Mental multivitamin: From the archives: A grief ago

The following material first ran three years ago today.

The text (Dylan Thomas) and the illustrations (Chris Raschka) of A Child's Christmas in Wales have transformed the geography of the imaginations of the Misses M-mv, whose desks are strewn with their own drawings depicting their favorite passages of this seasonal favorite.

"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards."

"Were there postmen then, too?"

"With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully. But all that the children could hear was a ringing of bells."

Have you heard Thomas read this treasure? We'll wait.
____________________________

"Death has caught me, / it lurks in my bedroom, and everywhere I look, / everywhere I turn, there is only death."
(Gilgamesh, Book XI)

I reread A Child Christmas in Wales last night, then knocked Gilgamesh (and a (thank goodness!) empty mug) from the nightstand when I set it down. Certainly this was an invitation to return to Stephen Mitchell's most wonderful seminar on the hero's journey, "the mother of all heroes' journeys," writes Mitchell, "with its huge uninhibited mythic presences moving through a landscape of a dream."

The archetypal hero's journey proceeds in stages: being called to action, meeting a wise man or guide, crossing the threshold into the numinous world of the adventure, passing various tests, attaining the goal, defeating the forces of evil, and going back home. It leads to a spiritual transformation at the end, a sense of gratitude, humility, and deepened trust in the intelligence of the universe. After he finds the treasure or slays the dragon or wins the princess or joins with the mind of the sage, the hero can return to ordinary life in a state of grace, as a blessing to himself and to his whole community. He has suffered, he has triumphed, he is at peace.

So Gilgamesh is a quest story, maintains Mitchell, but on close inspection, it's a "bizarre, quirky, and postmodern" one.

Ayup.

Paging through Mitchell's remarkable version of "the oldest story in the world, a thousand years older than the Iliad or the Bible," I paused, as I have several times now, at Book VIII. Enkindu, Gilgamesh's best friend, has died. "Hear me, elders, hear me, young men," laments Gilgamesh,

"[M]y beloved friend is dead, he is dead,
my beloved brother is dead, I will mourn
as long as I breathe, I will sob for him
like a woman who has lost her only child.
O, Enkindu, you were the axe at my side
in which my arm trusted, the knife in my sheath,
the shield I carried, my glorious robe,
the wide belt around my loins, and now
a harsh fate has torn you from me, forever.

And, as before, the cadences of his profound grief recalled to me W.H. Auden:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

____________________________

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
("Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night," Dylan Thomas)

And as is my wont, I sat up at precisely 3:14 a.m. and marveled anew at how playfully, skillfully the brain arranges its thoughts when left to its own dreamy devices.

Dylan Thomas. Gilgamesh. W.H. Auden.

A grief ago...

Were my mind as facile during my waking hours, I'd be a force with which to be reckoned.