3/7/07

"... as we, pale captives, creep to death". If this line, from a sixteenth, perhaps seventeenth, century poem, first and last read at school when you were twelve, and whose author you no longer remember (if you ever did), and, as you were aware even then, of dubious artistic quality, has stayed with you all the years since, it is surely because it seemed then - and now - to express some fundamental truth about life. And perhaps the fact that it still seems to do so is itself a 'direct' consequence of your initial recognition of it as undeniable (a recognition conditioned, surely, by attitudes acquired from your father);in other words, its truth was of the self-fulfilling kind. On the other hand, if there is anything to be argued with in it, it isn't the final final destination it ordains, but the manner of getting there: why must we inevitably creep, as opposed to walk or march or run? Is it merely to prolong things here with a shameful dawdling, a cowardly dragging of the heels that is concerned only with postponing the inevitable? Or do we creep because awed and terrified by the final end, reminded constantly by it of the vanity of any human undertaking? If the line contains any truth, it is perhaps of the kind we default to out of despair or exhaustion, the consequence of mental rather than physical weakness, whereby the world becomes too hostile, too dangerous, for us to face it any more: then you are reduced to creeping. But for the rest of life, perhaps even for most of it, that need not be the case. Why should knowledge of one's transience and eventual certain annihilation destroy meaning, either now or at all? Isn't meaning itself an inherently transient phenomenon? Doesn't it fit 'naturally' within the scheme of finitude? Seen in this light, the pale captives creeping to death start to seem a bit absurd, a kind of baroque Grand Guignol. It aims at merely scaring, while misapprehending the real nature of mortality (which is what exactly?)