my paper!

On Liberation Through Illusion
Advice on Living and Dying in Nooteboom , Beckett and The Tietan Book Of The Dead
Both the novels Malloy and The Following Story tell the story of a character dying in much the way that is described in the Tibetan book of the Dead. Malloy is a very confused man, very uncertain and in allot of pain. He is decaying, both mind and body, but refuses to accept his death by continuing to falsify sad stories. In The Following Story, Herman Mussert is not very involved with actual life. He has only one affair and this is the subject he thinks of when people normally see their whole lives flash before their eyes, because this is the only thing interesting that has happened to him, the only time he lost the separation between him and the world. Neither man is acceptant, or even aware of his being dead, but both reach for a form of understanding in concurrence with the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
My theory, displayed through these books, is that to enjoy life, you must accept what Nietzsche calls ‘the preconditions of life’, including death. This requires a mysterious mental maneuver, what the Tibetan Book of the Dead calls a ‘setting to face,’ in which one realizes the oneness of all things as mind-based illusion, emanating from the Dharma Kaya, or the unformed state of Liberation, which is associated with a clear and/or radiant light. What we learn from these two wayward ghosts, and a few other works I will mention by way of conclusion, is that one must accept the transient nature of existence, not being over awed or angry with it, but allowing one’s self to bathe in the beauty of the illusion. In concurrence with the Tibetan Book of the Dead, this means recognizing the hallucinatory nature of all things, even as we sometimes extol and beautify them.
The Good Book
Now this ‘extolling’ or ‘reveling’, on the surface, seems a dangerous statement as regards the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The book clearly states that one may not reach the desired liberation because of “being over awed and terrified” by some of the illusions one sees after death (Book of the Dead 107). The meaning of this statement all hinges on the meaning of the word ‘awe’ to the translator. Did translator Evans Wentz imply here the modern, popular or demotic, use of the word to mean only wondrous and beautiful, as in ‘awesome’? The Oxford Essential Dictionary defines the word awe as “reverential fear or wonder”, but the juxtaposition of the word ‘terror’ seems to imply that it is the ‘fear’ part of the word which is to be avoided (Dictionary 38). The Tibetan Book of the Dead elucidates what should be feared as well as what, it seems implied, should be revered:
“a light of dull green colour from the (wrathful ones) proceed from the cause of feeling of jealousy, coming side by side with the Wisdom Rays, will shine upon thee. Meditate upon it with impartiality- niether with repulsion nor attraction. Be not fond of it… At that time fear not the glorious and transparent, radiant and dazzling green light, but know it to be Wisdom” (Bardo Thodol 117).
Much of The Tibetan Book of the Dead deals with the appearance of lights to the deceased. It seems that some of these lights, particularly the dull ones, rising from negative reactions, are not to be held with fondness. The Book of the Dead also tells us to merge with other lights, the more clear and luminous ones, and that this is the way to liberation. In fact, the whole book is a repetition of this same process, because most souls don’t accept the first clear light they see, but withdraw from it in fear. The book tells us that “because of the power of bad karma, the glorious blue light of the wisdom… will produce in thee fear and terror and thou wilt wish to flee from it,” residing with other illusory, though less ‘clear’ or ‘pure’ lights (106). This, we are told, “is an interruption to obstruct thee on the path to liberation” (107). Therefore, while The Tibetan Book of the Dead tells us that we shouldn’t be terrified, it seems that reverence is implicit when the bright lights of wisdom are being described as being “shining… glorious,” and “dazzling,” or, “so radiant that thou wilt scarcely be able to look at it” (106). This reverence then, would be reverence for illusion, because all the things the dead man sees are illusions. Some of them are good, “issuing from (his) own heart, being (either) a product of thine own pure love” or, in the case of the wrathful ones and terrifying ‘duller’ lights, jealousy and fear (121). These ‘wrathful ones’ and lights are embodiments of one’s own inner negativity, and seek to encourage negative feelings in the dead man in order to scare him from Liberation (143).
The Lost Ghosts
Mussert and Maloy are both rather unpleasant dead men, both having unhappy illusions because that’s what their mind creates for them. While Malloy is stern, unhappy and cruel, Mussert is a sort of spineless recluse. They are the souls who have not yet recognized the light, have not achieved “liberation through recognition” of the light, and they instead become confused (Book of the Dead 97). They occupy the state “when the consciousness-principle getteth outside the body” where they “sayeth to (themselves) ‘am I dead, or am I not dead?’ (and they) cannot determine” (98). In ‘low brow’ terms, their stuck in the bardo between life and death, a state similar to that of Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense.
One way the fact of their death is shown, is their lack of association with the body from whence their ‘consciousness principles’ have departed. Malloy forgets his physical ailments. He cannot remember which of his legs is the stiff one, sometimes forgetting that he had a stiff leg at all when in a ‘real,’ living or non-liminal, state the pain alone ought to be enough to remind him (Malloy 38). In his confusion he not only forgets his name and the name of his mother, but actually thinks he is someone else, claiming, “if ever I stoop, forgetting who I am, or kneel, make no mistake, it will not be me, but another” (37). He also states that he only consumes six quarts of beer a week, though before he forgets his name, he also says that he “quite like(s) getting drunk” (112, 37). In his confusion, fearful of recognizing his state of existence, he is clinging to a life that is gone. “Mostly I just staid, in my jar, which new neither seasons nor gardens” he says, possibly referencing an urn,
“but in there you have to be careful, ask yourself questions, as for example whether you still are, and if no when it stopped, and if yes how long it will still go on, anything at all to keep you from loosing the thread of the dream” (49).
Nooteboom leaves much less to argue against the fact of his hero’s death, as his hero even meets with a woman who had previously died in the novel, telling stories of what he remembered as they discover his corpse (Nooteboom 114-115). The hero, like Malloy, also undergoes disassociation with his body and the body of other spirits around him, saying that:
“our bodies seemed undecided as to whether they really wanted to be there; I had seldom seen a group of people with so much missing…shoulders, feet disappeared from view, but our eyes were not in the least disconcerted… sought out the eyes of others as if thereby to exorcise the threat of wholesale disappearance” (Nooteboom 102)
In the beginning, both Malloy and Mussert are incapable of accepting what has happened to them. This is much because they couldn’t accept their own lives while they had them, the ‘conditions of life,’ that is to say, their place in “the link between killing, mating, eating, changing –the voracious, serrated chain that is life” (41). Mussert says himself that, “one probably can’t become enthusiastic unless one already partly consists of… plastic oneself, and no longer believes in the existence of free will” (12). This is to say that one must be pliable and acceptant of fate (even when it disagrees with our ability to free choice) in order to feel the kind of reverence we spoke of earlier, in either death or life. It is this lack of acceptance in Mussert which made him withdraw into bookish seclusion after the loss of his lover, claiming that “life’s a bucket of shit that keeps being added to,” and it is this lack of acceptance that makes it hard to realize his own death (44). Even though “the word goodbye is drifting in the air around (him)… (he) cant seem to catch hold of it” (44). He clings to that which is gone, his dead language and his estranged lover, and is living a kind of half-life long before he is dead.
Malloy’s problems with death also reflect his problems with life. Malloy does not reject death due to love of life. He hates life and God alike. He, like Musset, cannot accept one or more of life’s conditions, and so whines with a “daily longing for the earth to swallow (him) up” (81). But his negativity toward life exists within him, not life itself, for he holds death with equal aversion. He says, “the confusion of my ideas on the subject of death was such that I sometimes wondered… if it wasn’t a state of being even worse than life… I found it natural not to rush into it” (68). For him life and death are equally dreaded, it is “misery to stay, misery to go” (42).
Malloy’s problem is that he doesn’t recognize, “The Clear Light of Pure Reality,” and “(his) present intellect, in real nature void… (are) the very Reality, The All Good” (Tibetan Book of Dead 95). He even speaks once of a light, an “alien light which must have once been (his),” and then again, of a “kind of clawing towards a light and countenance (he) could not name, that (he) had once known and long denied” (42, 148). He could not, at first, acknowledge that the radiant light is one with he himself, or that “love is in the lover”, so he worries over trifles such as whether or not he had ever known true love if it so happened he was partaking in anal sex, instead of vaginal, or if having a beer before communion made the rite worthless (Nooteboom 51, Molloy 57).
The Setting to Face
Malloy is less trained in the art of “the setting face to face” process (or mental maneuver) necessary for a smooth, quick liberation (Book of Dead 95). He does, however, come upon some realizations about the illusory state of the death bardo, in which he may be said to be trapped. He states, “it is at the mercy of these sensations, which happily I know to be illusory, that I have to live and work” (Malloy 111). He finally begins to see that the whole story, lights and all, are a product of his mind. “For who could have spoken to me of Molloy,” he asks himself, “if not myself, and to whom if not myself could I have spoken of him?” (112). Here Beckett shows that this man’s ghost is finally beginning to merge with the unformed, or Dharma Kaya, a state which is identified by the radiant, clear light. Nonetheless, Malloy begins his story again, in obeisance with TS Elliot’s dictum, right where he began. But instead of “know(ing) it for the first time”, he seems to live out his death loop much the same anguish, never to cease what the Book of the Dead calls the “intense illusion” that causes us to “wander in samsara,” ceaselessly tortured, incapable of “abandonment of hallucinatory fear, awe and terror” (Elliot 59, Book of Dead 201). Here chooses the samsaric loop over liberation, saying that “to see yourself doing the same thing over and over again fills you with satisfaction” (Molloy 133).
Mussert, perhaps because of his knowledge of transformation gleaned from Ovid, is much more familiar and competent with this process than Malloy. He draws on his knowledge from Maria’s class on the dead rat providing a habitat for birthing beetles to help him understand that “everything is connected with love” (Noteboom 41). He uses this knowledge, channeling bravery from Socrates, to accept his death, though unlike Socrates, he has no illusions to immortality (91).
Then, as his life story closes at the end of the second half of the book, Mussert begins to see his union with the clear light and everything. He recognizes that he is like a pilgrim, revisiting the sites of his life and says, “like the lights in the city below I would descend to the river, the broad, secret stream of darkness, above which dancing lights traced their course, fluorescent letters on a blackboard” (55). He “let(s) go of the rail… let(s) go of everything” including Beckett’s “thread of the dream” (Nooteboom 115, Malloy 49). He finally embraces “the euphoria of farewell,” (114). In terms of the Book of the Dead, Mussert tells an illusory story, “caus(ing his) naked consciousness to be recognized as the Clear Light…” so that he, “becometh permanently united with the Dharma Kaya (so that) Liberation will be certain” ( Book of the Dead 97). Unlike Malloy, who uses his false story-telling mostly to torture himself, Mussert’s story of illusory memories and boat rides serve to set him free, in much the way the self manifested illusions of the bardo can. Through this ‘mysterious mental maneuver’ into the state of Liberation, Henry Mussert is capable of forgetting his aversion to kitsch, allowing “the most pedestrian details (to speak) volumes” as he accepts his death, standing at the ship’s rail listening to the beauteous riot of frogs, birds, trees… the river… all of which are illusion (95, 114).
So what?
The wisdom here is not contained in these books alone, just as this knowledge isn’t for the dead alone. These books and others from class detail the inner workings of the alchemical, ‘mysterious mental maneuver’ required to change that which we do not wish to bear into beauty, as gold is seduced form lead.
Mussert’s emergence from seclusion into acceptance, or the pure unformed mind, is like the emergence of Molloy from his imprisoning jar of denial. It is a mental maneuver, “like a crumbling of all that ha(s) always protected (one) from all (one) was always condemned to be” (Molloy 148). This acceptance is a necessary component to the mental maneuver which allows us to see everything as a passing illusion whose only purpose is to be enjoyed, Nirvana. As our minds draw near to Dharma Kaya, the divine unformed, we see the world, life and death as just this sort of illusion. Not an illusion to be destroyed or hated, but to accept and, sometimes even revere. Perhaps it is Prospero, master illusionist, who illustrated it best when, at the end of The Tempest, the illusory happenings of the play having expired, he walks to the audience and says to them that the work of all this stage magic, like the story crafting of Haroun’s father, was merely to please the audience and nothing more (Tempest 163).
Carl Jung, in a forward to another sacred Tibetan text, said that “in Buddhism, we shall inevitably find that… opposites condition one another, that they are really one and the same thing” (Jung xiv). Therefore, life and death, to the liberated Buddhas, are the same. “The fire and the rose are one,” because “time future and time past are eternally present” (Elliot 59, 13). Therefore, Mussert’s final acceptance of death and love of the world can also be applied to life. For as Nooteboom says, “we are both present here, still” and we have the choice to affirm or deny our existence (Nooteboom 57). We still have time, while living, to follow the wisdom of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and hold all things, as illusion whose essence emanates from the beauteous clear light which is essentially our own, purest selves.
“And so we seemed to belong only to the water, two light-headed fools among the workers, fools who were not part of the real world, but of the sun stabbing the water, the wind tugging at her dress” (Nooteboom 55).
“The All-Good Father and the All-Good Mother, the Great ancestors of all the Buddhas… The Divine Father and the Divine Mother, also will come to shine. These forty-two, perfectly endowed deities, issuing from within thy heart, being the product of thine own pure love, will come to shine. Know them…. These realms are not come from somewhere outside (thyself). They come from within the four divisions of thy heart” (Book of the Dead 121).



Bibliography
1. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Ed. W. Y. Evans-Wentz. London: Oxford University Press, 1927.
2. Jung (commentary). The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation. Ed. W. Y. Evans-Wentz. London: Oxford University Press, 1954.