Death and Dying
Page 9
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
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Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
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Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, —
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
Sunset, night and winter hover along the poem’s periphery, but the foreshadowing of death, far from haunting or escaping the poem’s affirmation, gives it its inclusive character. The poet is totally undisturbed by the recurrent foreshadowing and subtly resonating imminence of death. For, at this supremely luxurious moment of fruition, he is able to view the external world of nature from the point of view of one who fully accepts his mortality and recognizes that nature will survive him. The natural cycles of the year and the day are moving towards winter and night, poised in the bittersweetness of autumn twilight. Against this transient background, numerous smaller cycles are playing themselves out. Nuts, fruits and flowers are all ripe or overripe, and this ‘ripeness to the core’ signifies the fullness of life and—what becomes virtually synonymous with that fullness—the inevitability of death. Underlying these bountiful images of completion is Keats’s conviction that it is precisely because death is always implicated in life that life takes on its special poignancy and value. This beauty inheres in our experience of autumn’s music as both a swelling towards completion and fulfilment and the beginning of an ending. The swollen gourds, the ‘plump … hazel shells’, ‘the full-grown lambs’, and the ‘gathering swallows’ are, like the ‘cottage-trees’ bent with apples, simultaneously images of imminent death and of utter abundance, of a world teeming with life (which of course includes death) and ‘mellow fruitfulness’. Even when the apples go to the ‘cyder-press’, the sense of an ending is inextricably tied up with a sense of their juicy life, as ‘with patient look/Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours’. By accepting mortality, Keats discovers again the paradox that death is the mother of beauty.
In his wide-ranging paper, Patrick Mahony suggests that the acceptance of death can be understood either as the highest achievement of psychological health or as hard-won wisdom. I want to turn to this issue of acceptance, first, by acknowledging that for Keats the acceptance of death reveals both his remarkable psychological health and his precocious wisdom; though neither, I think, can be said to have been his motives for developing this view. In this respect, a comparison with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross will be useful. After initial periods of denial and isolation, according to Kubler-Ross, people who are dying typically pass through stages of anger, bargaining and depression, and some reach a final stage of acceptance. ‘It is not a resigned “giving up”, a sense of “what’s the use”’ (Death 99), she says, but rather a state of ‘equanimity and peace’ and of ‘dignity’ (Questions 34). And yet, she says, ‘acceptance … is almost void of feelings’ (Death 100).
The voice of ‘To Autumn’ is clearly not one of resignation to death, and it is indeed characterized by peace and dignity. But so far is it from being devoid of feeling that we might as well say that the genius and originality of the poem lie precisely in its rendering and orchestration of complex and profound feelings in the face of death—emotions that include peace and equanimity, to be sure, but that embrace both life and death with a heartbreaking intensity and vividness. Keats does indeed accept death, but his acceptance involves beauty because it is active rather than passive, because, like Apollo in ‘Hyperion’, he does not merely register or admit ‘Knowledge enormous’; rather, he lets the reality of mortality ‘Pour into the wide hallows of [his] brain’ (3. 113, 117).
Although the day may be dying, its death is figured as a blossoming: ‘barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day’ (emphasis mine). Keats offers no fantasy of rebirth. If autumn is beautiful, it is not because winter will be followed by spring. ‘Where are the songs of spring?’ he asks. ‘Ay, where are they?/Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.’ Autumn’s most beautiful music can be heard only when we cease regretting loss (the youthfulness of spring), only when we shed fantasies of rebirth (a new spring), and accept the reality of death (the coming winter). When we do that, the ending of a day can be perceived as a fruition, a coming into itself, a full flowering. The fields may then be ‘stubble-plains’, but, seen in this light, they will take on a ‘rosy hue’. The music of autumn, of mortality, can be heard only when one accepts the reality of death and gives up looking back to the spring of youth and forward to the fantasy of rebirth, of a spring beyond winter. The music of mortality can only be heard when one not only accepts death but embraces it.
I hope I have made clear that one of the important differences between Keats’s version of accepting the reality of death on the one hand and Kubler-Ross’s model on the other is that while her model is ‘almost void of feelings’, Keats’s is characterized by nothing so much as the intensity and depth of feelings. We are all familiar with the stoic approach to death, which accepts its reality with a stiff upper lip, which sometimes is deeply felt and sometimes merely endured without emotion. Obviously, those who have abiding faith in an afterlife, as in most traditional religions, will display an array of emotions, some more inflected by a sense of loss, others more inflected by a sense of joyous reunion. My sense is that while Michael Stone’s faith was fundamental, he shared with Keats an equally acute sense of how life itself becomes more precious and beautiful when it is understood as transitory. He had no doubts about an afterlife but he also had no doubts about the poignant beauty and value of frail human relations, and he understood much more fully than anyone I have ever known what Keats meant when he observed ‘How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world impress a sense of its natural beauties on us’ (Letters 2:260).
It is one thing to calmly accept the reality of death, either out of religious faith or uncommon courage. Although Michael Stone had both, Keats had to make do with courage on the one hand and the consolation of discovering a relationship between transience and beauty that was so central as to be the basis for a new understanding of spirituality itself. Michael held a more traditional spiritual grounding, but he was moved to the depths of his being by the connections Keats was trying to articulate between suffering and beauty. Although he embraced a more traditional conception of God, Michael understood the wisdom of the human truth Keats’s work embodies: that by embracing—not just accepting but actually embracing—mortality, one discovers that autumn has its own music, and that that music is even more beautiful than that of spring. There is, as Keats put it in ‘Hype
rion’, a ‘Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self’ (1. 36). Its connection with death lies at the foundation of Keats’s life and work.
In conclusion, I want to submit Keats’s hard-won insight about death to a critique of its own. As I suggested earlier, at the foundation of Keats’s vision is the paradox that, because an acute sense of mortality fosters one’s apprehension and appreciation of life and beauty, a deep acceptance of death is imperative. Indeed, as the ‘vale of Soul-making’ letter and ‘To Autumn’ illustrate, one must not only accept death; one must embrace it. But consider an alternative. Consider the advice that Dylan Thomas gives to his father on his deathbed:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at the end know death is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding light
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas’s advice to his dying father is in one clear sense based on a passionate disagreement with Keats’s premise that one must accept death, or at least that one must accept death with peace and calm. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night,’ Thomas pleads. To go gently, without protest, would be a violation of the life force. Thomas does acknowledge that the night is a ‘good night’ (emphasis mine), and he also admits that ‘wise men at their end know dark is right’, which suggests that wise men do understand that at some level death may be acceptable. But neither concession is grounds for surrendering one’s passion to stay alive, which is why Thomas urges his father to ‘burn and rave at close of day’ rather than calmly accept it as Keats does in ‘To Autumn’. Rather than accept the finality of sunset, as Keats does in his ode, Thomas urges his father to ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’.
So let me pose the question this way: Are these two positions irreconcilable? Is one suggesting a calm acceptance of death while the other suggests a fierce and passionate refusal to accept it? Or is there some common ground between Thomas’s view and Keats’s when we recognize that Keats urges not so much passive acceptance as active embracing? What, that is to say, is the relationship between passion and calm, motion and rest, embracing and accepting?
Finally, to complicate these issues further, let me pose a different challenge to Keats’s view of acceptance. I have already recounted one story, from my own experience, of someone dying of cancer. But consider this other, very different story.
This is the story of a friend’s mother who was diagnosed with a cancer that was already so far advanced that every doctor she consulted gave her no more than a couple months to live. We have all heard stories of people who defy the predictions of the experts. But this is a story about a woman—a remarkable woman, who was an opera singer—who, over the course of a full decade, cheated death not once or twice, but literally eight different times. Over and over again, she and her husband and son were told by all the best oncologists in the US that Mrs Lerner could not possibly survive this latest round, and each time—I repeat: eight times over the course of ten years—she did survive. To this day, the doctors are simply baffled.
This woman did finally die a few years ago, and her son is now writing a book in which he argues that the way in which he and his mother survived during that decade was through a sustained act of mindfulness so certain that it could cheat death that it never wavered. In his book Dan is exploring the connection between the qualities that sustained his mother and those that characterize the most accomplished people in the world: a Picasso, an Einstein, a Michael Jordan. ‘We simply refused,’ Dan told me, ‘to accept that she would die. It really is as simple as that.’
Where an admirably iron will leaves off and a pig-headed refusal to accept the obvious begins is difficult to say. This is familiar territory, of course, for the psychologists, who will have encountered every conceivable form of denial in the face of death. But as the papers of Michael Grosso and of Emily and Edward Kelly suggest, we would do well to give pause before relying so readily on what we assume are ironclad realities about death and dying. We may want to humble ourselves before such mysteries, as Jung does in John Dourley’s account, and acknowledge that, just as the scientific evidence is not unambiguous about survival beyond the death of the brain, there may indeed be more of a connection between mind and body with regard to the onset of death than we have generally acknowledged. Can we really say for certain that the state of mind of Dan and Mimi Lerner had absolutely nothing to do with her inexplicable survival not once, not twice, but eight times?
Whatever our views, the dynamic of resistance to, and acceptance of, death will always, I would argue, affect the character and texture of our experience of death and dying. Keats’s contribution to this debate—and in my view it is an invaluable one—is to articulate, perhaps better than anyone before or after him, the paradox that life accrues value precisely to the extent that one experiences its fragility, and that the only way to glimpse a ‘Sorrow more beautiful than Beauty’s self’ is not just to accept one’s mortality, but to embrace it.
Death and Afterdeath in the Writings of Rabindranath Tagore
Sudhir Kakar
On 10 September 1937, Rabindranath Tagore—poet, painter, philosopher, educationist, and perhaps the greatest multifaceted genius India has produced in the 19th and 20th centuries—fainted suddenly due to an attack of erysipelas. He was seventy-seven years old. Since there was no telephone in Santiniketan, in rural Bengal where he lived, he was in a coma for sixty hours before a medical team arrived from Calcutta and he began to respond to the treatment.
On 15 September, propped up on pillows, almost the first thing he did was ask for a brush and colours and paint a landscape on a piece of plywood he noticed lying in the room, ‘a dark wood with streaks of yellow light breaking through its gloom’, a painting one of his many biographers calls ‘remarkable … and obviously symbolic’. 1 On 25 September, he wrote the first poem of a cycle of eighteen poems on life and death, dying and ‘afterdeath’, published under the title Prantik, the last one written on 25 December 1937. These poems, translated from their original Bengali by Tagore himself, are some of the finest meditations on death and afterdeath in world literature. Besides the fact that poetry is notoriously difficult to translate, especially from a non-European language into a European one, and that Tagore’s unrepentant romanticism may be alien to much of contemporary sensibility, the English translations of Prantik and the other poems in this essay also suffer from the drawback that Tagore was an indifferent translator. But as the poet and translator of some of Tagore’s poems, William Radice, observes, even the best of translators would have struggled with reproducing into English some of the characteristics of Bengali such as ‘its rich sound patterns, exploited to the full by Tagore, its elegantly economical and regular inflexional system or its abundance of vivid, onomatopoeic words …’ 2
It is not my contention that Tagore’s fascination with the theme of death had its origins in the somatic occurrence of his near-death experience, the sixty-hour sojourn in the borderland between life and death, which haunted the three months in which these poems (and the painting) were composed. 3 All t
hrough his adult life, both in his prose writings and in his poetry, death had been a recurrent motif of his meditations. Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross, the author of the popular and widely influential On Death and Dying, believed that no one had thought more deeply on death than Rabindranath Tagore and printed his quotations at the head of each chapter of her book.
Tagore’s preoccupation with death goes back to a traumatic event of his youth—the suicide of his Muse and the love of his life, his sister-in-law Kadambari, three months after the poet’s marriage at the age of twenty-three. In his first autobiography, penned at the age of fifty, he writes:
I had seen nothing beyond life, and accepted it as ultimate truth. When of a sudden death came, and in a moment tore a gaping rent in its [life’s] smooth-seeming fabric, I was utterly bewildered. All around, the trees, the soil, the water, the sun, the moon, the stars, remained as immovably true as before; and yet the person who was as truly there, who, through a thousand points of contact with life, mind and heart, was ever so much more true for me, had vanished in a moment like a dream. What perplexing self-contradiction it all seemed to me as I looked around! How was I ever to reconcile what remained with which had gone?
The terrible darkness which was disclosed to me through this rent, continued to attract me night and day as time went on. I would ever and anon return to take my stand there and gaze upon it, wondering what there was left in place of what had gone. Emptiness is a thing man cannot bring himself to believe in: that which is not, is untrue; that which is untrue, is not. So our efforts to find something where we see nothing are unceasing.
Just as a young plant confined in darkness stretches itself on tiptoe as it were, to reach the light, so the soul, when death surrounds it with negation, tries and tries to rise into affirmatory light … Yet amid unbearable grief, flashes of joy sparkled in my mind on and off in a way which quite surprised me. The idea that life is not a fixture came as tidings that helped to lighten my mind. That we are not forever prisoners behind a wall of stony-hearted facts was the thought that kept unconsciously rising uppermost in rushes of gladness. 4