Traveling with Pomegranates (25 page)

Back home, I searched for spiritual commentary on the play and discovered Helen M. Luke’s essay “
The Tempest
.” By allowing death to come often into his thoughts, Prospero is
preparing
himself for it, she wrote. The conscious and meditative attention to death becomes a spiritual task during the last part of life, she insists, and contrary to what we might suppose, it creates the opposite of despair; it creates
release
and
meaning
.

But now, on the ferry, with this intensifying blood pressure crisis, knowing there’s something physically wrong with me that neither I nor medication has been able to fix, the subject of death seems too visceral, too lacerating. I’m not sure if I have the stomach for a meditation on it.

I glance at my watch—only 2:00 P.M. but it looks like early evening. I watch the city of Larmor-Baden recede into the distance and shiver inside my raincoat despite the red shawl I’ve draped over it and the floppy wool hat pulled low on my forehead. Yesterday, when we left Mont-St.-Michel and arrived in Brittany, the weather was spectacular. We roamed the fields and woods, exploring prehistoric stone alignments around the village of Carnac, the sun glazing the megaliths. But today is bitterly cold. Grayness lacquers the sky and weighs down the air.

The water along the bow churns the same slate color as the sky, and I think fleetingly of the River Styx, the mythological river between life and death over which souls are ferried to the other side. It is a ludicrously grim association, but then I
am
crossing a body of water, on a ferry, to what the pamphlet calls “a sanctuary of dying.” Ann taps on the glass window from inside. Turning, I smile at her, ignoring her querulous expression—
what are you doing out there in the cold?

Really, what
was
I doing?

She had listened this morning to the whir of the blood pressure cuff inflating on my arm and then the steady
beep, beep, beep
.

“Is it high?” she said.

She’s aware of my recent hypertension, but I’ve said nothing about the elevated readings I’m getting here in France.

“Just a bit,” I told her, as if it’s no big deal. I didn’t want to lie to her, but neither did I want to fill her with a lot of unnecessary anxiety. I tried to pick something in the middle.

My body is a twilight
. . . I turn the fragment of poetry over in my mind, considering that the first tint of it has come to
my
body. I can only share so much of that with Ann. She is a young woman; how much of my truth should she take on? I struggle for intimacy with her, and then I struggle with the reality of boundaries, that there are places between us that intimacy cannot, perhaps should not, happen: the twilight, the larger darkness. I can barely handle them myself.

Since being in the Louvre, I’ve returned often to the idea that pivotal events in Mary’s life reveal windows into our own. I’ve sorted through the annunciation paintings—all those angels summoning all those Marys to bring forth new life—and wondered if there’s an “annunciation” embedded in my hypertension.

While in the thick of doctor visits before the trip, I dreamed about a strange woman who shows up to tell me my “true problem.” She diagnoses it as “Excel-eration and Acceleration.” She is annoying in the way all-knowing people usually are. I treat her like a quack and belittle the way she has apparently repeated my so-called true problem twice. Unfazed, she sits me down and speaks to me like I’m in kindergarten: “The words sound alike, but they’re spelled differently,” she explains, then writes the pair of words in big block letters on a school chalkboard.
My true problem
.

Does the dream suggest that my drive to excel and the hurried-ness it breeds—these old, implacable daemons of mine—are at the root of my hypertension? It does take me back to the need I’ve uncovered to cultivate being and find the contemplative writer in myself. I decide the woman in the dream is a “knowing” part of myself and that she has sent me back to repeat grades, to relearn basic truths I supposedly already know.

After disembarking the ferry, we follow a path to an igloo-shaped mound of earth, one hundred and sixty feet in diameter and twenty feet high. The tumulus. I hadn’t expected anything so mammoth. It looks like a vast pregnant belly. One side is covered with small stones laid on top of each other like fish scales. In the middle of them, a low doorway.

I pause at the tumulus opening and peer into the feeble light, feeling the slightest hesitation. The tunnel is straight and narrow, leading forty-five feet into an interior chamber. It’s lined with twenty-three massive stones, joined together to form what our thickly accented French guide earlier called “Pel-VEEC wallzzz.”

“Did he say
pelvic walls
?” I whispered to Ann.

“I do believe he did,” she replied.

I watch the other women threading into the tight space. The stones tower over them in colors of russet brown and bleached gray. While the birth canal design is unmistakable, what registers in me is
bones
—earth bones, Old Woman bones, that bone I dug up in my dream last year in Greece. I get a fanciful, if not eerie, picture of the group strolling along a column of vertebrae.

Stepping inside, I feel a lurch of dread that starts tiny, then fans through my chest and arms before fading. As my sight adjusts to the gloom, lavish carvings appear on the stones. Their surfaces are covered with finely balanced designs associated with the ancient Goddess: spirals, chevrons, crescents, egg-shaped ovals, and serpentine lines.

The most prolific motif by far is clusters of concentric arches nested one inside the other. They mushroom out in every direction, creating a complex and magnificent unity. Stepping close and studying the pattern, I notice a small navel protrusion on top of each set of arches and realize I am looking at birth canals. Not only am I standing in what is apparently a replica of a birth canal, they are all over the walls.

As I move deeper into the passage, the birth images repeat on the stones in new, unexpected ways, inducing the odd feeling in me of moving inward, traveling to what matters, down to the marrow. They possess a free and primitive beauty, the power to make me cry. I want to take back every condescending thought I had about this being the “Sistine Chapel of Prehistory.”

My only personal encounters with death have been with those of my grandparents, who were ripe with old age and the fullness of their lives, and with that of my father-in-law, who died abruptly of a heart attack at sixty. When his death occurred, I was nine months pregnant with my son. I sat on the church pew during the funeral, so great with child I was down to my one last pathetic maternity dress. Somewhere during the service, it hit me how sharply birth and death were intersecting in my family’s life. The words
womb
and
tomb
began to reiterate in my thoughts. I don’t know now if the minister uttered them and I picked them up like a refrain, or if they just materialized from a place in my own head.

Now here I am, in a burial chamber awash in the metaphor of feminine birth, when
whack!
—my foot strikes against something hard on the stone floor and I trip. I feel myself going down and reach out for one of the stone masterpieces, which we are, of course, forbidden to touch. I catch myself, but my bag lands with a thud and the French guide scurries over, more worried about the Pel-VEEC wallzzz, I suspect, than about me. He is kind and very gallant, however, taking my elbow and guiding me over the hurdle, which turns out to be an oblong rock stretched across the corridor like a door sill.

“Do not worry, you are not the first to trip here,” he says in his rich accent, trying to make me feel less clumsy. “It is possible the rock was even placed here deliberately—as a stumbling block. Such things were done, you know, in initiation ceremonies . . . to make people think about the obstacles.”

He points to an even larger sill stone ahead. “See, there is another one. You do
see
it, Madame?”

“Yes,” I assure him, aware that I’ve literally tripped over a piece of the ceremony that may have gone on here.

I notice Ann making her way back to see what the commotion is about, and I wave her on. “It’s nothing,” I call and walk along more alert, but thinking about the symbolic stumbling blocks. Mine, perhaps, being the reflex to look away from death, to shield myself. What am I afraid of? Oblivion? Of losing self and identity? Of the grief it would cause those who love me? Of my own despair at leaving them? Of physical suffering? Of regrets?

The passage ends in a room eight feet square—a small mausoleum lined with six more of the huge, sumptuously carved stones. Approaching it, I have the feeling of peeling away insulation, coming to an exposed wire. I halt at the entrance and stare up at the stone lintel over the door, noting the labyrinthine carvings. As I step inside, I take one of those long yoga breaths I’ve learned.

The inner chamber seems intended as a symbolic womb and carries the aura of a Holy of Holies. The layout suggests that one’s dying is a return to the womb and conjures up an astonishing image of birth waiting in death, of the dead buried like seeds in a Great Mother’s womb. I circle the chamber, inspecting the stones. The feast of sensuous lines appears as watery as fingerpaint on canvas, though each has been painstakingly etched with tiny quartz pebbles.

The memory of the rite of death and rebirth called the Eleusinian Mysteries that Ann and I had learned about in Greece fourteen months ago flits through my mind. But the context was different then, wasn’t it? I was focused on the death of my womb, the death of a former self, not death itself. My God, how much easier was it to think about death as letting go of some part of life: leaving behind a job, a relationship, a self, a pattern, a way of being, a hundred different things? Now I realize: they are all practice. Each a rehearsal for death, challenging my clinging and resistance, developing my soul’s facility to turn loose and open to what is new and unknown.

I stand in a corner of the inner chamber. Close my eyes and try to let the Larger Darkness in. Acknowledge that it will come and take me and then I will not exist. Disappearing like an exhaled breath, like that breath I let out a minute ago.

I don’t know if the meditation lasts a full minute. The truth grieves me and, opening my eyes, I feel quietly split, like the shell on the blue crab when the time comes for the creature to slough it off and grow. I’ve seen the shells lying broken on the creek bottom and the crabs scurrying, as raw and unprotected as newborns.

One day I will have to forgive life for ending, I tell myself. I will have to learn how to let life be life with its unbearable finality . . . just be what it is.

I cannot remember the next few lines of the poem, only that they contain a radiant assertion about death flowing into life. When I am back home, I will look them up. . . .