Waiting for the Last Bus Read online

  The phrase comes from Ridley Scott’s sci-fi movie Blade Runner. Roy is a replicant, played by Rutger Hauer, a humanoid who’s been genetically engineered by the Tyrell Corporation to be ‘more human than human’, but with a life span of only four years. As Roy feels his powers waning, he looks back on his brief life:

  I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

  It is hardly surprising that death should pose questions for us not only about the meaning of our own life but about the universe that generated it and in which we spent it. Just as imagining ourselves into the emptiness of death is hard, even harder is it to contemplate the absolute emptiness that will follow the death of the universe, the wiping out of everything, including the minds the universe invented to think about itself. All to be lost like tears in rain!

  It is impossible for some of us not to wonder about this paradox. It is why after a lifetime of struggle with, and frequent feelings of revulsion towards, religion I still think of myself as a religious man. But I now practise religion in a way that passionate protagonists on both sides of the God Debate dislike intensely. The frustration I attract reminds me of an incident a few years ago in the debate about gay marriage. Campaigners posted this slogan on the side of London buses:

  SOME PEOPLE ARE GAY GET OVER IT

  It was aimed at Christian groups who understood human sexuality not as a spectrum of different shades but as a stark choice between right and wrong, the permitted and the forbidden. Many of us are prone to this kind of binary simplification in moral and theological debate, but it is amplified by those whose favourite discourse is the adversarial. You are either with them or against them. You have to be one thing or the other. There’s nothing in between. You certainly can’t be both at the same time. This is not only a boring way to look at the world; it is also inaccurate. Nothing is that simple. Louis MacNeice nailed it when he said:

  World is crazier and more of it than we think,

  Incorrigibly plural.78

  The tragedy is not just the absurdity of trying to purge the world of its crazy variety, but the pain and hurt it causes those who can’t or won’t force themselves onto our narrow templates.

  The latest collision between the incorrigible plurality of humanity and the dreary compulsion to split everything in two is in our attitude to gender. We now recognise that, like sexuality, gender is fluid and plural. In some people it may never be permanently determined; and it might even shift during a single lifetime. Humans are incorrigibly plural. If we’ve got a problem with that, it’s time we got over it.

  It’s also time we realised that the human experience of religion is also various and complex. There are those who are firmly in and those who are firmly out of religious institutions. There are those whose belief is strong and those whose unbelief is equally unyielding. And like the majority of the population whose gender and sexuality are clearly printed, they are the ones who claim to define the territory for the rest of us. But there are as many hues on the religious spectrum as there are on gender and sexuality. We should acknowledge that and come to a more generous and comprehensive understanding of this important aspect of human experience.

  In the context of the theme of this book – death – there are those for whom religious observance in this life is a way of guaranteeing their status in the next. Their gaze is on the world beyond and how to get there. But for some of us life after death has little attraction, and we even doubt it exists. It is life before death we concentrate our attention on. We want to make it more just and abundant and joyful for everyone. And some of us find that meditating on religion’s best narratives, and listening to its wisest teachers, and being moved by its music and poetry, strengthens us for that work. We don’t want to prise others out of their systems of belief or unbelief any more than we want to be boxed into them. Even if we disagree on the best deal after death, why can’t we agree on a good deal for everyone before death? Anyway, the gulf between us is not as wide as it may appear. Religions that believe we go on to life after death all say its quality will depend on how we lived before death. Do good in this world and good will be done unto thee in the next, is the mantra. So whatever the final calculation, this world becomes a better place – exactly what those of us with little interest in eternal life want as well. Everyone wins.

  But in my experience, if you adopt this dialectical approach to religion, you get caught in the crossfire of its main protagonists. Both the champions and the despisers of religion attack you with equal contempt. It’s the binary game again. You have to be one thing or the other. You can’t be both at the same time or anything in between. Well, tough. Some of us are. Get used to it.

  However, there is more to my attitude to the wars of religion than the desire for a ceasefire to help the wounded. The big question at the centre of the conflict troubles me as well, though I cannot resolve it, cannot situate myself permanently at either pole of the discussion. The binary nature of the choice feels false to my experience. Is this a particularly Scottish tension? Hugh MacDiarmid certainly thought it marked the Scottish character. In his book on Scottish Eccentrics, published in 1936, he talked about ‘the Caledonian Antisyzygy’ – an antisyzygy being the presence of opposing or competing polarities within the same entity. And it has become a cliché in describing our cultural history: Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde being the proverbial example. Wherever the affliction comes from, its main symptom is intense discomfort with any claim to absolute finality in answering the big question the universe poses for us.

  The theologian Paul Tillich said that being religious meant asking the ultimate question of the meaning of the universe, even if we arrived at an answer that hurt us. An answer that hurts me is that ultimately it means nothing because there never was anyone there to mean it. It just happened. The riddle is that, without having any meaning itself, the universe generated human creatures with a need for meaning, who then projected meaning onto its speechless blankness. They thought it had spoken to them, had disclosed itself. But it was their own words they were hearing, their own longing they were fulfilling. It was all in the mind, the human mind, the only mind the universe possesses. That is an answer that hurts me. Because I think it may be right. It was an answer that also hurt the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. In wrestling with the impossible idea of his own non-existence, his own annihilation by death and the annihilation of the whole universe, he wrote an extraordinary book that is not so much a philosophy or theology of death as a great cry of protest against it, a great NADA! He was one of death’s deniers honest enough to admit he needed God in order to guarantee his own immortality. In his book The Tragic Sense of Life, he quotes from the Italian philosopher Leopardi:

  A time will come when this Universe and Nature itself will be extinguished. And just as of the grandest kingdoms and empires of mankind and the marvellous things achieved therein, very famous in their own time, no vestige or memory remains today, so, in like manner, of the entire world and of the vicissitudes and calamities of all created things there will remain not a single trace, but a naked silence and a most profound stillness will fill the immensity of space. And so before ever it has been uttered or understood, this admirable and fearful secret of universal existence will be obliterated and lost.79

  That was the possibility that haunted me as I prepared to speak at the funeral of my friend Malcolm. Malcolm had wanted us all to remember him laughing. It was certainly an impossible laugh to forget, a great explosion of merriment and the huge heart it expressed. Even more important to me than his laugh was his smile when you met him. It was a smile of absolute welcome. This was a man who cherished his friends and kept them close, and his smile was the sign that his heart welcomed you in again with delight. That smile was there for his friends to the end as he lay on the sad height of his death bed.

  There wa
s laughter in his dying as in his living; but his had been a hard dying, bravely endured; and it would have been dishonest to ignore it or try to conceal it. This is what I found myself saying:

  Malcolm was a fiercely honest man, a man who refused to hide from following truth as he saw it; so we should not hide from this truth either: his was a hard dying. We all owe the universe a death, but not everyone owes it a hard one, and Malcolm certainly didn’t. His wife Marion captured its pain in her poem about his last months:

  Fresh from a family luncheon,

  Short-cutting through the cemetery,

  He found himself stranded in red-hot pain,

  Unable to move:

  The first step on a slow journey to a dead end.

  Losses piled up unannounced, huge and mean.

  Promises of better times flickered and fled.

  Each treatment stole vigour from limbs and life.

  The triple bypass now beat mercilessly.

  And hope seeped from our hearts.

  We learned to live with the downward path,

  To be grateful for freedom by buggy.

  For the jab that distanced the pain, even while holding onto the agony.

  We learned to be thankful for being shielded for so long from the knowledge that it could be like this at the end.

  And sometimes our hearts shone as they bled, and we were thankful for that too.

  So Malcolm’s dying forces a question from us: how are we to find meaning in the agony of such a good and life-enhancing man? Christian Faith has its confident answer, and those of us within the Christian tradition are familiar with its claims and their power to console, even if, like Malcolm, we have come to doubt them and the confidence with which they are proclaimed.

  But if we hold to the old consolations and believe that all shall be well in the end, all wrongs ultimately righted and tears wiped from every eye, there is still a difficulty in explaining how, in the meantime, the creator has ended up making us traverse a universe so steeped in pain and loss and so packed with grief. We may believe things will come right in the long run, but what is there to say about the short run? In particular, what is there to say about the meaning of this man’s life and his hard dying? I can think of three things to say at a time like this.

  First, even if the universe is ultimately without meaning, and even if we dismiss religion’s consolation, in the words of the poet Philip Larkin as:

  That vast moth-eaten musical brocade.

  Created to pretend we never die . . . 80

  we are left with the paradox that amidst the tumults and plagues and cruelties of existence, the universe has also given birth to love and laughter – both of them strongly embodied in the life of the man we mourn and celebrate today. I don’t want to push the claim too far, but is there not something unexpectedly gracious about a universe that can prompt a strong, confident, creative man like Malcolm to turn from the making of board games, at which he was a celebrated artist, and turn himself into an internationally respected cartographer of the strange land of dementia and a sympathetic guide through the dark valley of ageing?

  My second point follows from that. Even if the universe ultimately means nothing and comes to nothing; even if we agree with the philosopher Leopardi that a time will come when this Universe and Nature itself will be extinguished . . . and this admirable and fearful secret of universal existence will be obliterated and lost; even if that is to be the final truth of existence itself; I believe we can say that a life like Malcolm’s was its own meaning and justification, if only as an act of defiance of the void that awaits us all. Even if all comes to nothing, this man’s life, this confident, creative, compassionate life has brought meaning out of the abyss, and in celebrating it today we will not let it go to waste.

  It is right to mourn Malcolm’s death and to cry at losing one we loved so much. But we should also let his joyful living and brave dying strengthen us in our own struggle to live well; and when our own time comes to die as bravely as he did.

  Go from us, good friend: you have strengthened us for the struggle, and your laughter we will never forget.

  As I left the pulpit, the thought of the void giving birth to a life as generous as Malcolm’s – and then deleting it — continued to trouble me. Even if Leopardi is right and the experiment of being was empty of meaning from the beginning, and even if the universe is destined to be sucked back into the nothingness it came from and be succeeded by a naked silence and a profound stillness; then we will have proved ourselves better than the void that spawned us, because of what we ourselves created: great music, torrents of it, poured out down the centuries; great words, rivers of them, all trying to express the mystery of our own existence; paintings that captured its loneliness and grandeur; and acts of loving kindness that defied the sneer of the abyss that swallowed them. And isn’t it strange that such beauty and purpose came from such emptiness?

  So why be shocked when some of us find ourselves answering the question of ultimate meaning with a NO and a YES in the same breath and at the same time? That’s the antisyzygy in which some of us find ourselves. And yes, it hurts. It’s the pain that comes with being human. That’s why Unamuno advised us that, even if it is nothingness that awaits us and the universe, we humans should so live that it will be an unjust fate.

  VI

  THE DAY AFTER

  The American philosopher Arthur Danto described the human animal in a Latin phrase as an ens representans, a being that represents the world back to itself, a being that mirrors being. And we can’t help doing it. Give children crayons and a sheet of paper, and they’ll draw mummy and daddy and the cat on the mat before the fireplace. Listen to people on the bus going home from work, and they’ll be telling their day over again to their friends. All human art flows from this compulsion to represent or describe or make over again all the worlds we experience. And the best artists do it to a miraculous degree. We say of them what Samuel Beckett said of the writings of James Joyce: they were not about the thing; they were the thing itself.81 Great art does not tell or talk about its subject. It shows it, makes it present. It is all part of the human passion to preserve at least the memory of the past before it hurtles into oblivion. Writers do it. Photographers do it. And so do painters. This is how John Berger described their purpose:

  The portraitist contests the mortality of his sitter. The landscape painter contests the ceaseless movement of nature; the history painter the forgetting of history; and the still life painter the dispersal of objects. His antagonists are decay, the bailiff and the junk merchant.82

  Religion does it too. At his last supper with his disciples the night before he died, Jesus blessed bread and wine and gave it to his companions at table in these words from their Greek translation in the gospels: ‘touto poiete eis tēn emen anamnesin’ , ‘do this in remembrance of me’.83 In that quotation, the Greek word anamnesin is worth thinking about. It’s translated as remembrance, a word that has lost some of the power of the original. To us, remembering suggests the backward look. We sit under the lamp with the photograph album and see ourselves as we were and others who are no longer with us. But sometimes the experience does not feel like a backwards glance, a look over the shoulder. Through the chemistry of longing, someone from the past comes alive to us again. We imagine them in the street ahead of us and have to halt ourselves from crying out. We catch ourselves saying wait till I tell her this, forgetting for a moment that she’s gone forever. That’s why people take part in séances with psychics who claim to be able to make contact with the dead. Raising the dead is an ancient art, and even the Bible, which disapproves of the practice, contains accounts of it. In one of them, King Saul, perplexed about the challenges that face him as leader of Israel, tries to summon up his old adviser Samuel to help him:

  Then Saul said to his servants, ‘Seek out for me a woman who is a medium, that I may go to her and enquire of her.’ And his servants said to him, ‘Behold, there is a medium at Endor.’

 
So Saul disguised himself and put on other garments, and went, he and two men with him; and they came to the woman by night. And he said, ‘Divine for me by a spirit, and bring up for me whomever I shall name to you.’ The woman said to him, ‘Surely you know what Saul has done, how he has cut off the mediums and the wizards from the land. Why then are you laying a snare for my life to bring about my death?’ But Saul swore to her by the Lord, ‘As the Lord lives, no punishment shall come upon you for this thing.’ Then the woman said, ‘Whom shall I bring up for you?’ He said, ‘Bring up Samuel for me.’ When the woman saw Samuel, she cried out with a loud voice; and the woman said to Saul, ‘Why have you deceived me? You are Saul.’ The king said to her, ‘Have no fear; what do you see?’ And the woman said to Saul, ‘I see a god coming up out of the earth.’ He said to her, ‘What is his appearance?’ And she said, ‘An old man is coming up; and he is wrapped in a robe.’ And Saul knew that it was Samuel, and he bowed with his face to the ground, and did obeisance.84

  Though attempts to summon or use the dead in this way have been banned by many religions, they have rarely been consistent in their disapproval. We have already seen that in Catholic doctrine the prayers of the living were believed to assist the dead on their way through purgatory. The reverse was also true. It was thought that the prayers of the dead could assist those still alive on earth. Because it was believed that those holy souls who had entered heaven at death were now in a position to petition God on behalf of the living, much the way a favoured courtier might persuade a monarch to promote a friend. Intercessory prayer of this sort became specialised, and it was believed that individual saints had particular skills when it came to aiding human need. Going on a journey? Get the protection of the saint who looked after travellers. Lost a precious possession? Go to the saint for lost property. Cannot beget a child? There was a saint whose intercession could help with that. It wasn’t exactly what is now called spiritualism — the belief that the living can be in direct contact with the dead – but it wasn’t that far from it either.