Through the Dawn into the Light

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We might be sleeping, and when we die, we will awaken; unknown!

I must count the years since you left this Earth (or as you called it in your book: changing the level!) to find out how long it passed because these don’t mean to me as I have the feeling it was yesterday. (Tonight, we enter the sixteenth year of separation, although our reunion is getting closer.)

You’ve written many things about death and have many versions. I have found some of your notes on this, though some were hard to discern. ( Mostly, you were drunk when you wrote them and called them “Schnapsideen”, according to Germans!) But they all show your efforts to definite this great puzzle: the death.

The last days in Tehran. At the left is a very close friend of ours, a great late actor; they are now together– blessing!

“Death is psychologically as important as birth, and like it, is an integral part of life. … As a doctor, I make every effort to strengthen the belief in immortality, especially with older patients when such questions come threateningly close. For, seen from a correct psychological perspective, death is not an end, but a goal and life’s inclination toward death begins as soon as the meridian is passed. C. G. Jung (1957) CW 13

But the other day, you were full of life and permanently in love! However, this “falling in love” was not so expected or ordinary, as you never were! You were rather alone, and when I among our friends have tried vainly to set you up with a girl, you’ve been looking for a forbidden love. You have loved the impossible love, like Pip in one of your favourite novels, The Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Pip had loved Estella from the button of his heart but painfully and in vain as you worshipped it: painfully and in vain. Yes! You were unconventional; what love desires.

However, you never forgot your beloved point of “changing the level”, and I kept believing. Once, you told me about Jung’s point of view on this matter, that “death is inevitable and to think otherwise is to live in denial. More than just denial, it means living against one’s instincts.”

Live on and look forwards!

Jung writes from his most profound personal encounter with his soul in The Red Book, “The knowledge of death came to me that night… I went into the inner death and saw that outer dying is better than inner death. And, I decided to die outside and live within… I turned away and sought the place of the inner life.”

Yet, I try to follow the master and live the inner life, as you’ve done, even though what remains for me is the memories;
You do remember how Paul Simon had mused about it;
Time it was
And what a time it was; it was
A time of innocence
A time of confidences
Long ago, it must be
I have a photograph
Preserve your memories
They’re all that’s left you (“Bookends” Simon & Garfunkel)

35 thoughts on “Through the Dawn into the Light”

      • ell let’s just say that it became obvious we weren’t alone in that house–became obvious to guests too. One day I had a roofer in and to cut along story short that bit of the house was rooms knocked into one. Anyway he came down the stairs and said, ‘You’re not alone up there, are you? And this person is furious with you for knocking down his bedroom wall’ Anyway it turned out his wife was a true Romany and would be really interested and that led to her kind of getting this presence to move on… completely free of charge. I have to say that despite everything we had seen and witnessed I was still hugely sceptical. But the day she came to do that, told me there is certainly something out there because she’d have needed a sound and light show kind of thing to generate what went on. She got a bit scared herself. I just hesitate to tell this story cos I think people will think ‘ She’s either completely loopy or making it up…’ But the other was we bought that house from my sister–who was the one who had the wall knocked down and eventually after we opened up and converted the attic and it had all gotten worse, to the extent of footsteps pacing about the floor when you were sitting there, and she asked how we were getting on with it all. I told her. And it turned out they had had all the same bother but hadn’t said cos they thought we wouldn’t buy the house.

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      • Well we don’t live there now but THAT experience said…okay… other things here and honestly I still think, did i see all that? Cos I am that much of a sceptic. I remember reading this article by the musician Nick Cave who had lost one of his sons, re did he feel his son’s presence cos he needed comfort or cos he was there but either way it was all right. But to this day given I did not need the comfort of knowing ‘whatever’ it was quite unusual shall we say…..

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