The tables are empty, the chairs are waiting but how are we to banish death from the world? We don’t quite believe in an immortal spirit any longer – well, some of us do, but many of us have signed up to unrelieved materialism with a dash of atheistic Tabasco. So the task might be seen as either using white hot science to push death ever further into the future, understanding and countering the mechanisms of ageing, staying hopeful.
“We must never let it happen again.” This a near constant refrain these days. If only we can perfect the system so that the possibility of something going wrong is reduced to almost nothing. No chance! We’ve got all the variables covered.
Jacqueline Rose wrote: ‘in the words of Walter Benjamin, the storyteller used to ‘borrow his authority from death’ (there used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died’). But in the course of modern times, dying has been pushed more and more out of the perceptual world of the living.’ (On Not Being Able to Sleep)
Beckett’s Endgame occupies a boundary space. Four characters, two of whom might be dead, or are likely to be dead very soon, and of the other two, one, the father Hamm, appears to be heading in the same direction and the other Clov, cannot leave the job he has of caring for his father and presumably trying his hand at having a life. Get a life, as we say these days.
So much death. So much 20th century death and Beckett has a stab at describing the, well, I want to call it spiritual, the spiritual place we were in before we discovered the joys of the Market and the reinvention of a slave underclass as being a desirable option and even managing to upend history and persuade enough voters that it is a good wheeze not just for the super wealthy but for ordinary folk like you and me.
Where are we now? As Bowie sings. A good question!
May I quote from Jacqueline Rose again? (I’m finding her On Not Being Able to Sleep a very thought provoking piece of work) – ‘may I be permitted my speculation that the opening of The Waste Land looks at spring from the point of view of a corpse? As Levenson goes on to discuss, this is a corpse that sprouts. Life is breathed back into the body through a redemption which Eliot struggled towards and eventually reached.’
What sort of thing might redemption or resurrection, or rebirth be? Is that the sort of place we are trying to reach?
I suppose the great thing about the Market (our new capital G God) is that there is absolutely no need for these weird notions or any ethics because we are all rational economic units, bodies with a bit of rationality added, that will make all the appropriate decisions based on self interest. We can ditch the last forty thousand years of human life, forget about everything except making money or working as a (sort of mindless) slave.
Interestingly a bit further on Jacqueline Rose brings in Keynes:
‘Above all, what classical economics ignores, according to Keynes, is the problem of time. In his 1937 article on The General Theory of Unemployment, he wrote:
We have, as a rule, only the vaguest ideas of any but the. Most direct consequences of our acts . . . our knowledge of the future is fluctuating, vague and uncertain . . . The senses in which I am using the term (uncertain) is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain,or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth-owners in the social system in 1970. About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know.
Knowledge with a foretaste of its own ignorance, or knowledge brushing at its limits, would be one way of defining the unconscious.’
Coming to that final word, unconscious, as Rose does feels like coming home. A place to stay for a while. The unconscious and the way that we might know (or not know) anything at all.