Mindfulness In Action: Paul ValÉry’s ‘seaside Cemetery’
Thursday, October 15, 2015 15:52
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I don’t do it often, but I don’t dislike a walk through a cemetery. In fact, I find it quite enjoyable—up to a point. A cemetery is such a great place to contemplate the eternal and the unknown. Media vita in morte sumus. In the midst of life we are in death. Mors janua vitæ. Death is the gateway to life. Having said that, too much contemplation of death and the dead results only in a morbid and melancholy state of mind. Life is for the living. I say that with no disrespect for the dead.
French poet Paul Valéry’s famous 1922 poem ‘Le Cimetière marin’ (‘The Seaside Cemetery’ or ‘The Graveyard by the Sea’), set in the cemetery at Sète where Valéry [pictured] himself is now buried, is a sublime meditation on life and death. The tension between being and non-being, between action and inactive contemplation, was a perennial theme of Paul Valéry, but in ‘Le Cimetière marin’ the poet, after coming to accept the inevitability of death, boldly proclaims the need to choose life and eternal change.
Valéry begins by describing a state of ‘celestial calm’—‘palpable calm, visible reticence’—when ‘thought has had its hour’. Life is a ‘temple of time, within a brief sigh bounded’. For three-quarters of the poem Valéry is lost in self-absorbed meditative contemplation— ‘long vistas of celestial calm!’ His contemplation of the mystery of death (‘The dead lie easy, hidden in earth where they / Are warmed and have their mysteries burnt away’) morphs into a mindful awareness of the inevitability of death as well as the self-livingness and endlessness of life itself:
Even as a fruit’s absorbed in the enjoying,
Even as within the mouth its body dying
Changes into delight through dissolution,
So to my melted soul the heavens declare
All bounds transfigured into a boundless air,
And I breathe now my future’s emanation.
Le Cimetière marin at Sète, France
In time, however, the wind begins to stir and waves start forming on the sea. A new state of consciousness arises in the poet. Self-absorption gives way to conscious awareness and exuberance. Even defiance. True meditation—mindfulness—is not a state of reverie or contemplation of the ineffable. No, mindfulness is an intense state of ceaseless change and action. Mindfulness is for the living, of the living, and is in the living of our days—all days, every day, and everymoment of each day.
No, no! Arise! The future years unfold.
Shatter, O body, meditation’s mould!
And, O my breast, drink in the wind’s reviving!
A freshness, exhalation of the sea,
Restores my soul . . . Salt-breathing potency!
Let’s run at the waves and be hurled back to living!
Yes, mighty sea with such wild frenzies gifted
(The panther skin and the rent chlamys), sifted
All over with sun-images that glisten,
Creature supreme, drunk on your own blue flesh,
Who in a tumult like the deepest hush
Bite at your sequin-glittering tail — yes, listen!
The wind rises! . . . We must try to live!
The huge air opens and shuts my book: the wave
Dares to explode out of the rocks in reeking
Spray. Fly away, my sun-bewildered pages!
Break, waves! Break up with your rejoicing surges
This quiet roof where sails like doves were pecking.
Jesusis recorded as having said, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead?’ (Lk 24:5) and ‘Let the dead bury their own dead’ (Lk 9:60). Have you lost a loved one? I lost my parents over 30 years ago and I still miss them. I seldom go to the cemetery where their cremated remains are buried. My parents are not there. I do not look for them there. They are to be found in the very livingness of life itself. I am reminded of some beautiful words from This, My Son by the Australian writer Joan Kinmont—words that capture the essence of Paul Valéry’s poem:
Then your dear, distant voice
Broke through the night …
‘Seek me in the world
If you would have me near;
Seek me in the light.
Darkness and defeat
Entomb me hear.
Dear, lift your eyes above
To beauty and the sky.
Seek me in the light.
Death is not the end.
There is no death.’
Your voice spoke in the night.
Mindfulness—like life itself—is not for day-dreamers. It is for those who want to live life fully and deeply for so long as it lasts. Mindfulness is not escapism. It is a non-judgmental, intentional awareness and experience of life as it unfolds from one moment to the next.
‘The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.’ So wrote Valéry. When asked about his enlightenment the Buddha is reported as having said, ‘I woke up.’ That, my friends, is what mindfulness is all about—waking up … and staying awake.
Yes, the wind rises! We must try to live! And if we live mindfully, that’s even better.
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Source: http://ianellis-jones.blogspot.com/2015/10/mindfulness-in-action-paul-valerys.html
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