Harry Houdini, RIP
At Houdini's funeral:
The St. Cecile Lodge of Masons and the Society of American Magicians formed squares in turn about the bier. Tribute was read and “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere” sung. Then a white lambskin was laid upon the bier and each Mason filed by and dropped a bit of evergreen, emblematical of the immortality of the soul.
The New York Times, 1926
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: as waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking candle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats
It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its history, and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are fully appreciated to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience, which is very rare and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing - atoms with curiosity - that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders.
Richard Feynman
Perennial Philosophy is the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being; the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the perennial philosophy may be found among the traditional lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions.
The Perennial Philosophy
Aldous Huxley
Voltaire thought he was dying in February 1778 and said: I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.
When he died on May 30, 1778, his last words were: For God's sake, let me die in peace.
When it's over, I want to say I have been a bride married to amazement; I've been a bridegroom taking the world into my arms.
When it is over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
From "When Death Comes" by Mary Oliver
An Aesop Fable:An old labourer, bent double with age and toil, was gathering sticks in a forest. At last he grew so tired and hopeless that he threw down the bundle of sticks, and cried out:
"I cannot bear this life any longer. Ah, I wish Death would only come and take me!"
As he spoke, Death, a grisly skeleton, appeared and said to him:
"What wouldst thou, Mortal? I heard thee call me."
"Please, sir," replied the woodcutter, "would you kindly help me to lift this faggot of sticks on to my shoulder?"
Moral: We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified. Art by Egon Schiele
A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.
e.e. cummings
Art by J. Charles
However smart we be, however rich and clever or loving or charitable or spiritual or impeccable, it doesn't help us at all. The real power comes in to us from the beyond. Life enters us from behind, where we are sightless, and from below, where we do not understand. And unless we yield to the beyond, and take our power and might and honor and glory from the unseen, from the unknown, we shall continue empty.
D.H. Lawrence
Otherwise known as The Fates (The Daughters of Necessity), Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos determine when life begins, when it ends and what happens in between. Some say that they are eternal and more powerful than any of the Gods.
God heard the embattled nations sing and shout:
"Gott Strafe England"- "God save the King"-
"God this" - "God that" - and "God the other thing."
"My God," said God, "I've got my work cut out."
J. C. Squire
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Rumi
Up through the chimney and out, the smoke mingled with the mist that was gathering speed, sweeping in thicker and thicker, obscuring things in parts—half a hill, then the other half. The trees turned into silhouettes, loomed forth, were submerged again. Gradually the vapor replaced everything with itself, solid objects with shadow, and nothing remained that did not seem molded from or inspired by it.
Kiran Desai
In ancient Egypt, The Opening of the Mouth Ceremony was conducted by a priest who would utter a spell and touch the mummy or sarcophagus with a ceremonial adze. This was to ensure that the mummy could breathe and speak in the afterlife.
When in the end, the day came in which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at a time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.
Isak Dinesen
Out of Africa
As a character who is dead says - regarding death - in this magical novel:
You think it's going to end all the time but it never does.
If individuals live on after death, where do they go?
Perhaps nowhere.
They're still here.
Fred M. Frohock
A few moments before the master departed this world he implored them to preserve the faith. "How to preserve it? The answer is in the word sila." After saying this he brought his palms together and enjoined upon his assistants to take good care of themselves. They left the room and returned an hour later to find that Xu Yun had quietly passed away. He was 120 years of age. When his body was cremated, the air was filled with a rare fragrance and a white smoke went up into the sky. In the ashes were found over a hundred relics of five different colors and countless small ones, which were mostly white.
"It was supposed that lost spirits were roving about everywhere in the invisible air, waiting for children to find them if they searched long and patiently enough ... [The spirit] sang its spiritual song for the child to memorize and use when calling upon the spirit guardian as an adult."
Mourning Dove/Christine Quintasket
Image by Edward S. Curtis
"Meanings are different in the other world. Indirection is the only way in which the dead can speak at all; that is, the only way we can understand what they are telling because they aren't actually embodied, say with pharynx, lips, tongue. They don't have a brain or language center. As you know, they left those accoutrements behind, dust to dust. They must rely on telepathy and mutual intention, yours and theirs. They are broadcasting ... They push letters of a sacred alphabet through blankets of radiation and infinitudes. Now and then they may displace objects on bureaus, but not many and not very far. Attend to what they push and ask yourself why. Query it as you would a symbol in a dream."
Richard Grossinger - The Bardo of Waking Life
Excerpt from Floating:
"We wear no form or figure of our own
- a wisp, a thread, a twig, a shred of smoke -
to tell us from the motions of the air."
Sarah Arvio
Visits From the Seventh
An excerpt from
Remedios Varo's Appearances and Disappearances
Roots, fronds, rays, locks of hair, flowing beards, spirals of sound: threads of death, of life, of time, the weft is woven and unwoven: the unreality that we call life, the unreality that we call death ... only the canvas is real ...
Octavio Paz
She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and O,
The difference to me!
William Wordsworth
As time starts to run out, what are the things that really matter?
Kazuo Ishiguro
"Death is not the ending of anything. I believe all of us are only energy that becomes matter. When the matter goes away, the energy still exists. You can't destroy it. It never dies. It manifests itself somewhere else. We are never alone. Even by ourselves, we are not alone. Death is just a door opening to somewhere else. Some day we'll know what that door opens to."
Willie Nelson
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work ... I want to achieve it through not not dying."
Woody Allen
Disagree? Plato said that an aging man "can no more learn much than he can run much."
... any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.
John Donne
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.
Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden
"Hell is empty and all the devils are here."
Shakespeare
According to his son, Mitchum was defiant to the end: "The night he died, he sat in his chair and there was a stubbed out Pall Mall and an empty glass that reeked of tequila. He got up during the night, knocked back a shot, smoked a cigarette, got in bed, and died in his sleep."
"Of course you don't die. Nobody dies. Death doesn't exist. You only reach a new level of vision, a new realm of consciousness, a new unknown world."
Henry Miller
The Jazz Funeral is a major celebration. The roots date back to Africa. Four centuries ago, the Dahomeans of Benin and the Yoruba of Nigeria, West Africa were laying the foundation for one of today's most novel social practices on the North American continent."
Bourbon Street Black
"There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." Thornton Wilder "Our Town"
From Emily Dickinson's eulogy:
As she passed on in life, her sensitive nature shrank from much personal contact with the world, and more and more turned to her own large wealth of individual resources for companionship.... Not disappointed with the world, not an invalid until within the past two years, not from any lack of sympathy, not because she was insufficient for any mental work or social career - her endowments being so exceptional - but the "mesh of her soul"... was too rare, and the sacred quiet of her own home proved the fit atmosphere for her worth and work....
Memento Mori means "remember that we all die." If we must confront this, we must do it with the help of Muriel Spark:
The novel tells the story of a group of older adults, all of whose long lives have intersected, and who are now all receiving phone calls from a mysterious, anonymous caller telling them to remember that they must die. In their varied reactions to this caller, as well as their relationships to one another, we see a wide variety of human temperaments and weaknesses thrown into relief as they confront approaching death.
It is funny. And a masterpiece.
Harry Houdini, RIP.jpg)
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
The Second Coming
It is a great adventure to contemplate the universe, beyond man, to contemplate what it would be like without man, as it was in a great part of its history, and as it is in a great majority of places. When this objective view is finally attained, and the mystery and majesty of matter are fully appreciated to then turn the objective eye back on man viewed as matter, to view life as part of this universal mystery of greatest depth, is to sense an experience, which is very rare and very exciting. It usually ends in laughter and a delight in the futility of trying to understand what this atom in the universe is, this thing - atoms with curiosity - that looks at itself and wonders why it wonders. 
Perennial Philosophy is the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being; the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the perennial philosophy may be found among the traditional lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions.
Voltaire thought he was dying in February 1778 and said: I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.
When it's over, I want to say I have been a bride married to amazement; I've been a bridegroom taking the world into my arms.
An Aesop Fable:
Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand. I think, I too, have known autumn too long.
However smart we be, however rich and clever or loving or charitable or spiritual or impeccable, it doesn't help us at all. The real power comes in to us from the beyond. Life enters us from behind, where we are sightless, and from below, where we do not understand. And unless we yield to the beyond, and take our power and might and honor and glory from the unseen, from the unknown, we shall continue empty.
God heard the embattled nations sing and shout:
Up through the chimney and out, the smoke mingled with the mist that was gathering speed, sweeping in thicker and thicker, obscuring things in parts—half a hill, then the other half. The trees turned into silhouettes, loomed forth, were submerged again. Gradually the vapor replaced everything with itself, solid objects with shadow, and nothing remained that did not seem molded from or inspired by it.
In ancient Egypt, The Opening of the Mouth Ceremony was conducted by a priest who would utter a spell and touch the mummy or sarcophagus with a ceremonial adze. This was to ensure that the mummy could breathe and speak in the afterlife.
The worst of all fears is the fear of living.
When in the end, the day came in which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at a time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.
If individuals live on after death, where do they go?
Excerpt:
