For instance, although (or perhaps precisely because) "death opened, like a black tree, blackly," Sylvia Plath's father was almost inescapably present to her, his voiceless voice "worming through" what she envisioned as a "black telephone" that she had to cut "off at the root" in "Daddy," her love/hate elegy for the lost parent who had been figuratively reincarnated in her faithless husband, Ted Hughes. And more lovingly, more hopefully, Thomas Hardy believed he heard his dead wife Emma "calling" to him after her "great going" into death. "Woman much missed," he mourns in one of his finest elegies, "how you call to me, call to me." Yet of course even Hardy was tormented by uncertainties. From where did Emma call, how, and in what form? "Can it be you that I hear?" he wonders, demanding "Let me view you then," and, by implication, commanding (as Horatio commands the ghost of Hamlet's father) "Speak, speak. I charge thee, speak." Hardy's indecision about his wife's "prosopopoeia" dramatizes the mystery of Hamlet's "undiscovered country" even while his attention to what at least might be her "voice" emphasizes the plausibility of that puzzlingly unknown and familiar place. His stanza beginning "Can it be you that I hear?" is followed by utterances of skepticism and near despair:
But surely such "faltering forward" across the "wet mead" into a vortex of oozing wind is dangerous! Surely, as he stumbles after the all-too-plausible "calling" of the dead woman Hardy risks staggering across the border into death itself, that all-too-near country. Marcellus and Horatio know this peril. When Hamlet, recognizing his father's ghost, declares "I'll follow it," they seek to restrain him. "What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord," demands Horatio, "Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff...?" And Plath too encountered such a threat, famously confessing to her dead father in "Daddy" that "At twenty I tried to die,/And get back, back, back to you." Nor is a silent ghost less dangerously seductive. Even if the "black telephone" is off the hook, even if the "calling" seems to cease, the plausibility of the dead one draws the mourner like a magnet, as Plath imagines herself to have been urged "back, back, back" at the time of her first suicide attempt. Dead King Hamlet is speechless at first, until his distraught son cries "Whither wilt thou lead me? Speak." Haunting his lost wife's childhood home in Cornwall, Hardy echoes the Danish prince, as he falters half-blind among the misty moors and cliffs of the past, writing in "After a Journey":
Was my dead husband an Orpheus leading me, his Eurydice, not out of but into the kingdom of death? Perhaps, through the process of unconscious revising and reversing that Freud describes in The Interpretation of Dreams, the old myth has the plot exactly wrong. Perhaps the story of the poet and his lost beloved isn't a tale of a failed attempt at resurrection, with Orpheus striving to lead his bride away from the lower depths of Hades into the upper air of the living, but rather a myth of immolation, in which the mourner follows the dead one down into the increasingly real, dense, and plausible shadows of the grave, unwittingly faltering across the fragile border between life and death the way, during Samhain's "season of death revels," a traveler who has missed his path might be tricked into crossing the frontier between this world of the "too too solid flesh" and that "other" one that only seems to be insubstantial and fantastic. When the young D. H. Lawrence was mourning the mother whom he had loved, as he once told a friend, "like a lover," he felt the borders between life and death dissolving, as if the very categories of the living and the dead were losing their usual meanings, so that the town in which he lived began to "glimmer" with "subtle ghosts" who might be the dead walking among the living or the living appearing in the guise of the dead they must inevitably become. Addressing his lost mother in "The Inheritance," he claims his grief as a gift of transformed and enhanced perception, almost like the privilege of "double sight" that, as traditional Scottish belief has it, belongs to anyone born on All Souls' Day. "I am dazed with the farewell," he admits, "But I scarcely feel the loss," for
And in another poem, the eerie "Troth with the Dead," he sees a "broken ... half a moon" lying "on the low, still floor of the sky" as an emblem of his own unswerving fidelity to his dead mother, the "troth with the dead" that he is "pledged to keep." Yet such a troth--virtually an incestuous betrothal--to the dead is as dangerous to this poet as the half-blinded, "faltering" pursuit of Emma might have been to Hardy, or as Plath's efforts to get "back, back, back" to her daddy surely were to her. The keeper of a "troth with the dead" knows even better than Hardy did what Horatio and Marcellus fear: the "calling" of the dead one so eloquently described by Hardy may be dangerous, may indeed be a "Call into Death," as the title of Lawrence's most explicit poem on this subject has it:
Is it the dead one, then, who is the Orphic singer, the chanter of mysteries, inviting us through a suddenly opened doorway, uttering a strange and breathless call into what once seemed all a darkness but has now become unexpectedly luminous and at least as plausible as "the haze of the sky"? What, though, if the dead struggle to voice their urgent claims and needs but we don't hear them? Perhaps the mourner intuits a nearness from the "other side"--the estranged dimension that spirits supposedly inhabit--yet the call from the dead is inaudible. Imagine, then, the frustration of the despairing spirit, speaking without sound or substance! In "The Haunter," one of the most poignant examples of elegiac "prosopopoeia," Hardy evokes the pain of his ghostly wife, who cannot "let him know" how close her dead self is to his living one.
And in a very different but equally bittersweet gesture of prosopopoeia, Dante Gabriel Rossetti imagines the speech of a dead woman just as her lover, left behind on earth, must himself imagine it. Rossetti's "blessed damozel" presses so fervently against the golden bar of heaven, barrier between herself and her still-living beloved, that her bosom "warm[s]" it as if she were still alive with fleshly desire. And standing, yearning, "on the rampart of God's house," she longs, serenely, for her lover's death:
In "The Raven," Rossetti once declared, "I saw that Poe had done the utmost it was possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and so I determined to reverse the conditions [in "The Blessed Damozel"], and give utterance to the yearning of the loved one in heaven." As (more obviously and famously) in "The Raven," a perpetual chilly Nevermore provides a kind of ground bass to the utterances of mutual desire that cross the gulf between the lovers. Although in the gaze of heaven and in her own thoughts the damozel "scarce had been a day/One of GodŐs choristers," her survivors know she's been dead ten years, and her grieving lover, feeling her death has already lasted "ten years of years," intuits her presence as a powerful absence:
Those who seem so near, whose country has become so incontrovertibly real to the mourner, are yet so far! They're inhabitants of a distant land that is nevertheless absolutely ours! And perhaps the impulse to elegy itself arises from our sense of the simultaneous nearness and farness of their place, arises because we feel the dead are so near that we must speak to as well as about or for them--because, that is, we wish to converse with them as if we were in their presence while lamenting what, at least intellectually, we understand to be their absence. To readers who have never mourned, the elegist's intimacy with death must seem like ghoulishness. Such apparently unseemly intimacy may be what frightened the Church about Samhain, with its welcoming rituals of lanterns and soul cakes. But those who mourn, those who summon the dead while intuiting and perhaps resisting their calls into death, know that it is essential to speak of death and the dead because if those who have died are still part of us even while they are part of death, then death is part of us too. I have to confess here, however, that although my husband's death made death itself so plausible, he never sang to me from beyond the grave, nor did he call me in formal verse. He simply put death there, in the middle of my life, because he was there himself, in the center of death. And once, yes, he did appear to me in a dream, maybe a week after he died, looking forlorn. "It's so cold here, Sem," he complained, giving me my college nickname. "So cold." He had been exiled, so it seemed, in the mysterious but suddenly plausible ring of darkness that had unexpectedly opened around us both. He was shivering and sorrowful. In almost every culture around the world, writes the anthropologist Nigel Barley, it is "above all the dead that feel desperate grief and loneliness."3 At the end of Rossetti's poem, the not-so-blessed damozel gazes forlornly down from the vertiginous steeps of heaven, strains against "the golden barriers," and weeps. "I heard her tears," confides her lover. How could I not have wanted to follow my husband, to warm him, to comfort him, to "be dead with" him?
Notes 1 Nigel Barley, Grave Matters: A Lively History of Death Around the World (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), p. 87. |