Denounced in Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary, American Civil War veteran, Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899), was widely known as an agnostic who professed no use at all for religion, which he regularly and publicly denounced. Yet, he remained a strong believer in love. At the grave of his brother, Ebon (who was buried in Washington in 1879), the poet and orator made a speech that in part said:
“Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death Hope sees a star and listening Love can hear the rustle of a wing.”*
Faced with that final kind of sleep that seems to overwhelm even love at the close of human life, Ingersoll could not admit that love might be extinguished. He would not deny at least the possibility of eternity that human love suggested and might somehow engender. Clearly, in Ingersoll’s lack of religion lies another kind of religion, a belief in something that transcended what he saw as mere ceremony, and embraced the sacred depth of human love in all its forms.
Much as anti romantics tend to dismiss such notions, our delicate lives all too frequently seem crammed with random moments rushing to an end. Fragility and need are often laced together into the latest pair of shoes, longing for a peace. Curling up against the overarching sky, our lives seem to become unfounded and baseless, exposing our naked skin to hailstones while we attempt to fortify ourselves against those angry, swooping birds. Our skies incessantly dapple with crises. Sorrow, like a nearly feral kitten, sleeps at our doorstep while we wait within, mumbling furtive prayers in some attempt to avert night’s arrival.
“Alas, it is Horatio, my sweet son!
O no, but he that whilom was my son!”
(Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, II.v.13-4)**
Yet, there is more to love and sleep than death and mourning. The phrase may also conjure images of some of life’s greatest pleasures or pinnacles of contentment. Here is Algernon Charles Swinburne (with the titular sonnet for this post***):
Lying asleep between the strokes of night
I saw my love lean over my sad bed,
Pale as the duskiest lily’s leaf or head,
Smooth-skinned and dark, with bare throat made to bite,
Too wan for blushing and too warm for white,
But perfect-coloured without white or red.
And her lips opened amorously, and said –
I wist not what, saving one word – Delight.
And all her face was honey to my mouth,
And all her body pasture to mine eyes;
The long lithe arms and hotter hands than fire,
The quivering flanks, hair smelling of the south,
The bright light feet, the splendid supple thighs
And glittering eyelids of my soul’s desire.
In the province of desire, language seems to fall away, instances in life where words become a needless buzzing, a thousand twangling instruments, merely humming about the ears. Yet, in this case, the reader is carried to the drowsy erotic space, first by two four line stanzas that rhyme in an ABBA pattern where that repetition underscores the narrator’s sleepy state. The change in the last six lines emphasises the erotic while coupling it with the dreamy open vowels and buzzing endings–like the thrumming of locusts on a summer night. And that word order: mouth, eyes, fire, south, thighs desire.
Life and the erotic remain as impermanent as sleep. We and our structures, our priorities, and our meanings all dissolve. Sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly. However fast it happens, eventually we are lost boys and girls, always left behind. The fairies fade inexorably from our view. The back garden remains untenanted. American gods strive to find their own believers and maintain their hold on them.
This “crude matter” (as Master Yoda would express it) may animate us in many ways, and perhaps more than anything else. Still, the intellectual and spiritual protest that flesh is not all, and they are right. It is not. Acute longing may derive from many sources and one person, in a single life, drinks at many springs.
Zen master Ikkyu, held sexual congress as a kind of sacred rite that could aid enlightenment. According to some sources, he would wear his priest’s robes when he visited brothels. Yet, he wrote:
“A wonderful autumn night, fresh and bright;
Over the echo of music and drums from a distant village
The single clear tone of a shakuhachi brings a flood of tears–
Startling me from a deep, melancholy dream.”****
Whatever connections we make seem like proverbial summer lightning–so bright, so quick, and so quickly gone.
Near the end of Romeo and Juliet Paris catches the distraught Romeo breaking into the Capulet family tomb to see Juliet. In the ensuing fight, Paris is mortally wounded, and he asks Romeo to lay him in the tomb beside Juliet. Not even certain whom he has slain, Romeo is further horrified to discover that he has killed young Paris. Subsequently, on opening the tomb, Romeo is confronted with Juliet’s seemingly unvanquished beauty, and he says:
A grave? O, no. A lantern, slaughtered youth,
For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes
This vault a feasting presence full of light.—
Death, lie thou there, by a dead man interred.
(Laying Paris in the tomb).
How oft when men are at the point of death
Have they been merry, which their keepers call
A light’ning before death! O, how may I
Call this a light’ning?—O my love, my wife,
Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,
Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty.
Thou art not conquered. Beauty’s ensign yet
Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,
And death’s pale flag is not advancèd there.
(Romeo and Juliet, V.3.84-96)*****
Of course, the audience knows that Juliet is not truly dead. Romeo only believes her to be so. Yet, even with her lifelike appearance, the very thought of her death is too much for the young lover, who resolves:
O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh! Eyes, look your last.
Arms, take your last embrace. And, lips, O, you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death.
(Kissing Juliet).
Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavory guide!
Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on
The dashing rocks thy seasick weary bark!
Here’s to my love. (Drinking). O true apothecary,
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.
(V.3.108-20)
Breath and death mingled with last glances and last kisses, and moments later, Juliet awakens from her induced sleep. She echoes Romeo’s lines and actions in the way a dream might echo living moments:
What’s here? A cup closed in my true love’s hand?
Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end.—
O churl, drunk all, and left no friendly drop
To help me after! I will kiss thy lips.
Haply some poison yet doth hang on them,
To make me die with a restorative. (She kisses him).
Thy lips are warm!
(V.3.166-72)
Again the warmth. Again the kiss. The end itself is ‘timeless’.
Moments later, unwilling to leave Romeo, she stabs herself with his dagger and dies. Here love and death walk hand in hand, but what of sleep? Actually, there is much here that might be said of two households sleepwalking through a pointless feud, and how much we sleepwalk through so many parts of life. Too often, we set ourselves on some automatic course and neglect to consider where that might lead us, or how it might affect others around us. We might make life choices based on our parents or our friends, our faith or our economic station. These elements may shade or help to shape a choice, but if they begin to determine our choices more completely, we may be sleepwalking. Something to think about perhaps.
Loss comes soon enough. Sleep turning colder as leaves begin to brown. Rains sweep in off the sea and the summer visitors leave the grey and restless shore. Sleep gets longer in cold weather, until it seems almost endless. Kakinomoto no Hitomaro wrote:
In the empty mountains
The leaves of bamboo grass
Rustle in the wind.
I think of a girl
Who is not here.*****
Absence will arrive, is constantly arriving. That train already sits, steaming at the platform in the local station. Waiting for that kiss, that colour, the bright spread of wings, might take too long. The eternal promise of Robert Ingersoll’s love may well lie in the here and now, in each day before it dies upon the evening hearth. We are all already ashes, and our solace and our solution may be in taking to pasture, and in presence. Perhaps the only real point is to avoid sleeping our way through our human experience before that last sleep settles in for the long and cooling night.
*The entire speech was delivered in Washington on the 3rd of June 1879, and was printed in the New York Tribune the next day. It is not long, and it is a beautiful tribute which can be read in its entirety here: https://www.bartleby.com/268/10/9.html
**MacIlwraith, A. K. Five Elizabethan Tragedies. London: OUP, 1961, p. 163.
***Love and Sleep (Aegypt) is also the title of novel by the writer John Crowley.
****Ikkyu Sojun (一休宗純), 1394-1481, trans. John Stevens.
*****R and J quotations in this post taken from the Folger digital edition.
******Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (柿本 人麻呂), 653-710?, trans. Kenneth Rexroth.