The time of our lives, p.6
The Time of Our Lives, page 6
The near-death phenomenon is now being investigated with scientific rigour, as it should be. Be that as it may, the near-death plotlines and the remnants of religious promises of some sort of paradise aside, most of us, suspecting the worst, have, I suspect, stopped picturing anything at all.
Medieval Europeans pictured the afterlife quite differently, as we know. One of the things that strikes you about Giotto’s monstrous vision of hell in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua is the feeling that he probably believed it was all more or less true: for Giotto, as for Dante, extra ecclesiam there was indeed nulla salus (no salvation outside the Church). The tombs of the righteous in the fresco are open and the souls in them, looking very like bodies, rise to heaven. The sinners tumble into the fiery abyss. How dispiriting, then—no, that’s too insipid a term, but I can’t think of anything appropriate with more punch—to see that 700 years later, amongst the vast throngs of visitors to the chapel from every country on Earth, breathless, all of them, with wonder, it’s likely that nobody at all, not a single one, no man, woman or child from anywhere, now believes in the truth of what they are looking at on the wall of that chapel. There are still plenty of believers across the globe, but few, I imagine, in the literal truth of Giotto’s picture of the afterlife, and fewer still with Giotto’s frescoes on their bucket list. They’re art now, they’re heritage, but not thought to be literally true any more than Aboriginal myths about the origins of Uluru are. The virgin birth might still have some subversive attraction in the Western psyche, but not this ghoulish picture of life after death.
What we experience and desperately wish to hold at bay as death draws nearer is more a kind of horrified regret at being annihilated, I think, than fear of what will come next. There is, our culture seems to have concluded, no other reality but this one. Only cartoonists draw angels. From the back seat of the car, I studied the back of the Javanese driver’s head. What the Javanese believe with confidence is anyone’s guess. There was no point at all in asking the driver what he thought, as I might have asked a driver in Moscow or Tel Aviv: the question, as I’ve said, is a Western one.
No other reality but this one. It’s a position many of us have slid backwards into, as it were (even the near-death experiencers), without considering the alternatives. Not even many clergymen, unless repeating comforting religious formulae during a ritual, will stick their necks out to talk about being dead. What could they say with any confidence or conviction? So what we fear these days is less likely to be unending torture at the hands of a psychotically vengeful father-figure than what Ariès calls ‘the last convulsions of the machine that is breaking down’. Ourselves, in other words. It’s not really the idea of post-mortem nothingness that is soul-destroying to contemplate, but rather the pain and parting just before we die. That is what half the developed world these days is trying to ward off: the painful falling-apart and the parting. For some the parting is even more unbearable than the physical suffering: I noticed an article in the paper recently about a young American woman called Elizabeth Holmes who founded a healthcare technology company aiming to help us ‘elude death’ as well as, more tellingly, to build ‘a world in which nobody has to say goodbye too soon’. Forever, she means. She was a billionaire by thirty. Saying goodbye to the cat is shattering enough, let alone saying goodbye to those we love more than the rest of the world put together. The mere thought of it is heart-rending.
‘And there’s something else, too,’ Sarah said, when I told her what I was thinking. ‘There’s something else we fear.’
‘You mean the loneliness and boredom? Losing your mind and so on?’
‘No, something worse than any of those things—nothingness, the fires of hell, dementia, bad feet …’
‘What?’
‘Tolstoy.’
‘What do you mean—“Tolstoy”?’
‘Don’t rush me. It’s on the tip of my tongue.’ When you’ve recently had a stroke, a lot of things are.
‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich.’ It was surprisingly crisp once it came out.
I know Tolstoy’s novella well. Nabokov called it Tolstoy’s most vivid, perfect and complex work—or words to that effect. It isn’t, but it’s unforgettable, like one of those gruesome German fairytales—‘Little Red Riding Hood’, for example. It’s a relentlessly joyless tale: a severely ordinary man, a provincial civil servant, is diagnosed with a terminal illness—presumably some sort of cancer, although we’re never told precisely what it is. His mental and physical suffering are harrowing, and then he dies.
‘I wouldn’t have thought it would be your sort of thing at all, Sarah. So grimly Christian.’
‘Yes, but he does see that great light just before he dies. That last chapter stays with you, doesn’t it.’
‘All that terror,’ I mused, remembering, ‘all that hideous pain, all that horror of death and the enveloping darkness—he suffers for months, lying there on that sofa on the brink of the abyss …’
‘Yes, the sofa … dying on a sofa makes it worse somehow, don’t you think? At least give the man a bed, I thought.’
‘… and then, an hour before he dies, Whump! He’s struck in the chest by that great bolt of something or other from the beyond, and gets thrown on his side the way you are on a train sometimes, when you think you’re about to move forwards but instead you’re shunted abruptly backwards.’
‘And he hur- hur- hurtles,’ Sarah says, smiling, ‘into a vast black hole, a dark abyss, but suddenly, in the darkness, right at the end, sees an all-enveloping light. And he dies in a flash of light. There is no death after all. Just light.’
‘Well, I’d call that a happy ending, not a nightmare at all, wouldn’t you? A fairy-tale ending, really.’ More Disney than Grimm.
‘Or a bit Buddhist, no? I mean, since we’re on our way to Borobudur … nothingness as light.’
‘You’re in good company, saying that. Nabokov, from memory, thought the same thing. In fact, Tolstoy was a Christian at the time.’
‘Anyway,’ Sarah continued, feeling no compulsion to follow up on the details, ‘there’s something else in that story that’s even worse than the fear of hell or nothingness, it’s something nobody much ever mentions, yet … Damn!’ She bit her lip and frowned in concentration. ‘I’ve got the book on my Kindle, so I’ll have a look later. I remember being bowled over by it at the time. Let me get back to you on that one!’
All thoughts of Tolstoy abruptly disappeared when, without warning, we swerved round the orange truck in front of us and swung off the road to the left into … in a word, Java. It had been there all the time, of course, a hop, step and a jump from the main road, hidden from us by the long, thin line, the endless line, unbroken since we’d left the hotel, of shops and warehouses, mosques and minimarts, crowding the roadside. We plunged into it. Java is green and watery. It is rice, corn and chillies in a checkerboard of mud. It climbs in steps, the Javanese countryside, ever bluer, and eventually a misty, purplish black, up into the roiling sky. To dive headlong into it like this, out of cacophony into silence, is to wake abruptly in an altered state.
For that matter, I thought, my eyes resting on the herd of doomed goats we were now edging past (Idul Fitri being only a month or two away), if you wanted to get metaphysical about it, what if this observable reality turned out to be, rather than the only one, just one of many that are the case? What if the universe really were not everything? Or, for that matter, what if it were nothing at all—of no substance whatsoever—while consciousness were everything? The men who’d built Borobudur wouldn’t have batted an eyelid if I’d asked them what they thought about the proposition. The goats beside us would be finding out what the score was all too soon. I didn’t bring it up with Sarah—it would only make her tetchy when she needed all the positive energy she could muster. For the present, for today, she and I would ward off decay and bad feet and the pain of saying goodbye forever to those we loved by plunging deeper and deeper into the startlingly green Javanese countryside, excitedly on the lookout for Borobudur. Somewhere nearby in all this vividly verdant, muddy wetness was the biggest stupa in the world, a triumphant explosion of beauty affirming that there are many realities other than this one. Indeed, this might be the least of them.
The stupa at Borobudur doesn’t tower, it swells up out of the valley’s steamy lushness like a massive upturned bowl, pinkish brown. All the same, the thought of climbing all the way to the top would daunt anyone but a child. Standing by my side at the bottom, Sarah looked as if she’d lost heart.
‘I’m never going to get to the top of that, am I,’ she muttered dispiritedly. ‘What was I thinking!’ In silence we watched the gaily clad crowds clambering up the steep stone staircase to the first gallery. (No one in black in Borobudur.) In silence we gazed up at the stupa’s layered terraces, at the rising rows of Buddhas ringing this vast sculpted mandala crowned with three rounded galleries—at the scores of Buddhas, hundreds of them, circle after circle of carved Buddhas, rising up into the sky. There are meditating Buddhas, alms-giving Buddhas, teaching Buddhas, Buddhas turning the wheel of dharma and Buddhas hidden inside smaller stupas. Right at the top, piercing heaven, there’s a bell, a huge, hollow, stone bell. Emptiness. (But not nothingness.) And, for a monument embodying the world’s impermanence, I must say it’s lasting well.
‘There’s a ramp over there, but it only goes as far as Desire,’ said the guide, Mr Saliman, a slightly bossy man with a paunch and polished English. ‘The lowest level.’ But still quite a climb. ‘In Sanskrit Kamadhatu. Kama—you know, as in the Kama Sutra. Lust and passion, but also sensual enjoyment of any kind. That’s the first level. To the higher levels there are just the steps. Ready?’
‘Thank you, yes.’ And off we set, a little unsteadily, but resolved. ‘So what’s above Desire?’ I asked chattily.
‘I shall explain when we get there.’ Or if we get there, he was no doubt thinking. ‘I like your sunglasses, by the way—very stylish.’ He was friendly, but erratically.
In point of fact, Sarah made her way up the ramp with surprising ease. When she reached Desire, she was still looking quite sprightly. ‘So green,’ she kept murmuring, looking back down at where we’d come from, ‘so incredibly green, almost a sapphire green, I feel I’m drowning in all the green.’ Strictly speaking, she was sensually enjoying herself, although the pleasure of the eyes seems less reprehensible than other sensual indulgences. Only the hills to the west were darker—thickly forested hills that appeared to be slumbering, like a jungle-covered giant sleeping on his side.
We both liked Desire very much. ‘In Indonesian we call it nafsu,’ said Mr Saliman. We liked the word nafsu very much as well. ‘Marijuana, massages, drunkenness, sex and gossiping—do you see? The reliefs are all showing these things.’ In vivid detail. Faces. The procreating self, which after all, at root, is responsible for the whole orgy of appetite and depravity.
‘What’s wrong with gossiping?’ Sarah wanted to know.
‘Gossip keeps you attached to the world. In your religion also St Paul warned against it, by the way.’
‘St Paul is not part of my religion.’
‘Most of the bas-reliefs are hidden now, but you can see photographs in the museum. Murder, rape, abortion, also planned parenthood and some farming.’
‘I see.’
‘There are eight hot hells. Fishermen, for instance, are boiled alive for several centuries for killing animals. Also criminals are bound in searing chains.’
‘What kind did you say?’
‘Searing ones. Searing.’ So even the Buddhists had something hot to fear in the afterlife. We took our time, but eventually clambered up to the next level: Rupadhatu.
‘This is the Realm of Form. Also square galleries, you see? Square means the Earth. It’s like Desire, but now the passions are under control,’ said the guide. ‘Form is still there, however. The self as form. Faces, you see, lots of faces everywhere. The life of the Buddha and other enlightened beings is also here. Please examine.’ The passions are in abeyance at this elevation—in temporary disuse pending further enquiries, as it were. Devout Buddhists will make no further enquiries, of course, having their minds already set on pure knowledge. It sounds a bit like old age, really, I thought to myself, as I examined the bas-reliefs: fading passions and the mind, at least on its good days, drifting upwards to things it’s hard to put your finger on.
‘You’re not yourself a Buddhist, Mr Saliman?’ I asked after we’d walked around the first gallery of Form, slightly dizzied by the hundreds of carved panels in the walls.
‘I am Muslim. But once the Javanese were Buddhists. A thousand years ago Buddhism was flourishing here.’
‘So I gather. You’re not attracted at all to the Buddhist view of the world?’
‘No. Shall we go up further?’
‘To Nirvana?’
‘Not yet, more Form galleries first. Nirvana comes right at the end.’ He headed off up the steep stairs. ‘Or so they say.’ And for the first time that morning he grinned.
Panting and struggling a little with the steep stone staircase, which was crowded with scrambling children, I followed Mr Saliman higher. While Sarah stayed on the first level of Form to take another turn or two around the gallery, chatting to exuberant locals, the guide and I rose gently from gallery to exquisitely panelled gallery, until we reached the steps to Formlessness. I was not in awe—it was all too bewildering to seize my soul (not that Buddhists believe in essential selves), the universe it suggested too alien, too far beyond my understanding. Buddha bathed by the gods in a perfumed bath, Buddha as an elephant entering Queen Maya’s womb—none of that sort of thing touches me, it is too outlandish and fantastical, too foreign; I’m no credulous pilgrim from the days of the Buddhist empires that ruled in the archipelago a thousand years ago. Nevertheless, I was drawn upwards to the rounded terraces at the top, to Formlessness and Enlightenment, although it feels more like falling upwards, upwards into bliss. ‘Square is Earth, round is heaven,’ Mr Saliman said gnomically. No statues of the Buddha up here, no faces, no forms, and consequently no selves—up I climbed to the base of the main bell-shaped stupa, piercing the sky at the mandala’s pinnacle.
Nirvana. The ‘ultimate up and out’, as an American friend of mine, Ward Keeler, put it after an extended period meditating in a Burmese monastery. It’s the only way out, in fact, for earthlings. And in a hierarchical society the way out is always up—as Ward, an expert on Buddhism and hierarchies, has pointed out.
‘Nirvana is the great quenching, the joyful extinguishing,’ Mr Saliman murmured, cryptically and little breathlessly once we’d reached the first circle, the square galleries now below us.
‘Of what?’
‘Of the three fires: passion, hatred and delusion. Of the delusion of a self. That is the teaching. The self is blown out like a candle. It gutters and goes out.’ It gutters and goes out. What is left when that happens is not nothing, apparently, but something best understood as emptiness.
‘So what comes next, Mr Saliman, when the enlightened person dies?’
‘The Buddha didn’t say.’ Mr Saliman knew perfectly well what happened next, so was unmoved by Buddha’s silence.
The conundrum of how to be something and nothing at the same time just never goes away, really—after all, something is there, but not, it seems, what was thought to be there: that turns out to be nothing. But if there is no self, whose arthritis is this? as the Jewish joke about the Jewish Buddhist has it. Zinger! Sarah has a stock of Jewish Buddhist jokes. Buddhism itself doesn’t have much of a lighter side.
The Buddhists first looked this puzzle in the eye 2500 years ago, and not much later, in Greece, so did Epicurus (who did not believe in an afterlife, only in disintegration). Then, in Rome, just before Jesus was born, Lucretius, prophet of the particle, who didn’t believe in life after death, either, looked at the question of how to be something and nothing at the same time. Later, the Catholic Church, understandably, was aghast: the Catholic Church insists on essences and souls, having no reason to exist unless essences are real—well, there’s the real estate, but apart from that. It excoriated Epicurus and his followers as whoring wine-bibbers. When Poggio Bracciolini rediscovered Lucretius in the fifteenth century, he arguably helped to set in motion the Renaissance and the growth of modern science. Particles, just electrically charged particles, as we now know them to be, with nothing ghostly floating in the interstices at all—that’s the universe. I’m not sure the Buddhists even believe in particles, do they?
I craned my neck looking up at the stone bell soaring above me. ‘The Dutch built a bamboo teahouse on the top of it in 1844,’ Mr Saliman said. ‘At that time the religious significance of Borobudur was forgotten.’ I could have done with a cup of tea myself, to be honest. It had been an exhausting climb.
‘So it’s empty, naturally, this big stupa,’ I said. It was a half-question. ‘I mean, empty for symbolic reasons.’
