A dream that oversteps boundaries
A few years ago, I dreamt that I was dying. There are many dreams where you almost die, and I’ve always woken up just before it happened. At the leap of the talking leopard, before hitting the ground after falling down the stairs, a split second before the stalker found me. But in this dream, I really did die. I lingered. Someone shot me, and I was standing against a wall, slowly sliding down, until I reached the ground. I watched the room grow fuzzy before my eyes, everything slowly darkening, and eventually, I couldn’t see anymore.
And then I woke up.
All the way, right up to the end, I felt a great sadness, like a wave, a tsunami of sadness.
All dreams shadow your day, if you remember them, but this one shadowed my week. I felt the sadness, especially, like water, like getting wet in the rain and never completely getting dry or being warm again. I felt other things as well. Betrayed, for a start. How could my subconscious take me to a place where no one wants to go? Maybe that’s what subconsciouses do, take you to places you don’t want to go, but there has to be a limit, right, a boundary?
After so many dramatic awakenings, I had assumed that death was my boundary. I was shaken by this dream. Heartbroken that I would do this to me.
The body after the soul
Maybe there are two kinds of people in the world:
- Those who are afraid there’s a monster under the bed and look under the bed to check.
- Those who are afraid there’s a monster under the bed, and don’t look at all, burrow themselves deeper and deeper into their blankets and pillows.
There might be more kinds of people in the world, because I’m not sure which of those I am.
But a few years back, I read an article about what happens to your body after you die. This is worse than looking under the bed. It’s looking right under your skin, at the mysterious bits and bobs you were pretending weren’t actually there, all this time.
I don’t know why but I chose to go ahead and read it, even though I could accommodate the idea of death, but never of my dead body. When I read the article, though, I was shocked by how much life goes on after death. How much of life happens, inside you, after you die. Firstly, all the movement. Bits of you collapse, sink, stop, swell. Then other bacterial bits of you grow, feed. Then the outside invasions – insects, animals, birds, depending on where you are. Skeletonisation is the last part, they say. But so much happens before you turn to bone. And none of it sounds like death. In fact, it sounds like life.
Image: Priyadarshini John
In some ways, reading about this in so much detail was not as scary as I’d imagined. It was strangely comforting. The idea of bodily invasions is terrifying when you’re alive. But the idea of life after death is not terrifying. Isn’t that what everyone has always wanted, secretly or very noisily?
Eventually, when the bacteria have poured out, we release nitrogen, potassium, phosphorous and magnesium into the soil. Once the chemical toxicity has had its time to disappear, we leave behind a nutrient-rich fingerprint on the face of the earth. Because our bacterial composition – our internal garden if you will, is unique, and when it succumbs, when the fences are down, when the invaders have come and gone, the combination of bacteria we leave behind is also unique.
Image: Priyadarshini John
Dearly beloved, a whale falls
I watched a video that has, sadly, mysteriously disappeared off youtube, about a whale fall. It sounds like what it is – a windfall for what the narrator called the often starved creatures of the deep sea. A whale, unlike a human, is big enough for the word ecosystem to come naturally. When a whale falls, sharks, crabs, octopi, strange fish that have hints of rat, snake and worm, all gather round for the feast.
A whale fall can attract creatures great and smaller and smaller for up to fifty years, they say. Unlike with humans, the narrator could wax lyrical and did – bursting forth like spring flowers, he said. The life of the deep sea, for this period, concentrated on the body of the whale.
Image: Priyadarshini John
A fallen whale is already a fact of life. I don’t know if the whale cares about whether or not it leaves a unique fingerprint on the deep sea. But the fallen whale, simply because of its size, leaves more than a fingerprint behind. It falls into a place where food is scarce, light even more so, and everyone is hungry. It’s something like an oasis in a desert.
A sudden wealth of nutrition, that seems almost to fall from the heavens.
The miraculous event of the whale fall reminds me that revulsion is simply a matter of being unwilling to look too deeply into anything, especially our own bodies.
I’m attached to my body
Even though I do yoga, where they’re always telling us not to be attached to things, especially not to bodies. Transcending the body, looking into the blue of the infinite, are the things we’re supposed to be attachsorryattracted to. Things that float in the ether. Things that can hop between worlds and dimensions. Energy beings, light forms.
In a story by Isaac Asimov, called Eyes Do More Than See, light years from now, two energy beings travel across time and space. They’ve transcended bodies, so long ago. They’re sculpting the way energy beings do, with energy. But one day, they decide to try something different. Sculpting with matter To be cute, old-school, retro and new.
They make a clay face. Struggling to remember how it all worked. Bodies are fragile things, they realise. Matter cannot transcend, right? In the end, Ames adds tears to the sculpture, because energy beings cannot cry.
I felt a strange and familiar pain when I read this story because in some way, all my life, I’ve felt a similar yearning for my own body. Yoga brought me closer and closer to it, and I’ve always held on, tight, because so longed-for, just out of reach, my body has been very dear to me. Like a raft in the open sea.
The dead body is an ecosystem. A world of life and movement. The living body is also an ecosystem. A world of life and movement. We teeter on top of it like trapeze artists, tightrope walkers, and mostly we don’t look down, because we’re not really sure how we’re doing it. We’re scared that if we were to think about it, we might not be able to do it. That we might fall.
If we were never to fall
I’m not sure if not wanting to die is the same as wanting to be immortal. Not wanting to die is an instinct. In your conscious waking life, you might want to die a hundred times, a thousand times, on one day, some days, every day. But a millimetre below the edge of the axe, every cell in your body wants to live. Because living’s what they’re made to do, after all. Living is their key, their code.
Maybe there are two kinds of people in this world:
- Those who want to not die
- Those who want to live forever
And yet again, it seems, there are more than two kinds of people in the world.
I thought I was free from the desire for immortality, because I could accommodate the idea of death, more easily than the idea of the dead body. But there was one part of me that wanted to be immortal, the part which made things, wrote things. A sneaky part of me that didn’t completely reveal itself, just turned up intermittently and faded away before I could see it. Recently, I let this part drift away into the open sea. When I did, the most immortal writer I know of came to my mind.
I thought about Shakespeare’s sonnets. All those poems addressed to the fair boy, whom I never really liked. All those lines about the dial hand, stealing from his figure. All that effort to create an immortal picture. I engraft you new. Leaving us with traces of eternal summer, darling buds of May.
Image: Priyadarshini John
It’s hard to imagine that the same person who said, in The Tempest, that we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep, would be in such a passionate race against time.
If there was a piece of writing that tried to accept mortality, both in life and in work, it was the Tempest. A sorcerer gives up his powers. But the sonnets were not an attempt to keep the writer alive. They were an attempt to keep the things the writer loved alive. The people the writer loved, and all the images that came with them. Almost like the immortal thing was love itself.
And I thought, how lucky for me, that in my life, I got to encounter this effort, this kind of effort, at keeping something or someone alive forever. A warm comforting thought on a cold day, like a blanket. All the immortal people I loved came to my mind, along with it. A joyful memory, not a blanket-trap that keeps you from looking into the dark. A warm light to take into dark places. Just like sometimes, the dark can also be a comfort. And the thought of death can also be a comfort.
The comforting Death of Terry Pratchett
I always thought of Terry Pratchett as the writer who can reconcile you to death. It’s not just because of the comforting consistency of Death’s appearance. Nobody dies alone, in Pratchett’s books. Death appears, a familiar hooded tall skeleton with a scythe. HE TALKS LIKE THIS. He cuts the soul away from the body, with his scythe. In a dream-like paragraph, he walks on the sea floor, and finds a tiny bright red tube worm, in the darkness of the deep sea. With a microscopic scythe, he waits for the end. In Pratchett’s words:
The soul of the tube worm was very small and uncomplicated. It wasn’t bothered about sin. It had never coveted its neighbour’s polyps. It had never gambled or drunk strong liquor. It had never bothered itself with questions like, ‘Why am I here?’ because it had no concept at all of ‘here’ or, for that matter, of ‘I’.
Nevertheless, something was cut free under the surgical edge of the scythe and vanished in the roiling waters.
At this point, you do already feel a strange companionship with the soul of the tube worm. You also have a strange sense of the future, that in the end, you will not be alone.
In Reaper Man, Death is briefly retired, for a period of a book. It’s a difficult time, for the Discworld and for the reader. He is about to be replaced with a Combine Harvester. He is given a life, and time. I’m going to spend it, he says proudly.
He takes up the one other job where wielding a scythe comes in handy – as a harvester of corn on a farm. He cuts each ear of corn individually, in his brief spell of life, time and paid labour. A whole field, and yet, each standing stem gets one swing of the scythe. Before it goes on to leave its unique fingerprint on the earth.
In the process of this book, as Death learns something about life, I learn something about death. I learn how to cut corn. One by one. And how to fall. Singly, and as a multitude, an ecosystem, a world.
At the end of Reaper Man, Death asks Azrael, the Death of Universes, for a favour. He asks for a little time, he says, for the proper balance of things, to return what was given, for the sake of prisoners and for the flight of birds. In fact, he asks for a little bit of rebellion. As he makes his case, he says, LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?
Image: Priyadarshini John
