Contemplation on Death
A Srinivas Rao Feb 2010
This essay was written more than a year ago in Feb 2010. I am posting it here to have some of my earlier writing in one place.
“Where o death is thy sting and where o grave is thy victory” Corinthians 15:55
She was walking in her measured pace at that evening hour when the large flocks of crows returned to roost and the fewer sparrows chirped in chorus in a nearby tree. She was treading cautiously along the beaten track on the hem of a large playground where scores of walkers, the elderly and fitness enthusiasts trod in uneven pace. Slight of frame, dressed in an earthy brown, a tiny bag slung across her shoulder like a satchel, bespectacled and greying with an air of quiet dignity she walked. Little would one suspect that she was being treated for colon cancer, and had gone through a battery of therapies over the past year that left her slightly battered and darkened and with unseen scars of suffering and possibly loneliness.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into a conversation. My MP3 player was beckoning an evening raga and the prospect of a slow paced walk didn’t seem to be an attractive physical exercise. Yet I couldn’t resist wishing her and attempted in vain a reason to depart soon at my own pace and to the refuge of my own solitary observation ‘tower’. Amiable as she usually was we kept exchanging inconsequential remarks and pleasantries. She was genial to talk to and always did intrigue me with her ways of looking at things though I at times did seem dismissive at what seemed like an NGO worldview, slightly Left, slightly anarchic, slightly confusing. As the conversation ambled we unwittingly discovered that we were discussing death. In particular her own feelings that she had been experiencing and what she called ‘lived experience’ and her narration stopped my inappropriate academic chatter around the question.
What were the rush of questions and formulations that she encountered and more importantly what was her experience of seeing death as a looming reality made palpable by her condition? She remarked that the questions like “why me?” did emerge but not in the form of a master of destiny playing the Russian roulette. I unhelpfully suggested that it was anyway a dead notion of a capricious God allotting each one their varying burdens. She said that it took different forms especially those related to Karma and other consolations of false justice. I added that justice made sense only if the creator God disappeared after the act of creation as any interventionist would be unbearably capricious; that chance rather than law accounted for the inexplicable shifts in fortune and circumstance. However she thought that even a theory that discredited an interventionist God seemed out of place. She simply said “I felt deeply betrayed”. Wanting to provoke, I remarked “but betrayal is generally directed to an object or person, process or an idea”. She refused to pin her blame to anything external. She said that her betrayal was by her own body for which she had invested much energy in its care. She said that her body let her down. “Didn’t you feel that the betrayal also hinted envy towards your husband who had similar though inexplicable circumstances seemed more likely a candidate than yourself?” I heedlessly asked. She denied that she ever felt neither any envy nor any malice about the seeming randomness of her blind selection. The emphasis was the idea that one is ones body. In other words the most proximate idea of one’s identity is one’s body. I remarked that its seemed a simple truth, despite which people have struggled to seek the locus of one’s identity in a general processus as in Buddhism or even a more elusive idea of ’self” or atman in Hinduism. She seemed dismissive of such abstractions and simply stated that this was her lived experience which silenced the diversion into discussing individual identity.
She talked about how she felt that her body betrayed her in specific ways. In what seemed like intimate to her sensibility she believed that her hands and feet were the most expressive and beautiful parts of her body; which were the ones which were the first to give way in her chemotherapy becoming hypersensitive, peeling and discolouring. With her surgery the contours of her abdomen altered and it distressed her with what almost seemed like a violation of her body and its sensibility of herself. It was more the perceived sensibility than any apparent or noticeable change that offended her sense of self and its violation.
She mentioned that she did not believe in god and that she had led her life with no practice of faith. So she had not the usual dependence on prayer and expectation of deliverance from her crisis. She felt that she was dependent on her relationships that she had cultivated with care over the years especially two close friends who understood her almost like herself. Yet she had her moments when she felt that she might not tide over when she would confide in a small private note what she felt were the consequences and course of action that she would wish her family to pursue. She admitted that she felt lonely, and isolated in her suffering and that despite all the love and attention none would fathom her sense of unease and isolation.
Death I remarked was still an abstraction as many other things and did not constitute an organising principle in my own life. Not unless I did go through a close brush with death to understand its palpable and constant though invisible presence. Probably because the way we use language where entities including self maintain a changelessness in names, they permit an illusion of permanence and continuity. That we talk of impermanence is merely an abstraction and not a sense of dying each moment. She simply smiled in indulgence at my escape into abstractions what would probably be best accepted in silence.
Time is the face of death. Ubiquitous as a clock face of the 20th century or the numerical digital glow in its 21st avatar, that innocuous symbol is the face of death. In most ancient Hindu temples there is on the spire or tower (shikhara) or even over the crown of the deity, a gargoyle like figure a grinning fearsome face of the 'Kirtimukha' or face of glory. With bulging eyes and protruding canines a mass of undifferentiated vegetation and crocodile like creatures issuing out of its mouth. This is the face of Time. According to some puranic accounts this is "Kaala" and mythologically represented by Rahu or the node of the eclipsing moon; and Shiva the god of death wore them both in his hair.
However the idea of time as death is even more deeply rooted in our mythic imagination. We see time mythically as not uniform in constitution but of varying texture and moral value. Not a mere linear progression or cyclical rotation but a succession of ages the Krita, Treta, Dvapara and Kali each with a differentiated quality of being and moral signification. A fall from the Garden of Eden to explain away the march towards a paradisiacal utopia. And we are miserably stuck ever en passage groping towards deliverance and a promised land or a more propitious birth in some other 'loka'. The golden age is a residual nostalgia invented by each generation to console us of our present condition moral or otherwise. We invent all the belief systems of reincarnation and days of judgement perennially avoiding the utter annihilation of our little selves and refusing to face the simple punctuation of death. The Hindu irony is that the names Krita, Treta, and Dvapara were the faces of the die (dice), that ubiquitous symbol of caprice and chance that accompanies each visitation of birth and death.
It seemingly acknowledges that life if not the whole universe is an interplay of chance and necessity; order and chaos, emergence and dissolution. To the individual it merely highlights the utter insignificance of ones own self if she indeed contemplates the whole. We have spent oceans of ink embalmed in tomes, in describing that which transcends death, in every faith. Many a sage and scholar has given opinion and fable but not stated the simple fact of our individual terminus. They have overreached death to seek a rationale for virtue, justice and ethics, and invented our innumerable consolations to help us face a final tryst. Never in history so much has been invented and circumvented to explain so simple a fact as death. These are our innumerable arks of Noah that promises to bail us out of the tempestuous tossing between Pangloss (all is well) and Job (all is pain). It is not the consolations of faith and religion that seem questionable; nor does one grudge its simple solace. What I do wonder and sometimes object to is their enviable though pretentious certainties.
If our mythic imagination persuades us that we are ever en passage from the point of view of the individual (in linear time as modernity persuades us into ‘progress’ or cyclical time as our faith persuades us into belief), what is the status of the 'whole'? The whole also must be an infinite processus not necessarily intelligent and not necessarily towards some end but governed as much by chance as by necessity and not necessarily by a Governor. It is chance however, that captures our imagination and is the backdrop of our national epic the Mahabharata which is the story of one tremendous potlatch dice game. The irony is that chance mitigates the need for a propitiable god and even diminishes the power of effort. However when chance is tempered by the finite possibilities of necessity it yields us a habitable universe. Yet if the 'whole' is an infinite process then every solution and every condition and circumstance is whole. If the whole indeed is an infinite process then it moves to no purpose by definition. The whole must be in everyway indifferent to its parts. (Except in a finite way we are inexorably gravitating towards the death of the sun and supernovae will merge with other supernovae.) To then consider our privileged position as a chosen people, a chosen caste and faith; there is then no promised land and none of the 72 virgins in personal attendance. Simply, this is all there is. There is then no deliverance beyond death, no salvation and none to be salvaged. As the Buddha wisely observed in his last words "seek not refuge in anyone but thyself". And indeed while the Buddha did speak of salvation he did state that there is 'no self' to be salvaged as there is only 'one whole'. The whole is indifferent to salvation or damnation by definition.
Yama the Hindu god of death is also referred to as Dharma or ‘law’ or justice. We invent an afterlife to assuage our sense of justice here and hereafter, ignoring the possibility of a play of chance. (Even the notions of rebirth are nothing but a more mechanistic though sophisticated alternative to a retributive judgement day justice). We did not need recourse to afterlife to give us a sense of justice or ethics. We have a seeming sense of the same by simply being human. Our sense of justice emerges neither from the retribution on judgement day nor a compensatory rebirth but merely because we see others suffer just like us as in Hillel the Elder’s admonition “that which is hateful to you, do not do unto others; that is the whole of the Torah the rest is merely commentary”. Justice in the hereafter and not justice here is like Martin Luther King Jr.'s observation that justice delayed is justice denied. We have grown to domesticate death (by our evangelists and swamis/babas and scriptures and rituals) and use euphemisms in its descriptions as though we want to wish it away. It can never be wished away. Nachiketa conversing with death (Yama) was probably the earliest recorded contemplation of death regardless of the author’s conclusions (never mind the modern literary slogan “the author is dead”); an attempt to domesticate death (the earlier Egyptian book of the Dead dating the 3rd millennium BCE was a funerary text and not a contemplation).
Fear is the proper name of death. We dislike and fear death. We cease to examine it out of the fear and whisk it away by our silly etiquette of avoiding talking morbidity to finally bury every such questioning as ungentlemanly. We however do privately take a chance just in case there is an afterlife, just in case we can influence our ‘destiny’; the alternative of utter annihilation of the self seems too terrifying. This choice between inventing an afterlife and choosing extinction is the starkest choice we make in our belief which determines our locus of authority and our attitudes to it; our source of ethical behaviour, our sense of justice and defines our foundations of a humanism however imperfect. However nothing seems simpler than accepting the fact that death is indeed the final destination and there is no need for any further explication of eternity nor reincarnation nor paradise. We have developed a curious way of dismissing off death like we sanitise any uncomfortable thought and use euphemisms like “passing away” or left for a ‘heavenly abode’ or like the great epic’s final chapter “Mahaprasthan Parva” or the ‘Great Departure’. This belief is similar to and in sympathy with the Egyptian belief of dancing with Isis and Osiris after the mummy crosses over in a boat or even more dramatic like Emperor Qin Shi Huang leading his vast terracotta army across the shores of death. This seems especially so to our modern sensibilities of hand sanitizers. Yet like Lady Macbeth we discover “Here’s the smell of blood again and all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand”. In what seems like a modern interpretation or Neo-Buddhism, Babasaheb Ambedkar reformulated the ancient idea of rebirth to one of re assimilation into the five great elements and not the great round of transmigrations. Of all the modern Hindu masters I hold in regard at their insights on self and unity like Sri Ramana, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, or even Aurobindo only one enlightened individual stands out in stark isolation Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, who admitted than there is indeed nothing after death, (whose (‘chuckle’) Mahasamadhi was in 1982) except a ‘mingling’ of consciousness where individualized form becomes generalized content.
All the poetry of “punarapi jananam punarapi maranam, punarapi janani jathare shayanam” ‘endless cycle of birth and death and endlessly born of a mother’s womb’ is an elaborate consolation. (We are fortunate that we have no memory of our previous deaths despite the inanity of regression therapy of Dr Brian Weiss.) We however need the consolation which unfortunately ceases to be such when you discover it to be a consolation. Another modern ploy to domesticate death is our adopting celebratory stances of life and death. All play at celebratory stances at life and living is as puerile as a morbid obsession with death. We simply have no choice in either and thus are merely passive observers and no celebratory stance will mitigate the cycles of joy and unhappiness. All our fictional grasping of death through fable, song and film does not prepare us to face it in its utter meaninglessness and extinction.
Desire is the obverse of fear. The desire ‘to be’ is the most fundamental desire. To exist, to continue being and to wish for or seek immortality. Desire is the Janus face of death. While our life expectancies rose to twice what it was 200 years ago we continue to wish that life would be extendible indefinitely though we have no better resources to cope with such lease extensions. This desire to be (and being through becoming) asserts itself as life and manifests in love, sex, pleasure, money, power, virtue, knowledge, holiness etc. (And all these collectibles tend to corrupt with accumulation as J Krishnamurthy observed.) Death thus is the basis of desire and a foundation of life.
Change is the metaphor of death just as time is its face. Death is boundaries, limits, ends, beginnings and everything or every object is the death of one and the beginning of another. The space within the pot and the space outside the pot is a unity with the death of the pot; the ‘ghataakash and mathaakash’ of Hindu imagery. Any differentiation of the whole is the assertion of death. The act of creation, if we were to believe in one, was the birth of death. But will death die?
The only sane stance seems like an agnostic suspension of belief. “I simply don’t know”; it is, it is not, it is both is and ‘is not’, maybe neither is nor ‘is not’. And if this sounds suspiciously like the Jain idea of the relativity of all knowing, “anekantavad”, my apology is that I have no agenda (though I know there is no such thing as not having one). I have no morbid fascination for death and its many kinds of visitations like Webster’s “ten thousand doors for men to take their exits”. We seem to crave for some new “ars moriendi” art of dying (quite unlike the Tibetan or Egyptian or Roman) to help mitigate the trauma, and the increasing absence of death with dignity.
“O Lord, give each of us his own death”- Rainer Maria Rilke
A. Srinivas Rao
February 2010
A Srinivas Rao Feb 2010
This essay was written more than a year ago in Feb 2010. I am posting it here to have some of my earlier writing in one place.
“Where o death is thy sting and where o grave is thy victory” Corinthians 15:55
She was walking in her measured pace at that evening hour when the large flocks of crows returned to roost and the fewer sparrows chirped in chorus in a nearby tree. She was treading cautiously along the beaten track on the hem of a large playground where scores of walkers, the elderly and fitness enthusiasts trod in uneven pace. Slight of frame, dressed in an earthy brown, a tiny bag slung across her shoulder like a satchel, bespectacled and greying with an air of quiet dignity she walked. Little would one suspect that she was being treated for colon cancer, and had gone through a battery of therapies over the past year that left her slightly battered and darkened and with unseen scars of suffering and possibly loneliness.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into a conversation. My MP3 player was beckoning an evening raga and the prospect of a slow paced walk didn’t seem to be an attractive physical exercise. Yet I couldn’t resist wishing her and attempted in vain a reason to depart soon at my own pace and to the refuge of my own solitary observation ‘tower’. Amiable as she usually was we kept exchanging inconsequential remarks and pleasantries. She was genial to talk to and always did intrigue me with her ways of looking at things though I at times did seem dismissive at what seemed like an NGO worldview, slightly Left, slightly anarchic, slightly confusing. As the conversation ambled we unwittingly discovered that we were discussing death. In particular her own feelings that she had been experiencing and what she called ‘lived experience’ and her narration stopped my inappropriate academic chatter around the question.
What were the rush of questions and formulations that she encountered and more importantly what was her experience of seeing death as a looming reality made palpable by her condition? She remarked that the questions like “why me?” did emerge but not in the form of a master of destiny playing the Russian roulette. I unhelpfully suggested that it was anyway a dead notion of a capricious God allotting each one their varying burdens. She said that it took different forms especially those related to Karma and other consolations of false justice. I added that justice made sense only if the creator God disappeared after the act of creation as any interventionist would be unbearably capricious; that chance rather than law accounted for the inexplicable shifts in fortune and circumstance. However she thought that even a theory that discredited an interventionist God seemed out of place. She simply said “I felt deeply betrayed”. Wanting to provoke, I remarked “but betrayal is generally directed to an object or person, process or an idea”. She refused to pin her blame to anything external. She said that her betrayal was by her own body for which she had invested much energy in its care. She said that her body let her down. “Didn’t you feel that the betrayal also hinted envy towards your husband who had similar though inexplicable circumstances seemed more likely a candidate than yourself?” I heedlessly asked. She denied that she ever felt neither any envy nor any malice about the seeming randomness of her blind selection. The emphasis was the idea that one is ones body. In other words the most proximate idea of one’s identity is one’s body. I remarked that its seemed a simple truth, despite which people have struggled to seek the locus of one’s identity in a general processus as in Buddhism or even a more elusive idea of ’self” or atman in Hinduism. She seemed dismissive of such abstractions and simply stated that this was her lived experience which silenced the diversion into discussing individual identity.
She talked about how she felt that her body betrayed her in specific ways. In what seemed like intimate to her sensibility she believed that her hands and feet were the most expressive and beautiful parts of her body; which were the ones which were the first to give way in her chemotherapy becoming hypersensitive, peeling and discolouring. With her surgery the contours of her abdomen altered and it distressed her with what almost seemed like a violation of her body and its sensibility of herself. It was more the perceived sensibility than any apparent or noticeable change that offended her sense of self and its violation.
She mentioned that she did not believe in god and that she had led her life with no practice of faith. So she had not the usual dependence on prayer and expectation of deliverance from her crisis. She felt that she was dependent on her relationships that she had cultivated with care over the years especially two close friends who understood her almost like herself. Yet she had her moments when she felt that she might not tide over when she would confide in a small private note what she felt were the consequences and course of action that she would wish her family to pursue. She admitted that she felt lonely, and isolated in her suffering and that despite all the love and attention none would fathom her sense of unease and isolation.
Death I remarked was still an abstraction as many other things and did not constitute an organising principle in my own life. Not unless I did go through a close brush with death to understand its palpable and constant though invisible presence. Probably because the way we use language where entities including self maintain a changelessness in names, they permit an illusion of permanence and continuity. That we talk of impermanence is merely an abstraction and not a sense of dying each moment. She simply smiled in indulgence at my escape into abstractions what would probably be best accepted in silence.
Time is the face of death. Ubiquitous as a clock face of the 20th century or the numerical digital glow in its 21st avatar, that innocuous symbol is the face of death. In most ancient Hindu temples there is on the spire or tower (shikhara) or even over the crown of the deity, a gargoyle like figure a grinning fearsome face of the 'Kirtimukha' or face of glory. With bulging eyes and protruding canines a mass of undifferentiated vegetation and crocodile like creatures issuing out of its mouth. This is the face of Time. According to some puranic accounts this is "Kaala" and mythologically represented by Rahu or the node of the eclipsing moon; and Shiva the god of death wore them both in his hair.
However the idea of time as death is even more deeply rooted in our mythic imagination. We see time mythically as not uniform in constitution but of varying texture and moral value. Not a mere linear progression or cyclical rotation but a succession of ages the Krita, Treta, Dvapara and Kali each with a differentiated quality of being and moral signification. A fall from the Garden of Eden to explain away the march towards a paradisiacal utopia. And we are miserably stuck ever en passage groping towards deliverance and a promised land or a more propitious birth in some other 'loka'. The golden age is a residual nostalgia invented by each generation to console us of our present condition moral or otherwise. We invent all the belief systems of reincarnation and days of judgement perennially avoiding the utter annihilation of our little selves and refusing to face the simple punctuation of death. The Hindu irony is that the names Krita, Treta, and Dvapara were the faces of the die (dice), that ubiquitous symbol of caprice and chance that accompanies each visitation of birth and death.
It seemingly acknowledges that life if not the whole universe is an interplay of chance and necessity; order and chaos, emergence and dissolution. To the individual it merely highlights the utter insignificance of ones own self if she indeed contemplates the whole. We have spent oceans of ink embalmed in tomes, in describing that which transcends death, in every faith. Many a sage and scholar has given opinion and fable but not stated the simple fact of our individual terminus. They have overreached death to seek a rationale for virtue, justice and ethics, and invented our innumerable consolations to help us face a final tryst. Never in history so much has been invented and circumvented to explain so simple a fact as death. These are our innumerable arks of Noah that promises to bail us out of the tempestuous tossing between Pangloss (all is well) and Job (all is pain). It is not the consolations of faith and religion that seem questionable; nor does one grudge its simple solace. What I do wonder and sometimes object to is their enviable though pretentious certainties.
If our mythic imagination persuades us that we are ever en passage from the point of view of the individual (in linear time as modernity persuades us into ‘progress’ or cyclical time as our faith persuades us into belief), what is the status of the 'whole'? The whole also must be an infinite processus not necessarily intelligent and not necessarily towards some end but governed as much by chance as by necessity and not necessarily by a Governor. It is chance however, that captures our imagination and is the backdrop of our national epic the Mahabharata which is the story of one tremendous potlatch dice game. The irony is that chance mitigates the need for a propitiable god and even diminishes the power of effort. However when chance is tempered by the finite possibilities of necessity it yields us a habitable universe. Yet if the 'whole' is an infinite process then every solution and every condition and circumstance is whole. If the whole indeed is an infinite process then it moves to no purpose by definition. The whole must be in everyway indifferent to its parts. (Except in a finite way we are inexorably gravitating towards the death of the sun and supernovae will merge with other supernovae.) To then consider our privileged position as a chosen people, a chosen caste and faith; there is then no promised land and none of the 72 virgins in personal attendance. Simply, this is all there is. There is then no deliverance beyond death, no salvation and none to be salvaged. As the Buddha wisely observed in his last words "seek not refuge in anyone but thyself". And indeed while the Buddha did speak of salvation he did state that there is 'no self' to be salvaged as there is only 'one whole'. The whole is indifferent to salvation or damnation by definition.
Yama the Hindu god of death is also referred to as Dharma or ‘law’ or justice. We invent an afterlife to assuage our sense of justice here and hereafter, ignoring the possibility of a play of chance. (Even the notions of rebirth are nothing but a more mechanistic though sophisticated alternative to a retributive judgement day justice). We did not need recourse to afterlife to give us a sense of justice or ethics. We have a seeming sense of the same by simply being human. Our sense of justice emerges neither from the retribution on judgement day nor a compensatory rebirth but merely because we see others suffer just like us as in Hillel the Elder’s admonition “that which is hateful to you, do not do unto others; that is the whole of the Torah the rest is merely commentary”. Justice in the hereafter and not justice here is like Martin Luther King Jr.'s observation that justice delayed is justice denied. We have grown to domesticate death (by our evangelists and swamis/babas and scriptures and rituals) and use euphemisms in its descriptions as though we want to wish it away. It can never be wished away. Nachiketa conversing with death (Yama) was probably the earliest recorded contemplation of death regardless of the author’s conclusions (never mind the modern literary slogan “the author is dead”); an attempt to domesticate death (the earlier Egyptian book of the Dead dating the 3rd millennium BCE was a funerary text and not a contemplation).
Fear is the proper name of death. We dislike and fear death. We cease to examine it out of the fear and whisk it away by our silly etiquette of avoiding talking morbidity to finally bury every such questioning as ungentlemanly. We however do privately take a chance just in case there is an afterlife, just in case we can influence our ‘destiny’; the alternative of utter annihilation of the self seems too terrifying. This choice between inventing an afterlife and choosing extinction is the starkest choice we make in our belief which determines our locus of authority and our attitudes to it; our source of ethical behaviour, our sense of justice and defines our foundations of a humanism however imperfect. However nothing seems simpler than accepting the fact that death is indeed the final destination and there is no need for any further explication of eternity nor reincarnation nor paradise. We have developed a curious way of dismissing off death like we sanitise any uncomfortable thought and use euphemisms like “passing away” or left for a ‘heavenly abode’ or like the great epic’s final chapter “Mahaprasthan Parva” or the ‘Great Departure’. This belief is similar to and in sympathy with the Egyptian belief of dancing with Isis and Osiris after the mummy crosses over in a boat or even more dramatic like Emperor Qin Shi Huang leading his vast terracotta army across the shores of death. This seems especially so to our modern sensibilities of hand sanitizers. Yet like Lady Macbeth we discover “Here’s the smell of blood again and all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand”. In what seems like a modern interpretation or Neo-Buddhism, Babasaheb Ambedkar reformulated the ancient idea of rebirth to one of re assimilation into the five great elements and not the great round of transmigrations. Of all the modern Hindu masters I hold in regard at their insights on self and unity like Sri Ramana, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, or even Aurobindo only one enlightened individual stands out in stark isolation Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, who admitted than there is indeed nothing after death, (whose (‘chuckle’) Mahasamadhi was in 1982) except a ‘mingling’ of consciousness where individualized form becomes generalized content.
All the poetry of “punarapi jananam punarapi maranam, punarapi janani jathare shayanam” ‘endless cycle of birth and death and endlessly born of a mother’s womb’ is an elaborate consolation. (We are fortunate that we have no memory of our previous deaths despite the inanity of regression therapy of Dr Brian Weiss.) We however need the consolation which unfortunately ceases to be such when you discover it to be a consolation. Another modern ploy to domesticate death is our adopting celebratory stances of life and death. All play at celebratory stances at life and living is as puerile as a morbid obsession with death. We simply have no choice in either and thus are merely passive observers and no celebratory stance will mitigate the cycles of joy and unhappiness. All our fictional grasping of death through fable, song and film does not prepare us to face it in its utter meaninglessness and extinction.
Desire is the obverse of fear. The desire ‘to be’ is the most fundamental desire. To exist, to continue being and to wish for or seek immortality. Desire is the Janus face of death. While our life expectancies rose to twice what it was 200 years ago we continue to wish that life would be extendible indefinitely though we have no better resources to cope with such lease extensions. This desire to be (and being through becoming) asserts itself as life and manifests in love, sex, pleasure, money, power, virtue, knowledge, holiness etc. (And all these collectibles tend to corrupt with accumulation as J Krishnamurthy observed.) Death thus is the basis of desire and a foundation of life.
Change is the metaphor of death just as time is its face. Death is boundaries, limits, ends, beginnings and everything or every object is the death of one and the beginning of another. The space within the pot and the space outside the pot is a unity with the death of the pot; the ‘ghataakash and mathaakash’ of Hindu imagery. Any differentiation of the whole is the assertion of death. The act of creation, if we were to believe in one, was the birth of death. But will death die?
The only sane stance seems like an agnostic suspension of belief. “I simply don’t know”; it is, it is not, it is both is and ‘is not’, maybe neither is nor ‘is not’. And if this sounds suspiciously like the Jain idea of the relativity of all knowing, “anekantavad”, my apology is that I have no agenda (though I know there is no such thing as not having one). I have no morbid fascination for death and its many kinds of visitations like Webster’s “ten thousand doors for men to take their exits”. We seem to crave for some new “ars moriendi” art of dying (quite unlike the Tibetan or Egyptian or Roman) to help mitigate the trauma, and the increasing absence of death with dignity.
“O Lord, give each of us his own death”- Rainer Maria Rilke
A. Srinivas Rao
February 2010
No comments:
Post a Comment