You will do the very last thing.
Wait then for a noise in the chest,
between depth charge and gong,
like the seadoors slamming on the car deck.
Wait for the white noise and then cold astern.
Gaze down over the rim of the enormous lamp.
Observe the skilled frenzy of the physicians,
a nurse’s bald patch, blood. These will blur,
as sure as you’ve forgotten the voices
of your childhood friends, or your toys.
Or, you may note with mild surprise,
your name. For the face they now cover
is a stranger’s and it always has been.
Turn away. We commend you to the light,
Where all reliable accounts conclude.45
When death finally arrives, will we see it coming or watch ourselves leaving or casting off? Is it possible to imagine what that might feel like and what our reaction might be? Maybe because I am writing this book and thinking about death constantly, I had a dream recently in which I knew that my moment had come. It was a standard falling dream, according to Freud one of the most common and universal types. They are usually described as fear- of-falling-dreams, and analysts have offered many interpretations of their meaning. The fact that they are as common as they are suggests that they carry a straightforward anxiety about stumbling off a great height. I’ve known people who suffered from vertigo and could not walk up a hill as unthreatening as Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh without having to summon colossal resources of courage. I don’t have that fear, but I have felt its opposite. I have looked down from a high cliff and wondered what it would feel like to throw myself off or let myself drop. There is obviously something in dreams of falling that expresses either a brute fear of, or a dangerous attraction to, losing control of our bodies and their purchase on reality. It is only a short step to a more psychological interpretation in which falling is not about losing physical traction but about losing safety or purpose or meaning in our lives.
Inevitably, experts offer us their interpretation of these cloudy experiences. I have no desire to join the queue of interpreters. And I know that other people’s dreams are the archetype of tedium. So I’ll be brief about my dream. As I was having it, I knew that it was not about the fear of falling. It was about the experience of dying. I was drifting into empty space like an astronaut separated from a satellite. I remember the strange weightlessness, the sense of having nothing to hold on to any more. The dominant feeling was of resigned curiosity. So this is what it feels like to be dying, I said to myself as I floated away. Then I woke up. The experience was of dying not of being dead. Being dead is beyond or past all experience. But dying isn’t. It is something we can take part in, be aware of. I hope I am alert when it happens so that I can greet it and in some sense own it or choose it.
The novelist Henry James is said to have recognised it when it came for him. ‘So here it is at last, the distinguished thing,’ he exclaimed. That suggests that though we might recognise death’s approach – whether as a tide we catch or as a bus drawing to a halt at our stop or a falling into space – it is hard to imagine what the moment of leaving will actually feel like, the event of death itself. Until recently no one came back to tell us, but with the successes of modern medicine that has changed. Now we have the testimony of many people who claim to have ‘died’ and been restored to life by their doctors. They even have an acronym to identify themselves: NDEs, people who have had ‘near-death-experiences’ or, in the shorthand of the movement, ‘experiencers’. And a movement they have certainly become. Millions of copies of books have been sold that describe and draw metaphysical conclusions from people who have ‘died’ and been brought back to life. So what do they tell us?
Most of them recount experiences of pleasure and acceptance. A common claim is that their souls were released from their bodies and hovered over them in the hospital room, watching what the poet Michael Donaghy described as ‘the skilled frenzy of the physicians’ working hard to defibrillate or resuscitate them. Others claim to have gone through brightly lighted tunnels into a world where they were welcomed by angelic figures and dead members of their own families. ‘Experiencers’ come back from these encounters changed for the better and convinced they are proof of the existence of the soul, an immortal entity that is related to but is independent of the body and goes on to another life when the body packs in. But not all near-death-experiences are pleasant. About twenty-three per cent of those reported are described as distressing. They tell of finding themselves in an ugly and foreboding landscape where the soul, though not being actively punished, experiences a desolating void.
***
Sceptical scientists do not deny these near-death-experiences in either their positive or negative forms. But they offer naturalistic or materialistic explanations for them. They think they do not so much prove the existence of the soul as reflect a previously held belief in its existence, which is then used to interpret what occurred. Sceptics offer a different explanation. They describe NDEs as hallucinations – events in the human mind with no reality outside it – induced by oxygen shortage, a common result of cardiac arrest. The experiencers were not actually floating outside themselves, but the neural connections that linked them to their own bodies had shut down and induced a feeling of separation. And it is well known that drugs can produce the same effect.
I remember visiting a parishioner in Edinburgh’s old Royal Infirmary late one winter afternoon. He had suffered heart problems for years and was being treated for yet another attack. When I arrived at his bedside in the huge ward, he indicated that he wanted me to pull the screens round the bed so they couldn’t hear us talking. Then he whispered to me that at three o’clock that morning his doctors and nurses had taken him to the Forth Bridge and suspended him over the dark waters below, where for hours he hung terrified. And he knew they were planning another excursion for him tonight. I told him not to be afraid, I’d deal with it. On my way out, I spoke to the ward sister. ‘It’ll be that new drug he’s on,’ she said. ‘We’ll change it.’ They did, and the hallucinations ceased; but not before they’d scared him almost to death.
If this proves nothing else, it reminds us that the human mind is a mysterious, shifting continent, and we have only just begun to explore it. The mind is its own place and does its own thing. In our time, it is being investigated by psychologists and neuroscientists, but artists have always been its best explorers. The poet John Milton said the mind could make a hell of heaven or a heaven of hell. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins knew how frightening it could be:
O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.46
For as far back as we can trace our own story, death has been one of the mind’s obsessions. And it seems to be unique to us. So obsessed are we with the knowledge of our mortality that Martin Heidegger, one of the great philosophers of the twentieth century, defined the human animal as a ‘Being-toward-Death’, one who was always old enough to die – and knew it.47 He described our condition as ‘thrownness’, finding ourselves thrust or thrown into a life we neither asked for nor understand the meaning of — yet with the knowledge that one day, maybe one day soon, it would be taken from us. On earth – maybe even in the whole universe – this knowledge seems to be unique to us. Of course it is impossible for us to fathom the inner or spiritual lives of the other creatures we share the world with, but they do not seem to live with the constant knowledge that one day they’ll die. In a chorus from his play The Dog Beneath the Skin, W.H. Auden meditates on the unselfconscious immediacy of the animal’s life.
Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read
The hunter’s waking thoughts. Lucky the leaf
Unable to predict the fall . . .
. . . the mineral stars disintegrating quietly into light.
But what shall man do, w
ho can whistle tunes by heart,
Know to the bar when death shall cut him short,
like the cry of the shearwater?48
All animals fight death when it threatens, like Leonard Woolf ’s blind puppies. And there is evidence that some of them grieve the death of their fellows. But most of them seem to move on and forget what happened. They certainly don’t care for their dead the way we do. They let them disintegrate where they drop, whereas we give our dead funerals and erect memorials to them and go on wondering what has happened to them. In fact, it would be little exaggeration to say that it was the fate of the dead that started us thinking. Thinking about ourselves and the world in which we found ourselves. Much came from that thinking, including religion, which is best understood as belief in spheres of reality behind or beyond, but related to the one we inhabit while we are alive. And looking at the dead and wondering what happened to them might have been what got it going.
The most obvious thing they noticed about the dead was that something that used to happen in them had stopped happening. They no longer breathed. It was a small step to associate the act of breathing with the idea of something dwelling within, yet separate from, the physical body that gave it life. The Greeks called it psyche, the Romans spiritus, both from verbs meaning to breathe or blow. A spirit or soul was what made a body live and breathe. It inhabited the body for a time. And when the body died, it departed. But where did it go? One explanation was that it had gone somewhere else, the way a person could inhabit a place for a time then move out. This somewhere else grew into the idea of a spiritual world on the flipside of the physical one we inhabit while we are alive on earth.
Though our distant ancestors left only silent traces of their thinking, from about 130,000 BCE onwards we have discovered evidence that may point to a belief in life after death. Food, tools and ornaments were placed in graves, suggesting that the dead were thought to have travelled on into some kind of afterlife and needed to be equipped for the journey. Another practice was the painting of the bodies of the dead with red ochre, maybe to symbolise blood and the idea of continuing life. This was found in one of the oldest known burials, of a mother and child at Qafzeh in Israel from around 100,000 BCE. The same practice is found in Australia in 42,000 BCE at Lake Mango, where the body was also covered in red ochre. By 10,000 BCE, we have evidence that burial rites were not only more elaborate but in some places they had also become ferociously cruel, with the execution of wives and servants as part of the funeral ceremony. The slaughter of the widows of important men has been widely practised in different cultures, though whether to maintain the comfort and status of the VIP in the life that awaited him after death or as a way of appeasing or buying off the spirits of the dead, we cannot say for certain.
And marking where the dead lay became important, especially if they were significant figures. Sometimes they were laid under gigantic boulders, sometimes in carefully constructed stone chambers called dolmens, which consisted of two upright stones supporting a large lid. It has been suggested that piling boulders over the graves of the dead might have been designed to keep them under-ground where they belonged, so that they wouldn’t start wandering the earth as ghosts. Even now there are people who are reluctant to walk through a graveyard alone on a dark night for fear of what they might encounter, proof that ancient anxieties about the state of the dead still persist. An old fear is that some of the dead are either unable to accept or are unaware of the fact that they are dead, so they can’t move on and hang around to haunt the living. A practising psychic I knew once told me that after 1945 he had been used by a department of the War Office to settle the unquiet spirits of soldiers whose bodies had been obliterated by bombs that had left no physical trace of their existence.
There’s an enormous literature about the existence of these displaced entities. We call them ghosts, the Old English word for spirits, disembodied souls who hang around their old neighbourhoods. Most priests have been called upon to try to deal with the presence of unsettled spirits haunting a house and distressing the living. I have been called upon several times in this way and have always responded positively. At the time, I was more open to the possibility of the supernatural than I am now, but even then I was never sure whether I was ministering to the living or the dead. But what I did always seemed to settle the disturbance. Maybe it was another example of the usefulness of Negative Capability in responding to human need. It was the act itself not how I understood it that mattered.
On one occasion I was phoned by the warden of a university hall of residence at the top of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. A group of students had been fooling around with a Ouija board when the room suddenly became icy cold and they were spooked by a sense of presence. Ouija boards – from the French word for ‘yes’ — are flat slabs with letters, numbers, symbols and the words ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘goodbye’ on them. Participants place their fingers on a heart-shaped piece of wood or plastic called a planchette. Guided or prompted by the dead who are trying to get in touch, the planchette moves around the board spelling out words and messages for the living. Sceptics say the planchette’s movement is achieved by the body’s own reflexes, what they call the ideomotor effect, a bit like the naturalistic explanation of NDEs as hallucinations. As with a lot of the weird stuff that happens to us, they say it’s all in the mind. But we’ve already registered that the human mind has a disconcerting power that’s all its own. It has even been claimed that those who have survived near-death experiences have an effect on electrical equipment. It is reported that at one conference of Near Death Experiencers the hotel’s computer system went down.49 So it’s not hard to believe that if the mind can interfere with a computer’s software, it could much more easily mess with a body’s temperature levels. However you explain what happens in a Ouija board session, the effects can be spooky and scary, as they were that Sunday night in an old building up near Edinburgh Castle. I prayed with the students, the atmosphere shifted and calm was restored.
On another occasion, I was asked by the owner of an ancient castle south of Edinburgh, which he ran as a hotel, if I could help him. Some of his cleaners had refused to work in a room in the castle because of its unearthly coldness and sense of oppressive despair. His research had suggested that centuries ago children had been murdered in that room. He didn’t know what to believe, except that it was damaging his business and upsetting his staff. Could I help? Again, I prayed with the owner and his staff, and whatever the disturbance was or wherever it was happening — in the room or in the minds of the cleaners – the situation was calmed.
However we interpret or explain these experiences, in them we catch a glimpse of belief in another world or another life beyond this one, which is connected to it, with death as the gateway between them. But let me leave ghosts to their wanderings on this side of death and ask a different question. Is anything waiting for us on the other side? Whether we actually experience what is happening to us when we die, whether we are conscious of the ferry pulling out from the shore or the bus moving away from the kerb, the big question is whether it is taking us anywhere. We die. Then what? What happens next? Very different answers have been given to that question. I’ll begin with the most complicated, which comes from India and the oldest of the organised religions, Hinduism.50
According to Hindu teaching, your soul or spirit is a wanderer that’s had many lives in the past before it came into the one you happen to be in at the moment. And it will live many more lives in the future when this one is over. The technical term for this belief is reincarnation or metempsychosis, and it is an intricate version of the doctrine of predestination we thought about in the previous chapter. Each of your lives will be determined by how you acted in the one before this, just as how you are behaving now will influence the kind of life you’ll have on the next turn of the wheel. This is called the doctrine of ‘karma’ or ‘the law of the deed’: actions have consequences. When the thinkers of India looked at the dead and wondered where the
y had gone, this was the idea they came up with. Souls did not die, either in the sense that they ceased altogether or in the sense that they travelled on into another sphere of permanent existence beyond death. The Hindu mind believed that the soul came back to earth again in another body, whose status was dictated by its karma.
Existence was a colossal recycling process in which the quality of the life that went through the door marked ‘death’ affected the status of what emerged through the door on the other side marked ‘rebirth’. They called the system ‘samsara’ or ‘wandering-through’, because souls were carried through it to their next shape and the next and the one after that, far into the disappearing future. For good or ill, every action the soul committed in its current life affected the quality of its next appearance. But they did not think of karma as a punishment devised by a heavenly judge. It was an impersonal law like gravity, in which one thing followed another as effect followed cause.
In its wanderings, the soul might go through millions of lives before achieving escape into a state called nirvāna, from a word meaning to be blown out like a candle. How to escape from the wheel of existence and be blown into nothingness was the ultimate purpose of Hindu religion. It is interesting that at its centre is the idea that existence can become a burden and failure to die a torment. Here it reflects another of the mind’s obsessions that has also been well rehearsed by poets. A Greek myth captures the sorrow of it. The myth concerns a beautiful Trojan called Tithonus who asked the Goddess Aurora for immortality. But he forgot to ask for eternal youth and vigour, so he grew old and weak but could never die. His predicament was captured by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
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