Smashed to smithereens

Falling. Not someone falling. Not a thing falling. Not through the air or from a place. Simply falling. Isolated. Falling itself. The essence of dissolution.

In Richard III, George, the Duke of Clarence has a prophetic dream the night before Richard’s agents murder him:

CLARENCE 
Methought that Gloucester stumbled, and in falling
Struck me, that thought to stay him, overboard
Into the tumbling billows of the main.
O Lord, methought what pain it was to drown,
What dreadful noise of waters in my ears,
What sights of ugly death within my eyes.
Methoughts I saw a thousand fearful wracks,
A thousand men that fishes gnawed upon,
Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl,
Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels,
All scattered in the bottom of the sea.
Some lay in dead men’s skulls, and in the holes
Where eyes did once inhabit, there were crept—
As ’twere in scorn of eyes—reflecting gems,
That wooed the slimy bottom of the deep
And mocked the dead bones that lay scattered by.

Richard III 1.4.19-34.

Dissolution. Potential lying dormant. Riches stacked and scattered across the bottom of the sea while human forms erode around them. Clarence, like an Ishmael, observes what is around him, but he cannot act.

“the falcon cannot hear the falconer”*

Indeed.

Nothing to hear and no one to hear it.

No falconer. No falcon. Gyre without widening, without spiral. Tree falling/not falling in a forest. Schrödinger’s tree. Soundless not soundless.

“Call me Ishmael.”** Fishmeal. Except that I only will be escaped alone will to tell thee. Job as witness to obliteration. It is as if Ishmael/Fishmeal remains exempt. A witness, a participant even. Yet not part and parcel of destruction. Ishmael is the telling, the reason of our knowing, and perhaps an agent of the whale’s vengeance in that he is there to see the tree making its sound.

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night”***

What is this thing called, Love? Mind evaporating. Mind exposed to the golden wind. No mind. No body. Madness. Forgetfulness. Oblivion.

Past and future become dense forests, the illusory unknown extending only in shadowy dream landscapes. Undulating into the unknown, they lead away from the now, into places we cannot rightly know. They are obivion, masquerading as bits of life, only representing where we believe we’ve been, and where we might yet go. Empty of substance. Owls hooting in the winter trees.

What’s past and what’s to come is strewed with husks
And formless ruin of oblivion

Troilus and Cressida 4.5.167-8

The moment of death is the moment of becoming and vice versa. Letting be.

Here is a version of the Beatles’ “Let It Be” from the motion picture Across the Universe (CONTAINS STRONG IMAGERY):

In birth is tragedy. Nietzsche famously knew this.***** In flowering lays foundation for the fruit, yet also ends the blossom. The end of the world potted in a vase. The cut stems never again draw sustenance. The knife’s moment makes them into false show, sprays destined for the soonest kind of grave.

“Death of the organism through senescence–programmed death–makes its appearance in evolution at about the same time that sexual reproduction appears.”******

Eruption! Flowering! Our attention, focus, and admiration. Death incorporated. Our gaze becomes Ted Hughes’ poetry.

We are Shiva, perpetuator of the universe. God/Goddess of sexual union and of final emancipation. Deity of creation and killer of demons. Winter coiled inside soft summer day. Vast slow heaving of trees, leaves sea against the restless wind, stars invisible in the daytime sky. Winter’s conception within the spring. Lamps against the dark and within the waiting darkness too.

For even at the end, the universe simultaneously perishes even while it is born. Ishmael recounts his salvation from the sinking Pequod and the ensuing whirlpool that drags everyone else down to the bottom of the sea:

Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day nad night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharkes, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.*******

Moby Dick, p. 583.

Buoyed up by a coffin. Survival bursting, enduring through the perishing. Moss on treestumps. Birth in death. Falling up.

Falling. As we all fall. Dissolving as we all dissolve. Individually. Or as a nation or a world. The ocean remains the same.

After our Pequod sinks away into the darkness, what ship Rachel will sail over our horizon to rescue us? Or will we remain orphans on an endless sea of our own making?

How will we look back and see ourselves? Will we be able to? Will we allow the sway of momentary comfort, of immediate gratification, to extinguish our collective future? Cut down our forests? Run our people into the grave in order to maximise profit or capital advantage? Expect our neighbours to manage their lives on less because we yearn to save an extra 93 pennies on our taxes? Forfeit our schools to miserly budgetary management? Abandon our arts to the wind, and shape our citizens into ignorant slogan chanters?

What will we shape? What can we shape? What will we see? Or will we remain blind? We stand at the edge of such a precipice now. Will we look back at this moment and recall Marc Antony’s words after Julius Caesar’s murder in the Roman senate?

Even at the base of Pompey’s statue
(Which all the while ran blood) great Caesar fell.
O, what a fall was there, my countrymen!
Then I and you and all of us fell down,
Whilst bloody treason flourished over us.

Julius Caesar 3.2.200-4.

Let us hope, wherever we happen to be in this challenging world, that we can all do better. We must. Do better. Much better. Or we will not. Then we will not. Then neither we nor our children will be looking back at all.

*Yeats, W. B., and Richard J. Finneran. The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. New York, NY: Scribner Paperback Poetry, 1996. The poem, “The Second Coming” is on p. 187 of this volume, and it is also available widely online.

**Melville, Herman. Moby Dick or The Whale. Edited by Viola Meynell. New York, NY: Avenel Books, 1985.

***Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems, 1947-1997. New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 2007. The poem “Howl” appears on p. 134 of this volume, and it too is available widely online.

****Wu, John C. H. The Golden Age of Zen. New York, NY: Image, 1996. John Wu’s translation of Wang Wei’s verses appears on p. 203 of this volume. Like the other poets cited above, much of Wang Wei’s work may also be found online, and John Wu’s introduction to Zen remains a clear and useful resource.

*****Nietzsche, Friedrich. Nietzsche: “The Birth of Tragedy” and Other Writings. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, ed. Ronald Speirs, trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Twelfth printing, 2010.

******Clark, William R. Sex and the Origins of Death. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 63.