My father-in-law has a colleague of many years named Kai Woehler, a German immigrant who came to the States in the early 60's and began to teach physics for the U.S. Navy in Monterey, California. He had been one of the last students of Heisenberg, and fallen heir to Heisenberg's dream of a unified field theory--which if I get it, is at once an understanding of the most fundamental particles (movements?) of Being and something like the
meaning of Being. Something that you could point to and in some sense say,
that's the gist of it, right there. Woehler is also a traveler to remote, dangerous places--through the Taklamakan Desert along the Silk Road, to Svalbard, to the Skeleton Coast in Namibia. The impulse to find the basic particle of Being--he himself capitalizes It--and the impulse to travel to places that are nearly unreachable and that mark the end of something, that cannot be gone beyond, seem related somehow. So, busy life. And he has lunch with my father-in-law, whom I adore, on the third Thursday of the month, I think it is.
Now presumably, if you saw the smallest possible particle it wouldn't look like much. The point, in fact, is to edge as near as possible to nothing, to approach the instant of Becoming. And maybe you would see how the finger print of Being is scrimshawed, how the iris and the vocal chords are tuned to the particular pitch of something unrepeatable. But there is a logical problem, or at least a sticking point, with looking for meaning in matter. Even the most fundamental stuff is just stuff, even if it is the stuff we're made of. There is a question for me of whether it's the answer or the question that we worship at the shrine of philosophy or science. I think I know the answer but I don't like it. I think maybe, looking at the fundamental particle or movement, what you would see, if you were a cosmologist and a searcher, would be as much as anything the road approaching this particle. The effort and tedium and longing, the dead ends at which beloved friends and revered elders had gotten stuck, the luck of arriving alive.
Lunch may hold as much transcendental meaning as anything else. Kai Woehler and my father-in-law were once discussing the moment of death. They were trying to imagine the fear and pain of death, and considering whether the moment of death were somehow the best seat in the House of Being or just the Edge of the Dumpster. And Kai said confidently that he would take his chances with the pain and disappointment, that he wanted no anaesthetics. That in some sense this was the great adventure and he wanted to arrive at the much anticipated destination with a clear head. I like this. Of course, again, it's just death. Not logically any more the source of religious meaning that my first cup of coffee this morning. And yet I suspect that somehow the end of my first cup of coffee, the firstness of the cup itself even, has to do with death. That death is the end towards which all Being and all consciousness of Being moves. And likewise, I can't help believing--even as I lose belief in nearly everything else--that the basic patterns of Being are the basic patterns of consciousness: planning and doing, waiting and missing, longing and relinquishment.
I need to think about death again. Not this time as the end of personality and personal accomplishments, of being seen and loved. Or, okay, maybe a bit. But more than that, I need to know whether I can believe that death is good. Walt Whitman, after seeing plenty of it in the Civil War hospitals of Washington D.C., summoned his clearest voice and called to it, sang to it:
| Come, lovely and soothing Death, | |
| Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, | |
| In the day, in the night, to all, to each, | |
| Sooner or later, delicate Death. | |
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| Prais’d be the fathomless universe, | |
| For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious; | |
| And for love, sweet love—But praise! praise! praise! | |
| For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death. | |
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| Dark Mother, always gliding near, with soft feet, | |
| Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome? | |
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| Then I chant it for thee—I glorify thee above all; | |
| I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly. | |
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It is easy in dark, exhausted moods to--theoretically--welcome ones own death. It costs no more than the welcoming of other ultimates--Love or God or even Independent Wealth. Ones own death, or the thought of it anyway, wipes the board clean. Unless one has the bigness of heart to imagine leaving other people behind, leaving behind a world that continues to need and break. But the occasion of this hymn to death was the disastrous, faith-shaking loss of Lincoln, two years into an endless war that was killing not only brothers but belief. For Whitman, Lincoln was "the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands," as he says at the close of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," his consideration of Lincoln's death and of his body's long recessional by train across the country back to the earth of Illinois.
So I'm wondering whether death is good, and I don't even know how to ask yet. But I'm thinking that in all sorts of ways that I'm only starting to see, mine is an American life. That is, I'm deeply situated in this land and this history, this particular love and violence. And so in some way mine will be an American death. And even the great American hymn of death, Whitman's great discursive twilit talk of death-longing, is a road story--a movie in which it feels like something worthwhile or real happens because of the sheer fact of movement towards a destination. Or is it just movement through the swamps and plains of the land? Or even awareness of the land spreading out around you? And if you're a Westerner then you have to add to catalog of the land deserts, forests and mountains, and the ever-present fact of distance, and the Pacific beyond them all. Clearly the land is itself a story. I get to be in it until I die and then, even, I suppose, all my tendencies will carry on in the land. It's after 4AM now, and I'm ending this not because I've gotten anywhere but just because I'm grateful to be tired. I'm going to practice believing that death is good.
