In Memoriam

“Now Besso (one of his oldest friends) has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us…know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion”

Albert Einstein, as quoted by Robert Lanza

“All psychological difficulties are due to the absence of a right relationship with the dead”

Rudolph Steiner (as quoted by Robert Sardello)

So first principles…what I have been witness too: when the death rattle stops and the psyche finally leaves there is a palpable stillness, a peace descends, and a struggle surrenders into a mystery, a mystery that emanates presence. This have I seen, and my heart felt a relief as my loved one left. A joy that stayed with into the next day, playing meaningful music and entering the world with an unencumbered brevity of movement and lightness of mood, soon to become unstuck within hours of picking up her stuff and signing death duties and civic records, but hey…

All of us of a certain age have sat with the dying. We have been with them through the trials of that process, the bed sores, the aching or paralysed limbs, the difficulty breathing, the pallor or blackening…At times one can enjoy humour and breathtaking shifts of perspective with the dying. I am ready now; everything I have is now yours said one old lady to her two grandchildren who had just said how much they loved her. A complete change, a reversal in energy, a feeling shift, she would leave later that night having given of everything that she ever could have.

At other times we sit through the clinging to life. We all do this … the living (who are the dying) and what we might call the ‘dying sooner rather than later and I know it’…all of us get into clinging to life. Whether it is a significant relationship we did not want to end, whether it is a substance or daily routine we now loathe but still cannot give up, whether it is a body that has so far stood us so well that now develops a tragic flaw, an antidote to our existential hubris. Sometimes it is sitting with the ‘dying sooner rather than later and I know it’ folks that allows us to see the absurdity of this clinging, the impossible dream we endlessly recycle as human beings desperate not to see our sense of meaning get up and fly over the fields like the black crows of death in Van Gogh’s last paintings…

In it no secret – we are all terminally ill, we are all ‘doing time’ as another put it and will leave the playing field sooner rather than later. How we deal with the inescapable anxiety of our self-consciousness in the face of our transience…well that is another issue. Some populate ever more fiercely the Elysian field of heavenly vistas; some turn their minds to apocalypse as if to project their own nihilism onto a global dimension. What we are doing with our fear, what we are doing with our fear of dying, what we are doing with our denial of death (Becker), our denial of the dead (Steiner) is an important issue, indeed is an ecological issue of great import. It is this existential dimension of the current climactic, energy and ecological crises that is often overlooked. What we are imagining as we stare into the barrel of the gun, as we write the sand mandalas of our lives, is an essential aspect of the subtle ecology of life on this planet.

For we are scared and fear has a way of controlling us and destroying us. Fear flows from some of the stories of Rabbit in the Native American Indian traditions (whose own fear would constantly manifest situations to justify itself) to the general tendency of human beings to eroticize or make relationship to their fears through fantasy material – i.e. that what cannot be appropriated easily by the unconscious mind becomes fertile ground for the activity of the unconscious mind. I have personally witnessed people defend the meaninglessness of life, the randomness of existence, the sheer chance of things with such vehemence that you could only imagine that this randomness was a god whose altar they filled every night with the summation of their earnest longing. Such were these people’s fear of meaning…

Fear of death. Fear of the dead. For they are there, they have not gone. For they have entered the (from our point of view) ‘ultimate’ shift in perspective. Their identity is phased out of the current seemingly linear reality we all, by consensus, occupy. More, where they go we, like Aeneas and many before and after him, must follow… obviously we have one trip lined up whatever, but must that be the only time we ever ask ourselves the questions, is that the only time we will journey?


For Kleinzeit the hero or small-timer (his name might mean both) of Russell Hoban’s eponymous novel is never allowed to ignore the fact that death lurks around every corner, and that in so lurking their can be no ownership, no permanent holding of any given, in fact every high is a ‘short high’ as one chapter holds, a black hairy voice offstage (death?) shouting, as Hospital tells him that nothing is his. As always it is Kleinzeit’s love for the sister that is redemptive for him, and by implication the whole of heroic small-time humanity. Yet even that love is awash with death, and in fact it is only this love (awash with death) that can make any sense at all of life with death:

“Sister by owl-light, Sister zipping out of the tight trouser-suit, stepping out of her knickers in the glow of the gas fire. Sister pearly in the dusk, silky on the flowered sheets, tasty in the mouth, opulent to the touch, Kleinzeit, overwhelmed, became nothing, disappeared, reappeared, from nowhere entered, inventing himself as theme, as subject. Answered by Sister he sounded deep chill, silence, all beneath him, raised Atlantis, golden domes and oriental carpets, central heating, dates and pomegranates, mottled sunlight, stereo. Far below them Underground said, are you Orpheus?”

A very good question indeed…


Mark Jones

IMAGES: Untitled (1987) and Mr Reddy doing Pranam to the Divine Mother (1986) by Mother Meera.