Looking In the Distance. Richard Holloway

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СКАЧАТЬ particular ships, preferring the intimacy of the life-boat or the exhilaration of swimming in the sea to the routinisation of life on one of the great explanation-tankers of organised religion. But even if we choose to go overboard and swim alone, we have not necessarily abandoned the religious quest; not if we think of it as the name we give to humanity’s preoccupation with its own meaning or lack of meaning. There are any number of metaphors we can use to capture this insistent concern we have about ourselves. Hafiz used the image of swimming alone in the sea, others talk about life as a search for the great unknown, Rozanov described it as looking in the distance. Following the Rozanov metaphor, I want to do a bit of distance gazing. I want to sit in the chair and describe some of the conflicting things I have seen. I shall not attempt to weave them into an explanatory package, to make them continuous with each other. That would not be honest to my own experience of the mystery of life, which has been disjunctive and contradictory rather than seamless; so I shall leave things jagged and disconnected, just as I saw them.

      But before I settle myself in the chair to start describing what I see, let me affix a health warning. Religion, even without the definite or indefinite article in front of it, is dangerously volatile stuff. The root of the difficulty lies in the nature of the claims religions make about matters that are beyond any verification. This uncertainty, which lies at the heart of all religious systems, famously produces compensating protestations of absolute certainty about matters that are intrinsically unknowable. This is what gives such a dangerous edge to religious conflict. It is why Montaigne dryly observed that it was rating our conjectures highly to burn people alive for them. Another mordant observer of the excessive self-importance of religious systems was the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. I spent an afternoon with him in Jerusalem just before his death a few years ago. Amichai described himself as an atheist, but he was a wise and wonderfully tolerant observer of the religious madness of his own city of Jerusalem. He wrote a poem called ‘Jerusalem Ecology’, the first stanza of which I’d like to recite as a prophylactic against religious poisoning.

      The air above Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams

       Like the air above industrial towns

       it’s hard to breathe.4

      Having paid close attention to that health warning, let me now settle into the chair and describe some of the things I see in the distance. I propose to thread onto a string of narrative some beads of quotation, mainly from poets, who best capture the essence of the human experience at those vulnerable moments when we are most open to the mystery of our own existence. The first one I call ‘looking into the abyss’.

       Looking into the abyss

      It’s three o’clock in the morning and I can’t sleep, which is probably why I’m in that chair, not in bed. I’ve made a pot of dark roast coffee to clear my head and help me think, because I have been invaded by a terrible sense of ultimate meaninglessness. I have been engulfed by the void, made to look into the abyss of emptiness that life seems to be stretched upon. Everything I once thought to be steady and enduring has disappeared into the ceaseless flux of a universe without meaning. The mood is probably best expressed by Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade’– dawn:

      I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

       Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

       In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

       Till then I see what’s really always there:

       Unresting death, a whole day nearer now . . .

      What unnerves Larkin is not the thought of a wasted life, the quite natural remorse many of us appropriately feel as we look back on our lives:

      –The good not done, the love not given, time

       Torn off unused –

      No, what frightens him is extinction, complete nothingness, non-being. He is overcome by a sense of

      . . . the total emptiness for ever,

       The sure extinction that we travel to

       And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

       Not to be anywhere,

       And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

      This is a special way of being afraid

       No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

       That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade

       Created to pretend we never die,

       And specious stuff that says No rational being

       Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

       That this is what we fear – no sight, no sound,

       No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

       Nothing to love or link with,

       The anaesthetic from which none come round.

       And so it stays just on the edge of vision,

       A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill

       hat slows each impulse down to indecision.

       Most things may never happen: this one will . . .5

      As far as I am concerned, Larkin has captured the mood all right, but not exactly the object of the anxiety. My blues in the wee small hours are not caused by apprehension at the prospect of my own death and extinction, though I hope my number will not be called any time soon. No, my mood is more universal than that. It is a puzzled revulsion at the pointless plenitude of Being, and dismay at the way this planet has manufactured trillions of life forms only to cast them indifferently aside, like an out-of-control assembly line in an old Charlie Chaplin movie. My mood of nihilistic despair is amplified by the thought that most of these lives have known enormous pain and the human ones considerable sorrow, if only at the end when life itself slowly undermines them before withdrawing completely. The mood of early morning loss comes from a sense of bafflement at the massive indifference of the universe. We try to care about one another, but life itself, the life that impels its indifferent way through time and space, does not seem to care about anything; it simply is. Even that does not quite capture the mood, because to say that the life force that activates the universe ‘is’ gives it a sense of stability, when, in fact, we experience it as constant change; it is not so much Being, as Passing, as something endlessly in the process of becoming something else. There are times when the cosmic indifference of life is as disorienting as being lost in a dense wood or as frightening as falling overboard into the sea at night with no one to know we have gone.

      The strange thing is that this void, this Nothing or No one, gave us birth, and it is impossible not to be emotionally involved with a parent, however absent and indifferent. There’s a poem that captures this ambiguity better than the straightforward despair of Larkin’s ‘Aubade’. I am thinking of ‘Psalm’ by Paul Celan. Celan was a poet of the abyss, a victim of the brutal indifference of history. His parents were lost in the Nazi death camps and he himself, like other Holocaust survivors, committed suicide. He wrote a wrenching series of poems called Die Niemandsrose, ‘The No one’s Rose’. This is one of them:

      No one moulds us again out of earth and clay,

       no one conjures our dust.

       No one.

       Praised СКАЧАТЬ