Mementos Mori: Reflections After A Visit to a Portuguese Chapel

Memento mori! Remember death! Why? That is the subject of this essay.We shall begin with one of the most famous mementos mori, which my wife and I encountered on a recent trip to Portugal. After mentioning a few additional examples, we will then discuss the purpose of these reminders, the promulgation of which has long since disappeared in contemporary culture, if not in nature, where they abound. Why were momentos mori created? What are the benefits derived from a healthy contemplation of death?

I would like to answer that last question before proceeding with our discussion. When I was a medical student, many years ago, I did a rotation at the famous Hospital for Sick Children in London. I remember attending an autopsy of a middle-aged man there; I recall that his stomach contained the residue of antacid—He was, poor man, apparently ignorant of the origin of the chest pain in the hours before a massive heart attack felled him. Over the lintel of the entrance to the dissection room was the following Latin inscription, which I have not forgotten to this day: Hic gaudet mors succerere vitae, that is, “Here death triumphs in order to give succor to life.” This is a good definition of a memento mori with the following caveat: there is nothing sweet about this succoring, it is indeed bitter. The antithesis of sweetness, however,  can be quite salutary, like the consumption of the Indian vegetable kaipukku, “bitter gourd,” which lowers blood sugar, while, at least in my opinion, being tasty as well.

1, A Capela dos Ossos, The Chapel of Bones, Évora, Portugal 

Évora is an ancient town, of Celtic origin, located in the Alantejo region of Portugal. Once of great economic importance, it is now (at least on first impression) a somewhat sleepy town. The central square, dominated by the Gothic cathedral, is impressive. There are many fine historic buildings, one of the most famous being the ruins of a first-century Roman temple which was probably dedicated to the emperor Augustus.

Not far from the central plaça, stands the 16^th century Church of St. Francis. It is a rather unimpressive building from the outside; it contains the skeletal Mother of All Mementos Mori, the famous Capela dos Ossos, Chapel of the Bones. Its interior is decorated with the bones of approximately 5,000 persons: skulls festoon the columns, skulls, look down at you from the supporting arches of the chapel. The skulls look surprisingly small, perhaps an effect of perspective; they are placed with an exact periodicity that reminds me of the colorful, little pill-sized candies fastened to wax paper, each about an inch from its neighbor, which I sometimes bought at a fair when I was a kid. But these weren’t candies, far from it; the chapel contained the skeletal remains of enough people to fill Grand Central Station on a busy day in New York.

Over the entrance to the chapel the following message is inscribed:

NÓS OSSOS AQUÍ ESTAMOS, PELOS VOSSOS ESPERAMOS

Translation: We Bones Are Here, Awaiting Yours

Here are some photos we took of the chapel:

The chapel dates from the sixteenth century, the time of the Counter Reformation. To counter the superficialities and degenerations of the Catholic Church during Luther’s time, the Counter Reformation tried to win the hearts and minds of the faithful by demonstrating interest not only in gold-brocaded bishop’s mitres, but in the inner world of the individual as well.  These days one might attempt to stay the onslaught of Protestantism with a guitar mass; in the sixteenth century, however, a good memento mori was thought to be a condign way of scaring the bejesus out of people, hoping that would increase dedication to an institution that claimed to possess the keys to salvation.

There is more than a parochial reason for a memento mori, however, one, as I hope to demonstrate in this essay, that is much needed today.

There is, also, however, a more mundane reason why the remains of so many were exhumed. At the time of the church’s construction, there were over forty cemeteries in the  Évora region—the town, as mentioned, is very ancient. It was decided to put the land of those cemeteries, many contained in monasteries no longer in use, into the hands of the still (at the time) flesh-covered bones of the living.

Instead of reburying the bones, however, they were put on permanent display in order to help reduce the vanity of that factory of vanities, the human brain.

2. The Poem

On the wall of A Capela dos Ossos is an early nineteenth century poem, attributed to a parish priest of the church, Fr. António da Ascenção Teles. It is a good example of a Petrarchan sonnet, remarkable for having originated from the quill of an amateur poet, and quite appropiate to quote here. I present first the original Portuguese poem, followed by my non-Petrarchan translation.

Aonde vaís, caminhante, acelerado?

Pára…não prossigas maís avante;

Negócio, não tens maís importante,

Do que este, a tua vista apresentado.

Recorda quantos desta vida têm passado,

Reflecte em que terás fim semelhante,

Que para meditar causa è bastante

Terem todos maís nisto parado.

Pondera, que influido d’essa sorte,

Entre negociaçães do mundo tantas,

Tão pouco consideras na morte.

Porém, se os olhos aqui levantas,

Pára…porque em negócio deste porte,

Quanto maís tu parares, maís adiantas.

Where are you rushing off to, traveler?

Stop…Do not proceed any farther;

You don’t have any business more important

Than this one here, right before your eyes.

Recall how many have already died,

Reflect that you will have a similar end;

Mortality is reason enough for everyone

To pause here awhile and meditate.

Think how little you reflect on death;

Caught up in the things of the world,

Ponder how these things apply to you.

If, moreover, you choose to lift your eyes,

Pause—for, before a theme of this import,

The more you stop, the more you advance.

The more you stop, the more you advance—a perfect definition of the purpose of a memento mori.

3. Other Examples Of Mementos Mori

a. A Scene from a Play

I recently attended a performance of Waiting for Godot, excellently performed by the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, D.C.  A literary momemto mori, one made of words, occurs in the seond act. The dialogue is spoken between the down-and-out pair, Vladimir and Estragon, better known in the play by their clownish names, Didi and Gogo;

Estragon:  Well, If we gave thanks for our mercies?
Vladimir:  What is terrible is to have thought.
E.               But did that ever happen to us?
V.:              Where are all these corpses from?
E.:              These skeletons.
V.:              Tell me that.
E.:              True.
V.:              We must have thought a little.
E.:              At the very beginning.
V:               A charnel house! A charnel house!
E.:              You don't have to look.
V.:               You can't help looking.
E.:               True. 
              
 --Act ll:154-166)


There are no stage directions for this dialogue. In the production we saw, Vladimir looks directly at the audience when he says, "Where are all these corpses from?" One is reminded here of the first stanza of Whispers of Immortality, in which T.S. Eliot refers to the Elizabethan playwright, John Webster: "Webster was much obsessed by death,/And saw the skull beneath the skin/And breastless creatures underground/Leaned backwards with a lipless grin." Vladimir, in this episode of very effective theater, saw our skulls beneath the skin. It is our future; the silent arrow of contingency pierces the heart. Vladimir has thus transformed the entire audience, and, by extension all humanity, into a (briefly) living memento mori. 

We might view ourselves as gods, except for this one nasty detail: gods don't rot. For Vladimir and Estragon, this is a source of great pessimism--thinking, according to Vladimir, must confront suffering and mortality, and is thus for him "a terrible thing." We don't have to look, after  all; many do their best not to, despite the ubiquity of sickness and death.  If one thinks, however, one can't help looking. We are once again confronted with the Buddhist assertion that pessimism can be closer to the truth than a glossy-eyed optimism.  On the way to wisdom, we might first fall  from a superficial knoll into a ditch; there are indeed many obstacles on the narrow road to full maturity. But the purpose of life as Buddha and others saw and see it, is not to wallow in ditches. We are to climb out of the ditch and move on.

b. A Tomb in Southwark Cathedral

I mentioned earlier that I participated in a clinical elective at Guy’s Hospital, the London Hospital for Sick Children, during my last year of medical school in 1971. Not far from Guy’s is Southwark Cathedral, on the south bank of the Thames near London Bridge. I often stopped there to marvel at that fine, medieval building, and to meditate there as well, inveterate meditator that I was then, and am still. I was struck by a memnto mori in the cathedral, a stone statue of a cadaver in an advanced state of putrefaction. (I remember the little stone worm crawling up its arm—at least I think I do; it might well be the stony phantasm of a later dream, projected onto the statue by faulty memory.There are many examples of statues like this; mementos mori were very much in vogue during the medieval period. Here is a photo, taken from the internet:

How many passers-by have contemplated here, who have long since passed on? I have been one of them, soon to pass on as well.

c. Daguerreotypes of the Dead

Daguerreotypes were the first photographs, achieved by a laborious process that included an iodine-sensitized silvered plate and mercury vapor. (Hope those early photographers used masks, but I doubt that they did). The method was invented by Louis Daguerre in 1839; it took little time for daguerreotypes to enjoy world-wide popularity. (There were many in antebellum New York, several of which Walt Whitman frequented, resulting in several portraits of the great poet).

Throughout history, humans desired not only progeny, but to “immortalize” their features in portraits to be hung on walls. In the last half millennium or so, paintings or sketches were the sole methods available to achieve this aim. Many portraits of Lady This or Lordy That have survived; the faces of Tim the Cobbler and Anne the Seamstress, however, were generally able to be recalled, after a generation or so, as well as the nuzzle of a once-beloved lapdog, or as well as the face of a long-since discarded clock. Daguerreotypes, the polished ancestors of modern selfies, changed all that. Soon everyone would be snapping everyone else. But not so soon. New products tend to be expensive; daguerreotypes were no exception. Relatives often forgot to have taken a daguerreotype of their loved ones while the latter lived. Better late then never. Thus began the custom of post-mortem photography, which lasted even into the beginning of the twentieth century. These were often the only likenesses of the loved ones in question; they were for this reason often among a family’s most prized possessions.

To the modern eye they constitute odd examples of memntos mori. Everyone wanted the portraits of their loved ones to look natural and life-like. They often looked macabre and deadly; after all, you can’t make a cadaver say 'cheese.'

Here are two examples:

The second example seems to us moderns to border on child abuse. That poor little girl! I can only imagine her subsequent nightmares. The Chapel of the Bones is a fine place for adult contemplation; taking little children there is, however, ghastly. 

Mementos mori are thus best-suited for adults, especially older adults, in order to foster wisdom that tends to grow as one ages. 
Why is that? Many adults, even older adults, alas! are afflicted by narcissism and are sorely in need of the jolts mementos mori can provide. (Yes, I admit it, they don't always work. Those most in need of contemplation and reflection are often the least likely to undertake the considerable effort needed to become more wise. Nevertheless).

4. A Buddhist Meditation on Death

In the Therevada Buddhist classic, The Way of Mindfulness, still a sacred text in many Buddhist countries, there is a section entitled “The Nine Cemetery Contemplations.” It is still much in use in the East, but, as I’ve read, not in the West, where, perhaps even among some monks, the slightest bit of dust tends to be swept inattentively under the rug, Times have changed, however. I must admit that I’ve never meditated as instructed here; this doesn’t mean that they can’t be of use to some persons. As we shall see in our interpretation of mementos mori, their purpose is not to induce a morbid feeling; their purpose is to lead us to a life of love and wisdom, and to use time better to achieve this goal. I will only quote the beginning of the cemetery contemplations here:

After explaining body-contemplation in the form of the modes of materiality, the Master said, “And further,” in order to explain body-contemplation through the nine cemetery contemplations.

UDDHUMATAM—“Swollen”. By reason of the swelled state of the corpse comparable to a pair of wind-filled bellows owing to the gradually uprisen bloatedness after death.

VINILAKAM, “Blue”… Blue is that corpse which is reddish in the protuberantly fleshy parts, and whitish in the purulent parts...It seems to be as though covered with a blue mantle…

VIPUBBAKAJATAM—“Festering” is the corpse that is full of pus flowing from the broken parts or from the nine openings of the body.

“He thinks of his own body thus: ‘Verily, this body of mine, too, is of the same nature as that dead body, is going to be like that body, and has not got past the condition of becoming like that body.

              

--The Way of Mindfulness, Colombo, 1949, page 103

Etc., etc. You get the idea.

5. What is to be learned from Momentos Mori?

Two objections come to mind regarding the benefit of mementos mori. The first and lesser objection is that the creator of a specific memento mori might have an ulterior motive. In the case of the ossuary in Portugal, a product of the Counter Reformation, the goal of mementos mori were not merely to frighten people, but to utilize fright to better maintain the populace under control of the Catholic Church. Terrified by the sight of death, an individual might be induced to abandon worldly ways, at least temporarily, and think of salvation. According to Catholic doctrine at the time, the Church provided the sole means of getting into heaven. Hence, existential anxiety was fostered among the populace in order to help keep the Church foremost in people’s minds. 

Another more modern use of mementos mori are Halloween-like frights, such as in horror films, designed more or less to isolate a common dread for a cathartic release, so that one could subsequently forget about death, presumably forever.

The other and more widespread objection today is that mementos mori are morbid, and serve no real purpose, other than to foster sadness or even depression. There is a thin line here; morbidity for its own sake is not the true purpose of mementos mori, at least the way I see it. Anyone with a significant tendency toward depression is best kept away from mementos mori; let that person work on his or her depression first. Mementos mori work best for those, to use Keats's famous phrase, who are "half in love with easeful death," or who are so lost in non-essentials that they have forgotten just what the essentials are; to become wholly in love with the beauties and challenges of life.  "Had we but world enough and time,/This coyness, Lady, were no crime...,: as Andrew Marvel famously wrote. (Failure to manage time well is, of course, not confined to the ladies!)

Persistent gloominess  generally results when egotistic desires are thwarted. This isn’t dying but Death, death-within-life, which is to be avoided—and mementos mori can help here to do just that. I’m reminded of a poem of e.e. cummings which illustrates the division of a natural, inevitable phenomenon, dying, and the evil of Death:

Dying is fine)but Death

?o

baby

i

wouldn’t like

Death if Death

were

good; for

when(instead of stopping to think)you

begin to feel of it,dying

‘s miraculous

why?be

cause dying is

perfectly natural;perfectly

putting

it mildly lively(but

Death

is strictly

scientific

& artificial &

evil & legal)

we thank thee

god

almighty for dying

(forgive us, o life!the sin of Death

Thus, the purpose of recalling death is to put an end to ‘the sin of Death’—hopefully once and for all.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, saith the Preacher. I do not agree. Vanity of vanities, almost all is vanity—that’s a lot closer to the truth. (Without this “almost’; without the hope of rising to the next level, mementos mori would be macabre and nothing else.

Buddha famously formulated The Four Noble Truths centuries ago. The First Truth is that life is suffering; the Second, that this suffering is caused by desire; the Third is that elimination of suffering can be achieved by the elimination of desire; the Fourth outlines the path to achieve this goal. Stated thus, Buddhism has little to say to us today. But once we interpret suffering as mental suffering caused by egotistic desires, Buddha’s wisdom shines. The anguish resulting from encountering the world while wearing ego-distorted glasses is why we see life as suffering. One of the chief distortions from wearing these cloudy lenses is forgetting that everything we see is contingent, including, of course, ourselves. 

Adam and Eve gained the knowledge of individuality, the knowledge of birth and death, by eating the forbidden fruit; they were stopped, however, from eating from the Tree of Life which would have conferred immortality. They gained consciousness, and this is a very great gift. It also has a great drawback: the knowledge of death. Imagining that the ego is of cosmic importance, however, and might even last forever, can do great harm; vanity can kill. A poem by Shelley is appropriate here:

Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert…Near them on the sand,
half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
tell that its sculptor well these passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The had that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, yet Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, bondless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Two types of  egotism result from wearing self-distorted glasses, one leads to suicide, while the other leads to narcissism. Shelley’s poem is a literary memento mori; it would have been perhaps beneficial if Ozymandias himself had a vision of what would happen to Self Built on Sand in the future. Lord knows how much destruction and suffering could have been averted if Ozymandiases had sense knocked into them by a memento mori.

We have seen and are still seeing—I’m writing this in May, 2018—the effects of having a narcissist wield political  power. There is a great neediness in such people; they need admirers only, not friends or colleagues. It is a situation that is causing harm to our democracy: the trouble arises from seeing Ozymandias in the mirror, instead of a mortal, contingent being. It is naive, of course, to imagine that a memento mori could convert an extreme narcissist into a balanced human being, but for those less afflicted by pride, a memento mori might help a lot to jolt one back onto a path of  balanced maturity.

Once one takes off those delusional lenses from one’s eyes, one is able to see the great world we live in, and the great beings that each one of us is; we can thus finally see the world through the eyes of love and wisdom. Once the heart is no longer worn on one's sleeve, it can return to its central place. Everything we see is then a source of wonder, as Walt Whitman wrote in the Leaves of Grass:

And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.

That is the purpose of mementos mori: to shame silliness out of us.

Epilogue

Once a memnto mori completely accomplishes its task; once we have given up vanity and live a balanced life of love and wisdom for ourselves and for others, the work of mementos mori is done. The life of the Hindu sage, Ramana Maharshi (1979-1950) is instructive here. At any early age, he was beset by the terror of death. After this experience, he became completely identified with cosmic consciousness; Death or vanity had no place in his life from then on. When, years later, a person reminded him of his birth name, Venkataraman Iyer, he replied with a smile, “That person died long ago.” He faced his own impending death from cancer with supreme equanimity. When followers showed their anguish at the thought of losing him as a great teacher, he replied, no doubt with the same smile: “Where could I go from here, and how?” He had long since become one with cosmic consciousness. As Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass “How can the real body be buried?”

Hindus usually cremate their dead; it is thought to be a purification rite. Great sages are buried, however; no need to pass through fire twice.

Permanent identification with the cosmos, however, is very rare indeed. Only for such extremely rare individuals, mementos mori are no longer necessary. Most of the rest us come in and out of cosmic consciousness;  joyful work, artistic creation, acts of love and wisdom, all involve the transformation of ego-noise into selfless music. 

Whenever we fall from the heights of higher consciousness and land on the rocky terrain of the machinations of an injured self, an occasional  memento mori can help us see that we might be on the path not only of spiritual death, but of physical death as well. In summary, the purpose of mementos mori is to shame the silliness out of us and to send us in the right direction.

I will now summarize a lovely poem by Edna St.Vincent Millay:

I shall die, but that's all I'll do for death;
I'm not on his payroll.

If a memento mori can induce us to stop working for death-in-life in the service of a fictive, tyrannical  boss inside the skull, occasionally seeing the skull behind the skin will have served its purpose well. Then we can retire to life--hard work!

Buddha, Ramana Maharshi, Pessoa, and Ninguem

Nirmala and I recently returned from Lisbon. Our visit to the Portuguese capital was very brief; in addition, we were on a group tour, and had only a few hours to ourselves. I reveal myself here as an unabashed admirer of Fernando Pessoa, one of the greatest writers of the past century: we asked directions to A Brasileira, the café Pessoa frequented during his lifetime. I read about a brass statue of Pessoa in front of the café, and wasted little time to walk the mile or so to this destination. Here are some pictures of us at the café:

A recent article of mine, Ramana Maharshi, Pessoa, and Niguem, available on my blog and on the internet, contained a discussion of the inscription at the base of the statue, a quote of Pessoa’s from his most famous work, The Book of Disquiet. “To read is to dream, guided by another.”

I began my discussion as follows:

An interesting quote! It is, however, only the opening phrase of a passage of remarkable insight. This will be discussed at length in a subsequent essay.

This is that subsequent essay; we shall now begin our detailed analysis of the full passage.

2.

We present the passage from the book in the original Portuguese and in the excellent translation of Richard Zenith:

Ler é sonhar pela mão de outrem. Ler mal e por alto é libertarmo-nos de mão que nos conduz. A superficialídade na erudição é único modo de ler bem e ser profundo.

Que coisa tão reles e baíxa que é a vida! Repara que para ser baíxa e reles basta nâo a quereres, ser-te dada, nada depende da tuo vontade, nem mesmo da tuo ilusão da tuo vontade.

Morrer é sernos outros totalmente. Por isso o suicidio é a cobardia; é entregarmo-nos totalmente a vida.

                                               
                                                 --Livro de Desassosego, 229

To read is to dream, guided by someone else’s hand. To read carelessly and distractedly is to let go of that hand. To be only superficially learned is the best way to read well and be profound.

How shoddy and contemptible life is! Note that, for it to be shoddy and contemptible, all it takes is you not wanting it, it being given to you anyway, and nothing about it depending on your will or even your illusion of your will.

To die is to become completely other. That’s why suicide is a cowardice: it’s to surrender ourselves completely to life.

                                                    
                                           --The Book of Disquiet, 229

First Paragraph

The opening sentence, which is inscribed on the statue’s base, is quite appropriate for inclusion there. It encourages one not only to read, but to become absorbed by what one is reading; to allow what’s being read to read the reader, as it were. We certainly can use all the encouragement we can get to read more in this age of cable. computer streaming, and cell phone. But the quote has a certain Hallmark-card quality; a bit too pat when it stands alone. The next sentence goes a little deeper:.a good book demands and deserves one’s undivided attention. The image of letting go the hand that is guiding one is quite effective, as one would expect from the hand of a major poet. The last sentence shocks us and comes as a complete surprise. “To be only superficially learned is the best way to read and be profound.” That’s hardly what's taught at schools and  implied at universities! It seems to contradict common sense. Pessoa is not the kind of writer to shock for shock’s sake, however. What does he mean? The rest of the passage will make what he is saying clearer, as we shall see; this sentence is in perfect agreement with what follows. Pessoa is informing us here that we must leave our egos behind and forget all the cleverness that makes us smile before the mirror, when we read. We are not to overwhelm the text we are reading with an inner dialogue of commentary, we are to let the text overwhelm us. We must not interpret Hamlet as we read the play; that will come later. First we must let Hamlet interpret us. We must become the stage, as it were, on which the play occurs, not some Euro-trash director commenting behind the scenes. I interpret “being profound” here as leaving one’s ego completely behind, thus, as it were, becoming the world. Concentration and ego are veritable oxymorons. One of the many ways good music and good literature delight is by giving us a profound relief from ourselves.

Second Paragraph

How shoddy and contemptible life is! Note that, for it to be shoddy and contemptible, all it takes is you not wanting it, it being given to you anyway, and nothing about it depending on your will or even your illusion of your will.

I remember reading somewhere that Buddhists teach that unhappy persons are closer to the truth than happy persons are. This statement must be qualified. Certainly Buddha’s First Noble Truth teaches us that life is dukkha, suffering, or perhaps better translated as 'insufficient', that is, what you think will satisfy you completely ultimately won’t. (It often takes a long time to realize this.)  So, according to Buddha, those who seem happy while denying the Four Noble Truths are living a life of illusion—what I would call a double illusion, since the primary illusion is that we are each a separate self. Persons who seem happy while living lives full of greed, hate, and delusion often do great harm to others as well as ultimately to themselves.

This doesn't mean, however, that life in itself is shoddy and contemptible. Far from it! My favorite Yiddish proverb is ibergekummene tsuris iz gut zu dahrstellen, (“it is good to depict overcome sorrow"). Buddha’s entire teaching is a call to joy, a guide to lead us bey dukkha. As profound as Pessoa is, we must concede that Buddhism in its essence goes even deeper.

Ramana Maharshi, the greatest Hindu sage of the past century, taught that our true nature is bliss, not sorrow. Sorrow denotes an ego in the web of anguished self-centered desires. Suffering is always associated with the ego. Important here is to remember what Ramana said as he was dying from cancer in an age when the availability of analgesics was severely limited. “There is pain, but there is no suffering.” He had transcended ego, he had transcended suffering.Transcending the pain that the body is heir to, however, was not a goal of either the Buddha or Ramana Maharshi.

Pessoa was not a happy man. He lived a very isolated life. He stated in The Book of Disquiet that if his heart knew what his brain knew, it would stop beating. This is not the highest stage of wisdom.

What Thomas Mann said about Nietzsche is noteworthy. He said that Nietzsche is undoubtedly very profound; his life of extreme isolation, however, is not an example to follow.

The Hindu expression,  satcitananda, is much closer to the truth. Sat is wisdom, cit is consciousness, and ananda denotes bliss.

It is also noteworthy to state that a fake gurus’s incessant quoting of this compound word doesn’t make him a true guru—Just about all gurus, at least in my opinion, are fake. Ramana Maharshi, however, certainly wasn’t.

Pessoa’s profundity cannot be denied. That it has its limitations, however, is also apparent.

Third Paragraph

Before we interpret the third paragraph, I would like to write a few words about the ending of the second, namely that life is given to us and it doesn’t depend upon our will. The question of free will has exercised philosophers for centuries. I am convinced that free will is indeed an illusion, an assertion for which I cold cite much scientific evidence, for which space is lacking here. The individual, separate from the environment, is not an objective reality, but belief in it has greatly improved our chances of survival. This “Darwinian illusion” of an objective self is, however, very strong. I am convinced that free will does not exist, yet I schedule events and meetings on my Iphone neverthless. This is not a contradiction; that a dreamer dreams is to be expected.

I have a “higher I” inside myself, as it were; my everyday I functions as if it weren’t there.  If I completely realized my identification with my “higher I,’ I would be a sat guru. I am not.

Pessoa reveals here that he realizes that free will is an illusion. His problem is that he is suffering spiritually and knows no exit. It’s as if a hammer in an unknown hand were pounding on his hand, which is unable to move. Not a good situation to be in; I am convinced that there is an exit from despair, other than suicide, but it is not easy.

Now let us proceed to an analysis of the final paragraph, the most important of all: To die is to become completely other. That’s why suicide is a cowardice; it’s to surrender ourselves completely to life.

To die is to leave despair behind; suicide, however, is cowardice, since it’s an escape—a very strange escape at that, stopping suffering by a deliberate destruction of the sufferer. Pessoa is not a coward; he accepts his fate and will not leave its terrible exigencies voluntarily. The important thing to do is to surrender ourselves completely to life.

Note the paradox here: if we surrender ourselves completely to life, we transcend ourselves. Once one viscerally realizes that the illusion of the self is not a necessary burden to carry, we may not be able to disard the burden completely, but, if we work on it, we can certainly lighten the load. To surrender ourselves completely, however, is a kind of death, since our poor little suffering, sickly phenomenal ego must die to achieve it.

This is why Jesus taught that his yoke is easy and his burden is light. Once the cross is thoroughly borne, it disappears—there is no one left carrying it anymore.

If Pessoa had ever been able to completely surrender to life, his despair would have ceased and would have been replaced by an ineffable condition, which we hint at with the words 'joy' or 'bliss'.

Now let’s turn a moment to the Portuguese text. The equivalent of the English, “it’s to surrender ourselves completely to life.” The Portuguese begins this phrase with “é”. This translates as “is”—One must recall, however, that verbs in Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian can stand alone, the pronoun, as in Latin, is contained in the verb. Thus, in English this “é” must be translated as “it's” or “it is.” But a subtlety is lost here. “é” in the text  occurs after a semicolon; it thus can be interpreted as applying to “ler”, “to read” in paragraph one; it also can refer to “to die” in the last paragraph. In other words, becoming absorbed in a book is a kind of death, because our ego is no longer there. Similarly, surrendering ourselves completely to life is a kind of death as well. Once one is absorbed by life as by a good book; once one realizes the illusory nature of the ego, the imaginary egotist inside the brain, the Wizard of I pulling the levers behind the curtain, as it were; this central mirage which gives you so much anguish, disappears like a cube of sugar in a hot cup of tea.

The death which Pessoa refers to in the third paragraph is Life, a state of being which Buddha referred to as Nirvana and Ramana Marshi referred to as Moksha.

This excerpt from Pessoa’s masterpiece is a good illustration of the Buddhist teaching that unhappy people can be closer to the truth than happy ones. Without being a Buddhist or a Hindu, Pessoa, on his own, leavened this passage with the truth of Buddhism and advaita Hinduism. It is an extraordinary passage, worthy of contemplation, internalization, and realization. It contains the difficult, wonderful answer to anguished questions concerning the human condition. 

"Womb, a novel in utero," by Eric D. Goodman, Reviewed by Thomas Dorsett

• RAVEN PRESS BOOKS

The Loch Raven Review

Search: 

Eric D. Goodman. Womb, a novel in utero. Reviewed by Thomas Dorsett.

Eric D. Goodman, Womb: a novel in utero,  ISBN: 978-0990443292, Merge Publishing, 2017, 330 pages, $17.99.

1.
My heart leaps up when I behold
……A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
…..Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Literature is replete with attempts to recover the innocence and spontaneity of childhood, as this fine example by Wordsworth attests. (In this case, however, the protagonist has never lost them.) Nature is seen as something numinous and pure; her indifference to human beings, however, is glossed over.

If we follow Blake’s example and attempt to divide poems into those of innocence and those of experience, Wordsworth’s poem eminently qualifies as one of the former.  There, is, however, a poem of experience that responds to this poem of child-like spontaneity:

‘The Child is father of the man.’
How can that be? The words are wild.
Suck any sense from that who can,
‘The child is father of the man.’
No, what the poet did write ran,
‘The man is father of the child.’
‘The child is father of the man.’
How can that be? The words are wild.

Gerard Manley Hopkins knew, of course, that Wordsworth didn’t mean the reversal of the parental relation literally. Wordsworth trusted nature and believed a deep connection with the natural world to be of extreme importance. Hopkins didn’t trust nature; for him, a man beset by homoerotic tendencies in an age when such tendencies were unacceptable, natural man was a born sinner and needed the discipline of the Church if he were to find salvation.

“The Child is father of the man.” What does this really mean? There can be no doubt that it is an example of the use of childhood as metaphor. It’s not a desire to return to one’s first childhood, much less to a second one; it is a desire to transcend what Buddhists and Hindus call “discursive reasoning,” the constant chatter of ignorance and estrangement that goes on and on in most minds nonstop. Life isn’t all about “the mania of owning things,” but about relationships—to nature, to others, to God, to ourselves. The child thus becomes a symbol of what we must discover, recover, or even recreate in ourselves.

I cannot resist giving one more example of the idealization of childhood. It’s by Thomas Traherne, a seventeenth-century poet who was a true master of this (inner) worldview:

How like an Angel came I down!
…..How bright are all things here!
When first among his Works I did appear
…..O how their Glory did me crown!
The World resembled his Eternity,
…..In which my soul did walk;
And ev’ry thing that I did see
…..Did with me talk.

This lovely stanza comes from a long poem called “Wonder.”

There seems to be a surfeit of poems of experience these days, some very good; songs of innocence, I suppose, strike many readers as naïve in this age which has witnessed the horrors and savagery of modern warfare of the present and last centuries; an age in which the optimism of the Enlightenment has been severely challenged; an age in which self has become selfie, and “we” merely a concatenation of “me. me, me”.

Is it still possible to write about what Hopkins referred to as “the dearest freshness deep down things?”

2.
In Goodman’s novel, Womb, a novel in utero, the effort to recapture youthful optimism, as the title suggests, is pushed back even farther. Here are two quotes from the book:

…I have access to memory greater than my own, and it takes ample time to explore…I know the great literature that has become part of the universal mind, but not the latest bestsellers. I know the themes of films and plays from years gone by, but not this week’s releases or last summer’s blockbusters. I can picture most of the masterworks at the Louvre, Hermitage, Met and National Gallery, but don’t have a take about what the girl across the street drew in art class this quarter. I can picture the Taj Mahal, locate the Nile on a map, and appreciate the calm atmosphere of a Buddhist temple, but couldn’t fill you in on this year’s hot architect or the latest designer religion…And I know that the greatest good lies in focusing on the here and now, and in helping one another.
                                                                 –page 19

Being an intellectual, I don’t want to come off as a simpleton. But after examining the major philosophies, studies, and religions, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is really quite simple. There’s no mysterious secret to a good life. The meaning of life is this: Chill. Relax. Enjoy it right now, because it will be over before you know it.
                                                                 –page 264

What would Hopkins or Martin Luther King have said about that?

“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. I just want to do God’s will.” If you had known that the purpose of life was to chill, Dr. Martin Luther King, you might be still with us. Yet where would we be today without your blood, without your sweat, without your sacrifice? Relaxing is important, yes, but the way to the promised land is not found during Happy Hour while sipping margaritas.

I found Goodman’s little fetal hippie brat to be insufferable, at least at first. As the novel progresses, however, despite occasional bromidic asides, the little guy more and more assumes the role of an all-knowing narrator, a transformation for which, I think, many readers will be thankful.

Goodman’s all-knowing fetus, is, of course, a metaphor as well. No one, even in California, attributes, I would hope, guru status to a fetus. It is used by Goodman as a literary device to help convey an important message to adults: stop stressing over nonsense and return to what is essential, the power of wisdom and love. When Li Po wrote, “We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains,” he meant that, once ego is transcended, one becomes one, as it were, with the whole world. He was not advising seekers to become a pile of dirt! We should not take the great Chinese poet’s metaphor literally; similarly, we must not take the wisdom of an unborn tyke literally as well. (Fetuses undoubtedly have some awareness, but it is limited. Nature limits brain size so that the baby can pass through the birth canal; significant brain development occurs after birth. An aside: infants are able to smile shortly after birth if they see a face close-up. Mothers are delighted, believing that this is an emotional response. It isn’t; it’s a trick of evolution to help secure bonding on the part of the mother. A baby will smile just as readily at a primitive mask; a newborn’s ability to relate to a caregiver is limited).

After a slow start, the novel picks up with a seduction scene. Here is where Mr. Goodman’s talent lies; he knows how to pace a story. Both Mom and Dad are Beautiful People who are in the process of learning what every fetus supposedly already knows. Yet Mom succumbs to the advances of a cad. How can a Beautiful Person ever sink so low? We find out why much later. This is but one example of the author’s ability to resolve situations gradually, and to provide the reader with just enough information to keep her turning pages with unchilled anticipation.

The characterizations are, however, not very nuanced. Mom and Dad and Fetus are a bit too good to be true; Mom’s boss and Stan, the seducer, are, quite simply, jerks. But the author certainly knows how to tell a story.

I do commend the author on the effort it took to write this novel. What came between a difficult beginning and a rather treacly ending is much more interesting than the first or final pages. The book’s design and layout are quite good. The style and the grammar are, for the most part, quite good as well, with only a few minor grammatical errors, e,g., “different than” instead of “different  from”; “for awhile,” instead of “for a while” or “awhile.”

This isn’t Flaubert, this isn’t Shakespeare, but it does have merit. For the general reader, especially for those who share the author’s presumptions, Womb might well provide an enjoyable and worthy respite from TV and cell phone.  For those who share the author’s aesthetics and worldview, I highly recommend Mr. Goodman’s novel.

© Eric D. Goodman and Thomas Dorsett

Eric D. Goodman has been writing almost since he emerged from the womb. In addition to Womb, a novel in utero, he is also the author of Tracks: A Novel in Stories, and Flightless Goose, a storybook for children. His short fiction, travel stories, and nonfiction have been widely published. Born in California, he has lived in Baltimore for nearly twenty years, where he writes about trains, exotic animals gone wild. and life in utero, among other subjects.

Thomas Dorsett is a retired physician and poet. Examples of his poetry have appeared in approximately five hundred literary journals. He is the author of four collections of poetry, two of which contain original poems, while the other two contain poetry in translation. His latest book, Letters Home, is a collection of letters translated from the German, originally written by a promising Austrian musician who died at the onset of World War l. Dorsett is an active blogger as well; his blog address is thomasdorsett.blogspot.com.

Ramana Maharshi, Pessoa, and Ninguem

1.

I recently read The Book Of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. One cannot help but be moved and fascinated by the insights—the book is a collection of short, philosophical commentaries on his life and on life in general—of this solitary writer, one of the great literary masters of the past century. You can read the sections out of order; the sections are not progressive. Some of the passages are astonishingly profound.

On a recent trip that included a brief visit to Lisbon, I headed for the A Brasileira, the café that Pessoa had frequented.  I had read that there was a famous brass statue of Pessoa in front of the café; I wanted to see it. (Unfortunately, there was not time to visit his residence nearby, which has since been transformed into The Pessoa Museum. Next time!)

My wife, Nirmala, and I took some photos of the statue, one of which I include here:

At the base of the statue is the following quote from Pessoa's best-known work,The Book of Disquiet:

Ler é sonhar pela mão de outrem.

(To read is to dream while led by another.)

An interesting quote! It is, however, only the opening phrase of a passage of remarkable insight. This will be discussed at length in a subsequent essay.

I immediately began to play with the sentence in my mind, transforming it with a twist of non-duality into a philosophical statement regarding the human condition. (I asked our guide. Leonor, who is Spanish, what the Portuguese equivalent of “nadie,” ("nobody") is, a word without which the sentence, with my very limited knowledge of Portuguese, could not have have been written:

Viver è sonhar pela mão de niguem.

(To live is to dream while led by no one.)

This sentence provides, I think, a summary of Eastern thinking, a glorious worldview that is completely consistent with science. Leonor, an intelligent woman, didn’t get it; most are too captivated by their own identities and the necessary prose-colored glasses that their worldview provides, to see the world-play beyond the word-play.

Just what is the significance of this sentence?

2.

Pessoa’s quote is an opening phrase of a longer sentence which gives the whole quote a considerable degree of profundity; the phrase is, on a lesser level, complete in itself. Pessoa is informing us, at least in my interpretation, that reading, whether the material in question is fiction or nonfiction, is based on illusion. I don’t mean that merely a partial view of an only partially comprehensible world takes place during reading, I mean that our partial view of a partially comprehensible world is illusory on both counts.  The basic illusion of human existence, the belief that we are individuals, separate from nature, is a fiction, albeit an evolutionary advance of the utmost importance to human survival. If we did not imagine that we are separate from nature, how would we separate ourselves, as it were, from the world and create tools, culture, art—and, alas! war? There is no getting around this fact. If we are not wholly part of nature, we possess something which many traditions have referred to as a soul. Very few modern scientists, however, believe in the duality of soul and world.

If we are ultimately fictive, readers reading fiction or nonfiction must be illusory as well. (Illusion, however is strong, it comprises the majority of our identity. At the center of our identity, there is, at least according to my experience, something impersonal. It, however, comprises a small fraction of our identities).  I, for one, am convinced, as Buddha and Ramana Maharshi taught, that one of the central truths of our reality is anatta, that is, non-self. This doesn’t stop me, however, from living as if the little man inside my brain, really merely a concatenation of thoughts, were something more than that, an individual, a soul.

Pessoa, however, is also informing us how to read. We must leave our egos behind; we must  enter the world of the author without preconceptions. For instance, we must not approach Shakespeare with a point of view in mind, be it Christian, Hindu or secular; we must let Shakespeare overwhelm us. Attempting to put an ineffable experience into words comes later.

We must be guided by the hand of another, as Pessoa so aptly puts it. This applies, of course, only to authors who delight us. If we feel like we’re being guided by an idiot, we put the book down after a few pages and choose something else. Pessoa certainly would have agreed with that!

3.

When I told our Portuguese guide,  Rafaela, about the quote I copied off the base of the statue, she revealed herself to be an admirer of Pessoa.  She wrote in my notebook one of her favorite Passoa quotes;

Tudo vale a pena quando a alma não e pequena.

(which I translate us: Everything is worthy of effort once the soul is not small.  NB—Please don’t assert here that this great writer believed in the reality of the soul. He means the reference to be taken metaphorically).

This is an interesting quote. Everything is worth the effort once one has gone beyond effort. It is a paradox. Ramana Maharshi stated that once one realizes one’s true nature, there is no more volition; there is nothing more to accomplish. One thinks of Li Po’s poem in which he enjoins us to meditate before a mountain until only the mountain remains. This transformed human being would thus find everything worth the effort that is consistent with its true nature, that is, breathing, eating when hungry, sleeping when tired, serving as an example, helping others. I doubt Pessoa meant that once the soul isn’t small, viewing telenovelas or soap operas is worth the effort! (And if the man-mountain did, what would the man-mountain see?)

4.

I couldn’t help riffing in four languages on Ramana Maharshi’s teaching that once enlightenment is obtained, there is nothing more to do.

Freneh version: Quand l’alme est tellement grande, ce n’est pas nécessaire de faire quelque chose, parce que on est déjà le monde entier.

Spanish version : Cuando la alma es bastante grande, no es necesario de hacer algo, porque eres ya el mundo entero.

German version : Nichts muss man tun, wenn die Seele gross genug ist, weil man schon die ganze Welt ist.

English version: When one’s soul is big enough, one need not do anything, because one is already the entire world.

Note; You might think that these quotes foster passivity; they do not, however. Very, very few "individuals" permanently go beyond illusion; complete enlightenment is extremely rare. (Having episodes of cosmic consciousness, which inevitably delight, is not at all rare, however).

Once a man, in visible distress, approached Ramana Maharshi, Should he give up the world and become a sage, or continue to meet worldy obligations? Ramana smiled. If it were your destiny to give up the world, he told him, it would happen as naturally as a leaf falling from a tree.

Such leaves, however, very rarely fall.  Ramana Maharshi is telling us to accept ourselves as we are.  Not bad advice.  And since my bouts of cosmic consciousness do not last, my advice is: accept yourself, find yourself--and do good in the world.