From a Column, Falling

From a Column, Falling

The moon of the New Year burns harsh and white above like an interrogator’s lamp. A question has been posed; but what is the question?

No response. The night is still. But how slowly my breath rises in the cold air! And in the plains below, where stars seem to glitter in the streets, how slowly the vast clouds drift from power plant smoke stacks in the light of the tiny moon. I am made uneasy by how far the moon seems and wander off crunching the snow in the streets alone.

I have come to Quebec City for the New Year. One troubling sign of global warming is the shift of migratory patterns; and so this winter I find myself North instead of the usual South, my migration may be a harbinger of apocalypse; as in the coal mine a canary sings.

I do not know if I will understand the frozen isolation of my heart. Would deeper Truth upset the gentle tour of my days and knock from my face the mild habitual smile? I would fall from my soapbox pulpit, scattering so many opinions like marbles rattling from my head. Behold the columnist fallen from his column like a tiny Stalin or small Saddam. So fall we all. Perhaps the question is simply this: how to fall with grace.

But did Saddam fall with grace? Only Allah knows. His character and ideology burned bright at the end. One is tempted to say: there goes a man. But how primitive we men can be! Our light burns like a fire but illuminates only a smoky darkness.

Certainly Saddam had bathed his hands in blood. But did he deserve to die more than other leaders we are too discrete or intimidated to name? Saddam grasped the role of martyrdom like a seasoned performer. The guards cursed him; the rope cut him; and he died, proud as a warrior chief.

This pride seems admirable, and his resistance to the occupiers appears principled and passionate. We all have our principles. Many of us are in principle opposed to such executions, and this was conducted in unseemly haste. The execution was denounced by the New York Times, the spokesman for the Pope, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson, among others. But I am not questioning that justice or lack of justice here. Other questions must arise as well, vast as a moonlit cloud over a ruined and ravaged community.

Did Saddam die well? What is a good end? Is it simply to “not go gently into Night” as the poet Dylan Thomas phrases it, but to “rage, rage against the dying of the light”? If so, the warrior king died well. But is grasping at glory as one topples tragically really a pre-Islamic model of behaviour?

What is a good death and how can we earn one? Imagining your death, what would you wish? Would we wish for an open heart, with some aspect of the mind clear from pain and fear, and sincere prayers? We might also require the prayers of family and others and perhaps too the alignment of the planets for the door to open to a conscious death. Allah knows best.

Saints struggle with extinction too, but not like warrior kings. Light and dark embrace in a final dance. As one falls into that final sleep we struggle to remain awake. As the rope tightens round the neck, new lights may appear in windows of the soul, indicating rooms we didn’t know existed, and which now are filled with silent witness.

So in the final moments of the year 2006, I wander the frozen streets of the North in a haunted frame of mind, considering those so called great inescapables, death and taxes. And I recall other streets far in the South; how the streets of Essourira resemble tunnels winding among high, damp windowless walls, feeling the echoing boom of the Atlantic crashing again and again against the ancient Portuguese ramparts. I am still lost n those ways, North and South, East and West.

But you dear reader are in a tunnel of your own, running to work and school, in social networks of friends and family echoing with laughter. You may not feel the need to escape. Yet, one day you shall. And we are all the vaster networks of capitalism and imperial power serving the false god of the bottom line. So, only Allah can lead us through our lives away from disaster and to both a good life and a good death. We cannot say what signs, what guides He will send us.

Meanwhile, we love, or hope to love. The seasons and the tides turn in their course. In the maze of the mind we may find trace of the Beloved; there is hope in human amazement. There may even be wisdom in human defeat, in the final struggle with sleep.

Beyond the larger mystery, I now face the smaller question of returning home. Will the U.S. border guards allow a weekend migrant to return? But I have steps to go before I face them. First I will walk alone through snow and with frozen defeated smile return to the small hotel. In the entry there is a familiar human jumble, piles of wet boots and snow soaked shoes puddling and piled as in the doorway to a mosque.

I remove my shoes, and enter a New Year; questions and concerns invisible like Jinn around me. And you—how will you enter the New Year? How will you and I make good ends and good beginnings in 2007?