Life & Death: Finishing School

Emanuel Swedenborg suggested, based on his visits to Heaven, Hell, and their vestibule, that we arrive intact into the spirit world. Being intact, he continued, it's quite natural that angels (and devils, too, I assume) have sex. Their offspring are souls, he explained, thus clearing up another mystery. If we accept his account, then what passes for reincarnation in other traditions becomes, plausibly, a kind of finishing school for the souls that arise in the spirit world. And although neither time nor space exist there, he also assured us, we can imagine that the souls incarnate here form a sort of cohort. This could explain the uncanny sense of familiarity we sometimes have on meeting someone new.

Swedenborg wrote that God loves every creature equally. God condemns no one to Hell, but people find their way there anyway, despite the best efforts of angels to dissuade them, attracted to a hellish existence by their love for it. Heaven is the same story. Just as the saved save themselves, the damned damn themselves, and God's love comes to appear to them as an intolerable light.

Part of Swedenborg's persistence as a thinker, despite the questionable nature of his tale, is the soundness of the underlying human psychology that he laid out. We may reject his account, but if Heaven and Hell exist, it's entirely likely that this is its dynamic. And while Emerson chided him for publishing a farfetched account of the souls on other planets, there is something inherently believable in his reports, which are set down in a deadpan style that reflects his long background as a government adviser and mining engineer.

If we take his account seriously, then our lives on earth provide the kind of leavening we get from travel or from a stint at a university or in prison. Perhaps they also reflect the hierarchies of Heaven and Hell - they're definitely there, Swedenborg reported, with each group of spirits finding its particular place in the pantheon or the hellish domains.

This suggests that the offspring of the downtrodden and oppressed among Hell's denizens may arrive here unsupported, succumbing prematurely or, less frequently, clawing their way into life, for better or for worse. Perhaps it's God's mercy to grant every new soul the opportunity to start anew, but not without the karma of parental transgressions. As in Heaven and Hell, so on earth, as the saying goes. 

Correspondence is Swedenborg's great theme. Whatever exists on earth has its spiritual cognate in Heaven or in Hell, he wrote. I think of this sometimes when I dip into George Gurdjieff's All and Everything, with its account of Beelzebub, an envoy of His Endlessness, as Gurdjieff styles God, exiled at one point in his career and sent to minister to our benighted planet, an adventure that he recounts later to his young grandson. Gurdjieff puts our planet in perspective by describing it as a backwater, subject to Heavenly interventions that, while well-intentioned, go seriously wrong, condemning its unfortunate three-brained creatures - that's us - to lives of neurosis and worse.

Like Swedenborg, Gurdjieff has his man visit the moon and other populated stopping points as he crosses the universe. The distinction between flesh and spirit is glossed over - when Beelzebub descends to earth, he does so as a man. For Gurdjieff as for Swedenborg, man is the measure of all things - Swedenborg even depicts Heaven as forming the body of the Lord, in whose image we are made.

Reading Swedenborg, who painted Hell as a very hellish place, I sometimes wonder if God's grace ever extends to this or that miscreant who sees the light sufficiently to climb out the darkness. Part of the Christian mystery is an insistence that life on earth is a one-way journey. In the spirit world, Swedenborg wrote, Hellish spirits appear ugly and misshapen to angels, although not to themselves - another instance of God's mercy. No one can dissemble there, he goes on to say, yet the demons can apparently dissemble to each other. Or at least can try to do so, and perhaps tolerate each other in this. Yet even they may eventually tire of the game. Is it really no exit, then? This has always struck me as a contradiction.

This gap year, this grand tour, this stint on earth is where we acquire the loves that carry us to Heaven or to Hell. Swedenborg made it clear that there's no escaping them, once acquired, even if the angels instruct us. We spend a certain time in the vestibule of Heaven and Hell, and then make our way, following our hearts. Just like here.

Life & Death: Reincarnation

Rudolf Steiner argued that life seems a cheat unless we are literally passing through, accumulating wisdom, working out karma, whatever, and taking it with us from life to life. The Buddha, whose teachings arose within a culture that took reincarnation for granted, told his followers, "it may be, it may not be, but at any rate it's not important compared to the tribulations of this life." (I paraphrase.*) The karmic aspect of popular Buddhism delivers a kind of rough justice, but the places to which it points, like the realm of hungry ghosts, could also be seen as a hell of the present - a hell of one's own making, here and now.

My first sense of having fallen through time, as I put it to myself, coincided with meeting a significant person for the first time and intuiting a substantial prior history. Some time later, a psychic I consulted affirmed this.** This person and I are linked over a long succession of lives, she said. And this is not the only person of whom this could be said, she added.

So I wondered if, in between these incarnations, we have any hand in creating the scenario in which we'll find ourselves? Moreover, is the cohort that seems to matter to us one that falls with us, everything changing in the interim, so we can take things up again? There is so much that's uncanny about my own life, which these theories would help explain. (Volition seems to violate the idea of an unfolding and ephemeral universe, however satisfying it is to our teleological sense. Perhaps, though, it's not so much a scenario as a problem that we give ourselves - or this may be how karma works, presenting that problem as the logical outcome of what went before.)

Once, standing in front of a Japanese scroll, I dreamt up a story about the poet and his dog-eared assistant it depicted. They're turned away, giving their attention to a crane that's flying toward them. The gist of the story is that the crane is a messenger from the future and only the dog-eared boy - he's shorter than the poet - can speak with him. Two partial drafts of this story exist, fragments of what I saw: a trajectory of time travel, which - if you add cranes that can fly "up river" against time's flow - can involve a certain trading of knowledge. The cranes, of course, are very wise.

My sense of time travel posits that we take on and shed the elements of personal identity from life to life, making our way across different spectra, like gender. We may even be attracted to those who bring out the identity we've left behind, so momentarily we are no longer our real selves, but who we were - an act, yes, but so convincing because we knew the part so well. And we may bring expectations of others that no longer apply to them, causing disappointment until we finally understand them anew.

Nirvana, which is supposed to halt the process of reincarnation, could be as temporary as enlightenment.*** Perhaps it's a resting place or way station from which we contemplate the terrain before we plunge.

*: Stephen Batchelor notes this in Buddhism Without Beliefs.

**: In saying this, I'm not arguing that what a psychic says is necessarily proof, but rather that her comments about our extensive connection affirmed and elaborated on what I'd intuited.

***: In the view of Dogen Eihei, who declined to privilege enlightenment over other states, seeing it as transient.

Life & Death: Materiality

I was 14 when the fact of my extinction first came home to me in its full terror. The foreknowledge of one's mortality is said to be a prod to action, reminding us to seize the time, but to my 14-year-old self it was simply terrifying. Inevitably, it was accompanied by doubt in the central project of Christianity: to convince us that we are saved.

I was reminded of this recently at a Roman Catholic service for the dead that I attended. Immortality was the theme, but to me the truer heart of Catholicism is fecundity, guarded and celebrated by a religion for whom the earth's fertility is a real concern, but whose methods of ensuring a good harvest are curiously indirect. Immortality is the least of it, in this schema: agricultural religions are really about the eternal return, not personal resurrection.

The eternal return I could accept, although there's the intruding fact of our sun's demise, the earth succumbing to its eventually explosive hunger for an energy it can no longer produce sufficiently on its own. That day, we're assured, is countless millennia away, but there it is: even the success of the crops is a temporal fix. The Buddha was right.

Materiality thus always struck me as a thin plank on which to try to bridge the abyss. The earth has outlived its formative turmoil, but species time shouldn't blind us to the other forces in play. Everything is maya. That this is somewhat less terrifying than the fact of our eventual death is mainly a tribute to the provinciality of our perspective. Cosmopolitans that we claim to be, we should place ourselves accurately in the universe we momentarily inhabit, recognizing the sheer brevity of our existence compared to longer-lived phenomena. Yet we pay more attention to things that speak to our relative longevity: fast-decaying particles, moths, warm nights in San Francisco.

Materiality led Diderot to write his Encyclopedia. Men and women of his type were liberated by the casting off of faith in anything but reason, the promptings of man as man and of the universe as perceptible stuff, if we could just find the instruments. That the universal arose in this period as the capstone of a long political consolidation that would ultimately seek to subsume the local and the different is the shadow side of this liberation. Yet the local and the different also have their shadow sides, suggesting that the universal and the local are necessary complements and that their balance is crucial.

Implicit in this view is the positioning of the self as the one who measures, the observer and explorer. The centenary interest in Amundsen and Scott has understandably given the tragic, self-reflecting Robert Falcon Scott more attention. Fatally hapless, Scott is nonetheless emblematic of a willingness to risk death in order to know, by which we mean not just expanding knowledge, but viscerally, personally experiencing reality. When we speak of overcoming or subduing nature today, we think of its exploitation, but Scott's knowing was direct and intimate, and his defeat resulted in a kind of apotheosis. So while Amundsen reached the South Pole and returned alive, Scott achieved immortality.

To be the one who measures is to place oneself somewhat outside of the universe thus surveyed. I believe it was V.S. Pritchett who observed that a writer is served by another self that goes out and lives life for him, to some degree. Or a writer may, like General Grant or Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, find herself at the tether end of a life ostensibly lived for another purpose, like invading Mexico or reversing an army's fortunes, finally ready to write it down. Much is made of Lampedusa's failure to find a publisher for his masterpiece in his lifetime, but the story of Walter Benjamin's lost suitcase is sadder.

Materiality demands that we save ourselves through our works. The genetic impulse to reproduce is the most basic expression of this requirement. Working our way up the chain, we see a clear dividing line between those who crave instant gratification and others, like Stendhal, who intuit a deeper resonance in the future. Gratification depends on fashion and worldly power, while its deferral or dismissal frees one to choose one's means and terms. Materiality's immortality, unlike say that of Christianity, involves the hubris of imagining it is even possible. To opt for immediate gratification is, in this sense, a kind of lack of faith in oneself, for hubris is a cardinal virtue in a material world.

Life & Death: Immortality

The plane from Kuala Lumpur spinning in the air, the horrendous English Channel crossing, cobras in the yard, the spot of tuberculosis on my lung: I took these facts of life in with equanimity, believing myself immune from death. I was afraid of the witch in Disney's Snow White, of Singapore's absurdly big and vicious insects, and of friends' betrayals and cutting remarks, always unexpected. The world passed by, often at the pace of a ship: out of the fog, Gibraltar or the Thames docks with their coal smell. The idea that any of this would go away did not occur to me.

I've read that children with fatal ailments are aware that death stalks them. It must age them to be sick, and death may look like deliverance. This is human, too, our desire for a doorway that leads us out of some sticky situation. We dislike being cornered. The villain who might confront us, who haunts our dreams, can be eluded.

This form of immortality goes hand in hand with being, the other prerogative of childhood. Without thinking about it, we live fully in the moment while the adults around us do their best to tame and socialize us, acquainting us with plans and deferrals and the need to work. We trade our pleasures in for the dubious line they hand us. Soon, we're collecting badges and other trinkets that speak to our merit and maturation.

The evidence piles up: if not mortal, we are at the very least subject to degradation. Girls prove fickle. Plants make us itch. Puberty makes us hairy and alienated. The school of hard knocks makes it harder and harder to believe in our omnipotence. With each succeeding blow, we lower by a notch or two our self-belief. And this is what it really is: a belief in the immortality of the self: against the odds, we'll keep on living.

Only we didn't really know the odds. Someone's mother died and my oldest son asked who would take her place. Surely some agency will send another? My sister's friend died after my sister's birthday party. My mother was upset, and I assumed it was because it was a breach of manners, to die like that. When the orderly came to wheel me to the operating room when I was five, I told him I had to put my shoes on, my mother having taught me not to go out without them. He let me put them on. (They expected me to be knocked out, but whatever they gave me didn't work.) "He needs to have his tonsils taken out," the doctor told my mother and me, leaning out of his Triumph convertible. It never occurred to me to wonder how they'd do it.

Still, I remember being fascinated by doctors, whose many inoculations were a source of pain. They knew something my parents did not, and were held in awe by them. What was it that they knew? In the midst of this, my friend Robin's father drove us to see a Chinese funeral - I think it was for King George VI, so a memorial. There was a big cart, elaborately decorated, and the din of music like Cantonese opera: wailing music. I knew the King from his image on stamps. He looked just fine on them.

Life & Death: Prologue

A death on New Year's Day and the remarks of a Franciscan father, prompted by it, brought to mind our mortal existences. We exist, as Nabokov noted, between two voids. Quickening in the womb, we enter roughly into the rest of life. Our passing out of it is comparable, leaving the lifeless body that, from the standpoint of bystanders, we lately quit. The sight of a body in its 99th year brings home just how used up a body can be.

I say "between two voids," because this is how Nabokov wrote of it, but that depiction is just one theory. There are others, also to be noted here.

At the service for the recently departed, the priest stressed the promise of immortality at the heart of his religion. The Franciscan also mentioned this, but in more personal terms, connecting baptism with the final rites as a journey in which birth and death are stages. He mentioned, appropriately, how this woman fell in love and took joy in being pregnant with her three daughters. From those three arose eight, I thought: both men and women. This is the chain of being, which often seems to be the real purpose of a religion that's mainly intended to ensure a good harvest. That this is an aspect of life cannot be doubted, although I disagree with several of the asserted implications.

This essay is not about religion per se, however, but about the theories of life and death that I have personally considered. These theories arise from life and shed light on it. As small children, we believe ourselves to be immortal. That belief dies hard, I would say. Even as we measure our deterioration, the idea that life is more or less infinite sticks with us and its staying power, however self-serving, makes it a kind of leitmotif, the cello part against which the other theories sometimes struggle for our attention.

To give this essay a bit of structure, let me note the theories I will describe. The first two are opposites: the childhood belief in immortality and the "adult" belief in mortality, pure and simple - a material universe in which everything is transient. The third and fourth theories are really theories of life and death. Let's call the one "cohort reincarnation" and the other "cohort education." The word cohort figures in both, because it's been my sense that we end up amid people who are significant beyond their earthly presence in our lives. So my theories are intended to explain this in two ways, one marked by a process that I think of as "falling through time" and the other analogous to being sent out into life by one's parents. The third theory has many, many antecedents, while the fourth draws on Emanuel Swedenborg's view of heaven and hell.

These theories are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, one of the characteristics of theories of life and death is that, like the Japanese embrace of native and imported beliefs, each assigned a different social role, one can hold to all of them at different points.

Loss & Gain

My friend, the writer Kenneth Caldwell, recently posted an essay on loss, prompted by the deaths of friends and his reading Joan Didion's latest book, Blue Nights. This led to thoughts about the Buddhist take on having: that we have a self, for example, or indeed possess anything at all. The Buddhist stress on being reflects an awareness of the ephemeral character of "all and everything." In this schema, there's neither gain nor loss. Physical laws govern our comings and goings, our outward mutations over our respective trajectories. I have lunch with Kenny episodically, witnessing his evolution as an individual. No doubt he has his own view of me from the other side of the table. At some point, one of us will slip away, flitting awkwardly through the fold of unfolding existence. That we regret these losses is inarguable. I believe it was Milarepa who, charged with hypocrisy by a disciple as he wailed over a dead son, called that death "a super-illusion." Grief is hardwired in us, especially so with the death of a child, but in the end we grieve most of all for ourselves. The Buddha's project, as I understand it, was to wean us from every illusion that posits our solidity. 

I write this as a bourgeois with a household and an extended family, pater familias. That my house is two blocks from the Hayward fault provides a sense of the "thread" that the Puritans railed about, its tremors a reminder that life is provisional. My neighbor commented a few years ago that when you become older, obituaries surface as a kind of pornography. However much we may regret the deaths of others, however much those deaths may alarm us, the fact that we live on is not merely affirmative, but on some level pleasurable, Schadenfreude. Their loss is our gain, so to speak, in life's apparently zero-sum game.

I could end this here, a rueful comment on the narcissism that runs through life. According to Stephen Batchelor, the belief in reincarnation that figures in Buddhism reflects the religious assumptions current at its formation. The Buddha's position was that reincarnation might or might not be true, but death remains our problem. My own view, derived from Swedenborg, Steiner, and personal experience, is that we fall through time, finding again and again a similar cohort. I suppose this argues that Kenny and I have been lunching episodically for eons.

Common Place 5

Angelica Bell and her aunt, Virginia Woolf

I edited my serialized essay, "Marriage, Family & Friendship," into a new issue of Common Place, the personal journal that I started in 2008. If you have an iPad, download the PDF, which is easier to read than the online version. If you read along to my posts on "Quotes & Thoughts," thank you. This version is shorter, removing some repetition and tightening up the prose a bit. I would now call it a speculative essay. It still has the discursiveness of the original, since I couldn't bring myself to leave any of the codas out. To me, they all relate, but the connection is not always obvious.