That Elusive Transcendence

I have now lost three close companions, loved ones to be sure.

This latest loss leaves me feeling as if I have watched him leap from the lip of the Quincy Quarry into its particular abyss, and now that I am being poked with a stick to follow him against my will into the same abyss.  In the absence of signs, it also leaves me with a weakened confidence in the hereafter -- first that it exists at all and, if it does, that I will find it a welcoming place, not one populated by laughing machine leprechauns or rapacious reptilians.  The collective unconscious by all accounts is not the same as heaven as we see it portrayed in film.

And yet I take some level of solace in films, not the great dramas of the late 20th century like "Chinatown" and "Taxi Driver," but films from any era that carry a special purity of heart and purity of execution, viz., "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1928), "La Strada" (1954), "Babette's Feast" (1987), John Huston's "The Dead" (also 1987).  It is as if I could slip the noose to populate the worlds therein depicted without suffering death in the transition, not as an active participant but as a quiet observer, a cat or a mouse, perhaps, watching unseen from the corner of the kitchen as Babette perfects her "real French dinner" of turtle soup and quail en sarcophage!

I know that I will have to forsake all of my personal attachments in the end, perhaps to the point of "ego death," but I would take with me attachments at least to these synthetic worlds, talismans to protect me in the ultimate wilderness.