The palm at the end of the mind
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze décor…—Wallace Stevens, Of Mere Being
These are the lines that keep repeating themselves in my mind as I sit in the church, the dull buzz of insects outside rearticulated by the dull buzz of the humans within, all of us repeating prayers and hymns and poems as though they are zen koans or Heraclitean fragments. We are in shock: that would explain it. The mind shuts down like a freezing thing here, even in July’s heat; in the landscape of despair memory goes numb and occluded monuments rise up to limn the horizon of one’s thinking. You end up grasping, half-blind and with stiff fingers, at words. And what are words? Puffs of air, aspirated, spent, already-too-late, guttural gestures. Words do not exist.
We are at a funeral. For a boy. Six months earlier I had been building a fort in winter with this boy, shoveling blocks of wet snow into the shape of a wall, then spiking it, Transylvania-like, with pine cones and fir boughs. I had watched him inhale the resiny tang of the boughs before he laid them into the snow and thought to myself, “I remember that. I remember smelling winter as a boy.” And now, in July, I am sitting in a church muttering poetry, remembering my memories of this boy and celebrating his death.
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
Churches tend to be dead things, all hard, marble surfaces, shellacked canvases, dingy clothes and stale water. That’s why they burn incense: to cover up the smell of death. And then there is the absurd, vertical orientation they force upon you. All this standing up, raising your voices to heaven, getting down on your knees, standing up again, bowing your head… God doesn’t live in the steeple or the sky. But we do anything in a church to avoid looking along the horizontal axis, to avoid looking at one another, because that would mean looking the thing in the face.
“Something terrible has happened,” we would have to admit. “It cannot be contained; we cannot contain it. It creeps in upon us and it creeps beyond us.” So we look up, we sit down, we lift up our hearts and pray. But if you look along the horizontal axis in a church, if you eschew the vertical to which you are beckoned, you begin to perceive the shimmering aura of alienation in which every human being is enveloped. In church, each of us is alone.
Which of course is one of the reasons for going to church in the first place—to transcend alienation (rather than puncture it), to remind ourselves that we are brothers and sisters in the eyes of God, that we are together in this, not separate, and that God is with us. We are not alone. But God is mute, and we in this church cannot speak. We can only pray.
I am so angry, I have to pee. So does my sister. Thankfully, I follow her out down the aisle.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
There were two hundred people in the church; there are fifty more in its entranceway and another two hundred outside. Most of them seem to have their mouths open. They are panting, weeping. The sky looks incredibly stupid above their heads. It is an oily, dull sky, thick with stupidity. It must be cruel as well, because it is raining heat down upon them. It is torrid outside. Everyone is suffering. My sister and I relieve ourselves, go back in and sit down. More prayers. Still no answer. That’s when I notice the canopy of green in one of the side doors. The boy’s father stands up and delivers a eulogy. It is one of the most stunningly courageous acts I have ever seen a human perform. He does not break. He speaks of a “brotherhood of pain,” how people used to derive their identities from suffering. Then he implores us not to join them. “Andrew had a good life,” he says, “Please. Leave your pain behind you. Leave it here.”
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
Through a side door there is a green canopy that I have been studying for some time now. It is a riotous growth of vines and leaves that smothers everything beyond. It emanates coolness. It glows. I feel like sitting there for fifty years and letting it grow over everything, the whole church and me too, smother everything, lend us a bit of shade from the idiotic, hysterical sky with all its light and heat and scuttering clouds. I would like to feel that green canopy envelope me, then start growing inside me. Death.
There’s a thick strand in philosophy’s braid that curls around death. I am not a philosopher, nor a poet—though some of my best friends are. (Wallace Stevens was both, it seems.) But I know that studying philosophy can make your life better, in no small way because it can help you deal with death, calmly and with equanimity. I’ve been puzzled by this poem since the first time I read it. Perhaps it is a measure of callousness on my part, but sitting in that church I found myself realizing not that philosophy illuminates death, but that death illuminates poetry:
The palm at the end of the mind
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze décor,A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.