eros, logos: Mortality

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Mortality

Repost: Oct 6, 2005

And at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Andrew Marvel, To His Coy Mistress

This poem is the first I ever memorised simply for me.

It is a defense of the pleasures of the flesh and an inducement to haste. But this is not all that it is. It is not only an ode to lust, although it is that. To read it only that way is to give a shallow reading of it. One must look more deeply, always--
The reasons for haste.
It is also an ode to death, to our mortality. A reminder that the flesh is transient, a fragile thing, and our existence too short. Brightness falls from the air; everything comes to an end, even we, even so, for we die.
"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness," writes Nabokov, in the first line of his autobiography. And though common sense tells us this, it is a very uncommon sense to live with this knowledge ever-present.

This is what I saw, when I saw myself there stripped bare by those words so old, my secret heart uncovered. 15 and in class, and I memorised it all before the lecture ended. I have it by heart still.
(I am, as the reader might suspect, the kind of person easily persuaded to recite poetry from memory in a pub, by the way. The words bringing another kind of drunkenness. I have a few by heart, yes, and among the talents of my clever tongue is the ability to return a stanza for a mere line.)

I recognised myself in that poem, and my nascient thinking. About life, death, eros, passion. But logos too. The poet's echoing song cannot sound, but is still read, still echoes, spoke to me that day. As words outlive us, the only immortality we may have.
As ideas endure also, and why else have I made them my life?--Except the knowledge that they persist, and we do not.

At 15, I recognised in it how I had felt since the day I had seen and acknowledged my own death, just 4 years before, during my close escape from it. Of which I may or may not publish, though I have written already.

Others died, yet I lived.
I almost died, in fact I was so close to it that I gave up hope, and this does not happen to the living unless they are in an extremity of physical pain.
I hoped finally only for death to come more quickly, and this changes you, it changed me.

I saw too in Marvel the marvelous, I saw my own commitment to life there. Carpe diem. My own defense of pleasure, of experience, my determination to live deeply, feel deeply, and also think deeply, as much as my poor and finite capacities will allow me, for the brief crack of light that is my existence. It is almost a duty, it feels like, one I owe to myself. As if it were a promise I had made myself that night, as I suppose in fact it is. This poem a memento mori for me.

It is a terrible truth to acknowledge,our mortality. It is hard to keep it in mind. But it seems necessary also to me. I think we are the only creatures with that capacity. It deepens experience also, or so I have found it to for me, since that night death came near me.

But having once heard time's chariot, it has never, never been possible since for me to unhear it. Nor would I wish to. It changed my life, to be so close to my own death. To have seen it there waiting, to have eluded it so closely. It held me by the throat, and it was words then that saved me too, at the last possible moment--this sentence is not metaphorical. Should I ever feel ready to publish what I've written about it you will see it is not a metaphor, no.

This knowledge drives me to hold every moment. Carpe diem, a battlecry--it has been such for me. Pleasures sweeter *because* they are transient, as is our flesh, as are we all. Even we, even so.

It drives me to roll all my sweetness into one ball, to tear my pleasures with rough strife/ through the iron gates of life. Yes, yes. Onward, rushing.
The poem is ultimately defiant and in it I see my own defiance. Against time, against death, against transience.

I hear it always, the chariot. Sometimes near, sometimes far. But it is always there. It impels me, drives me, to live, and live deeply, this knowledge that is always with me, the knowledge that I must die.

I run forward, onward, ahead of that chariot, I cannot stop racing it--- until the inevitable day when it must overtake me, at last.

Even we,
Even so.
George Meredith, Dirge in Woods

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posted by O @ 20:19