Rob Ayling, yer Gonzo Grande Fromage, writes:"Thom the World poet is an old mate of mine from way back in my history. Even pre-dating Voiceprint, when I was running "Otter Songs" and Thom's poetry tapes and guest appearances with Daevid Allen, Gilli Smyth and Mother Gong are well known and highly regarded. It just felt right to include a daily poem from Thom on our Gonzo blog and when I approached him to do so, he replied within seconds!!! Thom is a great talent and just wants to spread poetry, light and positive energy across the globe. If we at Gonzo can help him do that - why not?
NEAR LIFE EXPERIENCES
ALWAYS IN GOLDEN MOMENTS
when all the suns are shining
Stars illuminate all firmaments
Eyes grow flowers into gardens
The possibility of life emerges
Tentative at first,like a baby walking
or first driver/first flyer/virgin soldier
That Primal Innocence of Living Without Knowing
defeats all Grim Reapers/Horror Movies/Zombie Apocaslypses
Absurd/Surreal-that survivors should feel themselves lucky
in a world of Random Collisions and Statistical Errors
Catch 23.Good Soldier Schweik,Jnr.Salado Legends
Always someone survives a Holocaust.
Sometimes spills a memoir on a page
Calls out to the Living to Remember-
How Lucky We Are-To Be Alive Today!
Over the course of my life, I’ve had a few close calls,
incidents that, had they taken place a second or a minute later, might have
changed my life—or ended it. I’ve never had the classic near-death experience,
the one that includes an out-of-body moment, when one’s spirit floats away from
one’s body, to hover in a state of heightened awareness from the ceiling or some
higher plane. I don’t know what it’s like to have died and come back, only what
it’s like to momentarily feel that I might have possibly come close to
dying.
When I was in my mid-twenties, I bought my first car, with
a six-figure mileage, from a friend of my father’s. I was a reluctant driver at
best—a terrified one, really—and an overused lemon was not a good starter car
for me. Once, when I was driving along a busy street in New Rochelle, New York,
the car turned on its own and headed toward a garbage truck in the opposite
lane. There were only a few inches between us when both the truck and my car
miraculous stopped. If the truck had hit me at the speed we were both going, I
might have died.
A few years ago, I was standing on the landing of the
steps in front of a friend’s apartment in lower Manhattan. The front door was an
entire story above the ground. It had snowed a few days before, then had warmed
up, and then the temperature had plunged again. Black ice covered both the steps
and the sidewalk below. I’d just pulled the door shut, and had my back to the
steps, when I suddenly felt myself slipping. My arms flailed, and for a moment I
felt as though I were flying. I somehow managed to catch the railing before I
could freefall all the way down. Had I plunged backward and landed head first on
the concrete, I might have been at least brain dead.
There was also the time, soon after my mother died, when I
looked up from my phone while riding in the passenger seat of our family car and
realized that my husband had accidentally driven onto the wrong side of a
highway ramp. Had any cars been coming off the highway at high speed, nothing
could have saved us. That particular brush with death made me think of all the
close calls that I, and a few people I know, have had over the span of a
lifetime. Some of those close calls happen so quickly that we barely notice
them. Others are so intense that they might change the way we think about not
just living but about constantly being close to dying.
Every once in a while, a friend with whom I have traded
such stories will send me links to close-call videos on YouTube. In them, people
cluelessly walk into the paths of speeding cars, buses, and trains that somehow
don’t hit them. Dangers graze but don’t annihilate them. In that one moment, it
looks as though these people are covered with some invisible death-protection
shield. Or, as my mother might have said, “It just wasn’t their time.”
I have wanted to sit down and tally my close calls. (There
have been a few others involving being caught in the middle of a police chase, a
near-drowning, and a dodged bullet during a drive-by.) But I have been afraid to
do it. What if I tempt fate, and tip the balance, by paying too much attention?
What if my becoming fully aware of the frequency of such moments makes me
terrified to leave my house? What if I start wondering if my house is even safe?
After all, fifty-foot sinkholes have been known to spontaneously appear in
Florida living rooms.
I once sat next to a woman in a commuter turboprop plane,
who, as soon as the plane landed, started thanking God at the top of her voice.
This same woman, at the start of the trip, had refused to change seats with
another passenger who was travelling with a friend.
“My seat number is how they’ll identify my body if the
plane crashes,” she said apologetically, though loud enough for everyone to
hear. There had been some recent crashes involving the same type of plane in
different parts of the world, I later found out, so her fear was justified.
Surviving a routine plane ride had seemed like a close call to her, something to
be extremely grateful for having lived through. She couldn’t fully trust that
the plane would land and that we would all walk off and go on with our
lives.
She had a point, I realized. After all, don’t most
catastrophic events suddenly interrupt perfectly ordinary days? The “ordinary
instant,” Joan Didion calls it, in “The Year of Magical Thinking,”
her memoir describing her husband’s sudden death from a heart attack and the
process of writing about it.
“Confronted with sudden disaster,” Didion writes, “we all
focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable
occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that
ended on the shoulder with the car in flames.”
Unless a person is being executed, death rarely announces
its exact place and time. Against the backdrop of the ordinary, it often feels
abrupt, exceptional. And even if the circumstances right before death are
extraordinary—if one is getting married, for example, or giving birth, or had
just climbed Mt. Everest—how could these otherwise exceptional events not pale
in comparison?
Among the first words Didion wrote after her husband died
were, “Life changes in the instant.”
The ordinary instant.
“Nou tout ap mache ak sèkèy nou
anba bra nou,” my mother had been casually saying for years. “We’re all
carrying our coffins with us every day.” Or, “We are all constantly cheating
death, ” which is how I usually translated that Creole phrase to my mother’s
doctors and nurses whenever she asked me to, usually after they tried to
reassure her, during some agonizing diagnostic test or another debilitating
chemotherapy session for her stage IV ovarian cancer, that everything was going
to be okay. “Media vita in morte sumus” might have
also been another suitable translation: “In the midst of life, we are in
death.”
The French essayist Michel de Montaigne was apparently
afraid of death until he had a near-death experience of his own. One day, he was
thrown off his horse after colliding with another rider. He ended up unconscious
for several hours and believed himself to be dying. Then, as he recovered from
his accident, Montaigne realized that dying might not be so bad. He’d felt no
pain, no fear. The limbo state of being alive while feeling dead is what he
found to be most intolerable.
“I can, for my part, think of no state so insupportable
and dreadful, as to have the soul vivid and afflicted, without means to declare
itself,” Montaigne wrote, in his essay “De L’Exercitation,” translated as “Use
Makes Perfect.”
This is, perhaps, why we have so many tales of near-death
experiences, firsthand testimonials and fictional accounts whose authors are
attempting to understand—and explain—what it’s like to exist in a body that’s
hovering between life and death. There’s so much to imagine, so much to project
into that inexplicable void of people’s medical and spiritual purgatories as
they swing between living and dying.
“The poets have feigned some gods who favor the
deliverance of such as suffer under a languishing death,” Montaigne writes. The
gods of which he writes might appear as dead relatives or heavenly figures,
angels, spirit guides who offer the choice of either staying or going. Some
writers, like Dante, in “Inferno,” have us travel with them through several
circles of Hell, if only to possibly emerge frightened but cleansed, kinder and
wiser than we were before.
While medical professionals might attribute these same
type of visions and apparitions to neurochemicals working overtime, many of us
would like near-death or half-dead experiences to be real, because we’d love to
have a second shot at life, or we’d love to see our loved ones miraculously
return from the brink before it’s too late. Or, as Dylan Thomas wrote, to “not
go gentle into that good night,” and to “rage against the dying of the
light.”
Writing about near-deaths means trying to penetrate that
space where death could be imminent but living still remains a possibility.
Whereas death is the end of life as we know it, and as others around us are
living it, having a near-death experience means someone’s been given an
opportunity that most other people haven’t had. Survivors might rightfully feel
anointed—or guilty. A few might even wish they’d died, even though their
survival had seemingly required supernatural interference or assistance from
faith, if not fate. Their lives should have greater meaning now than mere
existence. Or should they? Maybe there’s some larger mission to complete,
something better to do, someone to love, or mourn.
Although it’s not a typical near-death narrative, my
favorite close-call book is Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient,” a novel
that is, among other things, about a man who escapes death only to spend the
rest of his life mourning the woman he loved. Burnt beyond recognition, the
so-called English Patient, Almásy, who is actually Hungarian, ends up in the
care of a young nurse, Hana, who looks after him in an old Italian villa, at the
end of the Second World War. Bedridden, Almásy is constantly thinking of
Katharine, the married woman he fell in love with while exploring and mapping
parts of the North African desert.
Even though the war has ended, the characters are still
living with the constant likelihood of sudden death, particularly from the
hidden explosives or mines that the retreating Germans left behind. Kip, the
Sikh mine sapper and Hana’s lover, is the one who must dismantle many of those
explosives, whether they’re hidden under bridges, in statues, or possibly in
pianos.
Kip is constantly living in the shadow of death. The life
expectancy of someone new to his job is ten weeks. Hana, too, has seen a lot of
death as a nurse during the war. After helping Kip with one of his trickiest
mines, Hana breaks down and declares:
I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die, I would die with you. Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying with me in the last year. I didn’t feel scared. I certainly wasn’t brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa, this grass, we should have lain down together, you in my arms, before we died.
Reading this, I think, Who would I want to be with before
I die? Who would I want in my arms? Or whose arms would I want to die in?
Certainly my husband’s. I would be hesitant, though, to subject my young
children to watching me die. Would they be able to carry that memory with them
for the rest of their lives? Would they be able to carry me?
Hana’s declaration also brings up the inescapable link
between sex and death. One way the French refer to orgasm is as “la petite mort,” or “the little death,” an antidote to
Freud’s “death instinct,” or what he saw as our longing to self-destruct and
return to our preëxisting state through war and other means. Sex, after having
just barely escaped death, would have been another way for Hana and Kip to
continue to circumvent “la grande mort,” or “the big
death,” and to counter one of Freud’s other notions: that we’re not convinced of
our own mortality and can’t imagine our own deaths. (Though having watched my
mother die, I can now perfectly imagine my own death.) Hana and Kip also cannot
escape their mortality: it confronts them every day in the devastated landscape
around them, and in the dying faces of their comrades and friends.
“In a painting of his imagining the field surrounding this
embrace would have been in flames,” Kip thinks, soon after Hana falls asleep in
his arms.
Yet both Kip and Hana survive. And the English Patient
continues to live, even though some of his friends, as well as his beloved, have
died. But always shadowing the survivors of this internal and exterior war is
one of Almásy’s favorite words from his native Hungary, “félhomály” (“twilight”), the type of twilight that the
French call “l’heure bleu” (“the blue hour”), or
what Joan Didion refers to in “Blue Nights,” her memoir of
her daughter’s death, from acute pancreatitis, twenty months after her husband
died, as “the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres,” and that Michael
Ondaatje calls the “dusk of graves.”
This type of sorrow-filled dusk offers itself as an
atmospheric bridge between life and death. It is the dying of the light against
which we are constantly raging, the light over which death might indeed have
some dominion, as it is part sunset, part nightfall, the gloaming, eventide, or
prologue to the end. It is, as Didion writes, “the fading,” so it would not be
unusual for it to linger over the holiest of places, those even holier than
Chartres or any other designated holy place.
Places can be holy, Almásy reminds us, not because we are
told they are, but because we want and need them to be. Places can be holy
because we are sharing them with someone we love, just as some places become
cursed because they’ve taken people we love away from us.
“It is important to die in holy places,” Almásy thinks,
toward the end of the novel. Though sometimes as we walk this earth, with the
memories of our loved ones shadowing us, we might also become our own holy
places: roaming churches, cathedrals, and memory mausoleums.
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