November 1, 2024
This newsletter is about the dead. It appears on the second day of the 3-day festival of the dead known as Allhallowtide. “Hallow” means sacred, and “tide” means time or season, as in Christmastide, Yuletide or Eastertide. The latter is in fact its counterpart, another 3-day festival, appearing at the other end of the year in spring, the celebration of rebirth and resurrection. Easter is a Christianization of the spring festival of Eostre, a Germanic goddess of fertility and rebirth. Some scholarly speculation links Eostre with the fertility images of eggs and rabbits. In other words, a background check on the Easter Bunny shows him to have a mythical past as part of the retinue of a goddess. He is not just an excuse for chocolate.
As James Frazer showed in The Golden Bough, many early religions originated in the worship of a “dying god,” a fertility figure who more broadly embodies the cyclical energy of time. Even though Frazer over-read some of his evidence, he was basically right about the dying god figure. The Classical poetic form of the pastoral elegy (and Frazer was trained as a Classicist) from Virgil to Milton’s Lycidas, mourns a dead shepherd according to the rituals of the dying god. The dying god was often worshipped in a 3-day festival corresponding to the god’s death, absence in the tomb, and joyous rebirth. Dante structured the Divine Comedy according to this rhythm: the Inferno corresponds to death and a descent into the earth; the Purgatorio is an ordeal of purification after death; and the Paradiso celebrates rebirth, though in the Christian form of resurrection, a rebirth into an eternal life beyond the cycles of nature.
At the other end of the year, Allhallowtide is most likely (with some scholarly dissent) a Christianization of Samhain, the Celtic harvest festival that marked the beginning of winter and was associated with darkness and the return of the dead across the threshold of the Otherworld. In its Roman Catholic version, it too seems to have a 3-day rhythm, but its phases are in a different order. The first day, October 31, Halloween, or All Hallow’s Eve, is the day of the dead. But the second day, November 1, All Hallows Day or All Saints Day, celebrates the saints in heaven, especially those who have achieved the beatific vision, a direct experience of God such as Dante achieves at the end of the Paradiso. The third day, November 2, is all Souls Day, dedicated to praying for the souls in purgatory. Since, as St. Augustine profoundly said according to Jacques Le Goff’s The Birth of Purgatory, the purgatorial process begins during life on this earth, that seems to mean that on All Soul’s Day we are praying for us all. God knows, we need it, and especially this year, when it will be followed by Election Day, which falls with hideous appropriateness on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, on which English insurrectionists in 1605 tried to blow up both the king and Parliament with explosives. This year we will decide on that day whether to vote America’s arch-insurrectionist into the presidency. Let us hope the plot fails, as it did then. If Trump is elected, American democracy will be blown up without the need of explosives.
There are the dead, but then there are our dead, our dearly departed. The cliché hides the brutality of loss. No matter how gently they die, those we love are ripped from us with a terrible violence, and in their place they leave a wound, an emptiness, an absence. The loss is final. King Lear cries that Cordelia will “Never, never, never, never, never” be alive again. One of the most emotionally intense lines in literature consists of five repetitions of a single word.
No one is exempt. Such grief is just as possible with the loss of beloved pets, and in fact some animals, dogs at least, grieve their owners in the same way. Christian preaching that those we have lost have “gone to a better world” is apparently no comfort whatsoever, as two of the rawest expressions of grief that I know of are by eminent Christians. One is A Grief Observed, a kind of journal kept by C.S. Lewis after the death of his wife Joy Davidson. What he discovers is not only the absence of the beloved but the absence of God:
But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. (9)
Reason, by which we mean a kind of stoic resignation, the voice that says, “People get over these things,” is no more effective: “Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this ‘commonsense’ vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace” (7-8).
Northrop Frye, after losing his wife Helen Kemp Frye after over 50 years of marriage, wrote in his private notebooks,
Sleep for me is a series of dreams in which Helen is alive and we’re talking and planning things together. Then I wake up and hear reason say, “You will never see her again,” without bothering to add “in this life.” Reason makes the rest of me puke….I take pills, of course, but a drugged stupor is not sleep. (5.144)
Later, he says, “A sympathy note after Helen’s death told me the veil between life & death was very thin. To me it’s as thick as the distance to the next star” (5.191).
I have written about grief before, but, after all, it is something we are never done processing, and grief is the starting point of a meditation about our relations with the dead. In geometry, a point subdivides infinitely, asymptotically approaching Nothing. But God created the world out of nothing, and the imagination, operating on death, begins to pull out of its absence quite a few somethings, like rabbits out of a hat. It begins with death as a dead end, as the unimaginable, but it does not stop there.
The first way of imagining the dead after death is in fact negative: we think of them as having become completely other—inhuman, indifferent, turned away from us towards another realm. In his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, dictated when he was in his 80’s, he asks,
Why is there this insurmountable barrier between the departed and the living? At least half the reports of encounters with the dead tell of terrifying experiences with dark spirits; and it is the rule that the land of the dead observes icy silence, unperturbed by the grief of the living. (320-21)
Such a land of the dead is the Greek underworld as it appears in Book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey, when Odysseus descends into it, in which the dead are shambling zombies who have to drink blood in order to become sentient enough to talk to him. There is no heaven in the older parts of the Old Testament or Jewish Scripture, only sheol, sometimes simply translated as “the grave” but sometimes projected as another shadowy underworld realm. “Projected” is a key word, for, if Blake is right that the eye altering alters all, then such conceptions of a shadowy beyond are the result of an imagination set to the lowest possible power, reflecting a kind of clinically depressed state of mind. When Odysseus talks to the great Achilles, that is exactly the state he is in, telling Odysseus that all his glory won in life means nothing, that he would rather be a hired laborer and alive than dead and Achilles. He explicitly tells Odysseus not to try to cheer him up. This is the state, spoken of in the last newsletter, that Blake calls Ulro. You do not have to be dead to live in it: it is the death-in-life and life-in-death spoken of by Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.
Such a state is vulnerable to its own kind of insurrection, a coup coming from below, so to speak, in which archetypal contents from the collective unconscious may break through and stalk abroad, in what is psychologically a psychotic episode. That is what Halloween is all about. The fundamentalists are horrified that children find it fun to dress up as witches, ghosts, and other spirits from the dark side, the side of the Jungian shadow. Fans of horror fiction or the films of Tim Burton are also drawn towards the demonic as it breaks through into ordinary life. But these are in fact methods of catharsis, of coping with the demonic confronting it, because somehow or other it is our darkness personified, and repressing the dark side always ends in disaster, in what Freud called the return of the repressed. Indeed, the commonest horror plot is that of the return of the repressed, as something buried, kept secret, chained up by magical powers, escapes and begins wreaking havoc.
The dead leave us bereft, and we are heartbroken. The Victorians could not bear the loneliness, and turned to séances. If we cannot have them back, at least perhaps there is a line of communication. Thus, even some eminent Victorians left themselves open to be defrauded by fake mediums. Surely such gullible people are to be pitied. And yet the idea of conversation with the dead, in the root sense of “conversation” as going back and forth, has been the inspiration for a witty and sophisticated work of literature, James Merrill’s book-length epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover, which Merrill claimed was based on conversations that he and his partner David Jackson had over decades with a whole array of dead friends, including W.H. Auden—using a Ouija board. Merrill claims the conversations really happened, and there seems no reason to disbelieve him, whether one ascribes them to real spirits or to folie à deux. When the imagination brings back the dead, the mood often shifts to comedy, even rather screwball comedy. In Thorne Smith’s once-famous Topper (1926), the title character is haunted by the ghosts of two friends of his, a couple, who were killed in a car wreck. Careful what you wish for: the one thing worse than losing your dead may be having them refuse to leave, like guests who overstay their welcome at a party. Topper’s friends insist on sticking around until they have turned his life around and got him married off in the proper happy ending of a comedy, using that achievement to buy their way into heaven. Still witty but rather more wistful, major literary fantasist Peter Beagle’s A Fine and Private Place (1960), published when its author was only 20 years old, features two ghosts, a man and a woman, who dwell in a graveyard rather than moving on because they have fallen in love, and, as the couplet from Andrew Marvell says, “The grave’s a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace.” But, frustratingly, they cannot embrace now, since their ghostly bodies have no substance. Still, there is ultimately a kind of happy outcome.
When ghosts insist on returning, it usually spells unfinished business, most often the task of revealing guilt and demanding justice. This is true of Hamlet’s father, who will not stop haunting Elsinore until his son avenges his murder. The ghost of murdered Banquo returns to break Macbeth’s nerve, and, in Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus’s mother returns either as a ghost or a drunken hallucination in a whorehouse, take your pick, but in either case to lay a maternal guilt-trip on her rebellious son, who chose to remain true to his defiance of orthodox religion rather than praying with his dying mother at her request. Such ghosts are examples of what is called liminality, which I have treated in an older newsletter. As the word implies, they are phenomena that exist—or maybe do not exist—on a borderline. Ordinary reality is defined by the split between self and other, between the subject and a world objective to it. The subject-object split can be represented by the shorthand S/O. Liminality is a condition in which the central bar in that abbreviation becomes a kind of semi-permeable membrane. A ghost ought to be either a subjective hallucination or an objective supernatural reality—but in fact its status is more often elusive, uncanny. Many paranormal phenomena occur under conditions of extreme emotion, often involving death, and under such disturbed circumstances strange things happen that no one can explain yet no one can quite dismiss. Are the children in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw menaced by real demonic figures, or is their governess who thinks so deluded and psychotic? The fact that critics still debate the matter after a century and a quarter does not mean that James failed to be clear enough. It means he was creating a liminal experience that is in fact undecidable.
Ghosts may walk, or seem to walk, in the external environment, but the psychological turn of the screw, so to speak, leads to the idea that we may be haunted from within. Jung’s familiar archetypes of the shadow, the anima, and the animus are psychic phenomena, but we may be possessed by them, Jung says, just as people speak of being possessed by demons. Indeed, to be possessed by one’s shadow is to be possessed by a demon—but a demon who is an alter ego. But the possession is by no means always demonic. When trans people describe their development, to me it sometimes sounds like a description of being haunted by another identity than their assigned one, as if their trans identity, because repressed, were a kind of unquiet ghost. To me, Jung’s theory of anima and animus are the opposite of essentialism. I think he was trying to say that we are all androgynous by nature, and that we are haunted by whichever half of the traditional binary that we have repressed. Which means that gender is, on the deepest level, liminal, uncanny, potentially metamorphic—and therefore why those with an insecure need to fix life into binary opposites are driven into a frenzy by all the terms—transexual, nonbinary, gender fluid, genderqueer—that make the dividing bar permeable and uncertain.
This inward turn leads to the idea that the dead inhabit us. Maybe we cannot find them in some realm “beyond” because, like the kingdom of heaven, they are really within. This goes much further than the weak-tea idea that the dead live on in our memories. The subject-object split is a spatial model of alienated consciousness, dividing reality into “out there” and “in here.” But alienation, what Christianity calls the Fall, is temporal as well as spatial. The split between past, present, and future is exactly comparable to the S/O spatial split, with the present in the position of the bar between the S and the O. We think we are living in the present, but in fact the present is innately liminal, and we cannot pin it down. Any moment we are conscious of has in fact already receded into the past. And anxiety and anticipation lead us to live in the future rather than in the moment. The meditative technique of “mindfulness” provides a discipline for living in the moment, but insofar as it succeeds it must entail transcending ordinary ego consciousness.
In terms of the past, we came from our parents, and even genetically we are aware that we are haunted by them. Their bodies haunt our bodies, strangely but truly. I have my father’s small frame and big Italian nose—in the family photographs, I look a lot like he did at any given age, and thus can extrapolate how I will look when I grow older, so that his photos produce a strange Dorian Gray effect. Some family lines pass congenital ailments along in cases of haunted chromosomes. Our parents haunt us genetically yet also psychologically, as in the stereotypical “Oh my God, I’m turning into my father!”, an outburst that means I have just noticed one of his annoying traits lurking in myself. One of the caretakers who befriended my mother in the nursing home pointed out that my mom, my brother, and myself all have the same loud, explosive laugh. She was exactly right, but I had never realized it. I am myself, a unique individual and all that—yet sometimes I feel my identity is not entirely “my own”—I am partly that other. And this extends backward in time, through the chain of ancestors, as my parents’ selves were derivations of my grandparents’. Biology, in its more daring moments, ventures upon such speculations, hypothesizing a “Mitochondrial Eve” who is the ancestor through the maternal line of the entire human race going back 100,000 to 200,000 years through the mitochondrial DNA passed through the female line. So I am haunted in a way by the entire human race, an idea which is not new with modern science but is a restatement of the Renaissance idea that each of us is a microcosm. Carlyle intuited something similar via German Romantic philosophy in Sartor Resartus, a title that means “the tailor re-tailored.” As clothes cover the naked body, the body clothes the naked ghost, or, in German Geist, which means both mind and spirit. We may dress up as a ghost on Halloween, but the rest of the year we are ghosts who put on the disguises of our fleshly clothes. Haunted houses are variations of the same metaphor of a spirit inhabiting a frame, whether that spirit is of a departed owner or some otherworldly denizen.
We are close here to the idea of reincarnation and past lives. Transmigration is a less familiar notion in the West, no doubt because the Bible ignores it. But it shows up in Celtic tradition, especially in the story of the Welsh bard Taliesin. In his story, the witch Ceridwen brews in her cauldron a mixture so potent that anyone who swallows three drops of it will know all the secrets of past, present, and future. It is intended for her son, but instead the drops fall on the servant boy Gwion Bach, who puts his finger to his mouth and is reborn as Taliesin, a bard who has many of the characteristics of a shaman. Robert Graves, in his enormously popular book The White Goddess, quotes Taliesin speaking in one of the sources of his story, a poem called “The Battle of the Trees”:
I have been in many shapes, Before I attained a congenial form. I have been a narrow blade of a sword…. I have been a drop in the air. I have been a shining star. I have been a word in a book. I have been a book originally. I have been a light in a lantern. (19)
The recitation goes on for 6 pages, but is summed up by the line “There is nothing in which I have not been.” It ends boldly, skirting heresy only through ambiguous syntax:
Learned Druids, Prophesy ye of Arthur? Or is it me they celebrate. And the Crucifixion of Christ, And the Day of Judgement near at hand, And one relating The history of the Deluge?
He is not quite saying that Christ is one of his incarnations, but he is not quite not saying it either. In Celtic Heritage, Alwyn Rees and Brinley Rees draw the conclusion that “Taliesin is everything, and it is a fair inference that among the Celts, as in India and other lands, there existed alongside the belief in individual reincarnation, a doctrine that there is essentially only One Transmigrant. As Ovid expresses it: ‘The spirit wanders, comes now here, now there, and occupies whatever frame it pleases’” (230-31). Ovid puts that idea into the mouth of Pythagoras in the final book of the Metamorphoses because the Pythagoreans believed in reincarnation.
To paraphrase the famous Pogo comic, “We have met the dead, and they are us.”
We have been them, and they are reincarnated in us. It is all very strange. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom wants to play all the parts in the play that the rude mechanicals are trying to rehearse. He is very silly, but capable of intuitions that are wiser than he is. Joseph Campbell’s titles derive from the same intuition. All the heroes of the past are the same hero, who has a thousand faces. All gods are one divinity wearing many masks. But the same is true of the future, though the timebound ego cannot realize it except in rare liminal moments. Dicken’s Christmas Carol is often dismissed as fluff, but the ghosts who visit Scrooge are essentially one spirit who exists, like the God of the philosopher Boethius, in past, present, and future all at once. One of the classic science fiction novels, Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, features a character who is haunted by the figure of a burning man who appears at crucial turning points in his life. He finally learns that the figure is his future self, after suffering an accident that rips him loose from the ordinary self’s anchoring in time and space. The burning man, who is associated with Blake’s tiger burning in the forests of the night, is a kind of admonitory ghost of Christmas future.
Liminal situations in which the quick and the dead change places, suggest that our ego-notion of a realm “beyond” death in which “the dead” dwell is much too simple. The further we venture from the ego’s secure framework of self-and-other, past-present-future, the paradoxes become overwhelming. One is that we are already dead. We think this is life, but really it is the land of the dead, and we do not know it. The last novel of Charles Williams, the least appreciated member of the Inklings group that included Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, begins with a woman in exactly that situation. The significantly titled All Hallows Eve (1945) opens with the viewpoint of a woman wandering through a strange, deserted London, only slowly realizing that she is dead, having been killed in an accident. Although Williams was a Christian (of a creatively heterodox sort), the realm she wanders in is more or less that which in Tibetan Buddhism is called Bardo, a liminal realm between life and death to which all souls go. There, they look back upon their past lives in a kind of judicial review, and are judged by the good and bad things they have done, a motif similar to that of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Usually, the dead are reborn to try again, but a very few transcend the wheel of rebirth and its illusions. Japanese Noh plays are set in the Bardo realm, and in the greatest of the later plays of Yeats, who was influenced by Noh theatre, an obsessed old man relives the night of his own conception by his parents, begging them not to conceive him and thereby perpetuate an Oedipal curse—to no avail, as the vision fades and the old man repeats the curse by murdering his own son. The play is called Purgatory, because purgatory is the Christian analogue of Bardo. But the title is ironic, because the old man is really in hell, in sheol, Blake’s Ulro. Like a PTSD sufferer, he relives his trauma without redemption over and over. In one of the most difficult and ironic fantasy novels ever written, Gene Wolfe’s Peace (1975), we are submerged in the consciousness of a man who not only does not realize he is dead (neither does the reader for a long time) but is in complete denial about the many nasty things he did while he was alive.
The concept of Bardo has been popular in the West lately, most notably in George’s Saunders’ celebrated recent novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). For years, Northrop Frye referred in his notebooks to an aspiration of writing what he called his Bardo novel, only to be disappointed that William’s All Hallows Eve beat him to it. I think the reason for our fascination with Bardo has less to do with speculations of what lies “beyond” death than with an uneasy feeling that we are all dead right now. The most famous poem of the 20th century, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, is about modern life as a Bardo realm: “A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many,” an echo of Dante’s thought as he enters hell. It was perhaps a sense of affinity that drew Eliot to write the Introduction to All Hallows Eve. The sense that the dead are alive and those who think they are alive are really dead is the theme of one of the greatest 20th century stories, James Joyce’s “The Dead,” in which Gabriel Conway learns that his rival for his wife’s love is a dead man, Michael Furey, who died for her by staying under her window, refusing to come out of the chilling rain. After his wife has told the story and fallen asleep, Gabriel has a kind of vision:
The tears gathered more quickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.
Writing is a way of being haunted. Novelists, including conventional novelists whom we would not expect to be susceptible to uncanny experiences, often speak of their characters as apparitions. They do not seem invented but appear in the writer’s imagination and may take over the story, turning it in a direction the author had not anticipated. There seems to be a two-way-mirror relationship between the author’s world and the otherworld created by their imagination. The writer is peering into the characters’ reality as the audience peers through the figurative fourth wall of a stage, but every so often a character, at least in some self-conscious works of fiction, has the feeling of being written, so to speak. In Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany sustains an Otherworld for 800 pages that is entirely liminal. Some of the weird events may be the product of the viewpoint character’s mental state: Kid has spent time in a psychiatric ward and loses periods of memory extending over several days. But things also happen that cannot happen in consensus reality, such as the appearance of a second moon in the sky. At any rate, in exploring an abandoned warehouse, Kid comes up against a mirror from which someone is staring out at him, a character whose physical appearance is clearly that of Samuel R. Delany.
Poets in the epic tradition have their own version of reincarnation, as each poet feels that the spirit of his precursor has been reborn in him. Not the ego of the precursor: the true identity of epic poets is the vision that they attempt to pass on.
Virgil’s Aeneid is a remarkably thoroughgoing recreation of narrative and thematic patterns from both the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Dante explicitly tells Virgil in The Divine Comedy that he is his master. Spenser regarded Chaucer as his precursor, which is why he attempted to mimic Chaucer’s archaic style. Spenser was in turn the precursor of Milton, as Milton himself tells us, and Milton the acknowledged precursor of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. Among modern poets, Shelley was the precursor of Yeats and Keats of Wallace Stevens. The epic poet is not content merely to preserve the precursor’s vision, incubating it like a hen sitting upon an egg. He also feels that he must refine and improve it, so that the epic line becomes a progressive, a decreative and recreative process working through time to expand vision through the casting out of error. Blake’s “brief epic” Milton is an extraordinary account of the precursor’s collaboration with his successor. The dead Milton comes back from Eternity and enters into Blake’s left foot to become his inspiration and correct the deficiencies he has come to recognize in Paradise Lost. Because criticism can be as creative as poetry, the precursor may find his successor in a critic, as Blake did with Northrop Frye. In Frye’s Fearful Symmetry, the relationship is so close as to seem consubstantial: commentary often remarks on how difficult it is in that book to tell Frye from Blake. On the other hand, precursor and successor may resist each other, in which case the relationship may become one of Jacob wrestling with the angel. Harold Bloom takes as a paradigm the extreme case in which the successor figuratively murders his precursor by “strongly” misreading him. It is not hard to see behind the reductionism of Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” theory his own love-hate relationship with his precursor, Northrop Frye. It is hard to explain to those who have not experienced it how the relationship to a precursor can be deeply personal without being at all social. The personal relation, the sense of identity, of consubstantiality, is entirely through the precursor’s work, making it different than the relationship with a guru figure. It can fall into being cultlike, even when the precursor makes clear he does not want disciples, as Frye and Jung both did, but the genuine relationship inspires the successor’s individuality while the cult relationship obliterates it.
According to Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, writing itself is inhabited. Instead of the famous “prisonhouse of language,” perhaps we should speak of the haunted house of language. Every sentence we write is inhabited by the spectral trace, as he calls it, of what we chose not to say, what we excluded and therefore repressed. If I write that this is the truth, I repress another sentence saying that this is the opposite of the truth. The trace is like Freud’s “return of the repressed” widened beyond the realm of the sexual. Every signifier is haunted by the ghost of its opposite, which dwells in a liminal realm, a linguistic land of the dead. All the positive assertions of what Derrida calls the “metaphysics of presence,” which includes the affirmative truth-statements of religion, philosophy, and literature, are haunted by their own negations, in the way that Mephistopheles, who describes himself as a spirit of negation, acts as the voice of skeptical denial, of nothingness, in Goethe’s Faust. We cannot exorcise these negations. The attempt to do so results in fanaticism, which is always an attempt to quell an inner doubt. Memento mori: wisdom and sanity consist of recognizing that in the midst of life, we are in death. Likewise, we must recognize that there is no truth without doubt. We must affirm, we must have faith in something positive and act on it in order to live and to do any good in the world, but even as we do so, we recognize the valid claims of our doubts. Such honesty is literally a matter of life and death—of life and death.
What if our way of thinking about language is all wrong, completely backwards? Common sense tells us that of course we began as wordless animals living completely sunk in our body and senses. Then, we invented language as an abstract symbol system to convey meanings—but we became slowly imprisoned in that abstraction, living in our heads. As consciousness more and more intensified into self-consciousness, we became, like Hamlet, creatures of “words, words, words.” But the Bible, that mad book, says that language came first. In the beginning was the Word. What can that possibly mean? Heidegger said that man does not use language: language uses man. Anyone who writes knows the truth of that. As we sink deeper into the writing process, we dissolve into language. Stephen King says that there are maybe ten minutes at the beginning and end of his writing sessions when he is conscious of being himself writing. In the middle, he is gone. Dylan Thomas has a series of birthday poems, and every one is a memento mori, appropriate to his birthday on October 27, a few days before Allhallowtide. In the first of them, “Especially when the October wind,” he is “Shut, too, in a tower of words,” yet, like a latter-day Welsh Taliesin, he feels identified with a verbal power that creates what it speaks: “Some let me make you of the water’s speeches,” he says. “By the sea’s side hear the dark-vowelled birds.” And it also destroys: death is co-present in this Welsh landscape: “The signal grass that tells me all I know / Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye,” and what the grass signals is “the coming fury.” It is language that decreates the ordinary appearances of the subject-object world and reveals this world in which, as Heraclitus says, everything dies each other’s life and lives each other’s death in what Charles Williams, influenced by Heraclitus, called the Way of Exchange.
Yeats has a wonderful poem called “All Soul’s Night” in which he pours out two glasses of wine at midnight and waits for his dead friends to visit. And they appear—they appear as language, each stanza sketching a vivid portrait of a gallery of idiosyncratic personalities. It is nothing supernatural that makes them present: it is the power of language. The skeptic’s voice laughs at this in scorn, and moves to “demystify” such dangerous, potentially inflated pretensions. We laugh as well. For, after all, the skeptic is our creation too. We summoned him by the incantation of our language, gave him an invitation to our party, because we very much need his disinflating mockery. Yet he too is a linguistic event, and so are we. We laugh with him—but ours is the last laugh and therefore, so they say, the best.
References
Frye, Northrop. Northrop Frye’s Late Notebooks, 1982-1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World. Edited by Robert D. Denham. Volumes 5 and 6 of The Collected Works of Northop Frye, University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Lewis, C. S. A Grief Observed. Faber, 1961.
Jung. C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé. Vintage, 1961.
Rees, Alwyn and Brinsley Rees. Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales. Thames and Hudson, 1961.
Williams, Charles. All Hallows Eve. Introduction by T. S. Eliot. Eerdmans, 1981. Originally published 1948.