Carried Onward to Our End
I A Song At Darkness
1 /
The potter, Yang Gu said:
“Each process produces irreversible changes in the body.” (i)
Now, realizing old age has truly seized us, we see we are going further. Inescapably.
Now, old, where will echo the wish to remain, the familiar landscapes, the continuities of shaping and making? We must accept the plain and painful: soon we won’t belong here. Now, it seems, those who once needed us, now cut themselves free of such obligations, such constraints. Always. We are, it seems now, here at sufferance.
And we are being ejected from self and world not just by failing bodies, but by everything once thought ours. We are ejected like an astronaut from a damaged space-craft in a science fiction film. Released from this context, the mother-ship, tossed out into some dark and infinite. To see …
“A thousand years from now, perhaps, a man will stand, as I am standing, behind a windowpane and look, as I am looking, at this landscape of houses behind trees and this sky of spring rain. I try to imagine having crossed that great space of time and being that man.” (ii)
2 /
“I did not sleep this night at all. I was completely unprotected against the onrush of all the memories and ghosts of half a century on the night of my birthday…I suddenly succumbed to an overwhelming fear of insanity. I had the feeling that I was losing my senses and going mad …” (iii)
Now we are cast beyond the framework of goals and means. Discernments do not hold. Judgement is in abeyance. Perhaps we are now moving outside the limits of the communicable. All our sense of order and disorder has, (we see it now), all our sense of familiar and unfamiliar has, (as we’ve suspected), floated within an infinite and incomprehensible void. We are now in and inseparable from this unmediated expanse which is not just outside us but is the fabric of our hearts and brains and hands and feet and genitals; our skin, our hair, and eyeballs, and ears, and all that lies within/without.
In the cosmic void, we move either at the speed of light or not at all. The stars, bright, sharp, and cold cut through us. Once we may have thought of them as bearing the hidden patterns of innumerable individual destinies or as signposts across boundaryless heaving seas. Now they intensify darkness and the darkness of space, the absence of references, the indifference of space and pain.
The secret in old age is now we feel this in a central, intimate, encompassing, and microscopic way. A sharp twinge in the foot, a flash of reflected light from a passing car, a thud upstairs, the smell of fried chicken, a stain on a shirt, a roar of thunder, a screech. And another secret comes with this: There is no consolation. Crushed by silence, there are, in passing, words and starlight, flowers, hallucinations, and true love.
The I Ching says:
“In the light of the setting sun,
The old may beat their drums and sing,
Or they may weep as the dark engulfs the earth.
But who can hold on to the last light?” (iv)
II A Backward Glance
1 /
In we, the dying,
it is the body,
the nerves,
the twinge and twist, and needs
Oh, they are never satisfied.
Pains race like frightened herds before a fire,
pursued across an arid plain.
The charnel ground makes finality impossible.
It burns in this uncertainty.
And there is no solution,
and no knowing what ever has been solved.
It may have seemed that resolution, as if all at once,
rose in evening smoke and stillness:
There should be
in the nature of things.
A stillness
everlasting.
But there is no resolution to unknowing, pain;
There is the pale smoke that drifts above the charnel ground.
Shadow men and women bring corpses of their forbears,
bring firewood. Light flames. Tend fires. Rake ashes. Scatter them
on a river flowing steadily away. Discontented heirs fight to the death.
Ashes leave no mark:
2 /
And now is the time
We are old
And we are leaving here
And they know it.
And now is the time to surrender
Everything.
What was received,
Labored on
Is left on the workbench.
A skull cup is left behind.
Sometimes
The word
Completes the poem.
Sometimes
The world
Completes it.
And when we disembark,
Look briefly back,
It sings to us
This inaudible song.
3 /
Oh, we look back
and hear the turmoil, a summer forest fire or a life,
and journey and a path that surely,
surely must lead to an end
of yearning, a vision of colonnades
a vast exactitude of waking
as described in words, alluded to in music, drawn in ink, in paint.
But words, paint, notes, lines, melodies
speak only of themselves,
out of their own nature
as eyesight speaks, and words make visible, and smells seduce,
the voice, without pretending permanence, whispers.
I am suddenly old.
Awareness drops into itself.
There is the reality of silent stillness.
And with that, a deep unsettledness,
an absence of structure or resting point.
The pain of constant alteration,
and fear
unresolved.
And again, the vast panorama,
the shifting densities of sensoria,
the histories that do not end.
And now, the non-history of a last autumn.
Song on song singing,
O, singing singing sung
III Agenda
1 /
And now the concerns of the old, the aging,
hesitating in the doorway as the world breaks apart.
And we are left, staring amid the wreckage,
craving living: yearning for its limit’s end.
Deep in the shadows of our late afternoon. Men and women,
we sit in the public lounge; always almost filled,
all old, some slumped in wheelchairs,
some half-sleeping on the pale blue sofas or
in the embrace of pale pink wing-back chairs.
We do not feel as alive as once.
We envy the dead,
study dying.
Moment by moment,
we know less and less of who we were.
The words and grammar that used to maintain such knowledge
are insufficient to describe what
we are becoming now.
2 /
The Kali-yuga is entering its apogee.
Time has begun to die.
We are stranded among phenomena in transit.
Inner/outer: those edges blur.
Time loses momentum.
No longer has strength to sustain ongoing.
No longer carries forward.
The power of cause and effect wanes.
Continuity flaccid.
Imagination weak.
Faith weak.
Morality done.
Time is dying.
We turn to memory for intensities,
To animate life forms that increasingly lack them.
Gods, beliefs, morals, ideologies, mechanical processes.
These no longer bind us to the earth.
People are imploding.
The pale earth is crumbling.
Time is spilling in a void.
/ / /
(i) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK5v0KZ3MxQ
(ii) Julien Green, tr. J.S. Underwood, Paris, Marion Boyars, 1993, p. 153
(iii) Isaac Deutscher, cited in Gonzalo Pozzo, “I Must Start Completely Alone” – London Review of Books, 2 February 2/2023, p. 31, 32
(iv) I Ching, Hexagram 30, line 3.