On Death Premonitions
And three writers who mystically, deliberately, and unwittingly foretold their demise...
(content warning: brief discussion of suicide)
I wonder if you remember your first childhood encounter with the idea of (your own) mortality. I remember feeling terrified. Not just at the thought of my own mortality, but that of those I loved. You mean they’ll all die? We all die? I remember discussing this with my kindergarten teacher after a lesson on health. She explained that smoking cigarettes was very unhealthy and this deeply worried me because my grandmother was an avid smoker. I cried thinking I could lose her at any moment. And what did that entail anyway? Death? What happens when we die?
Well before David Chase scripted his bold conclusion to The Sopranos, I remember, as a child, feeling that death was a fade-to-black, the cessation of life and its pleasures. It couldn’t have been much different from sleep, which I dreaded as cousin to death. I never managed to sleep well (or at all) through our mandatory nap times and lay awake listening to my classmates huffing and chuffing in their easy sleep.
I remember too, in those precious early years spent with my mom, her explaining the elements of faith, of prayers (can I do it with my eyes open?), and of heaven—concepts and practices that, to this day, provide comfort and peace (against the void backdrop of my own, tiny angst).
I remember finally accepting it, the unadorned fact that death happens once. Like the future, death is a chronically fixed point on the horizon, one we’re always asymptotically approaching. To accept this meant assimilating a kind of fear, a kind of recognition that life is actually fragile, very fragile—and death is never as distant as we forget to remember.
Every now and again, this death-anxiety creeps back up on me—visits in the quiet of night to remind me how near it is, how ever-present the possibility of its being now. Regardless of my grounding in faith or the belief that we are of essences meant to return to our source, I am nevertheless haunted by this originary notion of death—one final, irretrievable end to the dream of the living.
It doesn’t take a literal near-death experience to know the taste of death. Maybe all it takes is knowing the acute anxiety that comes with suddenly realizing there are no guard rails, that not only are you dangerously close to the edge of something you couldn’t accurately explain, but that it wouldn’t matter either way. For as loud and catastrophic the experience, you sense the unnerving quiet of a true, abyssal death. The nothingness of an absolute oblivion.
For most of us, such experiences prefigure a kind of rebirth, as we accept and undergo the radical reconfiguration of everything we thought we knew and understood before we knew the taste of death.
Eventually, the seams of what you’ve come to understand as your life begin to fray and peel and tear away, exposing things hidden, unseen, unthought. The task then becomes one of assimilation and acceptance, how one might live after the end (of something).
After we’ve overcome our funambulistic fear of falling, we probably don’t think about our harrowing experience(s) often (or at all). It’s unpleasant, painful to recall with any kind of detail what nearly took us out (and radically transformed us). Or if we do return to such experiences and memories with any frequency, it’s because they can also be ecstatic in nature, as in la petite mort, the post-orgasmic haze we occupy in the wake of an arrival. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea comes to mind.
Either way, some like to linger in the space of the eternal thereafter and dare to write what they’ve witnessed. Three writers in particular come to mind: César Vallejo, Yukio Mishima, and James Baldwin—each curiously different in their expressions and prefigurations of death.
He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.
-F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (trans. Helen Zimmern)
Piedra negra sobre una piedra blanca
Me moriré en París con aguacero,
un día del cual tengo ya el recuerdo.
Me moriré en París—y no me corro—
tal vez un jueves, como es hoy, de otoño.
Jueves será, porque hoy, jueves, que proso
estos versos, los húmeros me he puesto
a la mala y, jamás como hoy, me he vuelto,
con todo mi camino, a verme solo.
César Vallejo ha muerto, le pegaban
todos sin que él les haga nada;
le daban duro con un palo y duro
también con una soga; son testigos
los días jueves y los huesos húmeros,
la soledad, la lluvia, los caminos…
from Poemas humanos (1939)
César Vallejo, the great Peruvian poet (1892-1938), (in)famously called his shot in the posthumously published poem “Black Stone on a White Stone”. Known for the marriage of his radical modernist idiom with his political/revolutionary conscience, Vallejo is considered a trailblazer in verse poetry. Maybe because his voice can be, as in Trilce, so opaque or, at its most epic moments, heraldic—I (and many others) consider Vallejo something of a mystic seer, a minor prophet of the 20th century. Admittedly, Vallejo is a major influence on me. His Trilce inspired my own Hívado. Even my choice of title is an homage to his 1921 masterpiece of otherworldly poetry.
But what remains fascinating about this specific poem is how nearly accurate it was in predicting the circumstances of his death. Published posthumously by his widow and executor Georgette, it was likely written in the last (or latter) years of his life. Clayton Eshleman dates the poems in Poems humanos to between 1923 and 1938. Some believe the poem dates all the way back to 1920 (eighteen years before his passing) when, while on the lam from cops for arson, Vallejo envisioned himself dead in Paris, his body surrounded by so many unfamiliar faces. The poem, a variation on a fourteen line sonnet, foretells the poet’s death on a rainy autumn Thursday in Paris.
Black Stone on a White Stone
I'll die in Paris in a squall
on a day I already remember.
I'll die in Paris—ten toes down—
maybe a Thursday, like today, in the fall.
Thursday it'll be, cause today, Thursday, my bones,
prosing this poetry, put me in a bad way
and, never like today, have I turned,
with all my mileage, to find myself so alone.
César Vallejo has died, they beat him
all without him doing anything to them;
they hit him hard with a stick and hard
too with a rope; they're witness
those Thursdays and those bones,
that solitude, that rain, those roads...
(trans. Andrew E. Colarusso)
The poem’s shift from first person to third person in the fourth stanza (César Vallejo has died…) also signals a shift in tone, from personal confession to journalistic obituary. He dies at the lexicographic center of the poem and tumbles all the way into the silence of his end.
Historically speaking, César Vallejo would die on a rainy day in Paris, but on a Friday (not Thursday). Good Friday, in fact, April 15, 1938 at 9:20 a.m. in the Villa Arago clinic. He’d been ill for several weeks and perhaps sensed something of an end approaching. His death (and life) has since become the stuff of literary legend, inspiring Roberto Bolaño to pen his short novel Monsieur Pain (or, in Spanish, La senda de los elefantes).
However clairvoyant Vallejo’s poem might have been, there is also something rather deliberate about it—as if Vallejo had planned for such a death in the then cosmopolitan capital of the old world (far from his Santiago de Chuco). If Vallejo had, in some sense, willed his death (just as he’d willed his life) in Paris, his example begs the question to what degree do we have agency in our own passing. For most people, those reared in draconian systems of governance, the only time we are made to confront our death is by way of last will and testament (unless you were one of my lucky students subjected to a personal eulogy writing exercise). But, as perhaps you’re aware, there are cultures where meditations on one’s mortality are not considered morbid or subject to a power of attorney.
The jisei, or death poem, provides us with one such example. The tradition conceptually and aesthetically derives from Buddhist notions of detachment from worldly desire (and, therefore, worldly suffering). This perspective, broadly speaking, treats mortality as something both sacred and mundane, not necessarily the end of a life, but an end to one piece in a greater non-theistic continuity of life and living. Such Buddhistic concepts have manifested variously over time in a variety of cultures. Feudal Japan, for example, would give rise to the noble/warrior Samurai class whose code of ethic, Bushido, borrowed heavily from Buddhism and Confucianism. An important (and very romanticized) concept central to Bushido philosophy was/is preserving a warrior’s honor and integrity. This meant, as perhaps you’ve seen in film or on TV, that a warrior dishonored in battle (having lost) would be responsible for taking their own life via ritual suicide (disemboweling, cf: Seppuku, 切腹).
This practice, in some sense, stills remains a part of Japanese culture, long after the Samurai of the Edo-period had no daimyo to serve, no land to protect. Rather than a glorification of suicide, seppuku was an ideological gesture meant to preserve the dignity and integrity of the individual. For the Samurai, this meant being the agent of one’s own death (rather than suffering the shame of falling to one’s enemy). In contemporary Japan, thankfully, the idea of suicide as a radical means of preserving one’s dignity in the face of great/public shame has long lost its majesty. While not myself qualified to speak with any accuracy or authenticity on contemporary Japanese culture, its seems to me Japanese culture is still very much concerned with notions of public standing, reputation, honor, etc.
So it remains, with the tradition of death poems, that a regard for one’s life is also an acknowledgement of death as one’s final act of poetic consciousness—how noble it is to have some say, some control, over one’s own life and death.
In the years following the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan faced a variety of crises (not least of which the physical devastation of an unprecedented weapon). One of these crises, perhaps ongoing, was one of identity crisis. Enter: Yukio Mishima. Born in 1925, Tokyo, Mishima is hard to describe. First and foremost a writer of great significance to 20th century Japan, it would be the drama of his life (and death) that commandeered the attentions of