Live; live; live

by Jonathan Buckley

  There was no secret, Lucas told me, as he had been able to reassure Kathleen, when she turned to him. Callum’s death was accidental, he promised her. What else he had learned posthumously from Callum, he could not reveal to me.

  •

  When depressed, Callum would often take himself off to a quiet place on the shore, to look and to listen, Kathleen told Lucas. The lapping of the sea was a lesson in mortality. Sometimes the corrective would work, and his turmoil would recede. The sound secured him, as the contemplation of a skull might make a penitent secure. And sometimes it was more than a corrective: it brought elation. It made him rejoice, Kathleen said. ‘Live,’ it urged, with each whisper of the water. ‘Live; live; live.’ Leaning forward, Lucas repeated the words with too much fervour, to make sure that the lesson was not lost on me. This was his mission: not to help people to keep hold of the past, but to help them to live.

  •

  Lucas cited the case of Swedenborg – the great thinker, Emanuel Swedenborg. He was a hero to Lucas. ‘A genius. A man of the highest integrity,’ he would say, as though providing a personal reference. Swedenborg was brilliant, certainly. In 1724 he was offered a professorship in mathematics, but he declined the post, because he was not truly a mathematician – metallurgy, geometry and chemistry were his subjects. But he had many subjects. His mind was boundless. After spurning the professorship, he turned his attention to physiology and anatomy. His studies of the nervous system and the brain were groundbreaking, Lucas informed me. The concept of the neuron was first formulated by Swedenborg. A genuine scientist, then. A mighty intelligence. In later life, however, he swerved towards the spiritual, the mystical, the theological. Psychic powers were manifested. One night in July, 1759, at dinner in Gothenburg, Swedenborg had a vision of a fire, in Stockholm, the city in which he lived, the city in which he had been born. Stockholm is about five hundred kilometres from Gothenburg, but Swedenborg saw that Stockholm was in flames. And a fire had indeed broken out, while Swedenborg was having his vision. A few hours later, in his mind, he saw it stop, very close to his house. It took several days for reports of the fire to reach Gothenburg. It turned out that Swedenborg had described the conflagration with uncanny accuracy. And once, asked by Queen Louisa Ulrika to tell her what he knew of her brother, Prince Augustus William of Prussia, who had recently died, Swedenborg whispered to the Queen a secret shared only by the Queen herself and her sibling. This proof of Swedenborg’s clairvoyance ‘caused the blood to drain from her face,’ whispered Lucas, as if he had himself witnessed the Queen’s astonishment.

  •

  The fortitude of Kathleen, in the years following her husband’s death, was admired by all who knew her, and quite rightly, said Lucas. One could not imagine a woman less inclined to self-pity. The day after the funeral she returned to her workshop. She worked long hours, as before. She talked about Callum to anyone who wanted to talk about him, but she seemed to have no need of commiseration. She had always been a somewhat taciturn character, and that did not change. To those who did not know her, she would have presented no symptoms of bereavement. The physique seemed to emanate both outer strength and inner. The crop of grey hair was helmet-like. For some, perhaps, she appeared a little too resilient, too self-sufficient, suggested Lucas. It was as if one’s sympathy were being rebuffed in advance. But what people were seeing, or creating, was an inaccurate image. (A recurrent motif in his conversation; Lucas too had often been mis-seen.) Kathleen was more fragile than she appeared to be; of an evening, with Lucas alone for company, she talked and talked. She was haunted, he said. For more than thirty years Callum had been her companion; more than ten thousand days. And of all those days, just one of them now occupied the foreground of her memory. A single hour of that day stood like an insuperable gate in her mind – the hour of his disappearance. Beyond that gate lay all that could be remembered of their life together. There was much that could be remembered, but in order to see it she had to open that gate, and the door was so heavy that she was unable to push it aside. This, it seems, is what Lucas enabled her to do. The death of Callum, he proved to her, had been a mishap. ‘We brought that door down,’ he told me.

  •

  The posthumous entity undergoes a process of disintegration, Lucas explained. Freed from the labour of maintaining a coherent self, a labour that is necessary in order to live in the terrestrial world, it becomes what one might imagine as a nebula, in the universe of spirits. Its individuality, ultimately, is surrendered. For us, the bereft, the departed person also becomes a nebula, a cloud of memories. ‘The dead begin to evaporate from the earth immediately,’ said Lucas. ‘But I can prolong the process. I can delay the inevitable,’ he said. ‘I keep them in view for a while longer, but that’s all,’ he said, as if that explained anything.

  •

  A day after the crash, in the small hours of the night, the teenage Lucas had come ‘as close to death as it is possible to get without dying,’ he told me. A nurse was talking to him, and suddenly it was as if his mind had withdrawn into a place that was impossible. His body had become a huge thing, and he was occupying a small part of it. It was hard to describe the experience. It was like being in a deep cave within a mountain; that was the best image he could think of. The nurse was at the mouth of the cave, peering into the darkness in which he was lying, and she was speaking a language that he could not understand. Some of the words were familiar, but the more she spoke the fewer words he recognised. He was sinking away from the world of language, and the nurse was sinking back into the air, falling away from him, very slowly. ‘I am dying,’ he heard. No thinking produced the phrase. ‘It simply arose,’ said Lucas. There was no fear in it. ‘So this is dying,’ he said to himself, as though arriving in a great city, where a new life would begin. His blood pressure had plummeted; his oxygen levels too. Nurses were at work on his body; a doctor arrived, and the word ‘critical’ was spoken. Lucas heard this word and understood it. He saw the doctor, but not with the eyes of his body. The Lucas who was observing the doctor did not have a body; this Lucas was a consciousness that occupied no definable location within the room but had an awareness – a precise awareness – of what was being done to the body that had hitherto been its residence. He saw his injured body; he saw the ruined leg, and all the other injuries, with nothing more than curiosity, as if it were an exhibit in a medical museum; he saw everyone who was in the room, and he heard what they were saying, although ‘heard’ was only an approximation of the sense that he had now acquired, said Lucas. More than that: he heard words that were being thought but not uttered. It was as though he were hearing half a dozen radios simultaneously, each tuned to a different station, but what he heard was not a cacophony – every voice was absolutely clear.

  For some time his consciousness observed what was happening; there was no sense that time was passing, however; he was suspended in a perpetual moment, in a condition of absolute contentment; it was like the non-time of a dream. As the people attended to his body, his consciousness moved away, like a vapour drawn by a current of the air. It entered other rooms, seeing everything, hearing everything. Then, as if pulled into a slow and gentle whirlwind, it fell back into the body of Lucas. His consciousness descended on a slide of light, he said. He was borne back on ‘a great wave of love’ for all the people who had striven to rescue the body. When he awoke, the first person he saw was a doctor who had not been at his bedside when the crisis had begun. His eyes had never seen her before, but he knew her name. He knew everybody’s name and exactly what they had done and said in the preceding hour. As if revisiting a scene in a film that he had watched that very afternoon, he gave an account of what had happened when he was on the brink of death. This was uncanny, but there might have been an explanation that would satisfy the sceptical, Lucas conceded. Patients have, after all, endured operations in a state of awareness that the anaesthetics should have made impossible. Though apparently unconscious, he might have been able to see a
nd hear. He might have guessed correctly which of the nurses had thought he would not pull through. As for the sensation of leaving the body – a benign flood of endorphins might account for it. Perhaps we are all ushered out of life in a festival of hallucinations. But how could hallucination explain the fact that Lucas could describe, in detail, the disposition of the adjoining room? What explanation could there be for his knowing what precious little item had been put into the hand of the patient in that room by his wife? How could he have known her name?

  This, said Lucas, was the day on which it was shown to him that we do not die with the death of the flesh.

  •

  ‘Science tells us’ – wrote Wernher von Braun, creator of the V-2 ballistic missile, later of the Saturn V – ‘that nothing in nature, not even the tiniest particle, can disappear without a trace. Think about that for a moment.’ His conclusion: ‘everything science has taught me – and continues to teach me – strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.’ Death was of course something that SS-Sturmbannführer von Braun knew a great deal about.

  •

  An example of Lucas’s generosity must be remembered: the gift of the bowl, on my birthday. It is an object of much more than pecuniary value, but the pecuniary value is not trivial. Kathleen, deceased one year previously, had been ‘impressed, and touched’ by my appreciation of what the bowl signified, when she first showed it to me, said Lucas; a less ‘receptive’ boy would not have seen past its misshapenness. ‘She wants you to have it,’ he said. I remember this – the present tense was used, pointedly. Facing me, Lucas held out the bowl with straightened arms. He spoke as the ambassador of the deceased creator. Her teachers had taught her that the spirit of the maker – the kami – persists in the objects that are fashioned by the maker’s hand; the spirit of Kathleen was in the substance of the bowl. From the window seat, in sunlight, Erin observed the presentation. Evidently he needed her to be present, to witness what he was doing. Does this reduce its generosity?

  •

  The tips of my thumbs meet on the nearside of the bowl, and the tips of the middle fingers come together on the other side. This is how Lucas held the bowl to transfer it to my ownership, as Kathleen had held it, showing me how the span of the hand was the measure that had been employed. This was the measure that was always employed, she told me. Things were understood differently in Japan, she said, and I considered the bowl, imitating the concentration of her gaze. It was an ugly object, one might think. Its skin was like a toad’s back. The warts were clots of milky glaze; there were runnels of the stuff, like ooze, and towards the base it was streaked with red, as though it had been lifted out of blood. Other parts were raw, the tone of soil. The rim was uneven, and the walls were of irregular thickness. Kathleen passed it into my hands, with care, entrusting a treasure. I looked down on the imperfect circle of the rim; the bowl lay in the imperfect bowl of my hands. A great satisfaction came from the weight of it, the curvature, the surface. I knew not to grasp it, but to let it sit, like something that breathed.

  The colours of the bowl were colours one might see in a river bank, Kathleen proposed. The white might be melting snow; the red a leakage of iron from the earth. Mud, to us, is a category of dirt; the crudest of materials; not quite a solid, not quite a liquid, it has no beauty and no worth; it has no place in art. But in Japan she had come to understand that there is no validity to our categories of ‘the beautiful’ and ‘the ugly’. In nature, there is no such distinction. ‘In nature there is only nature,’ she said. I was fourteen years old; I received Kathleen’s words as wisdom. What I was holding was an image of nature, an image transmitted by the maker of the bowl – transmitted, not invented. Its blemishes were not blemishes: they signified decay, the never-ending breaking down of everything that surrounds us, and of ourselves. The bowl was a celebration of things in decay. And she talked about the thrill of the moment at which she discovered what had happened in the kiln – the appearance of the bowl was to a large extent accidental, Kathleen explained. There was no way to predict what the ‘whims of the ash’ would do to the glaze. It was beyond her control. She had made the bowl quickly, ‘without thinking’, and then she had surrendered it to the kiln, to let the fire do its work. With her thumbs she gouged at the air, at an imaginary piece of clay, pressing a clod rapidly into shape.

  •

  Then there was the difficulty of understanding the role of Lucas. He was there while Kathleen talked to me about the bowl – or rather, he passed through the room. This I remember: she told me a story that was to be taken as a parable, about a master of the tea ceremony, making ready to receive his guests. Everything inside the tea-room was in its rightful place, and the floor had been polished so that it gleamed like glass. The garden around the tea-room had also been prepared: the ground had been raked over and over again; the stepping stones had been scrubbed. It was autumn, and the leaves of the maple tree were ablaze. The master cast his gaze over the tea-room and the garden. The setting was immaculate. So then he took hold of the trunk of the maple and shook it, dislodging several leaves, which he left where they fell. ‘The imperfection is what makes it perfect,’ Kathleen instructed. The conversation bewildered me, I am sure. I was being taken into the confidence of an artist and was being given a lesson by her, but I had no idea what I was to do with this lesson. Lucas passed behind me at the conclusion of the tale of the maple leaves, and there was an exchange of glances between himself and Kathleen, whose glance suggested that I was being approved, that I was being taken into their company in some way. And there was something else that I saw in Kathleen’s glance – a teasing quality. The relationship was strange. To Kathleen, Lucas was the son whom she and Callum had never had, Erin would later suggest. Yet the look that passed across me, as I held the bowl that Kathleen had made, was not the look of a mother. Perhaps what I told myself was that she was an artist, and that artists do not think or talk as we do; it is in their nature to be miscomprehended.

  She was an artist of a grandmotherly age, yet she insisted on being addressed by her first name, like a friend. But she had been our neighbour for years, and not until Lucas became her companion did I get to see inside the house. When I was invited, on my own, the invitation came from Lucas, as if the house were now as much his as Kathleen’s. Was I invited in order that she might have some other person to engage her, in compensation for the loss of her husband? Lucas had spoken to me, on the street, several times. Perhaps he had reported that I might be of interest to her now. Perhaps as a younger child I had been of no interest.

  •

  The toad-bowl glows on my desk, on its lamp-lit stage. At the base, there are three small black marks: the prints of two fingers and a thumb, left there when she held the bowl upside down to dip it into the glaze. Holding it, I see something of the moist lime-coloured light at the windows, and the brown-red tones of the Anatolian rug, at which I stared, listening to Kathleen.

  •

  In his foreword to the autobiography of the medium Ena Twigg, the Right Reverend Mervyn Stockwood, Lord Bishop of Southwark Cathedral, writes: ‘If we were to take psychic studies seriously, we would learn to appreciate that our experience in this world is not the consummation; instead we live now sub specie aeternitatis. There are other worlds and dimensions, and this should be taught in our schools as part of our general education.’ Distraught at the sudden death of her daughter Sally at the age of twenty-four, the novelist Rosamond Lehmann turned to Ena Twigg, who was able to console her client with the news that Sally was in heaven, and had been befriended by Saint Francis of Assisi. Having become aware of Sally’s musical talents, the saint had assigned her the task of teaching unborn birds to sing. Eighteen months after her daughter’s death, Lehmann wrote: ‘often I have more peace of heart and soul than ever before in my life – in spite of all the grief.’

  •

  I remember the afternoon when Kathleen talked about the game of g
o. The board was doused with sunlight in the bay window. The amber gleam of the wood was remarkable, and I remarked on it. Kathleen’s hands glided over the surface, a steady inch above, as if the substance were a liquid that must not be disturbed. Had she been able to afford it, she would have bought a board made from a single piece of Hyuga kaya; this was a composite of three. ‘But delicious, don’t you think?’ she said. This would have been some time after the day of the bowl; I had been approved. ‘Inhale,’ she commanded. A sweet and subtle fragrance arose – this was one of the special qualities of Hyuga kaya; of greater importance were the durability and the fineness of the grain, which ran from player to player. The direction of the grain was significant, as was the delicacy of the sound made by the stones on this exquisite wood. The wooden bowls of lens-shaped stones were then produced: the black made from nachiguro slate, the white cut from clam shells; they had cost even more than the board. Kathleen displayed a single white stone on the palm of her hand; it was yuki grade, snow grade, the best, and she held it up so that I could take note of the narrow straight veins. She placed it on the board, and smiled at me, and at the soft click of the little stone against the wood.