So, over the past six months or so, while commuting to and from work, while working in the yard, while doing the dishes, I've been listening to lectures on literature, partially out of interest in literature and partially to get ready for the GRE literature subject test. So far, I've listened to over 100 hours of lectures on literature. To tell you the truth, I really like the insights they provide into the works themselves and the tastes of the works I get from the lectures. However, the literary topics covered are kind of heavy and often sort of pessimistic. I'm not anti-pessimism--sometimes being pessimistic can be really fun and kind of energizing in a weird way, sort of like how saying "Screw it all," and meaning it, can be sort of freeing--but too much pessimism can become tiresome.
(This will be a rather lengthy aside, but here is an example of a warm/fuzzy segment from Georg Buchner's unfinished early nineteenth-century play Woyzeck. The grandkids have asked the grandmother to tell them a good night story and this is her response. Note: this is my own translation from the German, so there might be a few errors:
"Come here, you little crabs! Once upon a time there was a poor child who had no father and no mother. Everyone was dead; there was no one left in the world. Everyone dead, but still the child searched day and night. And because there was no one left on the earth, the child wanted to go up into heaven, and the moon looked down so friendly on the child. When the child got to the moon, it was just a chunk of rotten wood. And then the child went to the sun, but it was just a withered sunflower. And when the child got to the stars, they were little golden mosquitoes, stuck up there like the red-backed shrike sticks them on the sloe. And so the child decided to come back to earth, but the earth was a sunken harbor. And the child was totally alone. And the child sat down and cried, and there the child still sits and is completely alone." Nice bed-time story from Granny, eh?)
A lot of the heaviness from these works of literature has to do with the fear of death and what happens after death. This fear, of course, is as old as consciousness, and even religion can't cure people of it entirely, because, even for the faithful, there is a fear of hell or rebirth or the telestial kingdom, or the nagging doubt that God will turn out to be just like Santa Clause: a comforting fiction. So probably most people are afraid, in one way or another, of what happens after their last breath.
Now, I'm one of those people who believe in God and the afterlife and, truth be told, the thought of death doesn't produce in me a lot of anxiety, but in the same way that it can be fun to toy with pessimism, I sometimes like to imagine death as simply an end to existence, a vacuum, an eternal state of non-perception. This line of thought is thrilling to me in the same way playing "Bloody Mary" was exciting as a kid, or the way it was thrilling and terrifying to imagine that skinwalkers-who-ran-fast-as-cars were real and that they ventured off the nearby Navajo reservation to prey on people in villages just like mine. But I also realize that for many people the fear of death is real. I'm also convinced that death is a difficult concept for any person, regardless of conviction, who has really thought about it.
Anyway, this is to say that these lit lectures have me thinking about the fear of death, and thinking about people thinking about the fear of death--and its inverse, the meaning, or meaninglessness, of life--a lot lately. And this has led me to wonder about what the idea of death means to a kid.
As near I can tell, Sonora first encountered death as a concept when she was two. I can't remember the details, but she was on a hike with Elizabeth and they came upon a recently dead bird. It was bleeding out the mouth and Sonora squatted to examine it. She determined that the bird was painting, not bleeding, that the small, bright crimson pool was the bird's way of creating and sharing art. Elizabeth did not correct Sonora's interpretation, and I think the contradiction--painting, not bleeding; creating, not dying--sort of broke Elizabeth's heart while it also made her laugh.
The next time I can think of when Sonora encountered death was about six months or a year later when she and I were on a walk and she noticed a large ring-necked pheasant lying dead on the shoulder of the road. She asked me what was wrong with it and I told her it was dead. Then I felt compelled to explain what death is--that it is when the body dies and the spirit leaves the body and the body gets eaten by other animals, and doesn't ever move again of its own volition. This led to a discussion of humans and death and, being the sort of lay-it-all-out-there sort of person I am, I told her that she would die one day and Mom and Dad would die, that everyone dies eventually (thinking back on it now, I feel a bit like the grandma in Buchner's play, mentioned above) and that that is okay because the spirit lives on and goes to heaven, etc.
Since then, I think Sonora has spent a bit of time thinking about death. She talks about it when she sees a dead insect or any dead animal or when a character dies on a movie she has watched. She seems mostly okay with it now, but for about a year or so, I think it challenged her conception of life and made her a little more anxious than she might otherwise have been. For example, about six months ago, the plug in our bathroom sink broke. It was one of those metal plugs that is linked to a plunger you can pull up or push down to engage or disengage the plug from the sink. It took me about two weeks to get around to fixing the plug and in the meantime the drain was just open, a black circle with no net, no trap, no security, that the water ran down. Before the plug broke, even when it was disengaged, the plug had provided a sort of safety net to any but the smallest items that were dropped in the sink. One time, when the plug was absent from the sink, Sonora accidentally dropped a small hair barrette down the drain and it slipped into the hole. That ruined her whole day. She wept and shook and asked over and over where it would go. Where would the barrette go that fell down the hole? From then on, she was obsessed with keeping things away from the drain--barrettes, toothbrushes, even things much too large to fall in, like cups and the soap dispenser--so that they wouldn't fall down the hole and suddenly be gone for ever. When I finally repaired the sink so that the plug could go back in, she was visibly relieved. There have been very few things that have upset her as much as the sight and reality of that drain did. This may be a stretch, but I chalk up her fear of the unplugged drain to her anxiety about death. Death is the drain that life suddenly falls into and is then apparently gone forever.
The other instance that led me to believe she ruminates on death occurred when I was driving her to her friend's house for preschool. Out of the blue, she asked me "Daddy, what is under the earth?" I told her, as simply as I could, about dirt and rocks and layers floating on a sort of volcanic marshmallow layer, which led to a cursory explanation of volcanic activity, but her question, I came to understand as we talked, was not "what is the earth made of," but "how stable is the earth? Is it like an egg shell that can crack open and swallow us up?" Again, it was the idea of everything disappearing in a flash that was on her mind.
I guess what this all has taught, or at least reiterated to me is that we humans have a tough reality: from the moment we begin to be conscious of ourselves, we begin to recognize that we will die. For whatever reason, this realization creates a lot of distress in us, and we deal with it in different ways. A lot of art--literary and otherwise--has been created as a way to explore, examine, and cope with the realization of universal mortality and with the thought that "I, too, will die," which feels very profound. Of course, we've got a lot of stuff going on which keeps the wolf (in this case, the wolf is not death, but the idea of death) at bay: love, family, food, work, television, sports, politics, video games, music, hobbies, books, friends, church, school, schedules, schedules, schedules, schedules, schedules, and schedules. So many plugs to hide that awful yawning black hole in the bottom of the sink.
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