Heat o’ the sun

Here is Shakespeare’s sonnet 73:

To some readers (mostly to those under forty-five), this may seem more like just another sonnet with a bit of variance in its perspective.  As we move on in the march, walk, meander through our lives, however, the perspective can change.  Meanings can change.  Visions.  Just as one is advised to read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick at age 25, and at age 55, sonnet 73, popular at funerals, takes on a different kind of lustre depending on when in life it is encountered.  Death and night that may seem ominous (or, conversely, so far off as to be no threat) to the young, may become a comfort to those who grow older.  Not mere senior discounts, but relief that may not come too soon.  Whatever way we see it in any given moment, we tend to think about it more often than we might admit.

Strangely, for all this power that death holds over us, either by the time we spend collectively obsessing about or avoiding it, death personified remains a minor god, twinned with sleep.

Yet, death has many kin.  Eros (Cupid), the Greek god of desire, seen by Freud as the will to live–with the urge to reproduction representing an urge towards life and its perpetuation–seems intimately associated with death at times.  For although dying quietly in one’s bed remains a popular sentiment, the opposite also appears to be attractive, even if violent death per se may have been embodied by other siblings, the Keres–the sister spirits drawn to violent death on battlefields.  Here is poet Roger McGough:

Let me die a youngman’s death
not a clean and inbetween
the sheets holywater death
not a famous-last-words
peaceful out of breath death

When I’m 73
and in constant good tumour
may I be mown down at dawn
by a bright red sports car
on my way home
from an allnight party

Or when I’m 91
with silver hair
and sitting in a barber’s chair
may rival gangsters
with hamfisted tommyguns burst in
and give me a short back and insides

Or when I’m 104
and banned from the Cavern
may my mistress
catching me in bed with her daughter
and fearing for her son
cut me up into little pieces
and throw away every piece but one

Let me die a youngman’s death
not a free from sin tiptoe in
candle wax and waning death
not a curtains drawn by angels borne
‘what a nice way to go’ death

But we have already written some pieces including famous last words.  We may write more, but these are for another time.  For now, this speaks more to the peculiar contrary nature of death, as we step across that threshold, swept or no.

Not in its forms, albeit death may walk in so many ways, in so many guises.  Wrestler, clown, bird, a wayward meal of romaine lettuce, happenstance or circumstance, hand of other, self, or time.  Not as much this strange variance as how we greet it.  Anxious or determined about unsuitability, be it curtains or wallpaper.  Watching small lights scurry across the grass at twilight.  Death may part us from loved ones, even as it brings them to our side.  Here are the final two verses of El Paso, a well known gunfighter ballad by Marty Robbins.  Fleeing armed pursuers after gunning down his rival in a cantina, the narrator rides for his life:

Though I am trying to stay in the saddle
I’m getting weary, unable to ride

But my love for Felina is strong
And I rise where I’ve fallen
Though I am weary I can’t stop to rest
I see the white puff of smoke from the rifle
I feel the bullet go deep in my chest

From out of nowhere Felina has found me
Kissing my cheek as she kneels by my side
Cradled by two loving arms that I’ll die for
One little kiss, and Felina, goodbye

These images and sentiments become promiscuous in our western culture.  Fires, dying trees, embers and youth.  Hamfisted tommyguns.  Bullets, tears, and kisses.  Do we romanticize death too much?  Have we always done so?  Or do we romanticize the trappings that surround it?  Guns, swords, kisses and tears.  Is love the greatest teacher of our end?  Is there a glorious transcendent moment in the confluence of love and death, as there seems to be in novels, plays, and poetry?

The Japanese swordsman and philosopher, Miyamoto Musashi (1584?-1645), reportedly fought over sixty duels with a sword, and he never lost a single one.  According to popular legend, he stopped using metal swords against his opponents when he was twenty one years old, using only a wooden sword because he felt that using real swords gave him an unfair advantage over others in combat.  In later life, he mostly retired to write and paint.  Here is his painting Shrike on a Dead Branch, that again combines life and death into a single image:

 

Teachers still assign Romeo and Juliet in high school, but is that play really about love and death?  Or is it about death striding in and striking down Eros the king just before he gets the crown on?  How hate or love can poison thinking, leaving that door ajar for death’s entrance.  Hal, mistaking his father for dead, and taking the heavy crown from his father’s pillow.  Marley chained to ledgers, safes, and cashboxes.  Miss Havisham living and dying in her disappointed wedding gown.  Ophelia drowning where a willow grows aslant a glassy stream where the water weights her clothes to make her sink.

We seek it, or it seeks us.  The younger never knowing how much time they have.  The older knowing that they probably don’t have much.  Waves on a beach, sand changing, shore shifting and the same.  Stars in our skies and a changing moon.

As with Marc Antony and his shifting clouds, we cannot hold our own.  We all go down that other road sometime.  The owl roosts in the arroyo.  Coyotes range around us in the dark.  We only close that little window just to keep the nightmares from coming inside in the dark.  Cognizant of change, we never quite recognize how quickly or how much.  We too ask, “What country, friends, is this?”  But the river on the edge of which we stand belongs to Heraclitus, and Lethe.

Metamorphosis remains hoped for but uncertain.  Still, there may be something.  At least we tend to believe that there may be something after all.  Here is Shakespeare’s sonnet 74:

But be contented when that fell arrest
Without all bail shall carry me away,
My life hath in this line some interest,
Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.
When thou reviewest this, thou dost review
The very part was consecrate to thee:
The earth can have but earth, which is his due;
My spirit is thine, the better part of me:
So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,
The prey of worms, my body being dead;
The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife,
Too base of thee to be remembered.
The worth of that is that which it contains,
And that is this, and this with thee remains.