We do not know where our great uncle Edward – our grandmother’s only brother – is buried. So many thousand others like him are commemorated in anonymous graves like this one: serene, rather chilling, but dignified and beautifully looked after, nonetheless. This weekend, a hundred years ago, the guns finally fell silent and, out of a green and pleasant land from whence our ancestors emerged centuries before, a wasteland was revealed – a place of bones and emptiness, made all the more disturbing by the intermittent chirruping of sparrows and the bloody poppies which found their time to have come. As someone famous once said:
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
Extracted from ‘The Hollow Men’ by T S Eliot
Today we came across yet another young grey seal corpse, rolling in the surf of high tide. This one was upside down (and, it turned out, headless), so clearly dead already, which is a kind of relief in a way; sometimes getting them back in the water can be such a chore and potentially very distressing to them, and indeed dangerous for us. We are always excited when we come across them, in their various stages of disarray and indeed decay; occasionally we get a chance to cover ourselves in their wonderful scent, bringing ourselves closer to something authentic about animal life – and, it has to be admitted, death. Why is that, I wonder?
Over the last few days several sperm whales have been found beached on the east coast of this country. One by one, despite lots of kind folk trying to shoo them back into the North Sea, they have all died, and we are all saddened to see them lying helpless and gasping, uselessly out of their element. Sperm whales are our favourite cetacean and, though it would be terrible and sad, we would be thrilled and honoured to gaze up close at Moby Dick and think about his wondrous life, diving deeper than any other creature, grasping with his neat rows of peg-like teeth the giant squid we know that we will never ever see, travelling miles and miles from one end of an ocean to another. What strange journey brings them literally to our shores, beside this, the shallowest of Britain’s seas? It is as if they seek encounters out, sacrificing everything for the meeting of minds.
mr pip ponders 