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Monday
I was reading Maria Popova’s reflective and always stimulating weekly essay in The Marginalian yesterday when I came across something that reminded me of a powerful passage in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Memories came flooding back as that passage meant a lot to me when I was mourning my oldest son 25 years ago.
Popova is citing an essay by paleontologist, philosopher of science, and poet Loren Eiseley, who in his 1969 collection The Unexpected Universe observes that venturing into space and landing on the moon “is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion.” The inward world, Eiseley writes, “can be more volatile and mobile, more terrible and impoverished, yet withal more ennobling in its self-consciousness, than the universe that gave it birth.”
To make his point, Eiseley tells about an accident that led to a life-altering realization. Popova describes the accident:
Walking to his office afternoon, deep in thought while working on a book, Eiseley trips on a street drain, crashes violently onto the curb, and finds himself face-down on the sidewalk in a pool of his own blood. In the delirium of disorientation and pain, he looks at the vermillion liquid in the sunshine and suddenly sees life itself, suddenly feels all the tenderness one feels for the miracle of life whenever one is fully feeling.
Knowing that the blood he is seeing is made of millions of cells, phagocytes, and platelets, Eiseley writes that,
for the first time in my mortal existence, [I] did not see these creatures as odd objects under the microscope. Instead, an echo of the force that moved them came up from the deep well of my being and flooded through the shaken circuits of my brain. I was they — their galaxy, their creation. For the first time, I loved them consciously, even as I was plucked up and away by willing hands.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as I read it, is about a man who doesn’t fully value his life until he finds himself in a situation like Eiseley’s. In the story, Gawain has been challenged to a beheading contest by a Green Man figure from Celtic mythology: first he cuts off the Green Knight’s head and then, in a year’s time, the Green Knight gets to return the blow. Being essentially a vegetation god, the Green Knight has survived the ordeal, and Gawain knows only too well that he won’t be so fortunate.
But the Green Knight isn’t interested in Gawain’s death. Rather, he wants Gawain to acknowledge that he cares about his life. Gawain thinks that such caring is unmanly. After all, he is a Christian knight and believes he shouldn’t fear death. The nature god considers this an affront.
I have a theory that the poem, coming as it did a few decades (or maybe just a few years) after the Black Plague ravaged Europe, was written to reconcile audiences with Life, which had proved to be spectacularly unreliable. (Europe lost a third of its population!) Perhaps people, suffering from PTSD, figured that downplaying the preciousness of life was a kind of mental insurance against death. If you focus on the next world rather than caring about this one, dying (so the psychological reasoning goes) won’t hurt so much.
Initially Gawain think he can shrug off the fate that awaits him. “Good men can but try,” he says as he goes off to meet up with the Green Knight. Then, throughout the poem, the Green Knight attempts to lure him back to a lust for life. Gawain faces sexual temptation from the knight’s consort (which he resists) and he is given opportunities to turn back. In the end, however, Gawain shows up for his rendezvous with death and rests his head on the chopping block.
Twice the Green Knight feints with his axe, pointing out that Gawain’s flinch means that he cares to some extent about his life. Then this happens, leading to an experience similar to Eiseley’s:
[The Green Knight] gathered up the grim ax and guided it well:
Let the barb at the blade’s end brush the bare throat;
He hammered down hard, yet harmed him no whit
Save a scratch on one side, that severed the skin;
The end of the hooked edge entered the flesh,
And a little blood lightly leapt to the earth.
And when the man beheld his own blood bright on the snow,
He sprang a spear’s length with feet spread wide,
Seized his high helm, and set it on his head,
Shoved before his shoulders the shield at his back,
Bares his trusty blade, and boldly he speaks
Not since he was a babe born of his mother
Was he once in this world one-half so blithe…
(Trans. Marie Borroff)
When he sees his blood, which lets him know he is still alive, Gawain feels an immense joy–which is what the Green Knight has been trying to get him to see all along. Life is to be embraced.
In the summer following Justin’s death, I sensed that Sir Gawain had something special to tell me, although I wasn’t at first sure what it was. After I had read it over multiple times, I came to realize that it framed what I was seeing as I looked out my study window at the woods that bordered our lot. I started viewing, with a kind of awe, how nature never stops asserting itself. That year we had a prodigal summer (to borrow Barbara Kingsolver’s phrase), and the grass, catbrier, bushes, and trees kept up their never-ending greening. It may have been a season of death for me, but it was not so for them.
When we feel that life has let us down, as many did in the 14th century and as I did after Justin drowned, our response should not be to turn our backs on it. Rather, we must embrace it all the more fiercely, holding it against our bones (to quote Mary Oliver) and seeing it as the gift that it is.
I have tried to live my life that way ever since.
