No life is without its broken, empty spaces. In the West of Ireland almost each village has some story of a haunted room in a house. This is a room where the strain of an otherworldly, ghostly presence is felt and there is always a narrative to sustain such an appearance, some story of woundedness or loss. That haunted room somehow stands outside time; it holds a memory that never lessens with the passage of years. The memory remains a wounded presence. Somewhere in every life there is such a haunted room. Like cursed treasure, all the losses of one’s life seem to gather there. Pathos arises when something in the sequence of present experience brings us into direct contact with the burn of past loss. Socially the surface of our culture is fascinated with the break-up of relationships and the glamour of new partnerships. But the camera eye has loyalty only to the moment and always moves on. Little true attention is given to the secret, private death which the end of a relationship can bring. The deeper radiation of intimate tissue is concealed. Externally, an impression is given that one has already ‘moved on’, as the signal phrase has it. The truth is slower, more painful; when you have truly loved, it can take a long time to ‘move on’. Pathos can awaken when, for instance, you unintentionally find yourself back in the same place or landscape where you shared a special time with your beloved. You may hear a piece of music which immediately turns your thoughts to one previous moment of love. Old loss rekindles as you know this time, this place; this joy can never be recaptured.
T
O
L
EARN
H
OW TO
I
NHABIT
L
OSS
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.
JOHN DONNE, ‘The Good-morrow’
PATHOS IS ESPECIALLY PRESENT IN GRIEF. WHEN SOMEONE YOU love has died, it takes a long time to learn the art of inhabiting the loss. One of the loneliest times in this journey is when you have to clear the person’s wardrobe and decide what to do with their personal effects. When you see again the objects of their affection, the clothes they never again will wear, these things become receptacles of your sense of loss for they are link-objects still connecting you to the departed. In this sense they become ‘sacred objects’. There is some corner of the heart that remains faithful to all that we have loved. Even years after a loss, the sight or scent of something associated with the departed can still quicken the heart. The tragedy is, the longer you live, the more friends you lose. As the world grows older, the ruins of loss multiply and the textures of pathos deepen. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theologian, has a powerful passage in his Letters and Papers from Prison about being faithful to the vacancy of loss:
T
HE
U
NFILLED
G
AP
Nothing can fill the gap
When we are away from those we love and it would be
Wrong to try to find anything
Since leaving the gap unfilled preserves the bond between
Us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap.
He does not fill it but keeps it empty, so that our communion
With another may be kept alive even at the cost of pain.
The beauty of pathos is tenderness, a testimony to affection and care and recognition that love is always vulnerable. Pathos is the enduring witness to where our hearts have dwelt. This is evident in our relationship to our home. A home is not simply a building; it is the shelter around the intimacy of a life. Coming in from the outside world and its rasp of force and usage, you relax and allow yourself to be who you are. The inner walls of a home are threaded with the textures of one’s soul, a subtle weave of presences. If you could see your home through the lens of the soul, you would be surprised at the beauty concealed in the memory your home holds. When you enter some homes, you sense how the memories have seeped to the surface, infusing the aura of the place and deepening the tone of its presence. Where love has lived, a house still holds its warmth. Even the poorest home feels like a nest if love and tenderness dwell there. Conversely, the most ornate, the grandest homes can have an empty centre. The beauty of a home is ultimately determined by the nature of its atmosphere, by the texture and spirit of those who dwell there. A house is like a psyche in the patterns of spirit it absorbs and holds. The art of memory is its secret weaving, how it weaves together forgotten joy and endured sorrow.
D
EATH
: T
HE
F
IRST
T
IME
Y
OU
L
OSE
T
HE
W
ORLD
I find my bearings where I become lost.
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS
IN OUR TRADITION, THE LONELINESS OF DEATH IS USUALLY described with reference to those around the deathbed and the heartbreak that death brings. Yet for the one dying, how lonely it must be to lose the world. This is the first time that it is about to happen. All difficulty and sorrow up to now still happened in the world, in the home or some other familiar places. No matter how intense the devastation of the pain was, one still continued here, picked up the rhythm of one’s life and continued on. There are things of primal familiarity so deep that we never notice them. Being here in the world is a wondrous gift. Because we have always been here, we never render the surprise and shock of ‘being here’ explicit. From day to day we assume fully the role of being here; there is no elsewhere to consider as a destination. And because we are always in our bodies, we never gain distance. Every feeling, thought, delight, danger and confusion we have experienced, we experienced them all in this one body. The body is the inestimable gift that grounds our memory, perception and imagination. The horror of death is that we are in the same moment forced out of both worlds. We lose the world and we lose ourselves. There can be no greater distance on earth than that between the moment when life ends and the new moment when our post-life begins. The distance is infinite because of the utter break in physical continuity. We know nothing of what it is like to step onto that other shore. And it is incredible that no-one has ever been able to cleanly return to explain the journey. This raw factuality renders the loss of the world poignant and helpless. We may ‘rage, rage against the dying of the light’, but we cannot hold our grip here. Like the fall of sleep, it comes over us. However, this sleep will allow us no dreams and will never let us through to morning.
This is forced eviction from the world and from the body, the only home we know. To ordinary human eyes it seems to be a total and definitive eviction. Once evicted, we can never return. Within the whole sequence of life’s narrative, there is no cut like death. Every other ending in life is gathered forward into some other new beginning. The end of childhood is the beginning of growth into adulthood. The loss of a friendship can become the space for a new love or for a sorrow that can blight your life. One way or the other, the narrative continues. Not so with death. The continuity ends. The line of a life is left suspended from a cliff-edge. Everything is gone.
T
HE
C
HOREOGRAPHY OF
D
EATH
:
T
HE
S
ILENCE AND
S
TILLNESS
Nothing for us there is to dread in death.
LUCRETIUS
WHEN SOMEONE WE LOVE DIES, IT IS STRANGE COMING TO TERMS with their disappearance. At death it becomes clear how invisible a person’s life really is. The body still remains somewhat visible. But it has already become empty and is crossing the threshold into its own transformation. The crucial event is that the life of the person has now departed. Like a candle blown out, the flame has vanished. This was the old philosophical question: where does the flame go, when the candle is blown out? In one, unseen swiftness the life goes out. We see nothing. It seems that the essence of a person, the spirit which pervades every pore and cell and is expressed in every thought, feeling and act, can withdraw in one sweep like a wave from the shoreline. It is strange that something which was invisible in the first place can actually vanish and cause the ultimate collapse of everything: the memory, the breath, the body, the thoughts, the knowing, the Eros, the dreams and the eyes and the touch. Nowhere else in creation does an ending take so much with one stroke. Quantitatively in terms of objects there are larger endings. Yet because the object called the human body holds a world that death stops, it is an incredible event. Death is the end of a world; it unravels a unique geography of feeling, tenderness, creativity, sorrow, doubt and shadow; it all comes apart like a piece of knitting unravelling, stitch by stitch.