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Sunday
This has been an emotional week. Our two sons and their families joined us at Myrtle Beach as we celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary, and our stay comes to an end today on the one-year anniversary of my mother’s death (she died July 16, 2022). Thinking of her, I can’t help but ask where she and all those others who I have loved and lost are now. Where is my father Scott and my eldest son Justin? Should I conclude, with John Wilmot, that “after Death nothing is, and nothing, death,/ The utmost limit of a gasp of breath.” Or are they, in some form or another, still participating in the drama of creation.
Literature has grappled with this question time and again throughout history. The version I find most inspiring—and that comes closest to my own beliefs—appears in Philip Pullman’s Amber Spyglass, the third in the Dark Materials trilogy (after The Golden Compass and The Subtle Knife). That vision is itself a reworking of Dante’s Divine Comedy, especially Inferno and Paradiso.
To be sure, self-declared atheist that Pullman is, Dante’s Christian belief system doesn’t figure into his afterlife except in a negative way: he, like Dante, has reserved a special place in hell for corrupt church figures. For Pullman, however, church authorities are almost by definition villains, having crafted a hell that serves their selfish purposes. In this he agrees with Wilmot in “A Fragment of Seneca Translated”:
For Hell and the foul fiend that rules
God’s everlasting fiery jails
(Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools),
With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door,
Are senseless stories, idle tales,
Dreams, whimseys, and no more.
But Pullman moves beyond Wilmot’s dour materialist vision (“dead, we become the lumber of the world”) to something transcendent. He even gives us a version of the harrowing of hell where supposedly, between the crucifixion and the resurrection, Jesus visited the afterlife and brought salvation to souls held captive there. In Amber Spyglass, Lyra plays this role, freeing all who want to be freed. The vision she articulates can perhaps be characterized as a Buddhist version of Dante’s cosmic dance.
“This is what’ll happen,” she said, “and it’s true, perfectly true. When you go out of here, all the particles that make you up will loosen and float apart, just like your daemons did. If you’ve seen people dying, you know what that looks like. But your daemons en’t just nothing now; they’re part of everything. All the atoms that were them, they’ve gone into the air and the wind and the trees and the earth and all the living things. They’ll never vanish. They’re just part of everything. And that’s exactly what’ll happen to you, I swear to you, I promise on my honor. You’ll drift apart, it’s true, but you’ll be out in the open, part of everything alive again.”
Contrast this with the static limbo in which the dead find themselves. Pullman sets it up so that Christ-figure Lyra shows us how “death shall be no more” (to borrow from Donne). In his vision, Pullman is like Dante in seeing the afterlife as a continuation of the life we lived on earth. We can, if we want, make of our lives what Lyra calls the “Republic of Heaven,” which is her version of Jesus’s earthly Kingdom of God (“on earth as it is in heaven”). Alternatively, we can turn our lives into a Satanic hell. Here’s how Lyra defines her Republic:
We shouldn’t live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place…. We have to be all those difficult things like cheerful and kind and curious and patient, and we’ve got to study and think and work hard, all of us, in all our different worlds, and then we’ll build… The Republic of Heaven.”
The truly lost souls in Pullman’s afterlife are those religious ideologues who have sacrificed this life to focus on a desired afterlife and who, as a result, cannot see Pullman’s sterile netherworld as anything other than the paradise they envisioned. Plunged into denial because of the cognitive disconnect, they persuade themselves that the harpies are angels and that the caves are realms of light. To do otherwise would mean (to echo another Wilmot line) that all their lives they have been in the wrong. As one figure describes it,
When we were alive, they told us that when we died we’d go to heaven. And they said that heaven was a place of joy and glory and we would spend eternity in the company of saints and angels praising the Almighty, in a state of bliss. That’s what they said. And that’s what led some of us to give our lives, and others to spend years in solitary prayer, while all the joy of life was going to waste around us and we never knew. Because the land of the dead isn’t a place of reward or a place of punishment, it is a place of nothing. The good come here as well as the wicked, and all of us languish in this gloom forever, with no hope of freedom, or joy, or sleep, or rest, or peace.
This character, however, has a Road to Damascus experience, choosing to follow Lyra as Saul/Paul chose to follow Christ:
But now this child has come offering us a way out and I’m going to follow her. Even if it means oblivion, friends, I’ll welcome it, because it won’t be nothing. We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we’ll be glistening in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.
One imagines him quoting a passage from Henry Vaughan’s “The World” to those church authorities who insist on remaining behind:
O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night
Before true light,
To live in grots and caves, and hate the day
Because it shews the way,
The way, which from this dead and dark abode
Leads up to God,
A way where you might tread the sun, and be
More bright than he.
Dante brilliantly shows why it is that lost souls prefer dark night before true light. After all, they get exactly the situation that, while alive, they wished for. To cite examples from Dante’s fifth circle, those who longed to vent their rage on their enemies get to tear their enemies to pieces for all eternity while those sullen ones who inwardly fume get to do so buried in a dark muck. By focusing on their anger, these figures have shut out God’s love.
The harpies, like Dante’s hellish overseers, are projections of their inner darkness. As the harpy No-Name, referencing the Calvinist “Authority” that has ruled the land, puts it,
Thousands of years ago, when the first ghosts came down here, the Authority gave us the power to see the worst in everyone, and we have fed on the worst ever since, till our blood is rank with it and our very hearts are sickened. But still, it was all we had to feed on. It was all we had.
While this moment of self-reflection is promising, No-Name has been so conditioned to her hellish state that at first she can’t accept the pain of hope. As Pullman puts it, the harpies are “hungry and suffused with the lust for misery.” Perhaps concluding that April is the cruelest month, No-Name envisions preying forever on how (if I may use a colloquialism) we are stuck in our shit:
What will we do now? I shall tell you what we will do: from now on, we shall hold nothing back. We shall hurt and defile and tear and rend every ghost that comes through, and we shall send them mad with fear and remorse and self-hatred. This is a wasteland now; we shall make it a hell!”
Lyra and Will, however, are able to break through to the harpies, who sense deep down there is another possibility. When Will asks No-Name why, in spite of her hateful declarations, she and the other harpies are listening to Lyra, she replies,
Because she spoke the truth. Because it was nourishing. Because it was feeding us. Because we couldn’t help it. Because it was true. Because we had no idea that there was anything but wickedness. Because it brought us news of the world and the sun and the wind and the rain. Because it was true.
We see the joy that comes with accepting this truth in Lyra’s friend Roger, who is tragically killed in the first book:
The first ghost to leave the world of the dead was Roger. He took a step forward, and turned to look back at Lyra, and laughed in surprise as he found himself turning into the night, the starlight, the air. . .and then he was gone, leaving behind such a vivid little burst of happiness.
No-Name, meanwhile, transforms into an angel of grace who will guide the dead to the light. Lyra says to her,
“I’m going to call you Gracious Wings. So that’s your name now, and that’s what you’ll be for evermore: Gracious Wings.”
“One day,” said the harpy, “I will see you again, Lyra Silvertongue.”
“And if I know you’re here, I shan’t be afraid,” Lyra said. “Good-bye, Gracious Wings, till I die.”
She embraced the harpy, hugging her tightly and kissing her on both cheeks.
One finds versions of Pullman’s afterlife in other moving poems about death, such as Mary Elizabeth’s Frye’s “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep”:
Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning’s hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.
It can also be found in the inscription that Julia and I put on Justin’s gravestone. It’s from Adonais, Percy Shelley’s elegy to John Keats:
He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird;
He is a presence to be felt and known
In darkness and in light, from herb and stone…
Ever since Justin died, I have envisioned him as part of a celestial dance such as is described in Paradiso, which is governed by “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” And if he and my parents and all who I have loved and lost are dancing there, then maybe Julia and I will rejoin them when we die. It is a vision that Will and Lyra articulate when they are forced to separate forever at the end of the trilogy:
I will love you forever; whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I’ll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again… I’ll be looking for you, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we’ll cling together so tight that nothing and no one’ll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you… We’ll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams… And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won’t just be able to take one, they’ll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we’ll be joined so tight…
Is this vision true? At the very least, it seems truer to me than Wilmot’s materialist vision that the soul or spirit is snuffed out utterly with our last breath. In the meantime, it is up to us to forge the Republic of Heaven in the here and now.