Death and Dying

by Sudhir Kakar

  Here, Rabindranath reminds me of the English poet John Keats, whose painful experiences of death of loved ones—father, mother and brother, before his own first haemorrhage that was to kill him at the age of twenty-five, led to an insight that is at the foundation of Keats’s work, namely that life accrues value precisely to the extent that one intensely experiences its fragility and transience. 5

  The attempt to find a meaning in death is part of our universal heritage, as old as human consciousness of mortality. Where Tagore gives this search his imprint is in the insistence that death has a meaning because of the existence of life.

  If to leave this world be as real as to love it—then there must be a meaning in the meeting and parting of life.

  If that love were deceived in death, then the canker of this deceit would eat into all things, and the stars would shrivel and grow black. 6

  In his own quest for the meaning of death, Tagore rarely succumbed to the temptation of denying its dread by imagining it, for instance in the following poem, as a longed-for bridegroom, an atypical lapse into thanatophilia that transforms dying into a dramatic and celebratory occasion.

  Why do you whisper so faintly in my ears, O Death, my Death?

  When the flowers droop in the evening and cattle come back to their stalls, you stealthily come to my side and speak words that I do not understand.

  Is this how you must woo and win me with the opiate of drowsy murmur and cold kisses, O Death, my Death?

  Will there be no proud ceremony for our wedding?

  Will you not tie up with a wreath your tawny coiled locks?

  Is there none to carry your banner before you, and will not the

  Night be on fire with your red torch-lights.

  O Death, my Death?

  Come with your conch-shells sounding, come in the sleepless night,

  Dress me with a crimson mantle, grasp my hand and take me.

  Let your chariot be ready at my door with your horses neighing impatiently.

  Raise my veil and look at me proudly,

  O Death, my Death. 7

  On the whole, though, as in the autobiographical passage on the death of Kadambari, the two images of death in his poems are of emptiness and a darkness that has, though, an invisible light hidden in its layers. These are the two images that I want to explore further in this essay.

  The Emptying of Self

  For Tagore, dying empties the self of its past, obliterating memories, attachments, fears, hopes—a process that is deeply unsettling. In the very first poem of Prantik, he pictures it vividly:

  With the light of the world extinguished,

  in the heart of darkness,

  quietly came the envoy of death.

  Layers of fine dust,

  Settled in the sky of life, extending to the horizon,

  Were cleansed with the solvent of pain—

  This quiet scrubbing continued every moment

  With firm hands, like a nightmare. 8

  The fifth poem begins with the stanza:

  O disappointed past, constant companion following me,

  like shadows from the realm of ghosts,

  unfulfilled desires keep me company,

  persistently, emphatically calling me back,

  playing indistinct sitar in notes steeped of passion,

  like bees without a hive

  droning in a forest bereft of flowers. 9

  While in the seventh,

  In the twilight of my weary consciousness,

  I saw, my body float in the black stream of kalindi,

  carrying with it all its feelings, varied pains,

  collection of lifelong memories—under a painted cover,

  with its flute. 10

  For those whose consciousness is characterized by a psychological modernity, which is neither coterminous with historical modernity nor confined to specific geographical locations, 11 the fear of death is no longer in the torments of hell that await the wicked. These torments have been gruesomely detailed, sometimes with relish, in the texts of various religious traditions, for instance, in Hindu India in the Garuda-Purana that is ritually recited everyday of the prescribed thirteen days of mourning. They have also been represented in the visual arts of the major cultural traditions, in Western art most notably in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Signorelli.

  The ‘nightmare’ of dying and death in the psychologically modern is not in fears and hopes associated with an afterlife, but of the self being stripped of memories of which the most vital are of persons we have loved and who have loved us. In psychoanalytic language, the dread lies in the self being emptied of the mental representations of our most important attachment figures and experiences, a disaster of psychotic proportions. Not for Tagore, the consolatory notion of an afterlife where the links forged with vitally nurturing persons of this life are maintained, a heaven where one will be reunited with loved ones.

  The ‘gaping rent’ that the death of Kadambari tore into the fabric of young Tagore’s life, I would speculate, was an imaginative encounter with his own death. It ruptured the ‘membrane’ that protected his self, releasing intense anxiety, even if the act of imagining death was, to use Richard Wollheim’s distinction, peripheral and not central. 12 However close the connection to the beloved dead person and however heightened the empathetic capacity of the one who is left behind, death cannot but be an object of peripheral imagination since the premise of experiencing death centrally, that is, as if experiencing it one’s self, conflicts with the act of imagination. The comatose state of sixty hours, I would say, was the closest Rabindranath came to a central experiencing of death, partly accounting for his much more elaborate meditations on life, death and afterdeath in his Prantik poems than the one on his autobiographical recollections on the effect Kadambari’s death had on him.

  Where Tagore and most psychoanalysts would differ is not in their views of the self as existentially solitary at the time of death, emptied of its introjects in analytic parlance, but what such a total isolation of the self signifies. For the analysts, the emptying is a disintegration of personal identity and a dissolution of the self, whereas for Tagore, the self isolated, solitary, is not its end, but a part of the continual process of change to which the self is subject. The difference, of course, is due to their contending conceptions on the nature of the self. For Tagore, in line with Upanishadic and Buddhist thought, the self is not a finite entity that begins with birth and ends at death as in psychoanalysis or, indeed, in the currently ascendant paradigm of the human sciences. For him, the real self has a continuity beyond birth and death. Covered by ‘layers of dust’ accumulated by the experiences of life, under the painted cover of ‘feelings, varied pains, collection of lifelong memories’ of the empirical self of our conscious life, the real self is not limited by the two ends of life. The deepest striving of the self is to evolve towards the ‘great light’, which has been variously described in the world’s spiritual traditions—from the Hindu moksha to the Christian unio mystica. Such a striving is not animated by the illusion of immortality, a denial of the dread of death, as the Freudians would have it. It is the awareness, at some deepest layers of our being, of this innermost essence of the self that makes human beings …

  skeptical of death, even when the fact of death cannot be doubted … Our self to live must go through a continual change and growth of form, which may be termed a continual death and a continual life going on at the same time. It is really courting death when we refuse to accept death; when we wish to give the form of the self some fixed changelessness; when the self feels no impulse which urges it to grow out of itself; when it treats the limits as final and acts accordingly. Then comes our teacher’s call to die to this death; not a call to annihilation but to eternal life. It is the extinction of the lamp in the morning light; not the abolition of the sun. It is really asking us consciously to give effect to the innermost wish that we have in the dept
hs of

  our nature. 13

  Death is dehanta, lit. ‘end of the body’, not obliteration of the self. In the first poem of Prantik, Tagore writes:

  This body—carrier of the heaps of amassed past

  became a barrier like Vindhyagiri

  for the heart of the present

  raising its head towards the future.

  Today, I saw it fall off the horizon

  like the tired clouds of the morning.

  Freed, I found myself in the faraway sky of the heart,

  in the divine light beyond the Milky Way

  on the bank of fine extinction. 14

  And further, in Poem 14 of Prantik,

  It’s time for the bird to depart.

  The nest will be empty.

  In the strong winds of the forest, shorn of songs,

  the vacant nest will drop in dust.

  Along with the dry leaves and the wilted flowers,

  day and night will I fly in the trackless space

  beyond the sunset sea. 15

  And in Poem 15,

  I see me outside myself,

  as if I am some unknown from another age,

  as if the garment of everyday

  has been forthwith removed from my being—

  staring at it, persistent wonder embraces it

  like a wasp clasping a flower.

  …

  I tell myself,

  the castle of the ancient

  has been unlocked by death

  and the new has stepped out;

  it removes the worn stole of the trivial.

  With the total value of being,

  which inconceivable has come to light? 16

  The unimaginable anxiety of the empty self in death, then, is transitory:

  A child—for fear of losing the warm touch.

  Of his mother’s breast—begins to wail.

  But then, moved to her other breast,

  he’s calm again. 17

  The Darkness of Death, and the Light of Afterdeath.

  In Tagore’s poems, the imagery of light pervades his vision of afterdeath. In the first poem of Prantik, written on 25 September 193 7, eight days after he had regained consciousness, we read:

  A finger of light from the space

  touched the edge of the vast, still darkness.

  The trembling light, with the speed of lightening,

  broke the heaps of sleep into numerous fragments.

  Like the first dance of the floods on the realm of dryness

  dissipating into every branch,

  a sudden flood from faraway

  spreads in the obliterated riverbed of summer,

  similarly, in the intricate veins of sleepy darkness,

  the concealed current of light flowed. 18

  The landscape he painted on the same day is bathed in a brilliant yellow light. The darkness of death gives way to the light of afterdeath. In Poem 10 of Prantik,

  O Lord of annihilation,

  suddenly, from your court came the envoy of death,

  brought me to your spacious courtyard.

  My eyes saw darkness—

  did not see the invisible light

  within the deep layers of darkness—

  the light that is the glow of universal light.

  My own shadow obstructed my vision.

  You invited me

  so that I might invoke a hymn to light

  from the deep cavern of my being

  and touch the light at the edge of creation. 19

  In this light, the terror of the isolated self is transformed into the discovery of its essential, nay, miraculous solitude. Thus in Poem 13,

  The light of the galaxy of the faraway sky

  that touches the dark green forehead of earth,

  kisses your eyes and ties you up forever

  in a bond of brotherhood with the heavens.

  The great message

  traversing the path of time for ages past,

  honours you at this auspicious moment.

  Facing you is the path of the soul stretching to infinity—

  you are its solitary traveller—

  that is the wonder of wonders! 20

  It is the realization of the truth that human attachments that adhered to and appeared to constitute the self were transitory: ‘This life is the crossing of a sea, where we meet in the same narrow ship. In death we reach the shore and go to our different worlds.’ 21

  Death, which when alive we dreaded because of its merciless isolation of a self without memories or desires, reveals its benign face in afterdeath. In Prantik’s third poem,

  An invisible strike

  snapped the intricate bond of dream linking me with life.

  At that moment, I saw a long unknown path facing me,

  leading very far

  to the realm of the solitary—detached, merciless.

  Suddenly, from the top of the gate of annihilation,

  the Great Solitary called for the solitary.

  Amidst innumerable, unfamiliar stars my eyes opened.

  I realized, there was no fear in solitude—

  there is fear only when in crowds. 22

  For some gifted people, mystics, poets, artists, intimations of the afterdeath ‘affirmatory’ light rekindles the world with a fresh vision, endowing it, even if transiently, with newfound beauty and harmony.

  One day the precious gift of sight will cease—

  my last blink will forever seal my eyes.

  The following day will dawn the same as this,

  the world will wake to see the same sunrise.

  The noisy play of the world will carry on—

  in homes, the time will gladly, sadly pass.

  Thinking of this, towards this world I turn

  and look at it with newfound eagerness.

  The simple things that didn’t seem to count

  all now take on a value beyond price: 23

  This poem from Tagore’s Nobel Prize-winning collection, Gitanjali, reminds me of the moving verses of St John of the Cross, who, in a bizarre coincidence also fell victim to erysipelas, which eventually claimed his life.

  Overflowing with God’s grace

  He passed through the groves in haste

  And, though he saw them

  In their natural state

  He left them garbed in

  Beauty to his taste. 24

  It is the same light-altering vision that accounts for the sudden ‘flashes of joy’ even as young Tagore grieved for the loss of Kadambari. Indeed, mourning is not only ‘the necessary suffering that makes more life possible’, 25 but if it is intense enough, it can rupture the protective sheath around the self and grace the singularly gifted person with a vision of the afterdeath light.

  It was in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) that Freud first elaborated his theory of a death drive present in the depth of all living organisms, a drive that aimed at a return to the inorganic state. 26 Opposed to the death drive, which seeks to lead what is living to death, was the life force, composed primarily of the sexual instincts that are perpetually attempting and achieving a renewal of life. In postulating the twin forces of Eros and Thanatos, in eternal conflict in the psyche, Freud was going back to Schopenhauer, for whom, too, death was the aim of life, while the sexual instinct was the embodiment of the will to live. In contrast to most psychoanalysts who have ignored the death drive, Tagore would have no trouble in accepting that life and death are closely intertwined and omnipresent in the self; in fact, they are ‘twin brothers’. In Tagore’s conception of a deathless self, though, in contrast to the Freudian empirical one, there is no conflict between Eros and Thanatos. Death is as vitally engaged in the further evolution of the self as life. Death liberates the self from the fixity we seek to give it in life, from the psychological necessity of maintaining the integrity of our personal identity, and in this sense,
‘The mercy of death works at life’s core, bringing it respite from its own foolish persistence.’ 27 The opposite of death is birth, not death. Death and birth both belong to life of the self: ‘The walk is in the raising of the foot as in laying it down.’ 28 Death is negation of life, not its antagonist. In a collection of philosophical essays, Sadhana: The Realization of Life, Tagore writes,

  In the world of life the thought of death has, we find, the least possible hold upon our minds. Not because it is the least apparent, but because it is the negative aspect of life; just as, in spite of the fact that we shut our eyelids every second, it is the openings of the eye that count. Life as a whole never takes death seriously. It laughs, dances and plays, it builds, hoards and loves in death’s face. Only when we detach one individual fact of death do we see its blankness and become dismayed. It is like looking at a piece of cloth through a microscope. It appears like a net; we gaze at the big holes and shiver in imagination. But the truth is, death is not the ultimate reality. It looks black, as the sky looks blue; but it does not blacken existence, just as the sky does not leave its stain upon the wings of the bird. 29

  There is little doubt that Tagore’s views of death and afterdeath are part of a vision of reality that is a combination of the tragic and the romantic, in contrast to the Freudian vision that is a mixture of the tragic and ironic. 30 I have elaborated on the two contrasting visions of reality elsewhere, 31 and will only repeat here that such visions combine both the objective and the subjective. They are composites of certain verifiable facts, acts of speculation, and articles of faith that unite groups of human beings in shared cultural or professional identities, or even in an identity of the ‘like-minded’ that crosses the boundaries of culture and profession. Appeals to the ‘evidence’ by adherents of one or the other vision rarely lead to the development of a more inclusive vision, but only succeed in emphasizing their essential relativity. As a Freudian, I sometimes have misgivings about Tagore’s vision of death and afterdeath, but somewhere in my cultural unconscious as a Hindu Indian, I resonate to and am deeply moved by his imagery of death gently carrying the self into the great silence, ‘as the Ganges carries a fallen flower on its stream, washing every stain away to render it, a fit offering to the sea.’ 32 I wonder, too, if Tagore (or for that matter, Freud) ever had doubts in his own vision of death and afterdeath (in case of Freud, its denial) that he wrote about with such conviction and eloquence.