I happened to pick up my copy of Death at Intervals by José Saramago this morning (opening words: ‘The following day, no one died, this fact, being absolutely contrary to life’s rules… (etc)’). I was also reminded that the front-piece of the book quotes Ludwig Wittgenstein; If, for example, you were to think more deeply about death, it would be truly strange if, in so doing, you did not encounter new images, new linguistic fields.
Harry Kratchnikov has been away on a mission the last few days. Suspending time. In mid-air. There is the figure of a man falling towards the earth – except that the present tense has of course also been withheld – and accelerating as he falls in the landscape, not hanging.
“Landscape”, meaning like in the painting ‘Landscape of the Fall of Icarus‘, although they now say that the work is by an unknown artist – Circle of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, they say – and thereby also suspending the lines of Auden’s famous poem:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters…
Except that the motion has now been placed in the past tense by the poet’s lament: the landscape was the falling man’s death. It was sunrise. It was over the wine dark sea. It was Mediterranean. Then it was: he had not meant to go there, but, flying too close to the sun, he had, while the other man (it was not his father) flew on. Only it was not heroic and distant according to The Old Masters, the death was everyday accidental and close. People were hurt by it. Imminent and contingent, the body of the man was not disappearing into the water besides the merchant ship sailing by with only the legs remaining visible after the splash, he was suspended in mid-air. Above them.
Dio and Trixie were walking along the beach hand in hand. The temporary absence of Harry Kratchnikov had changed the way they were behaving, or they said that they thought it had. Harry’s absence they told each other had taken away the pressure of time. They were as if on holiday. Walking hand in hand, pretending to be lovers. Which they were in truth, only in a different sense from the young images of themselves walking along the beach in shorts and short-sleeve shirts, and bare feet and toes digging into the already warm sand. Dark glasses. Not saying anything of consequence to each other. Not even thinking of sex for a time. They passed by.
There was no forsaken cry.
In plain and everyday language through the medium of the story, Death at Intervals, how well the writer Saramago did his thinking more deeply.