They say death has changed for modern man, that it has been deconstructed and, like him, become postmodern. Sometimes, when the day is bright and blue and hot enough to be quite empty, and the rocks shimmer in the sun, the conviction comes that at their heart human societies are just elaborate fabrications for suppressing a knowledge of death – conspiracies sufficiently complex and beguiling that the dark secret of our own mortality no longer obtrudes. This huge artifice protects the race against its Achilles heel: the certainty that all its affairs are nothing and soon it will be one with the dinosaurs. It is as though it had decided to club together and invent a series of wonderful tales, from Gilgamesh to cyborgs. The principle is that of the Arabian Nights, with everyone their own Scheherezade.
On the morning wind we seem to hear the creak of a million treadmills, the squeak of rowing machines, the trilling and drilling of an endless aerobics class. It is the dawn chorus of anxiety. Another kind of insurance is being enacted, that private/public investment in keeping fit and being seen to be keeping fit. Apart from exacting its own toll in humourless tedium, it turns ill health into a personal failure such that death is seen as just deserts for not having taken the trouble to be sufficiently alive. The body as machine, the unread user’s manual, the culpable lack of maintenance: they all form a nexus of irresponsibility and downfall. Someone fails to turn up at the gym as usual in their Lycra leotard. After a few days their name escapes us. It is understood there was always something more they might have done: another few metres’ jogging a day, many fewer beers and cigarettes, a further notch of health reached in order to carry on being fit indefinitely. (What was it we failed to grasp even as we hung punitively from wallbars? Can the mind be rotting atop its splendid torso?)
*
In what pathetic fragments we move, believing ourselves whole! The precious ‘I’ disappears for long stretches of each day and entirely vanishes during sleep. In one of our registers something never forgets that in default of the ocean deeps, a refrigerator door is always yawning for us as the prelude to spade or flames. Here, at least, the old mythologies no longer work as they did. It is not possible to envisage a private survival. We cannot believe as Sir Thomas Browne did, the same scriptures lying open before us with their panoply of promises. There can be no magic left in prophecies of paradise. That all life was held to have begun in a garden and – if we are good – will likewise end in one convinces nobody. The majority of the world’s people are now town-dwellers to whom rural metaphors are no longer instinctive. Since most people who imagine life after death think of their ordinary lives transfigured, a townee would find the myth of the celestial city more plausible than that of a garden paradise. And what might an urban paradise be? Strange that Scheherazade’s own name meant ‘city-dweller’ in Persian.
There is pathos in the way religions of the book have become immovably beached on the littorals of faraway and long ago. To desert-dwellers, what more natural than to see heaven as a sublime oasis which owes its existence to nothing more mystical than water? Here we are, the deserving, eternally at peace in a lush garden, sprawled in the shade and recovering after life’s gruelling journey. ‘But the true servants of God shall be well provided for, feasting on fruit, and honoured in the gardens of delight. Reclining face to face upon soft couches, they shall be served with a goblet filled at a gushing fountain, white, and delicious to those who drink it. It will neither dull their senses nor befuddle them. They shall sit with bashful, dark-eyed virgins, as chaste as the sheltered eggs of ostriches’.* Ignoring the politics, we note only the continuing presence of physical appetites, the slaking of bodily desires. The twelfth-century philosopher and physician, Moses Maimonides, was impatient with this sort of naivety. ‘To believe so is to be a schoolboy who expects nuts and sweetmeats as a reward for his studies. Celestial pleasures can be neither measured nor understood by a mortal being, any more than a blind man can distinguish colours or the deaf appreciate music.’
The essence of paradise will always be conflated with that of lost Eden since the future is unimaginable and the present unmythic. The very word ‘paradise’ comes from Persian via Greek and means a park. What could the modern world offer by way of a matching tranquil and timeless vision? Are we to recline for ever in some leafy municipal square, where the sun filtering through the trees dapples us in a bearable radiance, where traffic noise has ceased, where litter-free paths are strolled by the righteous eating ambrosial hamburgers? It doesn’t work. Nor does a southern Californian dream of bronzing our cancer-proof skin beside Hockney-blue pools, endlessly dating and mating and clinching deals. Besides lacking depth, such visions have no ecstasy. In any case, our bodily needs are now largely catered for. It is impossible to imagine any central image as simple and important as water which might resonate for us as a condition of life itself. And this is the triumph of material mastery, that it supersedes and blots out the symbolic to the extent that the only resounding things left are absences. Nature has fallen beneath Homo’s power, and in doing so has left him without an image of heaven.
*
In distant archipelagos there are often days of heat and dazzle powerful enough to wipe out thought, to leach away everything that is not planetary furniture: trees, rocks, clouds and water to the horizon. To people who skitter about these gulfs of ocean in pea-pod craft – a few sheets of marine plywood tacked together with copper nails – death is an imminent presence. So it is for those hacking at their stony fields high above the glittering shoreline. Subsistence throws things into bright relief. At the end of the day’s work either there are fish and maize cobs to be laid over charcoal or there are not. Infants are born, linger for a week, vanish into the ground. There are no hidden deals. Everything – shelter, food, water – is in the open. The facts are dealt with by private treaty. The woman pounding her washing on a stone in the stream, the plodder behind his buffalo knee-deep in a rice paddy, the lone fisherman far out in the sun’s glare: each might harbour wistful dreams but none pretends to be proof against the cancellation which can descend in an instant, whimsically, without notice or reprieve. The beaches on which their children romp and tumble are composed of the dead. The whole landscape is a cemetery. Diatom, mollusc, foraminifer, cuttlebone, dog jaw, pig tooth, and all by the trillion ton. Daily they walk on the deepening past, mend nets on it, fall asleep on it, make cement blocks with it, shit into it. The sea turns over and over, a geological machine smoothly meshing its gears and grinding up time itself. At night it sparkles with energy. Sit beside it under the stars and fan the driftwood embers and watch very seriously the broiling fish as slowly they curve upwards from the heat. Not as dead as they look, some of them, for now and then one leaps off the coals the instant it is laid across them. ‘Buhay pa!’ and a child’s delighted scurry to retrieve it and place it on the fire again. ‘Lie down! Go to sleep!’ Companionable laughter. The incense of smouldering fish oil drifts across the constellations and brings the village dogs from far down the beach.
Despite the skinniness of this living, for all its rigour, there can exist in these rural and marine backwaters a certain ebullience. Not to sentimentalise it, it is that peculiar freedom which descends like a gift on those so constantly menaced that they slip off the burden of mere worry. A strange security results when death is so close a companion. It can be felt while crunching along a beach, a skeleton walking on skeletons with the time machine turning in step, wave-falls and footfalls. A gleeful levity at being so brief, at feeling so exempt. Freedom from what, then? Certainly not from the irreducible pact of living. Rather, from the heaviness of having to share in metropolitan anxieties, the contaminating conspiracy, the yearning. Freedom, too, from the corroding suspicion that the extra time bought by wallbars has already gone on wallbars. The Thousand and One Nights (alf layla wa layla) never meant a literal two-and-three-quarter years but was just an expression for a long time, the eternity spent in staving off the executioner by babbling at him.
* Koran, 37:48.