Notes on Everything, Vol. 7
Endings and ephemera.
Last December, the New York Times reported on a book club that took 28 years to read Finnegan’s Wake, the famously opaque final novel by James Joyce. They began in 1995, finished in 2023, and immediately started all over.
It is is an impressive demonstration of fidelity towards a book that’s sat unread on my shelf for years, lurking above my daily browsing, waiting for me to remember it, open it, scream, and return to Ulysses, which I also haven’t finished. It’s like a ritual. It marks the seasons, and reminds me there’s always something left to read, or to leave unread.
The happy interviewees note that Finnegan’s Wake, unlike our lives, “isn’t finished; it’s an ongoing experience.” But our lives, unlike Finnegan’s Wake, are ephemera, and retain that special beauty reserved for things that are already passing away.
In that spirit, here are a few notes on endings to help you welcome new beginnings, and another new year on this planet.
Matsuo Bashō, an Edo-era Japanese poet and a haiku master:
Lightning flashes -
Close by my face,
The pampas grass!
The philosopher Keiji Nishitani, glossing Basho’s poem in his Religion and Nothingness:
A living man experiences himself, as living, in the image of the skull on the pampas grass. There is more to be seen here than simply a meadow. It is what is being pointed to in the Zen saying, “Death’s heads all over the field.” Let the field stand for the Ginza or Broadway; sooner or later the time will come when they will turn to grassy meadows…One can see the Ginza, for instance, just as it is, in all its magnificence, as a field of pampas grass. One can look at it as if it were a double exposure—which is, after all, its real portrait.
For in truth, reality itself is two-layered. A hundred years hence, not one of the people now walking the Ginza will be alive, neither the young nor the old, the men nor the women….In a flash of lightning before the mind’s eye, what is to be actual a hundred years hence is already an actuality today. We can look at the living as they walk full of health down the Ginza and see, in double exposure, a picture of the dead.
Rachel Berdach, from her 1938 novel The Emperor, the Sages and Death:
I want to know why we, like upside-down sunflowers, turn to the dark side rather than the light.
Ram Dass, a man at peace, going home:
And something has happened to me as a result of my meanderings through the realms of consciousness over the past 30 years that has changed my attitude towards death. A lot of the fear that death generated that led to denial has gone from me. Death does not have to be treated as an enemy for you to delight in life. Keeping death present in your consciousness, as one of the greatest mysteries, and as the moment of incredible transformation, imbues this moment with added richness and energy that otherwise is used up in denial.
Death is not an error. It is not a failure. It is taking off a tight shoe.
Jon Hopkins, setting Ram Dass to music.
Kenkō, Tsurezuregusa, Meditation 74:
They flock together like ants, hurry east and west, run north and south. Some are mighty, some humble. Some are aged, some young. They have places to go, houses to return to. At night they sleep, in the morning get up. But what does all this activity mean? There is no ending to their greed for long life, their grasping for profit. What expecations have they that they take such good care of themselves? All that awaits them in the end is old age and death, whose coming is swift and does not falter for one instant. What joy can there be while waiting for this end?
The man who is deluded by fame and profit does not fear the approach of old age and death because he is so intoxicated by worldly cravings that he never stops to consider how near he is to his destination. The foolish man, for his part, grieves because he desires everlasting life and is ignorant of the law of universal change.
Pink Floyd, Time:
Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gunAnd you run, and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Seamus Heaney’s own words as epitaph on his gravestone:
Walk on air against your better judgement.
T.S. Eliot, in the fourth (and best) part of The Waste Land, “Death By Water”:
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
Shusaku Endo, Deep River, pondering an entirely different death by water:
I have learned, though, that there is a river of humanity. Though I still don't know what lies at the end of that flowing river. But I feel as though I've started to understand what I was yearning for through all the many mistakes of my past.
What I can believe in now is the sight of all the people, each carrying his or her own individual burdens, praying at this deep river. I believe that the river embraces these people and carries them away. A river of humanity. The sorrows of this deep river of humanity. And I am a part of it.
Daybreak, a poem by Roberto Bolaño, my very favorite author:
Trust me, I'm in the middle of my room
waiting for rain. I'm alone. I don't care
if I finish my poem or not. I wait for rain,
drinking coffee and through the window watching a beautiful
landscape
of courtyards, with clothes hanging still,
silent marble clothes in the city, where wind
does not exist and far off you only hear the hum
of a color TV, watched by a family
who's also, at this hour, drinking coffee together around
a table: trust me: the yellow plastic tables
unfold into the horizon and beyond:
into the suburbs where they're building
apartments, and a boy of 16 atop a stack
of red bricks contemplates the machines' movement.
The sky in the boy's hour is an enormous
hollow screw the breeze plays with. And the boy
plays with ideas. With ideas and with frozen scenes.
Inertia is a heavy transparent mist
emerging from his eyes.
Trust me: it isn't love that's drawing near
but beauty with its store of dead dawns.
And, of course, Finnegan’s Wake:
“bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-nuk!
Happy New Year.