Sunday, March 2, 2003		Books

Signs & signatures
The fear of death that runs through life
Darshan Singh Maini

THE idea of death or cease is almost born with a child from its nativity. The first cry is also the last cry — a journey through life’s perils and challenges amidst moments of felicity and celebration. The fear of death, therefore, is at once constitutive and phenomenological. The very nature of his existence posits extinction, for that’s the eternal design, the eternal destination. Almost all theologies are built around this inescapable fact. Call it what you will, death, "mother death", is as supreme as man’s birth from a mother’s womb. The miracle either way, abides. Fear remains an unconscious presence, and often becomes an imminent threat to life in certain situations and moments. When a person has conquered the fear of death, as sages, divines and other mortals in the service of their Creator do, he or she has achieved what we call nirvana. Is it surprising, then, that the greatest psychoanalyst of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud, used this expression to describe his theory of "return to the womb", or the "death-wish" etc I shall return briefly to Freud later, but here it suffices for the purposes of our argument.

To start with, two great tragedies of Shakespeare — Hamlet and King Lear — exemplify in a most agonising way the terror of death and the moment of epiphanic truth which is reached via unbearable, soul-searing suffering. I have no space here for the circumstances and the causes that finally drive one to heroic suicide and the other to a breakdown, which at the same moment, is also Lear’s breakthrough — his vision of his crucified daughter, Cordelia, in paradise (the Shakespeare critic, A.C. Bradley’s profound view). His death-howls are the moment of release and redemption. When Hamlet is about to die, he talks of man’s "readiness" in that terrifying ordeal as his mark of arrival. There are no religious overtones as such for Hamlet, the Prince of a rotten Denmark has reached that stage or point which the French existentialist novelist, Camus, styles as "philosophical suicide". This "readiness" is born out of the spirit’s own massive or heroic labours. From Hamlet (1600-1601) to King Lear (1605), Shakespeare has travelled in a matter of about 4 years to the next or final benchmark in the afflicted, tormented "pilgrim of eternity". Again, the religious motif is Shakespeare’s own overlay, not King Lear’s, for that pagan British King knew no Christian God, only the hypothetical "gods" who govern human destiny on earth. "Ripeness is all" are Lear’s words when the King, blinded by power and pride, is turned loose on the dark heaths to learn the beauty of humility and compassion. The road from Hamlet’s "readiness" to King Lear’s "ripeness" is, then, that marga or path which we see structured in religious songs and hymns.

Before I turn to the religious scriptures, I’m reminded of Henry James’s essay on death and "survival" just when he lay sick in old age. He wasn’t like brother William James, the great American psychologist, a religious person as such. The kind of transcendence which his characters achieve (such as Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove can be read as an extension of the Christian view on the subject, but, if so, it’s not James’s pondered or plotted view. However, in the essay entitled "Is There Life After Death?" (1910), the question is elaborated in his familiar later style — that of "indirection" and ambiguities. His conclusion seems to be that consciousness had a supreme value — and it’s called even "spirit" and "soul" here — for it’s through consciousness alone that one identifies life and wholeness and continuity, when the body of bones and blood returns to dust, or perhaps is "carried over". This, however, may not be equated with the Hindu theory of reincarnation. But distinct signs of some order of "transcendence" are there, undoubtedly. It’s somewhat close to Emersonian "transcendence", but its complexity makes it an enigmatic proposition. James will not commit himself to any absolute idea, even as he does keep voyaging in that direction.

Before I take up the question of death as destination as enunciated in world scriptures, I may briefly return to Freud. He stipulates two "principles"" that hold the balance: the pleasure principle and the reality principle. He, in this connection, used the Greek concepts of Eros and Thanatos, of love and death-wish. What he described as the nirvana principle was actually a kind of "regulatory principle" for him, or for "conserving the instinct". Otherwise, Freud had a deep distrust of religion. And that’s why the neo-Freudians find him insufficient, for he could not see beyond reason. The spirit and its transcendence did not fall into the categories of his thought.

The religious scriptures such as the Bhagavadgita, the Bible, Koran and the Guru Granth Sahib describe, all in their own idiom and way, man’s relation with God, and with the universe and his society. I confine my observations to the Guru Granth Sahib since I’m, to an extent, familiar with its philosophy, message and vision, all written or uttered in the form of divine, ambrosial hymns, and set to music in different Indian classical ragas.

Guru Nanak, the first Preceptor, has fairly large number of hymns devoted to the theological issues raised in this piece. If I were to sum up that massive and magnificent corpus of songs, I would be happy to recall only one couplet which translated loosely reads thus: "First accept the fact of death before you desire life." In another words, the primacy of death as man’s definition and the way to moksha is stipulated in the act of birth, and in the desire for life and happiness.

This thought permeates the hymns of all later Gurus whose poetry is included in the Guru Granth Sahib. In Guru Arjan who compiled the Adi Granth and later, the ninth Guru, Guru Teg Bahadur, in his great rhymes of Vairag or dispassion, Navan Mohalla, dwell significantly upon the theme of death-in-life (if you are alienated from God) and of life-in-death or your mukti finally.