Sermon for the Underworld

Aeneas and the Sibyl in the Underworld, 1598

William Faulkner famously said, "The past is not dead.  In fact, it's not even past."  I always liked the Mexican writer, Octavio Paz's version from The Labyrinth of Solitude better: "The past is not past; it is still passing by."  A Mississippian and a Mexicano would understand this truth better, perhaps, than other people, violent and inescapable as their respective histories are.

Last week, I taught my freshman students Book 12 of the Odyssey in which our hero must visit the Underworld before he can return home to Ithaka.  At the same time, I taught my sophomores the last chapter of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, called "The Lives of the Dead."  In that final chapter he takes the reader away from the Vietnam War and all the way back into his deepest past, his childhood, and retells the story of nine-year old Linda.  Linda was the author's first love, and her death from cancer his first experience of the loss that marked his time as a soldier.  It wrecks me every time.

Why must Odysseus go to the Underworld?, my freshman whine.  It seems so unfair.  He's almost home and then, BAM!, this one last test.  The injustice of Homer's twist is compounded for them by the fact that Book 12 consists mostly of conversations with ghosts--it has none of the high drama of archery contests, monsters, or mass slaughter in the palace.  Boring homework indeed.

Joseph Campbell would argue that any hero must revisit her past before she can complete her quest.  We cannot come through struggle fully healed unless we atone for our pasts and come face to face with ghosts.  Odysseus meets many ghosts: his dead mother, the war-weary Achilles, bitter Agamemnon, the eternally damned Sisyphus and Tantalus,.  Tim O'Brien too digs up bones of fallen boys: Kiowa, Ted Lavender, Curt Lemon, a dead Vietnamese boy.  

It struck me as appropriate that I teach these chapters the week of Halloween, our sanitized version of a visit to the Underworld.  The Mexicans still do it better with their Day of the Dead, a more gruesome and more holy holiday.  Americans do not excel at looking backward or shaking hands with our mortality. But as Paz writes:

"The Mexican . . . is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love. True, there is perhaps as much fear in his attitude as in that of others, but at least death is not hidden away."

Even more appropriate that my own ghosts keep popping up: in my dreams, in my news feed, in the pasta aisle at Whole Foods.  A few weeks ago I opened a piece of old, dusty tupperware, and inside I found a note that read: Wherever I am, I am loving you.  An ex-boyfriend left it for me when he helped move me to Houston almost 8 years ago.  He meant for me to find it sooner, I'm sure, but his words shot down into the deepest dark of the abyss in me, and I want to believe across the great distances of years and states and vows that they're still true.  I want to read them not as portent, but as a blessing.

My past loves have haunted me these last few weeks, hanging around like hungry children, skeletal beggars for my time and attention.    Go away, I tell them, I'm getting married in two weeks, you jerks.  Go away.  Useless arguments, since the teacher in me knows that a descent into the past has less to do with actual ghosts than with the infinitude of voices that sing inside each of us, the ones we give faces to in our choices of friends, lovers, enemies and idols.

I believe atonement asks two things of us: to acknowledge our mistakes and to say thank you.  We cannot achieve either without revisiting our pasts.  We must turn around to look our ghosts in the eye, and accept they might not have nice things to say to us.  So far, I've refused to turn around, imagining conversations like this:

Me: Oh, hey you, ghost.  Long time no see.
Ghost: I hate you, you &*$%#.

or

Me: It's really, genuinely wonderful to see you again, ghost.
Ghost: You broke my heart and I'm stuck down here in this hellhole with a bunch of dudes in togas.

or

Me: I still love you, ghost.
Ghost: I'm over it.  Don't write about me. 

or

Me: Hey--
(And the ghost attacks me like a werewolf, chewing out my jugular vein and swallowing it whole, licking his ugly lips)

But face them I must.  I want my new married life to include an awareness of the past, but I also want to close a few doors too.  I have really loved and been loved by three men before my fiancee, each of them shades of each other and hints at who I was and would be.  Some of them failed me, and I failed them too.  Because the past is still passing by, they won't ever die for me, nor do I want them to die, since they brought me here, to this lucky place in my life.  They can live inside my remembering and the stories I tell from that remembering.  As O'Brien so eloquently says:

And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are.

I remember them and will.  But I've never been much good with ghosts.

So I'll just say, simply:

I'm sorry, you spooks.

And I thank you.  So, so much.

Amen.