Of Death and Beauty

“Death is the mother of beauty” insists Wallace Stevens. I write this as Katharine’s father is near death. Things do not seem all that beautiful to me right now. I’m remembering his life, how courtly, how hard he worked, his grand sense of humor, his devotion to his wife, his penchant for things nautical. Fare forward traveler. I remember our nurse telling us when we were young that it is painful to enter this world and it is painful to leave it. She knew a lot about pain, suffering and death. She grew up a daughter of a sharecropper, never had much. Her parents died when she was a teenager. Two of her children died in childbirth. And yet she was always singing about God’s goodness, about God loving her as a mother loves her daughter. There was something beyond my horizon that she saw.

Perhaps it is the presence of beauty that enables us to cope with the slings and arrows of life…. suffering an artful contrast whereby we may recognize the beauty of life when we see it… this beauty just near that permeates the created order; but I think it goes deeper than that. Death itself has a beauty…the old passing away always giving way to the new. Death the ultimate symbol of the transience of life, that life is process. If we were to behold the transient as natural in the created order…perhaps there we will apprehend the eternal…For transience is the truth of the matter…and where there is truth there is beauty…Life and death one process…a process of becoming….Our souls and bodies forever becoming within this glorious universe we call the new Eden…an Eden in which easeful death has her rightful place as a part of a larger and profound order.

In death life is changed not ended, we say in our Burial rite….indeed that is literally true. At every death just as with every birth, the universe takes a turn towards its perfection still in the becoming…we all implicated in this grand becoming…our births, our deaths gloriously reveling in God’s imaginative handiwork of creating and recreating…..and yes there is pain….and yes there is joy, there living in a mysterious harmony….so these matters of birth and death are the harmonic lines in the same song…a song that moves the spheres of the universe entire….Death the gentle mother making way for new life….a sacred process of transformation, humming with mystery, engendering the consummation of heaven and earth. We shouldn’t be afraid.

3 Comments

  1. That’s really beautiful. As someone who has lost a much loved father, I feel for your wife during this painful time. God be with your family.

  2. Do I wake or sleep?

    We still need Wallace Stevens to remind us that be is the finale of seem, that the light must affix its beam.

    Thanks so much for sharing these thoughts. I’ve been looking for examples of how to write the verse novel I’ve been working on, and this piece just might trump them all.

    Let us know if there is anything we can do.

    Rob

  3. As you know, poetry can help fill the void… (I hope this posts okay).

    The Swan
    by Rainer Maria Rilke

    This laboring through what is still undone,
    as though, legs bound, we hobbled along the way,
    is like the awkward walking of the swan.

    And dying—to let go, no longer feel
    the solid ground we stand on every day—
    is like his anxious letting himself fall

    into waters, which receive him gently
    and which, as though with reverence and joy,
    draw back past him in streams on either side;
    while, infinitely silent and aware,
    in his full majesty and ever more
    indifferent, he condescends to glide.

    Translated by Stephen Mitchell

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