Conversations with a Soul (34 page)

Refusing to bathe or take care of himself, Gilgamesh simply surrendered to grief and began to fall apart until, finally, he decided that he could do nothing about Enkidu’s dying but that he needed to do something about
his
mortality. In very human terms the saga tells us;

Over his friend, Enkidu, Gilgamesh cried bitterly, roaming the wilderness.

I am going to die!--am I not like Enkidu?!

Deep sadness penetrates my core,

I fear death, and now roam the wilderness--

I will set out to the region of Utanapishtim, son of Ubartutu,

and will go with utmost dispatch!

Dressed in animal skins, he consequently set out to find Utnapishtim, who, together with his wife, were the only humans ever to be granted eternal life by the gods.

En route he met Siduri, the divine maker of wine. She strongly advised Gilgamesh to accept his mortality as a given and to get on and enjoy life. However, Gilgamesh was not persuaded and he convinced Urshanabi, the boatman, to take him across the Sea of Death to meet with Utnapishtim.

When they finally met, Utnapishtim explained that his immortality was a gift from the gods because he had survived the great flood. In the midst of the telling of the tale Gilgamesh, worn out from his travels, fell asleep! When he awoke, Utnapishtim, not a little piqued, told Gilgamesh that his request was an impossible one! However, Utnapishtim's wife, a motherly woman, worked to convince her husband to help Gilgamesh find immortality.

Utnapishtim finally relented and told Gilgamesh about a certain plant that grew at the bottom of the sea which had the power to confer the gift of eternal youth.

Back in the boat, Gilgamesh tied rocks to his feet, and descended to the floor of the ocean where he found the plant, which he grasped and brought to the surface. All that remained for him to do was to eat the plant, and his quest would be at an end. However he was a little suspicious that the plant might not do the trick, and so he decided to try it out on an old man before he ate it himself, just to see if it
really
worked.

Unfortunately, that night while he slept, a hungry snake ate the magic plant (which is why snakes shed their skin to become new again). When he awoke, Gilgamesh was devastated. He had lost his one chance at immortality. He never the less returned to his great city and the story brings us back to where it all started. We are told that Gilgamesh’s final task was to engrave the saga on stones so that they might be read and understood by future generations. The saga of Gilgamesh concludes in a journey of recognition for the deep and powerful themes of the story are the themes of every man and woman.

The great halls of the National Gallery in Edinburgh provided the venue for 'A Celebration of Spanish Culture.' Paintings by El Greco and Velazquez left me feeling that the subject in each work was about to come alive and step out of their frames! I was awed by the almost unbelievable skin translucencies and textures, and the eyes that followed me from painting to painting and hall to hall. Yet for all the artistic skill and engaging portraits that surrounded me, it was Picasso’s
Guernica,
which summoned me to take
a journey within,
for that is where the complex experience of recognition begins.

The work, inspired by Picasso’s desire to express agony, was a passionate protest of the bombing of Guernica, Spain, during the Spanish Civil War. Highly allegorical, it contains symbols of rage, despair and powerlessness against a crisis.
⁹⁵

I understand those words; 'rage, despair, powerlessness,' and they go far beyond being merely symbolic. I have been there. I have lived these words, and they have lived me and they still live within and it does not take a great deal to pull the words into the present!

Apparently, I am not alone in wrestling with the words that compelled Picasso to paint
Guernica
for the painting continues to threaten and question and invite a journey within.

Happy Rockefeller, after the death of her husband, Nelson, inherited a tapestry of
Guernica.
She
donated the work to the United Nations Building on condition it was permanently hung outside the door to the Security Council Chamber, so as to serve as a reminder of the horrors of war.

Several years later, Colin Powell was required to make the announcement that the Coalition had voted to invade Iraq. The broadcast was to be televised from just outside the Security Council, and Powell asked that the tapestry be covered up! Being covered, the tapestry was unable to command a moment of judgment on the invasion; however,
rage, despair
, and
powerlessness
were to return as a fierce endowment to individuals and nations in the years that followed.

Some images and some words have the ability to summon deep realities that reside within us, even when we would rather avoid them and escape the judgment for which they call. Yet to be open to the wonder of our inner world is to risk being claimed by something that has the power to interpret to our hearts what we see with our eyes or hear with our ears.

I determined not to try to
understand
Guernica or look for specific symbols and hidden messages, but rather, to the best of my ability, simply be present. If the images were really as powerful as I had been led to believe then they needed no help from me!

Yet, as I have discovered on numerous occasions, staying in the present moment is no simple matter. Parts of me don’t surrender control quite that easily and rebel by extending intrusive invitations, one after the other. Questions ranged from where and when we would eat lunch through to wondering where my companions were and whether the person standing next to me knew that one of his shoe laces was undone.

I was not entirely successful in staying in
the here and now
but each time I turned away from the seduction to let my mind wander and pulled myself back to the present moment, so more and more the painting came alive
in my being
. I began to see things I had previously missed, I found I could not ignore the horror of a village being destroyed, innocent people being gunned down and a world plunged into a bloody war and, slowly, their experience became my experience. The agonized scream of a woman cradling her dead baby resonated at some place deep within me.

Artistic expression, rather than prose, managed to pose questions that went to the heart of my being, and summoned insights that would leave me forever changed. (As soon as I returned home I ordered a print of Guernica which looks down on me even as I write.)

I was not familiar with the issues that set the Spanish Civil War in motion; nor was it required of me to know anything about Picasso, but it was of fundamental importance that I engaged the painting by
being present.
I didn’t need an interpreter or an explanation; in fact such 'aids' could easily have become a distraction, turning me into a witless tourist trying to see what I was
supposed
to see. But by simply immersing myself in the images, letting them have a life of their own, I began to
feel
what the work was telling me. All I needed was a willingness to trust my unconscious world in its strange work of bringing recognition to the moment.

There’s something fundamentally powerful that happens to us when we focus our attention and we give ourselves to the explosive energy present in great art or literature. Yet it requires that we be
alive in the present
,
in the now of life.

Several thousand years ago an artist, or perhaps many artists, who understood the language of the heart, and who painted with words, wrote the story of Gilgamesh. The words, no less that Picasso’s
Guernica
, summon me to be present.

Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to?

You will never find the life for which you are looking.

When the gods created man they allotted to him death,

but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh,

fill your belly with good things;

day and night, night and day, dance and be merry,

Feast and rejoice,

Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water,

cherish the little child that holds your hand,

and make your wife happy in your embrace;

for this too is the lot of man.

Siduri, gets to heart of Gilgamesh’s story even though he fails to recognize it at the time. The saga of Gilgamesh is a story of a man
trapped between living in the past and living in the future.
Gilgamesh is caught in a kind of time warp. The past lays claim to his attention, he cannot escape it.

The story of Gilgamesh is that of a man who cannot accept death and who struggles against it in every possible way. The focus of his being is always lodged in the
past
, inflicting him with fear and despair.

Yet the warp is a complex one for he is also imprisoned in the future, he longs for a time when the issues that plague his mind will, hopefully, be resolved, although they never are. Gilgamesh shuttles back and forth, between the past and the future.

Refusing to accept Enkidu’s death he cannot bring himself to dispose of his dead friend’s remains and so is forced to live with the stench of decay. Then he sets out to persuade Urshanabi, the boatman, to take him to Utnapishtim that he might have revealed to him the secret of immortality, thereby laying his anxieties to rest. Finally descending to the ocean’s depths he brings the life-conferring plant to the surface. Yet he wants to see if it will
really
work and bring his quest to an end. So once again he yields to the promise of tomorrow when he will face the test and feed some to an old man - only to lose it all to the snake!

Gilgamesh is a man trapped between the past and the future as he discounts the present.

I know something of the terrible power of the past for I have walked amongst the ruins of
yesterday
and cursed my choices. Powerless to change a single word, powerless to do or not do, powerless to change what came my way in a fleeting, seductive moment, I am left with the despair born of regret.

I have also lived with the counterfeit promises of
tomorrow
. Somehow from some unknown direction something or someone would arrive to enable me to accomplish in tomorrow what I failed in yesterday. Sometimes, as patently obvious as the phony suggestions plied by advertisements, sometimes in the yearning for a better deal, frequently in the wishful thinking that has no place in my meagre supply of wisdom, and often in the temptation to find fulfilment through an intimacy that bound me to another who could do for me what I could not do for myself; I courted the mistress of tomorrow only to find, usually too late, that she could not be trusted.

As in the daily experience of life so too in death neither the past nor the future hold much vitality, even though these are the tenses to which we most readily flee when confronted by death. Talk of the past simply sets a seal of finality; talk of the future is just talk for the future is a fantasy.

Siduri the divine maker of wine brings another, totally different perspective and invites Gilgamesh to learn to
live in the
present
:

fill your belly with good things; dance and be merry, feast and rejoice, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child make your wife happy in your embrace….

While he struggles with the monumental issues of life and death, Gilgamesh is directed to simply be present and live the common life of a man.

The story of Gilgamesh’s tangled, messy life offers me a reflection of my own struggles. I know that searching for hope often leads through the back roads of life where landmarks disappear; where promise gives way to despair, where I stumble and trip over my own clumsiness, where I have to back-track and cope with the terrible fear and loneliness of being lost, and then, finally, learn how to deal with life and death with grace and humour through surrendering to the invitation to simply
be present
.

The story of Gilgamesh’s struggle reminds us that in the face of death, we are powerless; there is nothing we can
do
to assure survival: No matter what our beliefs, or lack of them, no matter how many good deeds we have amassed or failed to amass, no matter what agreements we think to have made with God, we are unable to control our ultimate destiny. We made no decision to enter this world and we can make none to enter the next one.

Yet paradoxically, our hope lies within our impotence. To grasp the fact of our emptiness, to resign ourselves to our powerlessness, to understand that we have no claims on God’s mercy, is to surrender ourselves to grace. Whatever life there might be after death, will be a life made possible only through God’s unmerited love and not through any personal deals or manipulations on our part.

At one time or another we have all awoken to a racing heart and a frightening sense of our own powerlessness, common themes in the saga of Gilgamesh and equally common to the experience of being human. Such experiences serve to remind us that a conversation with death is a conversation that takes place far from our neatly ordered worlds of logic, cause and effect. In this world of the unconscious, the language of symbol and mystery is the only language that has any value and that being present in the now is fundamentally important to that conversation.