Adam Small
With humouristic good reason I turn my attention today to the important and greatly significant theme of immortality.
A friend is at the moment compiling a book of remembrances of N P van Wyk Louw, with a view to the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death in 1970.
The work is due for publication in 2020. The compiler’s rationale for this early request is that the relevant writers who knew Louw or were in touch with him during his life are themselves already around 80 years old and (skirting euphemism) at death’s door!
I have been asked to contribute to the anthology! This choice of theme may be considered outlandish (despite the fact that people live daily – at prayer, for instance – enclaved with the concept and word “Everlasting”).
Fortunately, I am free to write whatever meets my mind as important. I am not told what to think or “instructed how to think” (to adapt a phrase from Marx Refuted, edited by Ronald Duncan and Colin Wilson, with reference to Marx’s prescriptive manner).
It is this invitation that brought to my mind the “cut-off” or “black-out” reality of death – the point of life beyond which one’s hand can no longer move pen over paper. And one experiences sadness about the unavoidable final “end of things” in life.
I surmise that this experience pertains to cultures across the board. In ancient Egypt it flourished to a truly heartrending extent: total immersion in practices around the idea of immortality open before us, as nowhere else: the world of mummies, of embalming the dead, an utter refusal to let this life go, to shut down on this here-and-now.
A blurb for Ange-Pierre Leca’s book, The Cult of the Immortal, reads that “the men and women of ancient Egypt were half in love with death. For, mummified in their richly decorated cases, surely they would live forever…”
“In love with death” is caustic irony, for really it speaks of a bitter resentment of death.
The pyramids are evidence of all this – those massive edifices built to house embalmed remains, of pharaohs primarily, in chambers deep down. The vaults where the dead rested were accoutred with belongings of theirs – jewellery, and what not.
Even food was provided and air passages built! In general, “Convention dictated that the deceased required a whole variety of trappings and equipment (for the journey) to the after-life… Numerous amulets were needed, for it was considered extremely foolhardy to venture into unknown regions without protection”.
Throughout time, other cultures display this same rejection of death. A pillar of Christianity is its belief in life “hereafter”. This was Jesus’s teaching, and his crucifixion would supposedly break down the stark door of Death for us to pass through to Eternity.
Hinduism is deeply concerned with immortality – greatly free in structure, and not bound to a single book of faith or a single personage “in whom to believe” – it insists that “the soul never dies”.
Reincarnation takes place, a carrying forward of life, with the quality of the next existence determined by the “karma” or level of goodness of the present life. Buddhism is colourful and ornate in its expression – despite the fact that its monks “are expected to live a life of poverty”.
Like in Catholicism, they are also “to avoid sexual activity” (I fail to understand why this should be the case). Buddhism shares Hinduism’s belief in reincarnation. The persuasive “Zen” is a school of Buddhism. The Aztecs entertained similar ideas. Their forebears, the Quetzalcoatl, “had sailed across the sea, but (they believed) would return”. The idea seems to have been that of a “Second Coming”, presaging a continuation of life, not only for individuals, but for the group.
The Pygmies of Central Africa and elsewhere, a small population in the world, also eschew formal leadership.
Again, religion is a priority, and immortality a guiding idea amid the people’s daily hunting and gathering. Turning to another culture (or subculture): The Maya were a remarkable civilisation in Central America around 200 to 800 AD.
They had mathematical acumen, and were well-endowed with a knowledge of writing. Related to the Aztecs, they also knew Quetzalcoatl as a god, and looked forward to a life “hereafter”. Importantly also, writers in our time, poets and others, concern themselves with immortality.
Dylan Thomas would not accept death willy-nilly, and sanctions “raging” against it: “Do not go gentle into that dark night”. Gerard Manley Hopkins, in turn, engages with the concept with resigned understanding. Milan Kundera entitles a book of his Immortality.
Aldous Huxley takes up the theme in The Perennial Philosophy, an anthology that comments on ideas on immortality over the centuries. Van Wyk Louw himself turns to the theme, seemingly with the same accepting attitude as Hopkins. He writes lines such as the following (themselves “immortal”): “Your name will be among the last words I will speak; the final darkening of my thought and consciousness will yet contain it as I enter Death and leave behind all insignificance… Your name will live on here, and I will long from the Beyond to hear it ring, and sing.”
But, as Life was beautiful for me, let Death now be. The Bible, of course, speaks of immortality. In Romans 2 we read about “them who by patient continuance in well-doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life…” Immortality, of course, is double-edged: everlasting bliss, on the one hand, but also an eternity of unhappiness, on the other hand (an enduring, torturing “gnashing of teeth”).
Yet if, as 1 Timothy 6 calls for, we fight “the good fight” we can “lay hold on eternal life” in its sense of happiness: we are called up “in the sight of God who quickeneth all things, and before Christ Jesus, who before Pontius Pilate witnessed a good confession…” – all of this to the glory of God “who alone has immortality”, in which we can share.
In 1 Corinthians 15 we are told that, at death, “we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump, for the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible… For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality… Death is swallowed up in victory.”
A last thought: Contemporary space exploration deeply connotes an effort to secure immortality for humankind. It pursues the idea of, and the search for, a world beyond Earth for us to live and survive in after the demise of our planet which, slowly but surely, is running down. Van Wyk Louw images this in his poem Inferno:
I’ve heard a sadly sobering word that all the stars will flee away out of this sweet community of Milky Way and bright day…
And that their joyous dance together will slow down until nothing stirs,
and they, like great snails, tiresome will drag themselves to outposts of the universe.
As St Paul writes, however, and as all these death-denying cultures proclaim, this cold nothingness, like the “gates of hell”, will not prevail. Instead, a joyous immortality will open up and be there for all who practise goodness.