…DOES IT DENY?…

Stage 47 / Friday 12 June / From Erro to Pamplona / 36 km

 

The pain in my heel has disappeared. Fully! Is it another small miracle? But my walking shoes, alas, are dying. The soles are completely worn, the canvas is frayed in places, and they are no long waterproof. I will reach Pamplona this evening, which the French call Pampelune, and the Basques Iruña. I will no doubt find there something to replace my defunct shoes. Pamplona was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Navarre. This kingdom was the object of numerous disputes between the neighboring kingdoms, until it was split between France and Spain in the 16th century. And remembering that this kingdom of Navarre also is no longer, I am caught in meditating on death, this worrisome companion jealous of our life.

 

Here I am already giving death a personality (companion) and a negative epithet (jealous): this is a very primary reflex, an instinctive mechanism of defense, very human indeed. In our earlier western civilization (and essentially agricultural), death was represented as a skeleton armed with a scythe, ready to harvest young human shoots. Other civilizations gave it other representations: the Hindus for example made a buffalo-headed lord seizing its prey with a lasso. Certain representations are more complicated: the Aztecs made it a plumed serpent! Others are simpler: the wheel connecting impermanence, suffering, death and rebirth with the Buddhists.

 

But can death truly be represented? Is it even thinkable? As far as I know, no one has come back to tell us what this state of death looks like. How could that be, moreover, since death means the end of the conscious state? At the moment when I will live my death, I will have nothing to fear, because the next instant, I will no longer be aware of what has just happened. Nor will I have the leisure to return and write you a note about it! Therefore, why fear this word so much? The day it comes, perhaps I will be definitively fixed on what it means (if a part of me, my soul, still exists), and perhaps absolutely not (if I deny this possibility of the soul): but if … poof, there is nothing more, then I’ll be truly incapable of witnessing to it.

 

There I have proven, in a way, that death is only a problem for the living! An anguish constructed from two questions that only humans are capable of asking: “Is death simply an interruption of life, or instead an ignorance of what follows? Is it a stop, or a passage?” Anguish that some prefer to cut off by giving themselves death, subsequent to insurmountable pains in their own life, alas! O death who sometimes slips among us like a thief, and sometimes explodes as supreme master there where terror reigns! Death, your arrival seems so lovely in the autumn foliage, and yet this arrival becomes so ugly in the decrepitude of one agonizing! I fully understand from whence come these long debates on euthanasia …

 

And yet, must you not exist, oh death, to make sense of life? In any case, this is what many religions use as a motor for a more valorizing existence, favoring that each moment given to us is at stake for things far more important: be it a reincarnation to something higher (Hinduism), or a rebirth toward something freer from suffering (Buddhism), or an eventual resurrection in an “eternal and glorious” state (Christianity).

 

Reincarnation has an attractive side, allowing one to envisage successive understandings of quite different states, e.g. riches after misery, or inversely; it could be femininity after masculinity; animal life after human life, etc. This presents the advantage, by gradual testing, to limit lack of understanding and injustice, and also invites a greater respect for nature. The Buddhist rebirth imposes a discipline of life in order to better master the here and now. It encourages compassion and humility, meditation and stoicism in the face of testing challenges. Christianity sees in the certainty of life after death, accorded once and for all by a God full of pity, a reason to imitate now the example of the Savior sent by this God. This is an invitation to reduce our ego in learning to give rather than receive, accepting suffering rather than causing it.

 

Some deny these religious approaches, and see in death simply its natural character: a mechanism serving the diversity of life. They refuse to bring judgment too hastily on the unpredictable results coming from sexual reproduction and on an evolutionary adaptation sparing the persistence of a worse, enemy of better. The hope of a Beyond is nothing them, but the conduct which results from it can be a two-edged sword: some (the “enjoyers” I would say) will try to make the most of their life in adopting the attitude of the wolf in the fable of Jean de La Fontaine: “The strongest is always right (Fable I,10 – The wolf and the lamb [Le loup et l’agneau];” others (the philanthropists), on the contrary, go to find in this unique life without alternative or possible future, reasons to go beyond themselves to construct a better world for those who will come after them.] Should I indicate here my estimation of the relative proportions between the enjoyers and the philanthropists, between the wolves and the lambs? I don’t believe it’s good to venture out this much …

 

For me, death seems more and more a necessary evil. First of all, it’s inevitable … for all life forms. Worse, it also seems to be inevitable for the universe, as we know it presently. Entropy is a measure of the degree of disorder in a system and of the availability of the energy it contains to carry out work, for example maintaining life in an organism. Its inexorable increase implies therefore that the entire Universe should end one day in total decay. This is the famous specter of thermal death. But this pessimistic vision is opposed to a more optimistic one of an infinite “multi-universe” in perpetual renewal, in eternal inflation (Andrei Dmitriyevich Linde’s theory) made of an “ad infinitum” (infinite) expansion, and I am more willing to adhere to this way of forecasting our fate.

 

Death spares, in a certain way, from the worst. Without that giving me a right to make an ill-advised use of it! It spares us from aging, an unending decline. And it permits the hatching of new lives: “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.”  (John 12:24) Therefore death is less to be feared than one thinks. And it’s better to accept it as a companion that one refuses to see as ugly, and that one learns to tame day after day, subtle presence that will overcome you one day! Not to deny it is to make headway. And if on the day of its victory, my ego finds itself irremediably scattered, the invariant that I believe myself increasingly able to shelter, my soul, will finally be disconnected from that which in the long run will, in any case, no longer interest me (and no longer interest others, yes, less and less!): my body, my wrinkles, my headaches, my stiff feelings and suppurations.

 

Perhaps there will be some fruits that fall from my tree when it is dried up? May these fruits allow other humans to live better, those near and far! May they, like I who have found more value in my life under the influence of ancestors and good teachers, be in their turn bearers of enrichment and joy! And you my soul, if you truly exist, I definitely not want to deny you a good rest in the “star field”, well beyond the campus stellae of Compostela!