http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/poetry-as-medicine/2007/02/01/1169919470973.html?page=4
I STOPPED BELIEVING IN GOD six years ago. To say I woke up one morning with the realisation that religion is bunk would be a simplification, but only a small one. My conversion to atheism was rapid and joyful. I gloried in my new-found intellectual freedom and sense of moral responsibility and pitied those still caught in religion's web.
All was right in my godless world until, within the space of just over a year, I faced the death of a beloved relative and the possibility of my own death at the age of 29. The first event overwhelmed me with grief, the second with terror. When I say now that I would believe in an afterlife if I could, that I would take comfort in religion if I could, I mean it most sincerely.
How to deal with death without God? This question has been central to my life for two years. The sorrow of losing a loved one to death is different to other sorrows. We can pore over photographs and eulogise kind hearts and good deeds. We can read medical reports and talk about final hours. We can dissect the deceased's life and death, tell ourselves that the former was pleasant and the latter painless. All this is understandable and perhaps necessary, but none of it touches our grief, because grief is not an intellectual state. It cannot be altered by discussion or removed by reason. When the grieving heart asks how, it is not a question about heart attacks or car crashes or cancers, it is a question about the inconceivability of an entire consciousness simply not existing.
Likewise, the terror of death is not like any other fear. One cannot minimise one's fear of death by gathering information and avoiding risks, the way one might do to calm a fear of sharks or plane crashes. It is possible to reduce the chances of dying in these specific ways, sure, but in the end it doesn't matter how it happens, only that it does.
"After one has abandoned a belief in God," Wallace Stevens said, "poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption." This makes sense to me: poetry often has a murkiness that allows it to deal with subjects themselves shrouded in haze. And what subject is murkier than death, about which medical science can tell us everything and nothing all at once? We know exactly what happens to a body after death; we know nothing about what happens to the consciousness it used to house.
......
But finding solace in poetry is not as simple as opening a random anthology. After the death of a dear relative, I searched the poetry shelves for fortification and consolation, only to be confronted again and again by poems that assured me of the impermanence of death and the inevitability of a joyful reunion in heaven. It struck me that had I believed any of these sentiments, I would not have needed to search for consolation in poetry in the first place.
Still, every so often I would find a poem that spoke directly to my atheistic grief and I would copy it carefully into a notebook that I took to carrying with me everywhere. Dark nights of the soul do not only occur on dark nights. In the first page of my notebook I copied a line of Gwendolyn Brooks': "Beware the easy griefs, that fool and fuel nothing."
These days I keep the notebook in a drawer and, like a first-aid kit, bring it out only at times of need. Like a first-aid kit too, the book is not designed to be emptied all at once. Each poem is powerful medicine, but some are expectorants rather than salves; some are best applied immediately while others work only after time has done all it can.
TO BEGIN AT THE END, the last poem in my notebook is Philip Larkin's Aubade. Seamus Heaney called this "the definitive post-Christian English poem" because it "abolishes the soul's traditional pretension to immortality". It is the perfect antidote to our culture's coyness about death: a harsh, unblinking examination of what it means to no longer exist.
"Waking at four to soundless dark", the poet considers the "sure extinction that we travel to" and admits to "the dread/ Of dying, and being dead". He rejects the usual comforts; religion is a "vast moth-eaten musical brocade, created to pretend we never die", and courage is "no good" because "Being brave/ Lets no one off the grave".
The philosopher Montaigne, faced with the same deep dread of death, decided that the only way to overcome it was to avoid its contemplation, instead acting as an uneducated peasant whom "nature teaches not to think of death except when he actually dies". Larkin's poem ends on a similar note, and here the end of contemplation is brought about by nature. As dawn's light comes into the room, his mind turns to the fact that the world is waiting and "work has to be done".
......
Denise Levertov's Talking to Grief takes up the theme of acceptance. "Ah, Grief, I should not treat you/ like a homeless dog/ who comes to the back door/ for a crust, for a meatless bone", it begins. The speaker acknowledges that grief has been "living under my porch", and that it is time that it was given "the right to warn off intruders, to consider/ my house your own/ and me your person".
Levertov understands that after the death of a loved one we are changed permanently. Grief is not an illness from which you recover; it is, or quickly becomes, an aspect of your personality, a part of who you are and how you live.
.......
The attempt to pinpoint the value of a single life drives Kenneth Slessor's Five Bells. The poem is ostensibly a commemoration of the poet's friend, who drowned in Sydney Harbour, but it is important to me because of the insights about grief and remembrance that occur during the attempt.
There is no suggestion of a happy afterlife here - his friend is "nothing except the memory of some bones, long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud". There is only a desperate attempt to commemorate the dead man by recording something of his life, the "unimportant things (he) might have done".
Slessor fails to capture the individuality of his friend, but in doing so captures the nature of grief beautifully: the frustration of being unable to perfectly describe why our loved one was so special and is so missed; the random incompleteness of our memories and the feeling that in trying to memorialise them we are not doing them justice; the utter futility in trying to capture in words a whole life and death of a human being, no matter how "unimportant".
......
THE FIRST POEM I COPIED into my little book - Dirge without Music, by Edna St Vincent Millay - remains the one that best describes my feelings towards death. At the funeral of the relative whose death sparked my existential musings, the refrain was that this man had lived long and well and had died peacefully. Repeatedly I heard it said that death is a natural part of life and that it was unquestionably this adored old man's time.
With each repetition of these inarguably correct phrases, Millay's words roared in my head: "I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned." Like Millay, I am outraged at "the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground". That it has happened "time out of mind" does not make it OK; that it is natural, that flowers bloom from the remains of the dead, is no solace. I know that I will never again experience this man's "laughter (and) love", and I am not at all resigned.
This is, perhaps, the essence of atheistic grief and also the essence of atheistic hope. To understand that death is the end of existence and that it is inevitable, but to live as if it is not. To refuse to be resigned to death even as we refuse to deny its permanence.
I STOPPED BELIEVING IN GOD six years ago. To say I woke up one morning with the realisation that religion is bunk would be a simplification, but only a small one. My conversion to atheism was rapid and joyful. I gloried in my new-found intellectual freedom and sense of moral responsibility and pitied those still caught in religion's web.
All was right in my godless world until, within the space of just over a year, I faced the death of a beloved relative and the possibility of my own death at the age of 29. The first event overwhelmed me with grief, the second with terror. When I say now that I would believe in an afterlife if I could, that I would take comfort in religion if I could, I mean it most sincerely.
How to deal with death without God? This question has been central to my life for two years. The sorrow of losing a loved one to death is different to other sorrows. We can pore over photographs and eulogise kind hearts and good deeds. We can read medical reports and talk about final hours. We can dissect the deceased's life and death, tell ourselves that the former was pleasant and the latter painless. All this is understandable and perhaps necessary, but none of it touches our grief, because grief is not an intellectual state. It cannot be altered by discussion or removed by reason. When the grieving heart asks how, it is not a question about heart attacks or car crashes or cancers, it is a question about the inconceivability of an entire consciousness simply not existing.
Likewise, the terror of death is not like any other fear. One cannot minimise one's fear of death by gathering information and avoiding risks, the way one might do to calm a fear of sharks or plane crashes. It is possible to reduce the chances of dying in these specific ways, sure, but in the end it doesn't matter how it happens, only that it does.
"After one has abandoned a belief in God," Wallace Stevens said, "poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption." This makes sense to me: poetry often has a murkiness that allows it to deal with subjects themselves shrouded in haze. And what subject is murkier than death, about which medical science can tell us everything and nothing all at once? We know exactly what happens to a body after death; we know nothing about what happens to the consciousness it used to house.
......
But finding solace in poetry is not as simple as opening a random anthology. After the death of a dear relative, I searched the poetry shelves for fortification and consolation, only to be confronted again and again by poems that assured me of the impermanence of death and the inevitability of a joyful reunion in heaven. It struck me that had I believed any of these sentiments, I would not have needed to search for consolation in poetry in the first place.
Still, every so often I would find a poem that spoke directly to my atheistic grief and I would copy it carefully into a notebook that I took to carrying with me everywhere. Dark nights of the soul do not only occur on dark nights. In the first page of my notebook I copied a line of Gwendolyn Brooks': "Beware the easy griefs, that fool and fuel nothing."
These days I keep the notebook in a drawer and, like a first-aid kit, bring it out only at times of need. Like a first-aid kit too, the book is not designed to be emptied all at once. Each poem is powerful medicine, but some are expectorants rather than salves; some are best applied immediately while others work only after time has done all it can.
TO BEGIN AT THE END, the last poem in my notebook is Philip Larkin's Aubade. Seamus Heaney called this "the definitive post-Christian English poem" because it "abolishes the soul's traditional pretension to immortality". It is the perfect antidote to our culture's coyness about death: a harsh, unblinking examination of what it means to no longer exist.
"Waking at four to soundless dark", the poet considers the "sure extinction that we travel to" and admits to "the dread/ Of dying, and being dead". He rejects the usual comforts; religion is a "vast moth-eaten musical brocade, created to pretend we never die", and courage is "no good" because "Being brave/ Lets no one off the grave".
The philosopher Montaigne, faced with the same deep dread of death, decided that the only way to overcome it was to avoid its contemplation, instead acting as an uneducated peasant whom "nature teaches not to think of death except when he actually dies". Larkin's poem ends on a similar note, and here the end of contemplation is brought about by nature. As dawn's light comes into the room, his mind turns to the fact that the world is waiting and "work has to be done".
......
Denise Levertov's Talking to Grief takes up the theme of acceptance. "Ah, Grief, I should not treat you/ like a homeless dog/ who comes to the back door/ for a crust, for a meatless bone", it begins. The speaker acknowledges that grief has been "living under my porch", and that it is time that it was given "the right to warn off intruders, to consider/ my house your own/ and me your person".
Levertov understands that after the death of a loved one we are changed permanently. Grief is not an illness from which you recover; it is, or quickly becomes, an aspect of your personality, a part of who you are and how you live.
.......
The attempt to pinpoint the value of a single life drives Kenneth Slessor's Five Bells. The poem is ostensibly a commemoration of the poet's friend, who drowned in Sydney Harbour, but it is important to me because of the insights about grief and remembrance that occur during the attempt.
There is no suggestion of a happy afterlife here - his friend is "nothing except the memory of some bones, long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud". There is only a desperate attempt to commemorate the dead man by recording something of his life, the "unimportant things (he) might have done".
Slessor fails to capture the individuality of his friend, but in doing so captures the nature of grief beautifully: the frustration of being unable to perfectly describe why our loved one was so special and is so missed; the random incompleteness of our memories and the feeling that in trying to memorialise them we are not doing them justice; the utter futility in trying to capture in words a whole life and death of a human being, no matter how "unimportant".
......
THE FIRST POEM I COPIED into my little book - Dirge without Music, by Edna St Vincent Millay - remains the one that best describes my feelings towards death. At the funeral of the relative whose death sparked my existential musings, the refrain was that this man had lived long and well and had died peacefully. Repeatedly I heard it said that death is a natural part of life and that it was unquestionably this adored old man's time.
With each repetition of these inarguably correct phrases, Millay's words roared in my head: "I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned." Like Millay, I am outraged at "the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground". That it has happened "time out of mind" does not make it OK; that it is natural, that flowers bloom from the remains of the dead, is no solace. I know that I will never again experience this man's "laughter (and) love", and I am not at all resigned.
This is, perhaps, the essence of atheistic grief and also the essence of atheistic hope. To understand that death is the end of existence and that it is inevitable, but to live as if it is not. To refuse to be resigned to death even as we refuse to deny its permanence.
