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April 12, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:07:05
How to Understand Poetry: "Farewell Father"
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Hey everybody, it's Devan Molyneux from Freedom Aid and Hope you're doing well. So, for those of you who don't know, back in the day, I started out in the world of art rather than of philosophy.
I wrote like 30 plays.
I went to the National Theatre School for Acting and Playwriting.
And I've written like half a dozen novels, hundreds of poems.
And this poem, I wanted to go through with you because, well, I think it's a good poem, but also because I think it's important to understand just how complex or compressed language can be unpacked, like a dream.
You know, so think about a dream. You can get a lot of insight.
So this is a poem I wrote when I was in my early twenties and what happened was a friend of mine's father who had run a construction company his whole life and was fairly taciturn, like he didn't speak out very much, he had died suddenly and she was very close to him and was really heartbroken and she asked me to I do spend a lot of time facing the ugliness of the world and I also do want to...
Encourage the beauty of the world as well.
There is an old saying from Nietzsche that you have to be careful when you examine monsters too closely or too deeply that you do not become a monster yourself.
So I really wanted to bring more beauty to what it is that I do.
So I'll read through the poem and then we'll have a look at it and see what's going on so that you can learn to sink deep into language and explore it like a spelunker of syllables, so to speak.
So here's the funeral poem.
Farewell, Father.
Thank you.
The sky without my father is too bright.
There are now no gentle clouds to soften the glare of my own ending.
The voice of my thunder god has faded to ashen echoes and memories of high twirling.
As a child, I climbed his back, pulled his hair, explored his ears.
Now I have outclimbed his falling mountain.
The white of spirit and black of flesh have softened to grey.
"'he and I have become dominoes at his passing.
"'This larger pattern of falling may be pleasing to nature, "'but his fall, his slow fade of releasing light, "'for that I reserve the right to rail "'at "'for that I reserve the right to rail "'at the first commandment carved on the womb.' Who we love, we will watch die.
Who love us, will watch us die.
My loss is as deep as my love.
And the agony of this endless ending is a hard price to pay for such tenderness.
There is a cycle of life, perhaps.
Our flesh may be born again.
Our hair, eyes, stories, watches even passed on.
We are circular winds of starlight.
A larger pattern of falling pieces.
But so little of what matters to us is bound in mere matter.
We are deep layers of meaning.
Our bodies are like prehistoric insects.
Our histories drown them in lakes of clear amber.
At death, the lake, the amber, the deepest lacquer of our visible souls dries, vanishes, ashes in a whirlwind of blind renewal.
And the body, the least important footnote of our histories, that is recycled.
And the earth, which could wake and wonder at our memories, dumbly accepts our shells and calls itself content.
Now we know, really know, of this loss.
Thank you.
Tell me, why do we love?
There is a kind of immortality in detachment.
Never feeling a death before our own, it could remain a surprise, an accident, a careening bus with a black cloak at the wheel.
Or... Knowing the wild grief of this falling, would our love twist with the terror of impending loss?
Would such natural flowers wilt in the heat of our possessive greenhouses?
Life needs a balance.
Thank you.
No death would be no planning, no growth.
Death too close would be no discipline, no sacrifice for who does taxes in darkened hospitals.
To live right, we must remember death at a distance.
Neither embrace nor evict it.
In the face of death, neither a monk nor a wanton be.
Death is the sibling of life.
not stalking but approaching the seasons lie to us It is understandable. As children, we gaze up the flowing rungs of generations.
New, squalling, we imagine no ladder but a wheel.
Life runs, the generations roll around, and we feel like great-grandparents sprung new-bundled from an unwintered twig.
The seasons lie to us.
The seasons return because they do not live.
There is no spring to our individual winters.
As snow falls on our heads, so we fall from life to the endless ice of history.
So much is lost.
Of course, I remember you But only as I saw you.
As the beach knows the footprints, but not the foot.
The surf, but not the ocean.
A thousand books a day could not contain your thoughts.
I can keep only impressions, not essentials.
When my father fell, His past fell.
A burning map of where and what he had built.
The constructed children of his calloused fingers, as important, perhaps, as those of his loins.
His houses stand, though the hand has fallen.
I have lost not the memory of my father, but my father's memory.
This thousand-story library, this infinite vein of nightly mining, how little remains.
What his second night with my mother was like.
The dark flash of a bee that flew into his eye.
The transparent whirlpool of a reddened sunrise.
The groaning bones of his most exhausted day.
The last time he whispered a secret.
Did he know it?
Did he bid farewell to secrets?
This, all this, can never be known.
Thank you.
In the endless harvest of renewal, each stalk, each soul is an ecosystem, a world, a universe, blindly white.
For this, let us mourn what we have lost.
But also, now, that no father stands between us and our ending.
Dominoes now fall free to our own demise.
Grief is deep glass.
Thank you.
A window to what we have lost.
A mirror of what we shall lose.
And when we fall, what others will lose in us?
Okay, so that is the poem.
Let's go through and figure out what's going on in these lines.
And coming at this, I guess 30 years after I wrote it, it's really fascinating to see just how non-ideological, complex, and religiously rich, in a way, the poem is.
Okay, so let's start with, the sky without my father is too bright.
Okay, so what does that mean? Okay, so when you're a kid, right, and you look up, you're always looking up, right?
You're always looking up, like you go to a theme park, and what do you see?
Belts, buckles, and butts, right?
So you're always looking up.
Your father is reaching over your crib, and if there's a light, then he eclipses the light.
And he's leaning over you in the backyard and so as a kid you look up and you see your father and around him you see this kind of penumbra of the sky.
And so if you think of a father leaning over a child and then he vanishes, the sky would be suddenly very, very bright.
There are now no gentle clouds to soften the glare of my own ending.
So you have a father, and then if there are gentle clouds, then there's less sun glare sort of into your eye.
So what does this mean? Well, the sky without my father is obviously the loss of one's individual father, but also the question of religion is very powerful here for me.
How do we face a universe without a god?
We are fundamentally alienated from the universe because we're alive, we think, we reason, we're conscious, we dream, we have the capacity to form these incredible universe-spanning concepts, and the rest of the world, the rest of the universe, really, is just, as far as we know, dead, blind, empty, voided, null matter.
How do we relate to a universe when we're the only rational, conscious beings in existence?
It's kind of cold. It's kind of chilly.
And our relationship between the eternal nature of matter and the temporary nature of consciousness is quite complicated, and it's something I've thought of over the years quite a bit.
So, as long as your father is alive, you think less about your own death.
As long as your father is alive.
Because in this poem, The sun is death.
Now, that's kind of a reversal because death is usually, you know, a dark hole or it's fiery or it's hell or it's got a negative.
But in this case, I want death to be light, to be sunlight, right?
So when your father is leaning over you as you're a toddler and so on, he's blocking death from you because he's like, hey, my dad's still alive.
I remember when I was a kid, a friend of mine, Was two years older than me, and he always, you know, got things ahead and ran faster and got more allowance and got to stay up later and so on.
And I remember as a kid, I was really, really a toddler.
I was like three or four years old, and I remember saying, well, it's okay because at least I get to live two years longer.
You know, like there's some fairness in this longevity.
And of course, people said, that's not really how it works.
And I remember then thinking something was elementally wrong with the universe.
And so, if the son is death and you're the toddler, your father stands between you and death.
And then when he vanishes, it's like that brightness of death without your father or without a god.
I'm an atheist at this time, right?
To soften the glare of my own ending.
Because our relationship to death is very complicated.
And of course, I remember as a kid myself, When I read, I was very into astronomy as a kid, and I read, of course, that the sun was going to burn out in like 10 billion years, and part of you thinks, okay, so what am I building for?
But if you have a god, if you have a narrative, if you have a story, if you have a destination, if you get to live forever, so the sky without your personal father means that you get to look at death directly without a generational buffer, but also without a god, without god, There is a horrible, empty, fiery glare of your own ending, right?
In this case, the sun is simply looking at the fact that we're mortal, and if we don't have souls, then we just go into the dirt, and worms eat our eyeballs, and that's it.
And the fact, oh, well, we can live for others, we can create a legacy, we can, okay, that's all fine, but if the legacy is relatively meaningless to you, then it would be relatively meaningless to the people you influence, to your children and so on, right?
And, you know, we're just doing three lines here, but this is really, really important.
How do we face our mortality, both personally, intergenerationally, and also without a God?
So, the fourth and fifth line, the voice of my thunder god has faded to ashen echoes and memories of high twirling.
So... When you're a kid, your parents are gods in many ways, right?
I mean, they're huge, they're powerful, and you don't really experience a sort of foundational relationship between yourself and your parents because you're so fundamentally different.
You know, like if you came across some being that had different shapes than you, right, had different sized heads and a different side head, singular, I suppose, And was, you know, ten times taller or, you know, eight times taller and so on.
And, like, it would be like, that's not the same species as me, right?
So when you're a toddler and you look at your parents, you look at the adults, they seem like kind of a different species.
And they do seem like gods.
They're loud, right? You can't recreate their sounds.
If you're a boy, let's say, I mean, you sound kind of squeaky as a toddler and your dad has usually a deep voice or a deeper voice than you.
So it's like a thunder god.
Now here, of course, it works very well.
I'm just going to highlight here on the screen as well, right?
Because we've got thunder and clouds, right?
So the idea of God or your individual father being up in the sky, which is if you were a toddler, now you've got thunder, so very much associated with the layer of clouds between humanity and the sun, which is the layer of generations or God between humanity and death.
Has faded to ashen echoes...
Well, of course, ash is cremation.
Ash is death.
Echoes is You know how you have video, right?
And everybody has this incredibly detailed, largely impervious to time, 60 frames a second, 4K or whatever, videos of their life.
But it's not being generated from the person.
It's an echo of what they said before.
So if you're in a canyon, you say, hello, right?
Then the echo comes back.
It's not you speaking. It's just something that's bouncing back.
And it's the same thing. Like, you can look at old photographs.
You can look at Someone in a video, but it's not them anymore, right?
They're not generating it, and you can't film anything new because they're dead, right?
So Ashen Echoes and Memories of High Twirling.
So High Twirling is, you know, just the upy-downy game that parents play with their kids.
Like, you know, that thing where...
You throw a kid up in the air.
Dad throws a kid up in the air. The kid's like in one picture a foot above the dad.
It's like that's what's actually happening.
You know, five feet above the dad, that's what the kid feels.
And like 50 feet above the dad, that's what the mom sees with her like nervousness, right?
So high twirling. Memories of high twirling.
And also when you look at the video of someone who's dead, instead of it being a fun reminder of a fun time, there's a sadness to it, right?
There's a real sadness to it.
So Ashen Echoes is, well, we've got recordings, we've got photographs.
This I wrote back before.
I mean, there were still camcorders back then, but certainly long before cell phones or tablets or anything like that.
But you had home videos, you had photos and so on.
But they're just echoes.
They're not anything new.
They're nothing that can be generated anew.
And so when you look at a video of a person who's dead, you feel sad, right?
That's what I mean by ashen echoes.
So memories of high twirling, right?
So when the father dies, you go back in time.
And remember, this is kind of like a character, right?
Like, you know, when Shakespeare writes a monologue, this is kind of like a character wrestling with grief, right?
And you'll see this, that in the poem, this character, we can just say it's me or whatever, goes back and forth between analysis and emotion, right?
Right? So here we go to, as a child, I climbed his back, pulled his hair, explored his ears, right?
So this is a very young child, a toddler.
You'll normally stop doing this kind of stuff when you're maybe seven or eight years old, right?
So this is usually very, you climb his back, pulled his hair, explored his ears, right?
And so that's going from the ground level of birth, right?
So if the son is death, right, you're kind of mounting up, right?
But then what happens is, Now, I have outclimbed his falling mountain.
So you climb his back, but then he falls into a grave, and you're kind of stuck in mid-air, right?
Outclimbed his falling mountain.
The white of spirit and black of flesh have softened to gray.
Okay, so this, to me, is very, very sort of deep and powerful, right?
So, the sun...
In a godless universe, the sun in this poem is just death, just extinction, just endless what's called recycling, right?
This renewal, blind renewal, right?
We need new people, we need new people, and therefore people die, and therefore people die, and therefore we get new people and all that, right?
The only reason you're alive is because people die, because if people lived forever, you wouldn't need new people, plus there'd be no evolution and all that.
that so there's that sort of base evolutionary approach to life you know chemicals and and neurotransmitters and biology and and so on and the white of spirit is the sun is also an analogy for the soul so it's it's death like it scalds your eyes it burns you because it's just a material nuclear bomb that goes off in the sky and
But, of course, the sun as a god is very, very embedded in our sort of consciousness.
So the white of spirit and the black of flesh.
What do I mean by the black of flesh?
Well, of course, we've got ashen echoes above, right?
And flesh, you know, you turn black after a while when you are dead.
The white of spirit and the black of flesh have softened to gray.
He and I have become dominoes at his passing.
Okay, so this is important too, right?
So you think of dominoes...
I think I got this wrong in the video...
But if you think of dominoes, right?
One falls and pushes the other, right?
So one domino...
You think of those sort of domino trains or whatever, right?
One falls and knocks down the next, right?
So there's a kind of individuality when you're young...
And you never really think of death too, too much...
Unless it's, of course, around you for some reason...
But then when he dies...
Well, you're next, right?
You can't really escape that particular knowledge that we're not sort of individual things.
We are, you know, part of this sort of domino train that just gets knocked over generation after generation.
And I like the white of spirit and black of flesh.
Of course, dominoes are black and white, right?
So I think that's a pretty cool way of looking at it.
All right. So this larger pattern of falling may be pleasing to nature.
Okay, so this is, he's got the character, right, the poet, so to speak, is approaching something very mystical here, right, the white of spirit and black of flesh, the mind-body dichotomy, the fact that, you know, the idea of a soul versus the Messiness and transient nature of the body.
Are we eternal?
Are we superior to and exist independent of the body, right?
So he's getting really, really close.
The white of spirit and black of flesh have softened, right?
So this division has softened because now he's dead, right?
So if he's dead, of course, his spirit...
Now that the father's dead, if he has a spirit, if he has a soul, it's left the body, right?
So it's softened. He's just...
He's just become grey. He's softened to grey, right?
The spirit has left the body and therefore the body has just become grey.
So he's close to a spiritual revelation here.
But he still thinks of himself as divided, right?
Dominoes are black and white.
So he's saying, well, my father has softened to gray, but I'm still the domino that's up.
I haven't fallen yet, so I'm black and white.
So he's getting very close to a spiritual revelation, and then there's this recoiling.
So he says this larger pattern of falling may be pleasing to nature, right?
And what he's talking about here is...
Evolution, right? I mean, for there to be evolution, we have to have birth, we have to have genetic randomness to some degree, mutation and so on, and selection for ideal survivability and hunting and resistance to disease and you name it, right? So this larger pattern of falling may be pleasing to nature.
So he's recoiling from the spiritual element.
And saying, okay, let's just get back to Darwin.
Let's just get back to evolution, right?
And it is, quote, pleasing to nature, because the only way that evolution works is if people die and people are born and so on.
So he's saying, okay, fine, there's evolution, and that's why I have the consciousness to write this poem.
That's great. It's great that we evolved, but my own individual experience of my father's death Basically says to hell with evolution, this is too painful, right?
So here's four.
His slow fade of releasing light.
And you see here, he's back to...
He's interrupted his thoughts on spirituality with...
Evolution, but now his slow fade of releasing light.
So, my friend's father took a while to die.
And it was not good, of course, right?
Not pretty.
Slow fade of releasing light.
We're back to the soul, right?
The white of spirit. As he's releasing his light, it means the spirit is leaving his body slowly as he's dying.
And then he says, for that, I reserve the right to rail at the first commandment carved on the womb.
Right? And the womb to death, right?
Why is there a womb in a woman?
Because we die, right?
So womb and grave are two places that we get encased in that are the alpha and the omega of our existence, right?
We start bound in a womb, we end up bound in a coffin, right?
So he's saying, okay, fine, evolution, people got to die and all of that, but my own personal experience is that is awful.
This is horrible. This is so painful.
And the first commandment carved on the womb, this is the deal of life.
Who we love, we will watch die.
Who love us will watch us die.
That's the deal.
And he's saying, look, evolution, I understand, but my personal experience is that this is horrible, right?
So he says, then he goes from evolution to a sense of spirituality to just his own emotional experience.
My loss is as deep as my love.
And that is a real paradox that we all have to work with, right?
That, you know, I have people in my life that I love absolutely enormously.
And the degree to which I love them and the degree to which they love me is, of course, the degree to which It will be absolutely horrible and mournful when they die.
Now, of course, you can think of exceptions of people in a car crash or go down in a plane or whatever, but my loss is as deep as my love.
To love is to lose.
To care deeply is to condemn yourself To a prison sentence of grief.
Like, love is like something you steal from a bank and then you get caught.
You always get caught. And then you serve a prison sentence of loss and pain and grief and so on, right?
So that's something when you're younger you don't really see as much.
Now I've seen, of course, people die and all that.
And my loss is as deep as my love.
And if you don't love, which he gets to in a bit...
You don't face the same prison sentence, right?
It's like if you steal a million dollars, you get one prison sentence.
If you steal a thousand dollars, you get another.
And if you sort of sense steal from death the love of someone deeply, then death will take back that love and inflict amounts of grief that are staggering, right?
And he says, and the agony of this endless ending, right?
That's important. The endless ending.
So, of course, my friend's father took quite a while to die, right?
But the ending, because he's in the trough of grief here, it feels endless, right?
Why do people get depressed?
Because they feel the depression, partly because I think that they feel that their unhappiness will never end.
So an endless ending is the grief that we carry with us when a loved one has died.
Their death does not end within us.
It's not like they die and they pass beyond grief, but their death does not cause us to pass beyond grief.
We don't feel sad when they're dying, but feel better after they're dead, right?
So there's an endless... The agony of this endless ending, their death just bounces back and forth in your head, right?
Is a hard price to pay for such tenderness, right?
To love, right?
It is. Now then...
Having come to the core of the grief, the poet retreats back to abstractions, right?
Okay, that's too painful.
It's too agonizing. Let's just talk about the cycle of life.
So what is the cycle of life? Well, yeah, your flesh can be born again.
What can you pass on?
Well, you can pass on your hair color and texture or baldness or whatever.
Your eye color can be passed on.
But it's not just genetics here, right?
Hair, eyes, you know. Stories, right?
So you can tell someone a story, they can then repeat that story, and your story can replicate.
I mean, just think of making a movie, right?
Or whatever. Just personal stories that you tell.
Our hair, eyes, stories, watches even.
This was before Pulp Fiction.
Yes, before Pulp Fiction. So you can bequeath a watch to your child.
You can pass on your watch.
So we can pass things on.
We are circular winds of starlight, a larger pattern of falling pieces.
So there is the cycle of life and circular winds of starlight.
Just think of a whirlpool, right?
And a circular wind, not a decaying orbit wind like you'd have maybe around the event horizon of a black hole or whatever, or a decaying orbiter.
But we are circular winds of starlight.
Around life, we orbit, right?
And we can pass along our things, our stories, our watches arise to other people.
A larger pattern of falling pieces.
So yeah, falling is passing down, right?
If you pass down your watch, it's like it's falling from one generation to another.
So there is a larger pattern of falling pieces that what we do in life, who we influence, and our genetics do get replicated, particularly, of course, if we have kids.
So what does it mean, though, to pass along your hair, your eyes, your stories, and your property, right?
Because he's saying, okay, we're circular winds of starlight, larger pattern of falling pieces, but so little of what matters to us is bound in mere matter.
Because if you look at the hair, the eyes, and the watches, that's just matter.
It's just genetics. Story is a little bit different, but so little of what matters to us is bound in mere matter.
We are deep layers of meaning.
And it's the meaning that gets lost, right, when someone dies, the meaning of their life for themselves, what they found meaningful, and so on, all gets, right?
And what do we bury?
We bury the body, and that's relatively nothing, right?
It's relatively nothing. So our bodies are like prehistoric insects.
So the body is just a tiny, tiny fragment of our existence.
Our histories drown them in lakes of clear amber.
So you know, like, there's the, um, is it mosquitoes, and they get tree sap rolls over them, and you get these little flies in amber, little mosquitoes in amber, and then you come up with genetically improbable movies hundreds of millions of years later.
So our histories drown them in lakes.
So when you think of tree sap and the amber and the mosquito, say, or the little bug, It's just like a little thumb of goo, right?
But here, this guy's saying, I'm looking at my father in an open casket, and I'm looking at this head and this makeup, but his body is nothing.
Compared to the meaning of his life and his existence and all the houses that he built, the children that he had, our histories drown them in lakes of clear amber.
In other words, the bodies are tiny and the meaning, the history, what matters to people, is much, much larger than the body.
It's a lake, not just a little thumb of lacquer, right?
So then he's saying, at death, the lake, the amber, the deepest lacquer of our visible souls.
Right? So visible souls is just the body, right?
But the soul itself, the meaning and purpose and morality and integrity and all of the abstractions that give life purpose and power, the body stays.
But all of the history and all of the memory and all of the meaning dries, vanishes.
Right? Ashes in a whirlwind of blind renewal.
So again, the blind renewal is just people got to die, new people get born, evolution, nature, Darwinianism, and so on, right?
So the deepest lacquer of invisible souls dries, vanishes, ashes in a whirlwind of blind renewal, back to the ashes from earlier, right?
And of course, ashes is heat, right?
We're back to the sun, right?
So the sun, which is death, dries the lacquer, the lacquer vanishes, and all that's left is ash, right?
And the body, he says, the least important footnote of our histories.
That's important, right?
When you die, people will come and see your body, but your body is...
Not much compared to who you are.
I mean, think of the greatest singer that you love or whoever it is.
It's really powerful and really important.
Well, that person's body is kind of like everyone else's body, right?
It weighs 150 to 250 pounds on average or whatever, right?
And it's got two eyes and teeth.
But the power of, say, the singer or whoever it is that has produced great deep depth and meaning and power in your life, it's just another body.
When you just get turned into a body, all of the musicality, the singing voice, the performance power, whatever, it's all gone.
And the body is what remains, and that is recycled.
So the least important aspect Of us is what survives death.
I mean, in its physical form.
Not life, but the body. The body survives death.
And what happens to all the memories?
What happens to all the meaning? What happens to all the love?
What happens to, right?
It all vanishes and we're just left with this shell.
And he says, and the earth which could wake and wonder at our memories dumbly accepts our shells and calls itself content.
So the earth will take your body and recycle it, right?
I mean, it will be food for plants.
It will be food for worms. It will just be part of the biomatter.
Maybe at some point down the road, you'll turn into oil.
I don't know. But the earth could wake and wonder at our memories, dumbly accepts our shells and calls it self-content.
Yeah, that's good enough. I don't need any of those memories because worms can't eat memories.
I don't need any of that meaning because plants can't dig their roots into meaning and extract food.
And so I'm fine with the body.
And this is the frustration.
Of death being the sun and the earth being mere blind Darwinian nature.
Because the earth, like this guy standing at his father's funeral is saying I've lost everything that mattered about my dad.
And the earth is like I don't care.
Just give me the body and I'll recycle it.
And that's That's, again, this dichotomy between what it is to be a human being and what it is for everything else in the universe is really, really quite something.
Okay, so then he's really frustrated at the sort of empty Darwinian universe.
And then there's a big fundamental question.
And those of us who've gone through this kind of loss, I mean, you know.
And if you haven't, like, I'm sorry to be annoying.
But you can probably get a sense of it, right?
So, now he says, now we know, really know of this loss.
Tell me, why do we love?
Right? Because on the other side, it's like buyer's remorse, right?
You buy something and then on the other side, you feel like, ah, it wasn't worth it.
Now, when you've loved someone deeply for a long time, And then you're standing over their grave and you know you'll never see them again, never have a conversation with them again.
And all of the accumulated detritus has vanished of their history, their thoughts.
And he tries to grab them, you know, like when you're a little kid and you try and grab sparks flying up from a fire.
He tries to grab at these little memories, but he has to kind of make them up and there's a kind of despair in all of that.
And there is, of course, some regret here at not having had enough conversations with his father to know a lot of his, the meaning and so on, right?
Which is why it's really, really important to talk to people you love and make sure you know what's going on in their heads.
So now he's on the buyer's remorse side of love, which is, man, I love my dad.
And now I feel such agony at his death that the love doesn't seem worth it in a way.
Because he's saying, right, that the...
It's like a cannon firing up into the sky.
The higher the cannonball goes, the more solid the impact, the more harsh the impact is, right?
And so now he gets the loss.
And the question is, why on earth would you love if it's this bloody painful when someone dies?
And then he says, this is really interesting to me, I hope it is to you.
He says, there is a kind of immortality in detachment.
That's true, and I've known people like this.
They just won't get involved.
They just stay at a deep orbit distance from the world, from society, from love.
And they don't get much of a sense of time passing.
It's not real immortality.
That's why I say a kind of immortality.
There is a kind of immortality in detachment.
If you don't love, you won't lose.
If you don't have children, you don't experience aging as the same kind of thing.
So, if you don't love someone and go through the agony of that person dying, you never really feel what death is like.
And that's why he says, never feeling a death before our own.
Right now, he's saying our own like it would be really nice to be detached.
Now, of course, he recognizes it's too late for that because he already has loved and already is going through the loss, right?
So he says, never feeling a death before our own, it could remain a surprise, an accident.
Like you never think about it ahead of time.
You've not gone through the funeral.
You've not gone through all of this.
And I remember when a friend of mine's mother died.
He never dated. He never married.
He never had kids. And his mother died and he just completely fell apart.
Because he was, I mean, overly attached.
But if you just detach, like you move away completely, you go teach English and Korea or whatever, right?
And you just kind of cruise through your life, then...
Nobody vanishes around you, right?
Like at the beginning, the father who leans over you.
I mean, you'll know that he died.
Maybe he'll feel fine. But it's not the same as really being involved, going through the death process, the planning, the funeral, all of the eulogy.
So he's saying, look, if you're detached from people and you don't love, then you won't go through this kind of horrible grief that happens when they die.
So never feeling a death bone could just be a surprise.
Oh, I'm sick, I'm going to die.
But it's later on in life, right?
Most people will live to their 70s or 80s, right?
A careening bus with a black cloak at the wheel.
I love that. I just, I love that line.
Which means like, you know, the old thing, oh, it could get hit by a bus tomorrow, right?
It was random, right?
When you're deeply invested in intergenerational love, like you love your mother, you love your father, grandparents, and so on, death is not something down the road.
Death is around you, right?
I mean, you can go overly into it, which I get into later, like Blanche Dubois face up with death and all of that.
So death could just kind of hit you sideways.
You don't really get it if you're detached, right?
And he says, or knowing the wild grief of this falling, would our love twist with the terror of impending loss?
And that's understandable, right?
If you love someone desperately, I shouldn't say desperately.
It's not really the right way to put it.
Love, for me, is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous.
But if you love someone deeply, usually they get sick.
Usually something happens that you know, right?
So once you go through...
Really deep grief at someone dying Would you recoil from loving that deeply in the future?
I think you would. I mean, I know that you would, but you kinda gotta overcome that, right?
Because love is the great prize of life.
So would our love twist with the terror of impending loss?
Would you recoil from getting close to people because you know they're gonna die once you've gone through it already, right?
So why do we love, right?
Would such natural flowers wilt in the heat of our possessive greenhouses?
So the greenhouses, the flowers in the greenhouses are sealed off from nature, right?
This is the detachment that's a couple of lines above.
Possessive greenhouses means I want to hold on to my happiness, and I know how sad I'm going to be if someone dies, so I'm going to just hold on to my happiness.
I'm going to seal myself off the natural flower of love and attachment, right?
What do flowers do? They grow towards the light.
And they dig down into the ground for their sustenance.
And I've already got like the light is death and the earth is our bodies and nature and so on.
So you've got to be rooted in the ground. You're going to grow towards the light.
So natural flowers, natural flowers should be out there in the sunlight with the hummingbirds and the bees and so on.
But let's say we seal off our heart.
And our mind and our being from attachment, from community, we isolate ourselves because we're afraid, so terrified of loss, or we want the immortality that comes, the sort of pretend immortality.
Well, our natural flowers we place into a possessive greenhouse.
We just want to hold on to our happiness and we won't sacrifice it for the risk of loving and losing, which is inevitable.
So we take these natural flowers, where we're supposed to grow towards death while rooted in nature, They wilt in the heat of our possessive greenhouses.
We're no longer subject to the natural forces of life and death, and that is the immortality of detachment.
And that's the temptation, right?
So he's tempted with, I'm just going to give up on love.
I'm just going to... No more.
Bayer's remorse has kicked in.
I don't want to love anymore, right? So he's tempted.
But then he says, so would I love twist with the terror of impending loss?
Should I just not get attached anymore?
But would such natural flowers wilt in the heat of our possessive greenhouses?
That's a big question, right?
So then he says, okay, I'm not going to detach myself because the natural flowers of my heart will wilt if I sealed it off in a greenhouse from society.
So then he says, okay, so I can't just pretend death doesn't exist.
So what am I going to do with death now that I'm in the middle of this grief?
He says, life needs a balance.
And this is true. No death.
Now, this doesn't mean literal immortality.
This means no death in the mind.
No death would be no planning, no growth, and that's kind of true.
Like, I mean, the people who just kind of cruise along like they're not aging...
It's not good, right? Like I've talked about this before, like the women who just like, oh, I'm going to be good looking forever.
Or the guys who like, oh, I'll start my career soon or whatever it is, right?
I was going to spend 10 years traveling or whatever.
So if you never think of mortality, if you never think of death, there's no planning, there's no growth.
And that's very true.
But death too close.
When you're staring right into that black cloak of death, then there's no discipline, no sacrifice.
So death too close is like just hedonism.
Now, death too close can be you're really, really thinking about death, or it can be, well, we're all just material beings.
We're going to die, go on the ground, and so on.
That strips the meaning and happiness of our life.
No discipline, no sacrifice.
And I say, for who does taxes in darkened hospitals, right?
So darkened hospital is, it's the middle of the night in some, say, cancer ward.
It's a darkened hospital. The lights are dim.
People aren't sitting there saying, well, I better do next year's taxes because they're just thinking about dying.
And so if death is too close, now, of course, if you're in a cancer ward and you're terminal, death is close, right?
So what do you need discipline or sacrifice for, right?
Like nobody has their last meal.
They don't sit there and say, well, I hope this doesn't make my butt look fat or whatever, right?
I hope this isn't bad for my cholesterol because you're like 20 minutes from dying, right?
If you've got the death penalty.
So he says, to live right, we must remember death at a distance.
Now, that's important. I think that's very true.
So you've got to remember that you're going to die, but you don't want to just stare into that skull, Hamlet style, right?
Neither embrace nor evict it.
And this goes back to the book Denial of Death, which is a good book.
So you don't embrace death.
You don't hug the skeleton and have no discipline, no sacrifice, no planning, or anything like that.
And this is some of the antinatalist stuff, like they don't have kids, life is punishment.
That's an embrace of death.
But you don't want to evict death completely and pretend you're going to live forever.
In the face of death, because that's what he's facing death, he's at his father's funeral, right?
In the face of death, neither a monk nor a wanton be.
I'm sorry for that little Shakespearean turn of phrase there.
So when it comes to pleasure, when it comes to planning, when it comes to interacting with the world, a monk is someone who seals himself off In a monastery, of course, isolates himself from the world, and that's the possessive greenhouse where the natural flowers wilt.
Or a wanton is someone who just goes out and indulges in all forms of sensual pleasure, and the monk is isolation.
The wanton is no discipline, no sacrifice, right?
So neither a monk nor a wanton be in the face of death.
Don't seal yourself off.
Don't go out and just surrender yourself to hedonism because you're going to die.
Death is the sibling of life.
Death is the sibling of life.
So, he's bringing death down from the heavens, right?
So, at the beginning, the father eclipses death, right?
Because the father stands between you and your mortality, intellectually or emotionally.
So, at the beginning, death is like way up there in the sky.
It's the sun. It's and so on, right?
And now he's saying, no, it's not.
That's a child's perspective.
The death is really, really far away.
And of course, when you were a kid, you don't really think about it.
At least I don't think you do.
Most kids don't. Again, unless you have something in your face about it.
Death. So he's saying, look, it's not some big abstraction.
It's not a cloak on a bus.
It's not a son on the far side of my father's form.
No, no, no. Death is right here.
Death is the sibling of life.
It's with you.
Not stalking. The universe isn't trying to get you.
It's not stalking you. But approaching.
But approaching. And he's saying, look, it's approaching.
It's not here, which would be too close to death.
It's not infinitely far, which would be too distant from death.
It's approaching. And it is.
So then he tries to figure out why would he have this perspective?
What is his ambivalence around death?
So if death is a sibling of life, you grew up with a sibling, so he goes back to his childhood.
The seasons lie to us.
Now, of course they don't, right?
But when you're a kid, you think of death as going to sleep.
Right? And this is what my daughter said when she was younger.
You know, well, people die, but then they just wake up again, right?
You think of going to sleep, and there's this cycle in life, right?
There's day and night, and day and night, and day and night, and then there's, of course, spring, summer, winter, fall.
No, spring, summer, fall, winter, right?
And you go through this cycle all the time, right?
Sleeping, waking, eating, crapping, ingesting, non-ingesting, and You think that it's like a cycle.
Now, from a nature standpoint, it kind of is, but from an individual standpoint, it sure as hell isn't, right?
So, this perspective from life as a cycle, because you said earlier, let's go back up here.
He said, there is a cycle of life, perhaps.
Perhaps there is a cycle of life.
Our flesh may be born again and so on, right?
But he can't complete that thought.
And then he gets down here and he knows why.
It's not a cycle. Or it's a cycle of life in an abstract sense, like in a Darwinian sense, but from an individual sense, you're not a cycle.
You know, the generations get reborn.
You don't, right? So the seasons lie to us.
It is understandable.
As children, we gaze up the flowing rungs of generations.
New squalling, we imagine.
So, new squalling is almost like you're a baby, right?
We imagine no ladder, but a wheel.
Life runs. The generations roll around.
And we feel like great-grandparents sprung new bundles from an unwintered twig.
Now, new bundle, of course, is the baby, the baby burrito.
Sometimes they call it when you bundle up a baby.
An unwintered twig, it's like the bud comes out, but there was never...
It's just all part of a cycle.
The bud went to sleep in the winter on the tree, like on the branch.
And then when it's unwintered, when it's no longer winter, then the bud comes forward.
And it's the bud that was there the year before.
And there's a cycle, right?
We look at nature. We look at night and day.
We look at the seasons and so on.
And it feels like a cycle.
The generation is rolling around, right?
We imagine, right?
And, of course, the flowing rungs, water flows one way, right?
So it's like you step down the ladder, so to speak, of generating and step back up again, right?
It's just a one-time thing. It's not a circle.
It's a straight line. The seasons lie to us.
The seasons return because they do not live.
Our seasons are a concept, right?
Snow comes back because snow never died.
Snow doesn't live. It doesn't die, right?
There is no spring to our individual winters, right?
So you go through winter and And from a generational standpoint, of course, you think of the year, the cycle of life, think of your own individual life as having sort of four parts, right?
So spring is your childhood, and then summer is your middle age, and autumn is your old age, and winter is your death, right?
And, of course, in nature, it just starts all over again, but not for you.
There is no spring to our individual winters.
As snow falls on our heads, right, your hair turns white, right?
As snow falls on our heads, so we fall from life to the endless ice of history.
You're frozen, right?
Like the videos, right?
Like the videos on your phone of someone who's dead.
It's frozen. It's nothing new. Nothing can come again.
It's just an echo, as I talked about earlier in the poem, to the endless ice of history.
And now he's thinking, of course, Of his father falling from life to the endless ice of history.
History, of course, is that we exist in other people's memories.
But what does that mean to exist in someone else's memory?
What does it mean that he remembers his father?
That's what he thinks of next.
Okay, so... From the word history, he thinks of his father's history.
And of his father's history, he says, so much is lost.
And he says, of course I remember you, but only as I saw you.
As the beach knows the footprints, but not the foot.
Right? So we have impressions on other people.
Like you put your hand in the snow.
We have impressions on other people.
But we don't know the thing itself.
This is a Kantian perspective, right?
The thing in and of itself.
You know me based upon what I've recorded and what I've published, and obviously you know a fair amount about me, but that's not the same as being me or having all of the thoughts and so on that happen, because, you know, there's tons of things I do during the day that I don't broadcast.
It may not feel like a lot, but trust me, it is.
So people leave an impression upon us, but we don't know the person itself.
And he's saying, so okay, I had lots of conversations with my dad.
I remember those conversations. They had an impact on me.
But all the things that my dad never said are now gone.
Never to be recovered. Never to be retrieved.
Never to be figured out.
A thousand books a day could not contain your thoughts.
Now that's kind of true, right?
I mean, we're all thinking all the time, all just bouncing around like pinballs in our head.
A thousand books a day could not contain your thoughts.
I can keep only impressions, not essentials.
I can only keep what people have shared with me or what I've seen, not who they actually are.
When my father fell, Right?
His past fell. A burning map of where and what he had built.
Now the burning map is important because we talk about the ashes and so on before.
So it's like a map of his life, a map of his history, a map of everything he did just burns up when he dies.
The constructed children of his calloused fingers, that's because he was a home builder, a house builder, as important perhaps as those of his loins.
So what we build in the world is important, and it can be as important as our children.
This guy might have built 5,000 homes, 5,000 families in shelter and kept the price of housing down.
If he hadn't built them, houses would be more expensive probably.
So his houses stand, though the hand has fallen.
And so he's like, yeah, I'm glad that my dad made all these houses.
That's great. And that's an effect of his life.
It's an empirical measurable effect of his life.
But there's still something that's missing, and this is what he talks about.
I have lost not the memory of my father, right?
Because he can remember his father, but he's lost his father's memory.
His father's memory is gone.
And what's left is the body.
They'll bury the body, and the earth will recycle the body.
But his father's memory is gone.
I like this a little bit. Okay, this thousand-story library.
Okay, right, so thousand stories, right?
Stories like you tell stories, and stories also like stories of a building, right?
Thousand stories. This infinite vein of nightly mining.
I don't know about you, but, you know, if you wake up at night or before you go to sleep, you think about your day, you think about what's going on in your life, the good, the bad, the ugly, and all that.
This infinite vein of nightly mining.
Everything that he pondered at night, maybe when he couldn't sleep or when he was going to sleep or whatever, this infinite vein of nightly mining, how little remains.
Things his father experienced that this man doesn't know about.
Now, it's interesting. So it shows that there was some intimacy with his father, emotional intimacy, right?
Because he just has a couple of thoughts about things that he'd like to know about his father.
What his second night with my mother was like.
Now, it sounds sexual.
It doesn't mean that at all. It just means, like, what was the second date?
Or, you know, even after they got married, the first night of, you know, you get married and there's all this excitement and you're kind of tired.
But what's the second night like?
It's different than the first night, right?
So what was that? He doesn't know.
Now, he says the second night probably because he knows what the first night with his mother was like, so they talked about it, right?
He says, I don't know what the second...
And I will never know because my father's dead.
I will never know what the second...
I guess you could say, well, what did the mother experience?
But that's not the same as what the father experienced, right?
The dark flash of a bee that flew into his eye.
I actually just got that from when I was up in summer camp in my early teens.
I was hiking in the woods with some friends and we heard this incredible droning of bees and then a bee actually flew into my eye when I was running back.
And... I can't remember if I told anyone about that.
But of course, if he didn't, then maybe this happened, maybe it didn't, but he'll never know.
The transparent whirlpool of a reddened sunrise.
I just kind of like that vision, right?
He may have seen some beautiful sunrise.
Some beautiful sunrise. Maybe when he was out working, visiting a site, and he just got tired, never told anyone about it, never took a picture, but it was in his head, the whirlpool of the beautiful sunrise, and it's gone.
It will never, ever come back.
Like, you can think of a beautiful sunrise that you saw.
Maybe you told other people about it, but you can't, you know, you can't...
Even if you show them a photo, it's still not the same as you being there and experiencing it.
The groaning bones of his most exhausted day.
All of this is gone. So he doesn't even know what his father's most exhausted day was.
And it could have been, of course, that his most exhausted day as a father was the day of his death.
The last time he whispered a secret, did he know it?
Did he bid farewell to secrets?
So when we're going to die, when we're on our deathbeds, we'll call people in and we'll tell them things that maybe they need to know or maybe things that we'll ask them to keep, but just we want to unburden ourselves.
So did he know enough about his imminent death that he's like, this is the last secret I will ever tell?
And maybe it was a secret that you reveal.
And did he bid farewell to secrets?
Did he know enough about his own death that he knew he was never going to tell another secret?
He says, this, all this can never be known.
Never be known. The guy's dead.
And this is why the M. Forster, this novelist, only connect.
Connect with people. Tell them your thoughts.
Don't get distracted by screens and media and social.
I get it. It's all tempting and there's a lot of good that you can do in it, but just connect and talk to people.
This, all this can never be known.
In the endless harvest of renewal, right?
So, what do farmers do?
They plant crops, they harvest crops, and they plant crops.
Again, there's a cycle there, right?
And it is endless, right?
I mean, the cycle of evolution is endless, right?
People die, people mourn, people die.
In the endless harvest of renewal, of blind biological death and life, each stalk, right?
So you stalk of wheat or whatever, right?
Each stalk, each soul is an ecosystem, a world, a universe, blindly wiped.
And I find this incredibly fascinating.
I always have, since I was a little kid.
Everything that you think of, everything that you experience, that's like a Pink Floyd song, right?
You die and it's just gone.
It's just gone. It's just gone.
Blindly wiped. And I suppose it's one of the reasons why I like to share my thoughts, perhaps, right?
Okay, so he's like, okay, it's gone.
It's gone. And it's interesting because, of course, in writing down this poem, he's going against this blind wiping, right?
The poem itself is kind of a meta thing, right?
But the poem itself is him saying, here's everything I'm thinking about my father's death.
Here's the struggle, the tug of war, the horror, the love, the loss, the hope.
He's sharing all of his thoughts about how he can no longer access his father's thoughts.
So he's kind of fighting against death by writing the poem.
I just want to point that out. All right. So he says, for this, let us mourn what we have lost.
Okay, my father is dead.
I will never know all of the little bits of his life or even some of the big bits that he never told me.
Okay, so he's going to, I'm going to mourn.
I'm just going to mourn.
I'm not going to recoil from love.
I'm not going to create this possessive greenhouse to shield myself from the world.
I'm not just going to take refuge in Darwinian blah, blah, blah.
Yep. I'm just, let us mourn what we have lost.
Just be sad. It'll pass.
It'll pass. Let us mourn what we have lost, but also now that no father stands between us and our ending.
Let's go right back to the beginning of the poem.
Don't worry, we're not starting again. She says, the sky without my father is too bright.
There are now no gentle clouds to soften the glare of my own ending.
It's very much a metaphor or an analogy, right?
Which is soften the glare and it's all this.
And now he is looking at the thing itself, right?
It's like the old thing.
A rose is a rose is a rose.
Like a rose is not like a big red blah blah blah.
It's not like an explosion of petals.
A rose is a rose, right?
So now... We're going to mourn what we have lost, but also now that no father stands between us and our ending, right?
So this is not the sky without my father and blah, blah, blah.
This is like, okay, I get it. I get it.
I've worked through it. No dad stands between us and our ending.
Now, this, of course, again, is his personal...
His personal father, but also, if he's an atheist, and it sounds like he is because he's really fighting the spiritual, no father, no God stands between us and our ending.
Because if you believe in God, you don't end.
Your soul lives forever.
So no father stands between us and our ending.
Now that no father, and of course this is life in a post-Christian universe, life in a post-religious universe, where, what is it, 90% of millennials feel that life has no meaning?
So no No earthly or heavenly father stands between us and our ending.
If you go with the Darwinian explanation, if you go with the life and death and mere matter, then you're going to end.
You're going to fall into a hole in the ground.
They're going to throw dirt in your eye, sing songs, and head off.
And you're just food for worms.
And no father stands between us and our ending.
Dominoes now fall free to our own demise, right?
So the domino thing, right?
This, this, this.
It's kind of like the dominoes fall into each other.
It's kind of like a cycle, right?
Because new dominoes come up and then it's a circle, right?
Dominoes fall down. Dominoes come up.
There's a circle. Dominoes now fall free to our own demise.
There's no soul. There's no God.
My father is in a grave where I'm going to be shortly.
Dominoes now fall free to our own demise.
No cycle. Individual death.
And then he says, I love this bit, grief is deep glass.
So if you look at deep glass, and I always think of this phrase, through a glass darkly, how you look at the world negatively or can.
It says grief is deep glass.
So when you look into deep glass, you can see through it, but you also see your own reflection.
Right? So grief is deep glass.
You see deeply into what you're looking at, but you also see yourself in a reflection.
A window to what we have lost, right?
So I'm looking at my dad. And I can see his death.
I can see its effect on me.
It's a deep glass. I'm looking all the way through.
But it's also a mirror of what we shall lose.
Because now you know you're going to lose your life.
You're going to not live forever.
You're going to go into a hole in the ground.
And when we fall, what others will lose in us.
All of his thoughts will go into nothing when he dies, and he will go into a hole in the ground.
But he's fighting that kind of death by seeking immortality in communication.
By writing down this poem, he is seeking immortality in his effect on others.
So, I mean, there's more to say.
I just wanted to get this stuff across.
Please communicate to others.
Please write down your thoughts. Please don't distract yourself into atomic insignificance.
It's really, really important that you bind others to you with honesty and depth.
And that's, I think, what the poem is.
Not only the content, but the form of it.
I hope you like this.
I love this kind of analysis, and I hope that you find it helpful or useful.
As I've said, I've got a lot of poems, and I would love to do more of this.
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Thanks, my friends. I look forward to your feedback.
I'll talk to you soon. Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain show on philosophy.
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