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Dec 12, 2000
Fall and Mount
Back from Iceland, with its skewed seasons; time distorted through the lens of northern latitude. The low-slung sun skids across the horizon for a few hours: morning, noon and evening indistinguishable. Here, too, the days grow short, or at least we intercept less sunlight. Autumn erodes until we reach the Solstice. There we may look ahead to better days; more sun; new seasons; a whole new year. And all these hopes bundled into what we call Christmas, a catch-all holiday, preeminent among our celebrations, if unfocused.Yes, the Holiday Season is here again, drawing us into another round of revelry. Most cultures have some extended holiday sequence, but we generally dole ours out one by one, a day off here and there, a few long weekends to mitigate our daily labors. Only now do we allow a sequence of occasions, each triggering the next, as Thanksgiving signals the approach of Christmas, which cannot come without the New Year on its heels. Taken all together, summation and a new beginning are implicit, but the form is pure Capitalism: a fever of expenditure to honor...what? The birth of God, or some such thing...
You’d think that Christians might regret our choice in making Christmas a bigger Holiday than Easter, but is being born any less miraculous than being reborn?
Birth is not so much on my mind this Christmas season, except that Death remains its other side.
Death has demanded too much of my time of late.
Unseemly greed,
if it but wait,
Death shall have all my time.
But now,
I live.
It is my father who is dead,
and I feel bad.
Such is the simple equation of grief.
Grieving distances me from the Holidays. Sharing in celebration unites us, vitiating our idiosyncratic concerns, but putting on the mourning cloak isolates me from the hum and whirl. Mourning was once an institution of some formality, with rules to observe, which, like the Holidays, served to define our place within the Mystery. Now, like so much of our spiritual technology, it is neglected; something to get through, or over; and not to burden others with.
I stood on the Mount, “going through it”.
The Mount is the hill rising behind (that is, West of) the Conservatory Garden. Once, it was fortified, and formerly it housed the Sisters of Charity, but now it is a ruin. More than a ruin, it is a disturbed site. The whole top of the hill has been scooped out, and is used for composting the Park’s dead trees, which are reduced to wood chips nearby. Unwholesome characters frequent the tangled and tumbled margins of the height, and a general air of disorganization and destruction hangs over the place, with its steaming piles of chopped up life. It seems a charnel house of trees.
Such associations, no doubt, induced me, there, to rummage in the charnel house of memory, finding memories not fully formed, still animated by lost life, arguing against my need to extinguish and encrypt them. I could see all sides of this thing, my father’s death, but I could not see through it.
In that oblique moment, I saw myself, and I saw his death, but I did not see him. Mostly I suffered remorse over the medical decision making to which I had been party. What was done was not wrong; merely humane, but I nevertheless served, along with the doctors, in an embassy of death, a role more profound than I am accustomed to, and one that taxed my capacities. I’d been forced into a direct observation, and thus, an experience of, the incompatibility between Life and Death. I had requested my father’s death, yet I could not hope for it. I wished him to live and to die at the same time, which is not a tenable position to think from, though it may be a place from which to begin praying.
It’s not that my prayers have gone unanswered;
I just don’t ask for much.
What I’ve gone through is only a natural duty in the course of Life. It’s not a happy charge, but I can hardly resent it. Not without resenting Life itself.
What I am left with is my father. Not alive, but as himself, transcending the ghoulish guise of his death. For though I attended on his death, I cannot share it. None of us can die for another. This we know, and though we aver that there is One who dies for us, our doubt is such that we honor best the birth, and leave the rest to hope. But my father remains with me, dead and alive.
I see him now less as my father, and more as a man with his own life, which he navigated in his own peculiar, but not unsuccessful way. No longer the exemplar that a child sees, yet still I find in him a standard that I will always measure myself by. His completion does not complete our relationship. It will go on as long as I live. And this I call “coming into my inheritance”, which does not have to do with goods or funds, but is the compensation paid for making one of Life’s darker passages.
So I mused, upon the Mount, amid the rot and ruin.
The landscape disturbed, but my thoughts now less so.
Life is subject to disturbances, but these are also opportunities of a sort. Just so, a place like the Mount is an ecological hot spot. New plants rush to sprout in the freshly turned earth, which also reveals worms and bugs, attracting a wide array of birds, and even some surprising mammals, like the Woodchuck I saw there recently.
And I’ve seen the Kestrel, perched atop the Mount, or hovering above it. The Kestrel is a little Falcon, hardly bigger than a Robin, but a puissant bird of prey nonetheless, and the only one that hovers. It used to be called the Sparrow Hawk, but the name has changed, or rather reverted to the traditional European one, I think for the better. This nomenclature was championed by Roger Tory Peterson, whose Field Guide to the Birds was a landmark in the popularization of birding, and a 1947 edition of which is a part of my inheritance from my father. Peterson doesn’t mention the alternative name of the European species, which is Windhover, as I only learned while looking into foreign birds for the recent trip. This bit of knowledge put me in mind of the poem by Hopkins, and if it did not fundamentally alter my understanding of his meaning, it did expand my vision of his imagery, as I had always pictured a larger bird, not knowing about tiny, fluttering falcons, until I had seen one for myself.
Being alive, I could appreciate the death-dealing bird, beautiful and terrible, like Life itself.
For mourning is not our reaction to death, but our reaction to being alive, in the face of death.
And I thought of a different poem by Hopkins, which aptly wraps these feelings in an Autumnal metaphor.
And I’ve decided to put the Arboretum into Holiday mode, as best I can, for my woes cannot cloak the bare trees in black.
The Seasons and the Holidays teach a rhythm we must abide,
and do not recognize my loss
as different from the fallen leaves.
They do not reflect me,
but allow me to project
Father and Falcon,
Peak and Pit,
the Living and the Unalive
that ceaselessly in me collide.