Lapis Lazuli
I grew up in a large family in a small town. Everyone knew everyone else and people we knew died regularly. My mother was Irish, so going to wakes and funerals was just a part of everyday life, and we were indoctrinated into that culture from a young age. One of the conventions of those occasions was the prayer card, which any attendee could pick up near the door. These had an image on the front—Jesus or a saint, say—a prayer on the back, along with the name of the deceased. I never wondered, until just now, how they got those cards printed so fast. But they were always there. I used to have a small stack of them, mostly relatives, but they disappeared somewhere along the way. These were not necessarily somber events, except for the immediate family of the deceased, of course, but produced a sense of elevation, where the quotidian affairs of “life” in this world seemed suddenly to be superficial, even irrelevant, where time slowed down dramatically, almost didn’t move, a liminal space not entirely of this world or next. I will not say I enjoyed them, but I always felt as if I was learning something about what was of real value in this life.
Later on, I became an altar boy, a very reliable one, so for years I got called to serve almost every funeral in our church, dozens of them. I would get to be excused from school for a few hours to do this. I had the same experience at those occasions. All of the noisome grieving, especially at grave-side, that had nothing directly to do with me would prod my consciousness into this other dimension where I would stay for maybe an hour or so thereafter. I would come back to school and think how shallow and misguided, sometimes even rude and stupid, were the ongoing transactions of everyday life. People had such great in-built value. I had just seen the evidence of that from those left behind after their loss. Why couldn’t everyone see that every second of every day? Why would we treat each other so badly, or just blandly? That state of consciousness would diminish quickly and I would return to normal life, partaking I’m sure, quite shortly, in the same shallow, misguided, rude and stupid behaviors that afflict us at ground level in this world.
My wife’s sudden passing last year seems to have lifted me, and left me, in that state semi-permanently now, a neither-here-nor-there-ness that I experience, strangely, as freedom, able still to participate in all things this-worldly, but without taking them very seriously, maybe like that “serving-man” with “a musical instrument” “carved in Lapis Lazuli,” in Yeats’ great poem, climbing with his two Chinese brethren towards “the little half-way house,” seated now to rest:
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.
– Paul Kameen
www.paulkameen.com