Recently, in a therapy session a woman talked to me about her fear of death. I asked her what picture she has of death; what scares her in that picture. She said, being inside the coffin. And, what in this picture, is scary? Being deeply buried in the ground. And what makes this picture, where she is deeply buried, unbearable? The answer that emerged from this exploration was: there inside, the coffin, she is completely hidden.

This is the crucial point in every reference to death. I noticed it on the occasion of an excerpt by Heraclitus which says:

What's left for people when they have died is that which they neither hope for nor think about

I hope for things of the future. I think about the present and past things. What's left for people when they have died, is the things which are not of the future, nor of the present, nor of the past. What's left for them is nothing.

So, what is the crucial point in the conversation with the woman? That when dead inside the coffin no hiding and no fear would be left for her. Therefore, what she says doesn't concern her death per se. Where do they come from then? Where else if not from the way things concern her now? Now, while she lives?

So, I ask her about her relation with the things that have the nature of the hidden. To be more specific, I ask her if, e.g. she liked playing hide and seek when she was little, is she had secrets etc.

In the discussion which follows, we notice an attitude which has marked her and so far hasn't found its name. As a child she quickly stopped playing hide and seek; she can't have secrets, she doesn't want others confessing things to her; she despises shadows; the "I don't know" naked, withοut resorting to assumptions and speculations, terrifies her.

For today's subject, these are sufficient. Only as an antiphon and as a prelude to what will follow I read to you verses from a poem by Paul Celan titled "Speak, you also":

Speak, you also,

speak as the last,

have your say.

Speak -

But keep yes and no unsplit,

And give your say this meaning:

give it the shade.

Give it shade enough,

give it as much

as you know has been dealt out between

midday and midday and midnight,

Look around:

look how it all leaps alive -

where death is! Alive!

He speaks truly who speaks the shade.

We will return to Celan.

The woman thinks she speaks about death, but she speaks about life. This happens every time we refer to death. We say "I will die" and we use the word as if death were a future event. We say about someone who died "He left", as if death were a departure. In the hospitals' medical files, death is noted with the pompous and almost incomprehensible latin word "exitus", exit, as if death were also a type of hospital "discharge". Death is not an event, nor a departure, nor an exit, nor anything else, since all these words have a use and a meaning only in life. In death, they have none.

As much as we try to talk about our death, we will find ourselves talking in terms of life and the things of our life. And actually, as the example of the woman shows us, for things that have especially marked our life.

It's an incredible paradox: We started from the obvious perception that death is the exact opposite of life. What is for this woman the exact opposite of her life? That which is inconceivable to her, which she doesn't know enough, and to which she is closed? The hidden. Well, exactly that, the form of the picture of herself in the coffin, is the name she has given to her death!

If you haven't done so yet, try to see what scares you in death. There you will find your own life. Tell me about your death and I will tell you about your life! The paradoxical truth stated here is that life and death are named as one and the same. This one and the same is interlocked with fear.

The life of the woman, as long as it is a life where visible and hidden are separated and the hidden remains exiled, is half a life. Every time we talk about "life" without including death, we talk about a half life. We live a half life. It looks like the negative of a picture where everything is displayed in shades of grey. In the prospect of death the other half invades, all the colors swoop in - in an unspoken, more or less disguised fear.

Is fear though the only possibility for the life and death relation? Already in our discussion of our example there seems to be another: The more open one is to the things of life, the less he has to fear, the less is death an issue. Then, "life" also ceases to be an issue. If the woman can accept the hidden, the secrets, and the mysteries, the play of light with darkness that exists in everything, if she can "speak shadows", then she will live her death, i.e. here the hiding in life will find the way that the Far East tradition calls "great death".

Seferis writes:

Yet each of us earns his death,

his own death, which belongs

to no one else

and this game is life.

When I was a child and lied down to sleep, I was thinking I could die and I should be ready. I turned on my back, I crossed my hands on the chest, as they do to the dead, and said out loud three times: "A". Why? Because my last word should be the most open letter: "A"! Later, as a young man, I was tortured, as the woman mentioned above, by my picture as dead deep under the ground. That was eating me up. A dead one who would get colder and colder unable to protect himself. If I had met that young man today, I would have asked whether this cold penetrates him now, whether this longing for warmth fills him now, while he lives.

Why am I telling you these? Because one day I discovered, much to my surprise, that this picture of the dead who is freezing under the ground was completely indifferent to me. It is pointless to wonder which way and which processes brought me to this new place. We would get lost in a labyrinth of fruitless rationalizations.

Perhaps in this way the knots of life and death are untied, with an unexpected and unsuspected awakening to a new openness, as if given by grace. I wonder, had the "A" of the young child returned? Expressed in this new openness? Maybe in the eyes of the child this is how it was told, and hidden, that truth which says that I can die peacefully if I have lived openly. Maybe.

How are we going to die?

Seferis asks on behalf of all of us.

Humans are called mortals because they can die. To die means: to be capable of death as death

Martin Heidegger says.

Possibly the way to an answer to the poet's question and the way of a response to the thinker's saying is that in which death ceases to be an issue, which means that it ceases to be separate from life. Then, as it has been said already, life also ceases to be an issue. It's a matter of life and death. Don't ask me how this happens. I can only tell you this: someday it happens.

Only this still, as a transition to the next: Don't look for death in the coffin and corpse. Elsewhere, it can be found further, and at the same time closer. This "spaciousness" is needed - a word of Seferis. It's the place where the dead meet the living, not as separate but when (Heraclitus) the dead die the livings' life and the living live the deads' death. In this place, the kiss, and the stranger, and the tear are truer. Again a poem by Paul Celan speaks about these:

Crystal

Not on my lips look for your mouth,

not in front of the gate for the stranger,

not in the eye for the tear.

Seven nights higher red makes for red,

seven hearts deeper the hand knocks on the gate,

seven roses later the fountain begins to plash.

Three years ago my mother died. Let's assume that her death was indifferent to me. Does this say something specifically about the relationship with my dead mother? Or perhaps we were indifferent to each other while she was living? Let's suppose that I miss her, e.g. that I now feel I am an orphan. Does this say something specifically about the relationship with my dead mother? Or perhaps while she was living I remained mommy's little boy? Let's assume that her death relieved me and liberated me. Does this say something specifically about the relationship with my dead mother? Or while she was living she wanted me as her satellite?

Could it be that the life and death of my mother are two sides of the same coin? Exactly like the woman deeply hidden in the coffin and the young man freezing under the ground? Could it be that here too life and death are one and the same? Where one and the same interlocks each time with indifference, being mommy's little boy, selfishness?

But is my relationship with my dead mother exhausted here? Or perhaps here too we are dealing with a photographic negative? With a half life?

Let's take things from the beginning again. I have several memories of my dead mother. I remember her, for instance in gatherings at home taking off her shoes and dancing full of joy. Yet, in such a memory she is alive, completely alive. As I visualize her now dancing, it's not like in a replay. It's my memory that revives her. This is not my dead mother. Certainly, I will never again be able to share such a memory with her. Yet again, this and all the "never again" are said in reference to her life and our common life. They don't refer to my dead mother per se. The picture of her dancing vanishes.

I remember her dead too, in the coffin. But even this is a replay. It's not my dead mother today. Each representation of her remains behind my dead mother today.

We hear what was last said in a dirge of the Greeks of Southern Italy:

Dirge

In the basket of my daughter

the trousseau should have been white

Death came and brought her

the aspergillum and the candles

Who knows, my little girl,

where the priests have taken you?

- Where no leaf moves from the wind, it's better, mother, that you don't know.

- Who washes your clothes

from the ones who you are with, let us see him?

- Nobody from the ones who are here

can even be seen or see.

The daughter says the same: In Hades where literally there is no seeing, every image of her, every way of her mother referring to her vanishes. Again, such as the daughter, so too my mother is not nothing. Only no representation can attribute how she is today. So she is, without her figure, without her voice, as I had seen her and heard once. She is without a figure, without a voice, without a face, even without being recognized as my mother, the wife of my father ect. She doesn't even have gender. Even the "her", her personal pronoun sounds discrepant. All of them vanish. My dead mother, as dead, has been depersonalized. She is, but she is nothing - the emphasis now is placed on "is": she is nothing

This nothing has left behind the figure which was called "my mother". And again it brings her with it, impersonally. This nothing accompanies me ever since. When I see the light of the sun, this nothing sees with me. When I use the pan and the pot I got from her house, this nothing cooks with me. The hours I speak in this way with nothing, I become depersonalized also. I become nothing. Celan:

IT IS NO MORE

this

occasionally with you

sunken into the hour

gravity. It is

an other.

It is the weight that holds back the emptiness

that would go

along with you.

It has, like you, no name. Perhaps

you two are the same. Perhaps

one day you will also name me

so.

But now, in those hours, the light of the sun is more light because there is no ego in intervening with its perceptions and preferences. The light is more light and the objects, like the pan and the pot, are more things. This is the limit of the insight I reached.

At this point allow me a digression. "Phenomenology", the words which name the phenomena, express things as they are shown in themselves, can name them truly only when the subject disclaims all his substance.

This is what Freud asks for, to stay on the cause of therapy, even if he doesn't mean it in its full range, when he expects the client to say whatever comes to his mind without interposing anything of his own, that is without choosing, altering, withholding, emphasizing. And this is what he asks of the therapist when he expects of him an "evenly-suspended" attention.

But the encouragement is not enough. It shows the direction, towards which the therapist will be guided by his art - not his technique. It's things themselves which force this way, as they are always shown with their light and shadow. Death is such a thing, as that which (Seferis) "gives life".

True conversation with the dead where the world doesn't sink in death but "it leaps alive - where death is! Alive!" is rarely actualized in Western history. As far as I know, and as you could see, one of its most complete actualizations is the poetry of Paul Celan. This, I believe, is the secret reason why Celan is often recognized as the greatest poet of our time. No other poet, and no other thinker, not even Heidegger, has accompliced it in such fullness, I mean the conversation with the dead which gives - and here I am using the title of one of his poetry collections - gives a "breathturn" and satisfies what Heraclitus expressed with incredible simplicity, without exclamations, almost en passant:

I know,

I know and you know, we knew, we did not know,

we were here, after all, and not there

and at times, when

only the void stood between us we got all the way to each other.

And more:

PSALM

No one kneads us again out of earth and clay,

no one incants our dust.

No one.

Blessed art thou, No One.

In thy sight would

we bloom.

In thy

spite.

A Nothing

we were, are now, and ever

Shall be, blooming:

The Nothing-, the

No-One's-Rose.

"The dead are not enough" Seferis writes. First in the conversation with the dead, in which, I repeat, the dead die the livings' life, the living live the deads' death, in this depersonalization where nothing meets nothing, as I said, the light becomes more light, the things more things, the darkness more darkness. "More" means here: now everything sparks, ignites, the world becomes fire, πῦρ ἀείζωον, "ever-living fire" Heraclitus called it. This world, the Ephesian says in the same excerpt, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be an - ever-living fire.

Then everything is a flame which starts from nothing and remains firmly floating in nothingness. Here, in this image, the beginning of western thinking meets a peak of the eastern one. Such an image exists:

It's a calligraphy by the modern zen philosopher Hisamatsu. The flaming ideogram in the middle is the heart. It says in the margin: "You must reside or stay nowhere and you must let the heart burst". Perhaps what is said here too is what we repeatedly saw: life and death are the same.

Buddhism, particularly zen-buddhism, is always turned towards death. Anything relevant expressed in the West, in christianity, in poetry, in thinking, in art is miniscule compared to the East where it was developed to a unique extent and depth through a long tradition. What is almost completely missing here though is the openness to illusion, not in the sense of sympathy or condescension but as a way which sometimes can lead to the truth. I imagine that if the woman and the young man talked about their image of death to a zen teacher, they would receive α hit by his stick as an answer. The other way, our way, was set by the ancient tragedy: It's the illusion that makes the one following it crash, where precisely this disaster will bring catharsis. We will see this further down.

With this provision, it seems to me we have a lot to learn from the East - but now that they have become like us, they will have to learn to address the human suffering with a new understanding.

On the issue of the dialogue between West and East there will be one more digression. Keiji Nishitani, one of the most important contemporary Japanese thinkers, writes:

Today, where in all areas of human practice meetings between the East and the West take place with amazing speed, the mutual understanding is undoubtedly one of the most important missions of humanity. [...]

Today we stand before the most intense request, that is to go beyond our own intellectual patterns and standards, the rigid framework of dogma and dogmatism. This request is a break because it asks us to return to our spontaneous "self" -beyond any dogma- to disclaim once and for all those established patterns and standards which confine our thinking, sense, and will in standardized and seemingly eternal frameworks.

We are asked to return to the most fundamental level where man is simply man or only son of man, nothing less and nothing more; where he is entirely exposed, uncovered, naked, with empty hands, barefoot, but also where he can open frankly the innermost of his heart . [...] As difficult as it is, it seems necessary however to return to such a fundamental level inside us to prepare the open space for the desired genuine meeting.

I will not add anything. The speech itself is an attempt towards this direction.

In zen a keyword for the concept of death is "transience". Influenced by the prevailing tradition which presents as valid anything that has substance and stays stable over time, we consider the temporary as the insignificant which happens now and will get lost after. Dôgen, one of the greatest zen teachers, writes shortly before his death:

What can I compare to

the world and the life of man?

To the moon's shadow

when at the dewdrop touches

The beak of a sea bird.

Byung-Chul Han, Japanese professor of philosophy in Berne, comments:

Here one has to do with a particular experience of transience [...] Where a resistance is stirred against transience an emphatic self is formed. One is magnified, makes his ego bigger against death so to speak, which is my death, which will bring an end to the ego. Another perception of mortality is that "awakening to transience", in which one lets himself to cease existing.

Where one gives himself to death, where one becomes empty, death is no longer my death. It has nothing dramatic. I am no longer a prisoner of death, which would have been my death.

Then, reference is made to "great death", which was mentioned briefly in the discussion example of the woman:

"Great death" doesn't end life. The death which would come at the end of life would be a "small" death. Certainly only man is capable of the "great death". It constitutes that daring act, of dying and leaving yourself. Yet, it doesn't annihilate the self. Rather it clears the self up in the open, The self becomes empty as it is filled with a cosmic spaciousness. This particular kind of death allows a self of complete openness to thrive, a selfless self.

The transience implied here is graphically depicted in the art of ikebana, where the flowers are cut and placed in a vase with soil.

Listen to what Nishitani says having in mind that human existence is like the ikebana flower. Han writes:

Nishitani interprets the japanese art of placing flowers in terms of the phenomenon of cutting. When someone cuts off a flower from the root of its life, in some way he cuts it off from its soul. It is thus depleted of the instinctive drive, the appetitus. For the flower this cutting off brings on death. It makes it die deliberately. This death is different from decay which for the flower would be a sort of natural death. One brings on death for the flower before it lives to the end. [...]

The broken flower, which no longer desires anything, abides its time. It lives entirely in the present with no regard for before and after. It becomes entirely time with no resistance against it. Wherever it goes with time, reconciled with it, time doesn’t pass. [...] A peculiar duration arises in the midst of time, a duration without continuity, which doesn’t represent a timeless vastness, no stopped time. It is a manifestation of that finitude which is calm in itself, bears itself, doesn’t stray towards "infinity", which in a way has forgotten itself. [...] Ikebana literally means: "enlivening the flower". This is a unique way of keeping it alive. One keeps the flower alive, assisting it towards a deeper vitality by bringing death on it. Ikebana makes the finite shine without the light of infinity. Beautiful here is the reconciled, tranquil finitude, calm in itself, a finitude shining without looking beyond itself. [...]

And why human existence is like the ikebana flower? Because people are mortals. A word of Heraclitus for man is "μόρος". It means mortal fate. Being born means at the same and from the beginning dying. The cut of the flower in the art of ikebana, is given to man from the beginning and without any hand intervening.

We heard: "The broken flower, which no longer desires anything, abides its time. It lives entirely in the present with no regard for before and after." If the ultimate "after" is death, then the "care" for it would be missing to the extent that one would have died the "great death", or, for us, to the extent that one would have taken on his mortality, has become the mortal that he is. To this effect, I would add, that the first "before" is birth. But the birth relevant to man, would be the "great birth", as when we say that one is "reborn". Perhaps they are not even two separate things: When I die the "great death", I am reborn. Then the "small death" and the "small birth" wouldn't be issue of any "care".

We say these guided by the wisdom of the East, but for us there is still a provision: This wisdom speaks axiomatically. It doesn't tell us, perhaps it doesn't even need to consider it, where its authority is drawn from. In the writings of Parmenides of Elea it is said:

thus is becoming extinguished and passing away not to be heard of

Here too we see a way of existing similar to the transience of the broken flower and the human existence: before and after, and their ends, birth and demise, cease to be an issue. But in Parmenides, as throughout the early greek thinking and art, this is not said axiomatically but is prescribed by what the ancient called "Ananke" ("Necessitas"). It is not imposed by any man or god. Things themselves force it.

Let us recall the woman who is afraid of death. This is not a "psychological problem" and its solution is not found in a way by which she would be cured of her phobia and return to "normal". Besides what would be a "normal" way to deal with death? Psychology, as the science in total and almost all of the classical philosophy, knows only the death of the living being, decease. Its discussion of death, and above all when it makes it the subject of its investigation, is an aphasic discussion. Yet aphasia, we saw it repeatedly, it's not the reality of death appropriate for man. The woman who talks about her death, the way she talks, doesn't have a psychological problem. She is out of touch with reality.

Which reality are we talking about? I said at the beginning, following a saying of Heraclitus: "Dead inside the coffin no hiding and no fear would be left for her." We are talking about the reality where each hiding and each fear need the man who, implicitly or explicitly, says and means: "I am hiding", "I am afraid". The way of this need is named by Parmenides as the way of "is": (ἔστιν).

In the words of the woman this solid identity, where things are ascribed to man, and man is indebted to things, is disturbed: The woman talks of a hiding for which, being dead, will never say "I am hiding", speaks of a fear for which, being dead will never say "I am afraid". This path out of reality, is named by Parmenides as the way of "is not": (οὐκ ἔστιν).

Let us recap by listening to some words of Parmenides:

and this is judged:

is it, or is it not

surely it is adjudged, as it needs must be

that we are to set aside the one way as unthinkable and nameless,

(for it is no true way) ,

and that the other way [the way of "is"] is real and true

on this way [of "is"] there are very many signs: that Being is ungenerated and imperishable

The signs ἀγένητον (ungenerated) and ἀνώλεθρον (imperishable) do not signify some divine eternal existence without beginning and end. They signify that the before of birth and the after of death can never be understood or said. Any such attempt stumbles on the abaton of "is not". The questions about birth and death are pseudo-questions. That is precisely why they bring confusion and agonize, as in the case of the woman and the young man. This concerns each before and after, but discussing this is not of the time being.

You probably noticed that Parmenides doesn't talk about this or that thing but about "is". Perhaps a way for one to find its path is that which I tried to describe talking about my dead mother, the depersonalized, who is, but is a nobody, non-existent, a nothing which ultimately permeates and transforms me and everything. The occasion here was the death of my mother, yet eventually it concerns each meeting of the dead with the living, in which they dissolve in each other and absolve each other. This nothing, I yet said, is not "nothing" but in its light everything, Celan writes, "leaps alive - where death is! Alive!". We've heard this in different ways from Heraclitus, Seferis, the Easterns.

The "is" in Parmenides, I remind you, names that solid identity in which things are ascribed to man, and man is indebted to things. This way is dictated by Ananke, the power of which, I also remind you, is imposed tragically, that is with polemos (war), a word of Heraclitus where misguided ways are meant to reach a dead-end and their wayfarers to crash on its wall. We heard Parmenides' equivalent word "de-cision". It's from the Latin dēcīdere, de- + caedere. Ιt means to cut. A decision always puts us in the odd crossroad of illusion and truth and sets our routes. The fear of the woman and the young man, and every fear of death, is not a psychological emotion but a de-cision, a sign of crashing on such walls.

Similar to the fear of death is the de-cision of mourning. What illusion leads the mourner to extremes? As in the picture of the coffin for the woman and the young man, so in mourning the dead maintains his substance: His image is present, many times one talks with him. The swiss therapist Hanspeter Padrutt in his book on Parmenides, to which I owe a decisive boost for what I elaborated upon, mentions in the relevant chapter as a motto an anecdote of Kleist. I read it to you translated:

Bach, when his wife died, had to make the preparations for her funeral. But the poor guy was used to leave everything to his wife's care; so much so that when an old servant came and asked him for money for the flowers to decorate the coffin, he with wordless tears, his head fallen on the table, answered: "Tell my wife".

For Bach, his wife maintains her substance - where among other things, she takes care of everything. The pain of mourning, what hurts, is the fall on the wall of "no more": His wife will never take care of the house again, will never give the money for the flowers of her funeral. Ananke makes him fall on the wall of the dead-end. The pain of mourning is none other than the incident of this fall, which crashes the misguided mind, again and again. In this way and only in this, by suffering, we learn.

One more story from our mythology. It's said that Sisyphus was the most cunning and devious man. After his death he tried to fool the gods and return to the upper world, and for a while he was able to. The gods punished him and he was sentenced to roll a rock up a hill. A detail not so well known: The rock is in the underworld and Sisyphus is asked to roll it up the hill of the upper world. That is, he is asked to repeat what he indeed tried to do with tricks and schemes. The fact that the rock rolls back down, again and again, it underlies for him repeatedly the Ananke which prohibits any revival.

Mourning brings again and again the dead among us. "Who washes your clothes?", the mother asks the daughter she lost. "Tell my wife" says Bach. Even the black clothes, and the blackened soul, belong to the illusion which tries to bring the underworld with its darkness up in the light. Again and again one falls on the wall of "no more", and everything tumbles down where it belongs. We have to go through this to learn, to throw away the black one day, and let our dead in peace.

I will finish with words of Odysseas Elytis on the death of Andreas Embirikos. Many years ago they offered me a first glimpse of what I had to tell you today:

This one was not death, but a gentle waft, and then the birds and their chirrup - the ongoing poetry of that man who perished here in order to be found winning otherwhere, forever, amidst the blue vapours of the sky and the white stones.

Athens 2005

Translation: Maria Soupou, Psychotherapist