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I read with Proustian zeal and Dantean desire, an inconsistently written short story by Jorge Luis Borges, called "The Immortal." Although it is too confusing, even for Borges, I relished two illuminating points: one, that identity, or at least its life-essence, may be interchangeable and mutable, and two, that despite this possibility, our own personal identities, which are ego-driven, must die, never to return; that immortality, at least as one would want to conceive it, is neither possible, nor desirable. In the beginning of the story, Marcus Flaminius Rufus, an army officer, sets out to find the River of Immortality and the famed City of Immortals. He is astounded to discover that Argos, one of a tribe of troglodytes, or cave-dwellers, has abandoned the city. When Argos begins to speak a line from Homer's "The Odyssey," Rufus realizes that he is in fact Homer. Moreover, by the end of the story, Borges has us believe that Rufus, Argos, and Homer-- and perhaps himself-- are all one and the same!
The theme is not new: Cervantes explored it in Don Quixote, and virtually all of Shakespeare's plays toy with the notions of interchangeability, metamorphosis, and gender-bending, and even in the plays' epilogues, actors often come out of character to comment on the action. The fantastic autobiographical novel, "Orlando," chronicles the escapades of Virginia Woolf's protagonist through a life measured out over centuries rather than years, and, moreover, he is transformed into a woman by the end of the story. And Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" explores the issue of homosexuality and personal change endlessly throughout three-thousand pages describing the "social kaleidoscope" of his native France.
What is more provocative though, is that Rufus and the cave-dwellers reflect on the consequences of being immortal and conclude that immortality only brings apathy, listlessness, and cruelty, because decisions and events become meaningless in a never-ending world. Death is impossible, and since nothing new can ever happen, ethical distinctions and moral action are pointless. (Who has not honestly conjectured the same?-- that immortality here, in heaven, or anywhere else, is humanly incomprehensible and therefore devoid of any resemblance to human happiness, moreover one that could possibly go on forever.)
It is this second point of the story that is so poignant: that the troglodytes do not desire immortality. They seem trapped in a cycle, and it is unclear if they even have the capacity to escape. We are told later that they want to drink from the River of Death, that they need to feel pain in order to feel alive-- in essence to die in order to live, not unlike the recovering alcoholic who, knocked off his god-like pedestal, prefers to embrace the uncertain and painful human world, rather than the immortal and presumambly painless world he had tried to construct; his very experience is firsthand when he exclaims, in 12-step language, that "Religion is for those who do not want to go to hell, whereas 'spirituality' is for those who have already been there." Any non-human realm-- perceived as a heaven or hell-- is simply not a place one can express true human love. In this vein, one is reminded of the doctrine of "felix culpa"-- the Fortunate fall-- the commentary on Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden, which asserts the opinion that the Fall was necessary and good-- that it is what gave us the capacity to be human.
In a more secular world, recovered alcoholics who have "hit bottom" to return to the world integrated and whole, have learned to essentially become artists and co-creators of their spiritual programs, rooted in Earth, with the aid of fellow human beings and "a god of their own choosing." Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist, thought that modern poets and artists were in fact the myth-makers and spiritual sages of today, that they expressed the essence of the difficulty of life on Earth most deeply and honestly. John Keats is a perfect example. His nearly perfect "Ode to Autumn," with its unsentimentally depicted mournful gnats and twittering swallows, celebrates the paradox of living in the creative moment that is, in fact, always on the brink of annihilation. Ironically, the poem eerily prefigured Keats' own early and painful death at the age of thirty.
Similarly, Wallace Stevens-- considered a modern-day disciple of Keats-- stated succintly in the poem, "Sunday Morning," that "death is the mother of beauty," as he seems to cry for the need for self-affirmation in an aesthetic and agnostic modern world. But the poem's reference to Sunday-- the day of rest and resurrection-- is particularly interesting, and perhaps not without irony in this otherwise secular work. Though Jesus is mentioned only once in the poem-- and without particular reverence-- his importance seems implied by the poem's title, and it is therefore intriguing to consider his personage in a discussion of immortality and reincarnation. (Borges does this brilliantly in the provocative story, "Three Versions of Judas"). I wonder, then, if Christ's mortality and humanness-- like that of the poem's protagonist-- are what need emphasis here. I ponder what his reactions to his own fear and anger might have been, as he acclimated to the new world around him-- how he might have responded to his tirade in the temple and to his doubting his father's will for him, even has he hung on the cross, minutes before his death. I wonder, too, who of us hasn't disobeyed an omnipotent parent or stumbled more than once, climbing up the great mountain, wanting to give up, to experience the strange beauty and love of needing to be wiped and cleaned by a fellow sinner at the midway point of our journey? And when Christ was resurrected, where did he go? Is it blasphemous to suggest that he still must be here-- that he has to be, that he is an incarnation in each one of us? A current pop songs asks, "What if God was one of us, just a slob like one of us, just a stranger on the bus, trying to make his way home?" Perhaps it was more difficult for God to descend into the humble, human world, rather than the other way around. Ask any recovered alcoholic just how hard it was playing God, to then find out how much more difficult it was to rejoin the human race-- to be, like Christ-- a spiritual being in a human world, rather than a human being in a spiritual world.
So it seems that human beings suffer from a deep-rooted psychological need to imagine that we will live forever-- that to do so would somehow give our lives meaning and depth, when, in fact, it may be the other way around!-- that living in such a realm is humanly inconceivable and ultimately unsatisfactory; that perhaps meaning and joy are best achieved by a full acceptance of the very imperfect, mortal present moment. Maybe the role of the modern spiritual sage should be not to convince us of the possibility of immortality, but to help us embrace the ambiguity of straddling both worlds-- to live fully with the knowledge of the "human condition," like Joyce's Leopold Bloom or Woolf's Clarissa Dolloway, fictive characters who have become most human, most compassionate, and most Christ-like in their struggle to understand themselves and the world around them. Such characters shatter our complacent views of life, death, and the nature of Man's very essence.
I have come to the conclusion that Love, and its attendants, Truth and Beauty-- though immeasurable and potentially infinite-- cannot be abstact concepts to be extracted from somewhere "out there;" they are borne within, and their expression is wholly human, in the midst of much imperfection, suffering, and death, in an otherwise unknowable and ultimately meaningless world. There is great irony in Samuel Beckett-- unfairly considered bleak and pessimistic-- when he exclaims with affirmation and joy, in his monograph on Proust, that a life can only be lived when "the boredom of living is replaced with the suffering of being," the ever-forming and ever-dying present moment that is all existence.
Beyond this simple truth, I am unsure of anything else.
POSTSCRIPT: On November 6th, 2001, my notions were affirmed, or at least strengthened, when a man met me at Newark airport, in front of gate 23, before I boarded American Airlines Flight 432 to Atlanta, Georgia. He was dressed in black and took the name of Dennis Babbitt. He did not exactly resemble a historic personage, but he was fully recognizable in ways that are not ordinarily perceptible and are difficult describe. It was as if I knew him before, but that his name and personal attributes did not matter. He arrived to send me off, having arranged for me a trip under no initial will of mine, but which I ascertained was part of a larger plan-- a greater design. I was handed an envelope containing a sort of combined guideline and prayer, that, once incorporated into one's psyche, could theoretically be tossed away. Since then, its contents have been discussed among many modern-day cave-dwellers, many of whom have learned to speak for the very first time. The essence of these meetings may be expounded later, but suffice it to say, that during such encounters, I have become quite sure of many more things-- the most certain of which, that I am loved and most certainly alive.
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