Mistah Kurtz—he dead (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness)
The remark “excuse me for not dying”, which Leonard Cohen attributes to his Zen teacher Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, is one of those deceptively simple Zen statements that opens up the whole question of life, death, ego, and awareness. Assuming I make it, I will turn 80 this year. It’s older than anyone in my family lived except my grandmother who made it all the way into her nineties. Old age is both a blessing and a curse. There is a beauty to life, especially on the Mendocino Coast, but to enjoy it requires a reasonably healthy body and mind and not all of us are so lucky. There is also the financial constraint of not outliving your savings. As one of my good friends, now dead, used to say: The end is rarely roses.
Death is something most of us contemplate at one time or another. Philip Larkin’s bleak but beautiful poem Aubade is the opposite of the Zen way to think about death.
From the Zen perspective, the heavy seriousness we bring to death is part of the illusion of a self that is constantly changing. When Roshi told Leonard Cohen “I should die,” Cohen replied, “It won’t help”. Later, just before his own death, Cohen wrote his final album “You Want It Darker” (see below). Cohen, who constantly wrestled with depression, longing and spirituality was drawn to this kind of response because it offers no illusion of immortality and no denial of suffering. In the song he says simply “Hineni” or here I am.
Zen often cuts through what it sees as unnecessary metaphysics and emotional inflation. Instead of fearing death or philosophizing about it, Sasaki’s line shrinks it down to: Right now I’m alive, that’s all. Zen is about living in the present moment, not the future, not abstractions. You are alive now. Don’t behave as if you are already dead. Don’t give death authority over the present moment. Something like that is what I take from excuse me for not dying.
What happens after we die? No one knows but there are plenty of opinions. Would it be a good thing to live forever? Again, there is no universally accepted opinion. I have discussed such things in previous blogs: Some Personal Thoughts On Death, Arguing With Myself, and Fate. No need to repeat those arguments here. Instead, I’d like to mention two books I read recently.
In Death and the Gardener Georgi Gospodinov explores how humans try to negotiate with time, memory and death and always fail, but meaningfully. He describes the last months, weeks and days with his father who is dying.
Yes, my father was a gardener. Now he is a garden.
Gospodinov muses about resurection: The idea of resurrection is, I think, a botanical idea. This is where the allegory came from, that’s what started it. Immortality is also a botanical concept. All plants, which we view as less evolved than us, actually know one more miracle than we do, they have one more superpower. They know how to die in such a way that they can come back to life again.
“Nothing to fear,” (his father) said. ‘Nothing to fear’ was his favorite phrase. His ready answer to every question.
At seventy-nine he took care of a huge garden with vegetables, fruit trees and flowers … ‘Here’s where I feel my best’, he would always say.
I wonder whether flowers aren’t covert assistants to the dead who lie beneath them, observing the world through the periscope of their stems.
When a neighbor’s granddaughter dies, Gospodinov writes: I realized two things that afternoon: that it’s not just old people who die, and that it must be very awful to have someone close to you die, if even a grown man can sob in such despair.
When Gospodinov’s father asks the doctor if he might live to St. George’s Day (April 23rd), the doctor didn’t respond and father and son both understood. The father came up with shorter and shorter options, but the doctor just smiled and shook his head vaguely.
And really, how much would it cost the Man Upstairs to give my poor old father a few more months? To look the flowers he had planted in the eye. To sit in the garden, to throw one last bone to the dog, to gather us together one last time, and then to take his leave. I’m sure he wouldn’t ask for anything more than that. But God as usual, didn’t seem to be listening and his deputy here on earth, the doctor, didn’t dare make any promises either.
Well, at least till Christmas, we’ll get together, see the snowdrops spring up, my father said, looking at the doctor with such expectation. Christmas was twenty days away, almost no time at all.
Christmas might be possible, the doctor replied.
And this answer was at once the most merciful and merciless I have ever heard.
As it turns out, the old man didn’t make it to Christmas.
One aspect of the book I particularly enjoyed was the way Gospodinov vividly describes what it was like to grow up communist Bulgaria. For example: The apartment we rented (in a new town) was almost identical, on the ground floor, a semi-basement, from where you could only see cats and people’s shoes, and with no yard to boot. It was the very beginning of the eighties. The first half of that decade will always remain subterranean for me, scented with mustiness and moisture. Or, the way he describes a trip to the coast: Our car trips to the seaside in our Polish Fiat (it’a a Fiat, but a Polish one, its Polish, but still a Fiat, as we liked to smack-talk in the neighborhood). Getting to the seaside was a true odyssey, even though we lived just a stone’s throw Fromm the coast, some negligible eighty or ninety kilometers. Or when his father tells a group of friends in a slightly hushed voice (perhaps that’s why I remember it): Here, we’re happy only because we don’t know how unhappy we are.
After his father dies Gospodinov reflects on how he has lost a part of the past: My father was a sort of Atlas, holding the past one his shoulders. Now that he is gone, I can sense that whole past cracking, quietly collapsing in on me, burying me in all its afternoons. The quietly collapsing afternoons of childhood. And there is no one I can call to for help.
I laughed at the reference to Voltaire’s Candide (there are many references: to Balzac, Thomas Mann, Tomas Transformer, Dostoevsky, Susan Sontag, Proust and others) is to Voltaire’s Candide, on of the most memorable books I read as a young boy: We need to tend our own garden, Voltaire said, but I wonder whether he ever planted as much as a cucumber? We know that at least two dozen laborers and servants, led by two experienced gardeners, worked in his garden. that metaphor of his is possible thanks to them, to all real gardeners. Our pretty phrases stand upon their (stooped) shoulders. (So much for the armchair philosophers, like me.)
Gospodinov teaches us that we cannot escape death and that our attempts may lead us toward it, that time is not linear but embedded in the fabric of our lives, that memory shapes and confines us, that human life is small, but patterned and meaningful, and that the effort to resist fate is part of being human. Death and the Gardener is a lovely book that says as much about how to live life as it does about how to face death.
Death With Interruptions by Jose Saramago is an entirely different read, both hilarious and macabre. From the very first sentence: The following day, no one died, we realize something strange is about to happen in the world that Saramago creates and possibly in our own minds as well. What are the results of the happy enjoyment of eternal life here on earth? Well, the morticians are out of business, not to mention the life insurance agents. Hospitals will quickly become overcrowded with mortally ill patients who never die. And what about the church? Without death, prime minister, without death there is no resurrection, and without resurrection there is no church … Whether we like it or not, the one justification for the existence of all religions is death, they need death as much as we need bread to eat. How will the state be able to pay public pensions that now last forever?
Saramago thrives in satire, parody and subversive humor. The church has never been asked to explain anything, our specialty, along with ballistics, has always been the neutralization of the overly curious mind through faith. How will families cope with family members who fail to expire on their sell-by dates and who remain alive but incapacitated? Old age homes will burst at the seems while cemeteries will be empty.
It turns out that eternal life is granted only to the citizens of a particular state while death continues in all the neighboring states unabated. Some families decide it’s best to dispose of their elderly by having them transported to a neighboring state where they can die, as usual, of natural causes. A group called the maphia crops up (ph to distinguish them from the original mafia) to transport the bodies. Soon this practice becomes all too commonplace which challenges the idea of morality.
Eventually, Death (or as she, of course a woman, prefers death with a small “d”) realizes that she must set things right. She sends a violet-colored envelope to the cabinet minister to inform him that death will now continue as before for the citizens of his state. The cabinet secretary and the Prime Minister have a spirited argument about whether or not to warn the population of the state that Death (or death) is on the rampage again. “So what’s to be done, to warn or not to warn, That is the question.”
It is decided that a warning is in order and death agrees to send out violet-colored envelopes to those who are about to die: Dear Sir, I regret to inform you that in a week your life will end, irrevocably and irremissibly. Please make the best use you can of the time remaining to your, yours faithful, death.
So, what happens next? I won’t tell you since I don’t want to spoil Saramago’s story. Suffice it to say that death’s letter fails to reach one poor old cello player no matter what she does to get it to him. Finally she decides to deliver it in person and what happens next makes the story worth the time you take to read it.
The line “Mistah Kurtz—he dead” is one of those rare literary echoes that carries an entire moral universe inside it. It begins in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and is later lifted, deliberately, by T. S. Eliot into the epigraph of The Hollow Men.
“Mistah Kurtz—he dead” carries two layered meanings: In Conrad the phrase emphasizes the death of illusion (specifically how colonialism’s attempt to bring civilization fails, even backfires) and it exposes the darkness at the heart of man and empire. In Eliot the phrase shows the contrast between authentic confrontation and empty existence and acts as a symbol of lost intensity in the modern world.
Kurtz’s death is not just an ending—it’s a revelation. Eliot’s use of it suggests the real tragedy is not that Kurtz died after seeing too much but that most people live and die without ever seeing anything at all.
Thank you.
You hit a note with words and music