crossing the barrier of Death

[William Karlin]

Hello again,

  Continuing with Mason/Rebekah, I was recently looking over some other
reading of mine and came across passages that made me think about
Masons's and Rebekah's communications with one another.

  First, from Kundera's _The Book of Laughter and Forgetting_, there's
this:

     "No, he was wrong when he said that here sadness was only form
without content!  No, no, her husband was still alive in that sadness, he
was merely lost and she must go search for him!  Search the whole world
for him!  Yes, yes!  At last she knew!  Whoever wishes to remember must
not stay in one place, waiting for the memories to come of their own
accord!  Memories are scattered all over the immense world, and it takes
voyaging to find them and make them leave their refuge!"


  This is Mason, no?  foax have mentioned previously how Mason is
searching the heavens for signs of Rebekah (memories are scattered
throughout the heavens and the earth...).  Mason's travels across the
globe are more than his love of his work, more than the evasion of his
family -- they are an active search for Rebekah.
   This, the idea that he is actively trying to pull Rebekah back to him,
should be contrasted to how I read most of R's visits:  she was coming
back willingly to tell him something.  Perhaps the force of his memory,
his searching, pulled her back?  But he eventually loses her, like
Orpheus lost Eurydice (thinking of Rilke's "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes")
Just a thought.

  But I also came across something that reminded me more of Rebekah
coming back of her own accord with a message.  Here's that Rilke again
from "Requiem for a Friend":

    "I have my dead, and I have let them go,
     and was amazed to see them so contented,
     so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful,
     so unlike their reputation.  Only you
     return; brush past me, loiter, try to knock
     against something, so that the sound reveals
     your presence.  [....]

     [....]

     "But no:  you're pleading.  This penetrates me, to
      my very bones, and cuts at me like a saw.
      The bitterest rebuke your ghost could bring me,
      could scream to me, at night, when I withdraw
      into my lungs, into my intestines,
      into the last bare chamber of my heart,--
      such bitterness would not chill me half so much
      as this mute pleading.  What is it that you want?
         Tell me, must I travel?  Did you leave
      some Thing behind, some place, that cannot bear
      your absense?"  [....]

   

  Well, she left Mason and the children behind.  Is there possibily
anything else Rebekah wants to tell Mason, other than "move on" and "go
see the chiildren?"  Not that there need be anything else...those messages
are quite important on their own. 


looking forward to comments/criticism,

cheers,

 will