Behind the Veil

The following is an extract from Alfred Tennyson’s 1849 poem, In Memoriam A.H.H., cantos 55 and 56. The initials stand for Arthur Henry Hallam, a fellow poet and a young man who died at 22; he was engaged to Tennyson’s sister, Emily. The work was originally titled “The Way of the Soul,” and the quoted portions in a way summarize the “problem” we all face here.

LV
The wish, that of the living whole

No life may fail beyond the grave,

Derives it not from what we have

The likest God within the soul?

Are God and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life;

That I, considering everywhere

Her secret meaning in her deeds,

And finding that of fifty seeds

She often brings but one to bear,

I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares

Upon the great world's altar-stairs

That slope thro' darkness up to God,

I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,

And gather dust and chaff, and call

To what I feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope.

LVI

'So careful of the type?' but no.

From scarped cliff and quarried stone

She cries, `A thousand types are gone:

I care for nothing, all shall go.

'Thou makest thine appeal to me:

I bring to life, I bring to death:

The spirit does but mean the breath:

I know no more.' And he, shall he,

Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair,

Such splendid purpose in his eyes,

Who roll'd the psalm to wintry skies,

Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation's final law—

Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek'd against his creed—

Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills,

Who battled for the True, the Just,

Be blown about the desert dust,

Or seal'd within the iron hills?

No more? A monster then, a dream,

A discord. Dragons of the prime,

That tare each other in their slime,

Were mellow music match'd with him.

O life as futile, then, as frail!

O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

What hope of answer, or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil.

Although context provides the explanation, the word “type” used first in the second stanza of 55 means “species,” but that word would jar poetic nerves. Another as it were poetic work-around is in the last line of the first stanza, “the likest God within the soul,” where saying “the likeness of God within the soul” would much trouble the meter. Those fanes in the third stanza of 55? Banners.

The segments illustrate the problem faced by the sincere and active soul attempting to grapple with traditional understanding of the divine arrangements and actual observation. As Tennyson himself remarks in this work (Canto 96): “There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.” There is discernible here also the path by which portions of humanity reach a gnostic vision of the fallen world.

Why Babies Cry at Birth

Birth and death are in a way equivalent experiences. They represent transitions—one from a state we don’t remember, the other to a state we don’t yet know. This applies to most of us. On entry into what we here call life, our memories of any pre-existence are effectively suspended—except for the handful who, for a while, remember previous lives. The latter also remember a death, and it came before this new life had its start. Those few who’ve undergone near-death experiences also have memories that at least suggest what such memories might be like.

Their reports suggest that death is rather ordinary, indeed abrupt. Ahead of it come memories of accidents or hospitalizations and then a state of detached awareness without pain. In many of these cases the person hears doctors, nurses in agitated states pronouncing that the patient’s dead. The subject then protests: “No, I’m not. I’m still alive! Here I am!” But the patient isn’t heard.

Perhaps it is a blessing that our consciousness is blanked out at birth and that our new brains cannot yet link to accumulated memories of our longer past, if any. Then babies might cry even harder. “No, no, no! Not that old trip again! Oh, my God. High school. Still ahead. Again!” To be sure the healthy-minded might look forward to all that, the cheerleading, the hazing, the Letter, the quest for popularity. For non-participants birth signals joy, death sorrow. If we but knew it, participants’ reactions may be the exact reverse.

If we but knew it. But all that we actually know is what we experience here—plus what amount to marginal and indistinct whispers suggesting that we might be wrong. Hence we view this life as immeasurably precious—if it’s our own and not the life of a chicken we chew or the lives we send drones to terminate. Do I remember being upset at waking in this world? I don’t. But I do recall some doubts distinctly. As for what lies ahead, for that I have my least-favorite apostle’s judgment. Oh death, where is thy sting? Oh grave, where is thy victory? 1 Corinthians 15:55.

East of Eden

Poetry holds something beyond conceptual thought—and by the last, of course, I mean the rigorous, the philosophical kind. The poet tries to capture something elusive. He or she has been inspired. The act is a kind of mirror-making. The mirror is made of images drawn from sensory, actual, day-to-day experience. What it suggests is the not-quite-graspable. But if poetry then also mythographic works like Genesis. Both are subject to hermeneutics; we contemplate them; we try to extract meanings implicit but not sharply visible in them. Some view hermeneutics negatively: dissect the apple, analyze it chemically. The knowledge never tells you how an apple tastes. But we engage in hermeneutics all the time—even if the word is unfamiliar. We’re always pondering the meaning of our own intuitions and experiences.

The hermeneutic task I set myself today is to examined Genesis 3:19, the last verse of what is known as “the curse on man and woman” after their disobedience. It is interpreted to mean that death first appears in human experience after the fall. Yes. That’s an interpretation. The verse says (Revised Standard):

In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

The verse certainly doesn’t say: “Although my original plan was that you should live forever, always young, I’m now introducing a change. Your body will decay and you will die. You came from matter and back to that state you shall go.”

But then verses 22-24 complicate matters. They are much more specific. Do they already represent a bit of hermeneutics that got included into the myth itself later? Here is the passage:

Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”—therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.”

A curious verse. Adam had not been forbidden to eat of the tree of life. But now, now that he had knowledge, it was time to prevent him? Such readings of the Torah, of course, suggested to Paul (in Romans, for instance) that death came with the fall—not because of knowledge so much but because the fruit of the tree of life was then also denied—by denial of access to it.

But no. I’m not talking tongue in cheek here. This is a myth, a poetic statement. The sensory images of trees, magic although they are, are symbols easy for ordinary minds to grasp and to imagine. They simplify through images. They suggest the gist of things. The distance between human and the divine is symbolized simply as the distance between the lord-owner of the rich estates and the poaching peasant who doesn’t know his place. Genesis 3 is not a problem for the poet. Two big intuitions are wrapped up in it and turned into a story without too careful a logical parsing. One is the wayward, willful, selfishness of man. Another is an explanation of our current condition. One is said to cause the other. No critical analysis of each verse was contemplated by the writers—or, indeed, undertaken by them—much less the isolation of single verses as if they were hard facts like gravity.

There is no hint here, not the faintest, that after his body returns to the dust Adam’s soul shall rise into the heavens there to be judged. Materialists might find great comfort in Genesis 3. Dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return is rather, you might say, orthodox materialism. Isn’t it? But the poetry of humanity is not exhausted by reading Genesis. Genesis was one take on the subject. There are others. In some death may be viewed as a great blessing—rescuing the individual who, like Paul, in Romans 7:24, cries out: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”