Three graves
Rewak, William J.
THREE GRAVES NOT FARE WELL, BUT FARE FORWARD, VOYAGERS WILLIAM J.REWAK ome little children are ghouls. Some, of course, run and hide when they see a blood-dripping Halloween mask, or they...
...I did not engage in any heavy-duty contemplation of death, but I did recall her lines, "Because I could not stop for Death/He kindly stopped for me...
...Such dancing she never did and we should follow her example...
...It must be more than discontent with what we have...
...Once, however, London had discovered his favorite spot in the "Valley of the Moon," and near the village of Glen Ellen, he realized he had arrived, finally, at his home...
...And it's a bit of a walk, you see...
...I turned back toward the entrance, saying something unconsciously to myself—perhaps, "I'd better get going...
...Her poems are hard, personal meditations on the fact of her mortality...
...Sally sat right behind me with her wet nose nuzzling my ear...
...Most who travel can be enthralled by the sky of Montana or the harbor of Bodega Bay...
...We came to a small crossroads: two paths converged...
...Now where is it...
...When first we open our eyes and see color, do we at the same moment get a fleeting glimpse of another color, another possibility...
...He began construction on an ill-fated, mammoth residence for himself and his wife, Charmian, to be called "Wolf House"— it burned before they moved in and remains today a magnificent, but eerie, shell of volcanic rock and soaring chimneys...
...But this gentle man was a grace unsought, definitely unexpected...
...About twenty-five feet from the rock, against a redwood tree, stand two tiny wooden markers: the etched names are virtually gone, but there the two chil12...
...Eliot...
...even the general store was closed...
...This is the landscape Jack London loved...
...For some, it's the moon...
...Sally," someone yelled, "enough of that, will you...
...It was as if a Martian ship had landed and scooped everyone up and away...
...It does not only happen to everyone else, it happens to me...
...No, not at all, I was born in Birmingham, you see, but after the war—that would be the first war—my father moved us all here, and here I've been ever since...
...I have learned much from Eliot...
...they simply find entertainment in the bizarre...
...Comfortable...
...I was hoping for a bus back to Yeovil Junction," I answered...
...We passed a particularly beautiful, white-washed home with a thatched roof and dark beams and surrounded by a stone wall that was covered by the year's last geraniums...
...Why do we want to travel...
...strangely, they do this in the hope of preserving or of capturing life, however perverse that life may be...
...His poems and his life are public...
...let his resting-place be private...
...I am forced to reflect on mortality and how even those who have touched and healed millions with their words must, like the rest of us, end with nothing but a shroud...
...I explained about wanting to see the grave...
...I could hear them thinking), sat down against a tree next to the grave—and just sat there...
...I had first met Eliot in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and found that poem peculiarly suitable for high school seniors...
...They wrap cheesecloth around themselves and limp toward their little sisters in amateurish imitation of Boris Karloff, or secrete away, for evening delectation, the latest edition of "Horror Comics...
...I left the church, presuming that all I had to do was to go to the center of the village and catch a bus or a taxi...
...I thought, "Where am I going...
...I retired about five years ago, and I haven't been around here much lately...
...I allowed as how it was...
...And I must have looked worried for he said, "Come on, then, I'll take you...
...Or if we look across a valley at a tall peak covered with snow, do we want to see the mountain beyond that...
...They come from all over—from as far away as California or even Japan...
...memorial stone lies in the floor of Westminster Abbey, in Poet's Corner, but Eliot's ashes are buried in the small church of St...
...They come down and buy the whole building, fix it up for just two people...
...Travel leads to revelation...
...London wanted to rebuild but he died, at age forty, in 1916, before he could start...
...A large dog, of indeterminate parentage, arthritic but trying to be vicious for the sake of pride, jumped out from behind the cemetery wall and barked at me...
...Commonweal 4 December 1992: II movement: he writes in The Call of the Wild, for example, that there is a "boundless delight" in the "indefinite wandering through strange places...
...I noted that 14: 4 December 1992 Commonweal Americans consider these homes extremely attractive...
...He guessed on a turn to the right, and there was the station...
...I used to walk through these fields, but if you do that now, they tell you to get off the property...
...Why...
...I have to be sure you leave England with a good impression of the English...
...Are you a native of these parts...
...His fire and rose may at first seem too vibrant a memory for that secluded corner—but then maybe not...
...And because my own professional background is literature, I prefer the quiet graves of those whose lives are marked for all of us in books and poems of granite...
...I thanked him profusely...
...Emily knew, however, that in his kindness he always has time to stop for us...
...About two miles—that's two quid...
...we do not want to stop moving because to do so would make us vulnerable to the uncomfortable admission that we will die...
...it remains a part of us...
...Is there a taxi around...
...People from London do, too," he said...
...For death reminds us of what we have...
...The Sonoma Valley, in Northern California, is known today for its wineries and its lush vineyards, but it still holds onto redwood trees, its steep hills still boast a forest of oaks and madrones and Douglas fir...
...And roll over me a red boulder from the ruins of the Big House...
...Our senses give us possibility, and we want to make the possibility a reality...
...I have a friend in England, a famous historian of philosophy, whose personal quest is to visit every park and grassy square in London...
...Oh, my dear, this is Somerset...
...why does it stare at, pull apart, and then try to eat its first doll...
...I could say I respond— because of some lingering adolescent maladie de coeur—to the pinched despair of "Prufrock...
...It is now a museum...
...a young man was standing outside the station next to a taxi, so I asked him, "How much to East Coker...
...Sitting there on green grass, grown strong, as Whitman says, by the corpses lying under it, and looking at her simple headstone ("Emily Dickinson/Born/Dec...
...Childish perversity aside, what we are really unconsciously looking for in such young adventurers is an assurance that something we recognize as horrible and seemingly definite can be treated as fanciful, and that it therefore can be assimilated into a child's innocent and hopeful view of the world...
...When Buck is transported from the "sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley" to the storms of Alaska, we understand the journey to be one of enlightenment, of a return to a vital primitivism that has always lurked, unfelt, in his bones...
...4 December 1992 dren lie...
...I walked around outside the station but could find no bus schedule...
...I've just been clearing part of the cemetery here but it can wait...
...We squeezed into a mini-car that had seen better days under Churchill...
...He laughed softly, as if he knew he was dealing with someone slightly daft...
...The houses," he said, "are all gone under the sea./The dancers are all gone under the hill...
...It is not easy to explain, with any degree of clarity, one's likes and dislikes...
...They come down on the weekend and don't care about us who know the place...
...It has to be more than that which programs a bee to carve hexagons out of space and fill them with sweetness...
...We can dance around death's literary expression and thus depersonalize it...
...He stopped the car, sat back stiffly, and said, "Wouldn't want you to think the English aren't hospitable...
...It sits on the top of a hill, just a block or two from the village, surrounded by lush green sloping lawns that cover several ancient gravestones...
...I asked...
...We are too busy for him...
...after all, here was someone I have admired, I've studied and memorized her lines...
...This may sound ghoulish, but it is not: We all must learn to stop, to pause, to recapitulate and recalculate, to think and to pray, because in doing so we prepare for death...
...I enjoy visiting their graves because I am then forced to reflect on their art and on how, through the journeys it affords us, it has altered our consciousness...
...But even if our new place is peopled, even if hikers are tramping on ahead of us, we act like a discoverer, for our own eyes have not seen that particular color of light there on the horizon of the Sangre de Cristo mountains nor have we smelled the ocean here as it breaks against the boulders scattered along this jagged coast of Maine...
...Narrow two-lane roads curve through grassy fields and around clumps of orange poppies, and early morning mist sifts upward through the trees and into the lowlying clouds...
...I haven't spent much time with his poems, but maybe someday I will...
...If all our striving, the suffering and love and intelligence, is to end in the peace that passes understanding, then the calm that resides there, in that holy darkness, is peculiarly appropriate for a poet who, though filled with the energy and excitement of creation, was also a gentle soul...
...As a journalist and adventurer London had traveled from his hometown of Oakland to Hawaii, Korea and Japan, Alaska, Australia...
...We negotiated a sharp turn with grinding gears...
...That evening, after the ride back to Salisbury, and sitting down to a meal and a glass of wine—and knowing I would no doubt never return to that village—I did think of Eliot's line from the "Dry Salvages": "Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers...
...Michael's...
...All of London's travels—"the sheer surging of life," as he calls it, all the sailing and walking and horseback-riding, the primitive runs through Australia, and the more sophisticated trains through Paris and Rome—brought him finally to the silence of this hill and this solitary rock...
...I thought, as I stood there at that lava rock grave, that we are all programmed to travel, and our enjoyment may lie in the excitement and novelty of the trip itself—as it so obviously did for London—or in the revelation that always awaits us at our final destination...
...Monsters, after all, do spring from death (Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, the Wolf Man, any ghost, any avenger) and they all deliver death...
...I prefer the hidden, unassuming graves of those whom humanity has come to admire...
...Ironically, we can distance ourselves from death by reading about it...
...A bus may come today...
...And lest the above example of the Mummy suggest that the ghoulish is the domain of the male: Mary Shelley, too, had a streak of the hellish in her...
...You come for the church...
...I turned around, walked back past the two men again ("What's this guy doing...
...A preoccupation with monsters is therefore at least a flirtation with the idea that though death is inevitable, we seek some assurance it is not the final, the absolute, end...
...There was no one around—anywhere...
...And Emily Dickinson's house—now a residence for Amherst faculty—fits into that picture...
...I could say that because of my strong Jesuit classical training, I delight in puzzling out his more recondite allusions, or that I am sympathetic to his vision of the creative Word, and that when he says there is "Only the hardly, barely prayable/Prayer of the one Annunciation," I understand...
...If no one has been there before, we are proclaimed discoverers...
...And it may be there is no distinction between the two...
...Eliot's remains lie almost unnoticed—you have to search for the small wall plaque—in a dark corner of the church...
...He deposited me, in a light drizzle, at the door of St...
...For we should not visit the past to confront it and then, satisfied, dismiss it...
...Is someone waiting for me...
...Here I am on a weekend vacation during a sabbatical year and I'm rushing off to—where...
...For her especially, there is an inevitable regret that time did not allow her greater latitude...
...In other cases, graves of those we now consider great ones are almost lost...
...The words of these great writers will never be dismissed...
...for others, a subatomic particle...
...I had arrived by train at Yeovil Junction, from Salisbury, a little after lunch...
...Since no trains go to East Coker, I assumed there would be a bus connection...
...This isn't the right road...
...I walked back to the church...
...Since then, I have taken the opportunity to share him with students as often as possible...
...But it may come tomorrow...
...After about 1911, his travels became shorter...
...We do not all explore the same landscape...
...I suspect Eliot's spirit is not unhappy keeping company with him...
...Not seriously deranged...
...But it is a seamless voyage, for in both cases we are concerned that death not be the end...
...Michael's...
...Oh, I don't think so...
...I figured that was better than waiting for a forty-pence bus ride that might not materialize...
...It was important to make the pilgrimage to East Coker...
...But some run to the grave to look...
...Deep down, ghouls worry the bone of mortality...
...Are you looking for something...
...He was slightly stooped, bareheaded, with gray eyebrows that seemed to explode all over his forehead...
...Eliot's in East Coker...
...10, 1830/Called Back/May 15, 1886"), I reflect that we do not often pause in a busy life to think of mortality...
...Wolf Larsen sails his death ship over all the seas, eternally...
...But the geographical journey is a metaphor for the psychological...
...He hasn't stopped exploring the twists and turns of the rational mind, but as an elderly citizen he now delights in the smaller discoveries: the way the wind soughs through the trees of Regent's Park, the early spring brightness of roses in Kensington Gardens...
...he wore a long corduroy jacket, overalls, and heavy boots...
...A sign explains that London had remarked to his wife that "I wouldn't mind if you laid my ashes on the knoll where the Greenlaw children are buried...
...And snooty, they are...
...To play outrageously with the fact of mortality, at that age, is to be able to accept it...
...There, a moss-covered picket fence surrounds a large red piece of lava rock and under the rock rest his own and Charmian's ashes...
...the point is enjoyment, and learning through that enjoyment...
...Why does a child, once it can crawl, reach for a knick-knack placed on too low a shelf...
...It is interesting, too, to see that sometimes an age's estimation of the deceased is overblown with gingerbread and angels: time can whittle down the reputation...
...I sat on a bench and read through the "East Coker" section of Eliot's Four Quartets...
...He started to build a working ranch...
...Commonweal The cemetery is several blocks away, and she is buried there with several other family members toward the back, in a plot surrounded by an intricate, black wrought-iron fence...
...I reflect on how all of us, teachers and poets— or graveyard caretakers—must bequeath something to our world, otherwise we have wasted our space...
...I will, someday, lie under a stone...
...She lived the richest life of all...
...An admirable gesture of near-anonymity...
...Strange chap from New Zealand, he fell asleep in the cemetery...
...We were driving past a field of corn: "At that time, all these fields were owned by the squire, now they're all cut up, and all private, that's the way it is...
...Its fingers were always on her skin...
...Her hoary head bounced on my shoulder as we drove down some of the primitive paths that are, in the country districts of England, called roads...
...Do I have a conference to attend...
...Each one has an austere dignity, and each has its own story...
...Emily's words can lead us into literary excursions that delight us because of linguistic intricacies or metaphoric allusions or, in her case especially, the mysteries of punctuation and stress...
...That is, if you don't mind my poor car—and if you don't mind riding with Sally...
...Sally lost her balance in the back and fell noisily on some paint cans...
...If he is at times too esoteric or too precious, he learned later to soften the edges with a wisdom he had achieved through suffering, a mellowness he had learned through love...
...It is a spacious house, spacious enough for an imagination that wanted to rove and explore...
...His writings, too, are filled with travel, "It's an inside joke...
...Emily Dickinson herself took advantage of each moment, and she carved out those moments for us in words that will surely last longer than she could ever have hoped...
...You know what Dryden says about that, don't you...
...They are ghouls...
...No, it's a shame...
...As I stood in front of it, I tried to imagine her sitting upstairs, day after day, listening to the voices from the parlor and penning her short notes to the world...
...mherst, in Massachusetts, is a beautiful, small, typical New England town: one with a commons, a spired white church, plenty of trees turning yellow and gold in the fall, . a quality almost of bookishness, of fussy tradition...
...she feared death, she sought it as a lover, she was crushed by its indifference...
...Then I stopped...
...But don't fret, we'll get there...
...If the first grave was in the mountains of Northern California, and the second across the country in a quiet college town in Massachusetts, the third is farther eastwards yet, across the ocean in a little village in England: T.S...
...Michael's cemetery clear of dead branches, who quotes Dryden, who lives a full life without venturing too far beyond the walls of his village—and who is generously concerned that bewildered foreigners think well of English hospitality...
...There are many of us: witness the millionaire status of Stephen King...
...On such a first visit, there is always a touch of sentimentality...
...I thought: I hope Sally doesn't mind...
...Well, I thought, this atones for the mob scene at the memorial in Westminster Abbey the previous day (how we tourists can stain, by our persistence and numbers, the character of any hallowed ground...
...I chuckled...
...Their spirits should push us forward...
...And neither should we visit those graves with an air simply of nostalgia—though some of that is inevitable...
...You can see no habitation of any kind...
...That one used to be three cottages, with five or six children in each cottage...
...But I began Commonweal 4 December 1992: 13 to be concerned when, after walking down the one winding street that holds the village together, I saw neither a car nor a bus stop...
...Such a flirtation exhibits itself, not only in reading horror stories, but—one of my own favorite pastimes—in visiting graves...
...I stood there for a moment, on a fall day, and noted the potted plant someone had placed in the middle of her grave...
...The roiling action of Jack London, the sharp crystal of Emily Dickinson, the hard-won wisdom and theological breadth of T.S...
...Perhaps it's a way of trying to figure out whether or not what was laid to rest under the headstone has had any lasting effect on his or her environment...
...Some, of course, run and hide when they see a blood-dripping Halloween mask, or they cringe and lean toward their mothers when Dickens' s "Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come" beckons Scrooge to look at his own grave...
...An offspring, I'm sure, of English warriors, a day-laborer who keeps St...
...he asked...
...Eliot: these are characteristics that challenge us to know ourselves and to seek to know the world...
...Three graves I have recently visited are those of Jack London, Emily Dickinson, and T.S...
...he had wandered through Europe...
...Tom Eliot only showed up once or twice here," he said, "so folks don't know him, but we're all proud that he decided to stay in our church...
...That might be the theme of these journeys...
...I perked up my ears, turned and looked at him, "He says, 'How anxious are our cares, and yet how vain/The bent of our desires.' Now there's a poet who knew what he was talking about...
...Do I have to rush somewhere to dress for dinner...
...Michael's in that Somerset village...
...Do we remember her—and why...
...The hill may seem lonely, but it is eminently peaceful...
...We cannot live a rich life without the touch of death...
...WILLIAM J. REWAK, S.J., is president of Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama...
...We'd better turn back...
...It sits up off the road on a small hill, a large, two-storied handsome brick structure with white molding, surrounded by trees...
...But we have to accept that and prepare for it...
...he had sailed round Cape Horn...
...A man of about seventy-five came around the wall, holding a handsaw...
...If he had not offered to take me I would have been walking the lanes and fields of Somerset for days, and sleeping in cemeteries at night...
...The day would have been memorable enough if the only image I brought with me from East Coker was that of a simple plaque on a dim wall of St...
...How the empathetic connections are fused may be irrelevant...
...I hoped he would find his precarious way back to East Coker...
...We all want to see something new...
...Bit modern for my tastes...
...I don't know why Emily could not stop for death, but I do know that for most of us the reason is lack of time...
...I walked down the path and past two men who were cutting grass...
...Probably couldn't get out of East Coker, I thought to myself...
...The entire property is now a state park and the pilgrimage begins in the "House of Happy Walls," the house Charmian built for herself after Jack died...
...Don't mind her," he said...
...Nauri, in the short story, "House of Mapuli," swims through hurricanes, sharks, and dead bodies to arrive peacefully at home...
...We were now driving down a dirt path that led right into a barn, and we nearly came face to face with a resident cow...
...And then, later, to sit with ease near the headstones of Commonweal London, Dickinson, and Eliot is to know that the riches of life travel far beyond the grave...
...From there, you can walk almost a mile, in the shade of manzanitas and oaks, to the top of a hill that overlooks a long, narrow valley...
...Was his promise kept...
...It is a long voyage, itself: from running around graves as a child, and watching Dracula rise from his coffin in Technicolor, to contemplating the gifts that great writers have left us...
Vol. 119 • December 1992 • No. 21
