Intimations of Immortality

Lent 2020 - Day 26

Upon my sunset walk today I neared the tracks by where the old Ballast Mountain has now been replaced by an earthen one. I was contemplating how great artists - writers, poets, musicians, actors - can raise one's attentions away from the mundane towards the soaring, the numinous, the divine. I was humming Vaughn Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis to myself when...

*PAFF* Unbidden, into my consciousness, into my train of thought, leapt suddenly the phrase 'Intimations of Immortality'. Surely, 'intimations of mortality' - those first inklings that a middle-aged person has of no longer being indestructible and eternally young? No, It was 'Intimation of Immortality'. At home I checked. Yes! It's a lengthy Wordsworth poem (too long for our first-year English class at grammar school, but I would have heard of it, or read of it, for sure).

The poem's full title is Ode: Intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood; it clearly carries in it Wordsworth's conviction of having lived before. This is the fifth stanza:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
The soul that rises with us, our life's star
     Hath had elsewhere its setting
     And cometh from afar.
     Not in entire forgetfulness
     And not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
          From God who is our home.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy
Shades of the prison house begin to close
          Upon the growing boy;
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows
          He sees it in his joy.
The youth who daily farther from the East
Must travel, still is nature's priest
     And by the vision splendid
     Is on his way attended.
At length the man perceives it die away
And fade into the light of common day.

Our childhood Godlike innocence becomes tarnished as we age; the theme of Wordsworth's poem is slowly losing that connection with the Infinite in adulthood. A few days ago I quote Shakespeare's Hamlet - "To die, to sleep/Perchance to dream" - and here we have the the opening of the parentheses; "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting/The soul that rises with us."

While I share Wordsworth's sentiment about the wonder that a child remembers (as I do, so much) from early childhood, my own experience is not of that wonder "fading into the light of common day", but of a sense of its continual refinement. As long as we remember, hang on, to that childhood wonder, and seek the sublime.

Look at the faces of some new-born children - not all, just some - the ones with faces that tell of a consciousness at work, trying to make sense of what's around them... In our earliest infancy, the world around us consisted of shapeless blocks, vague monoliths, from which, with age and experience - and the chisel of thought - emerge statues of understanding. From out of crude lumps of unhewn observation they emerge, honed ever more finely, more delicately nuanced, catalogued more precisely, with each passing year. Watch that infant's wide, unfocused eyes play over an unfamiliar room, pulling together sense and structure from what is around him. Have they seen this all before. No...?

We edge slowly along from uncertainty towards certainty, from darkness to light - yet we are not even the tiniest fraction of the way along the infinitely long road from Zero to One. One life, one consciousness, one brief chance - is this to be our only glimpse into the marvellous process?

I don't believe it to be the case. The journey is long; much learning lies ahead. We must learn to overcome the reptile in the brain, that dim, brutal, angry and selfish animal within us, the ego - and in its place, allow in the angelic. This is spiritual evolution; willing yourself ever closer along that eternal path towards God-ness, towards absolute understanding; total Universal unity and infinite consciousness.

Our bodies will die, but the atoms that make this "shell of foam", those atoms maintaining formation within the molecules of our DNA, within our protein, maintaining our current consciousness - those atoms will keep on spinning as they have done so for many billions of years. "The stuff that knit me blew hither/Here am I!" wrote A.E. Housman. While that stuff is together, assembled as us - what will we have taught it?

And those atoms, those quanta of consciousness, will return from the dark collective of that rich loam once more as individual and conscious life, they will be another tiny step closer to God. There is a seamless continuum which our souls observe through myriad eyes. We live, we learn, we die, we are reborn; it must happen a countless number of times, each one level closer the Whole. There is something of the Socratic concept of anamnesis here. Socrates' theory suggested that the soul is immortal, and repeatedly incarnated; knowledge is in the soul from eternity, but each time the soul is incarnated its knowledge is forgotten in the trauma of birth. I'd suggest not so much knowledge, but spiritual wisdom, which is honed ever more finely with each successive incarnation.

This is the same William Wordsworth, whose poem The Daffodils introduced me to the concept of the qualia memory, the flashback ("When oft upon my couch I lie/In vacant or in pensive mood/They flash upon that inward eye/That is the bliss of solitude")

Are you familiar with Vaughn Williams' Fantasia? I mentioned Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) a few days ago; this is the piece that inspired Vaughn Williams (1872-1958) to compose an orchestral piece four centuries after Tallis's time. This is Psalm 2, set to music by Tallis. [The text of Psalm 2, though based on a later translation of the Bible, crops up again in Handel's Messiah as Why Do The Nations So Furiously Rage Together?, an entirely different sound.]




This time last year:
Peace of Mind

This time four years ago:
The Name of God and the Consciousness of Everything

This time seven years ago:
The Church and Democracy

This time eight years ago:
Prime lens or zoom?