O pure contradiction

Look at the flowers, so faithful to what is earthly,
to whom we lend fate from the very border of fate.
And if they are sad about how they must wither and die,
perhaps it is our vocation to be their regret.

All Things want to fly. Only we are weighed down by desire,
caught in ourselves and enthralled with our heaviness.
Oh what consuming, negative teachers we are
for them, while eternal childhood fills them with grace.

If someone were to fall into intimate slumber, and slept
deeply with Tings--: how easily he would come
to a different day, out of the mutual depth.

Or perhaps he would stay there; and they would blossom and praise
their newest convert, who now is like one of them,
all those silent companions in the wind of the meadows.

Ranier Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II.XIV
(transl. Stephen Mitchell)

For Rilke, roses were the consummation of mortal yearning, things of such ineffable beauty and thorniness as to symbolize, in fullest fashion, the trackless forest of the human heart. That they flourish for so short a season and then falter just makes them more intimate with human life. Poetry too comes and goes, flourishes and then withers on the stem; that it exists for so short a season only makes its flourishing more magical, here and then there in the mouths of the singers.

If he had lived in our age, Rilke would have had a rose tattooed over his heart, thorns and all: back in the earlier decades of the 20th century, it sufficed have them serve as his epitaph. This is written on his tombstone:

Rose, O pure contradiction , joy
of being No-one’s sleep, under so
many lids.

Their beauty, his: his verses, bouquets of rapture and wonder for the world. Like the flowers Timm ferried back from the wild for us in his camera …




When my wife’s nephew James was killed, at age 19, in an auto wreck in 1998, the funeral was cathedrally sad, the terrible tenor of that loss magnified by Catholic rites, baroque in that old Latin manner, the prayers of funeral office intoned amid the mixed fragrance of incense and luxurious white lilacs. The shocked grief was so thick in the congregation that all I remember of the proceedings as one heavy sigh.

The mood of shock was equal at my own nephew’s funeral in February 2007, killed, at age 23 in an wreck on slick roads in the middle of the night, doubly layered with the additional deaths of the girl he loved and his best friend in the wreck. The service was far different – Protestant, evangelical, with guitars and piano instead of the pipe organ – far less formal, more rural somehow, perhaps in respects for the country-boy ambience which Nicholas had so embraced – yet the grief was identical, his mother and my sister who raised Nick like stones in their pews, as immobile and incomprehending as my sister-in-law back in 1998, church regulars and family members sitting toward the front of the sanctuary, and all of his friends in back.

My wife had selected a Wilhelm Kempff piano transcription of Gluck’s “Plainte d’Orphee” from the ballet “Orpheus et Euridce” for the recessional music, and it was a profound gift for the moment, as aurally deep as the setting, one of the oldest jags in the heart, repeating the tale of the bereaved singer Orpheus who loses his wife on their wedding day and grieves down into the realm of the dead, trying to bring her back with his song. Orpheus fails, not because his song didn’t woo open the gates of the dead (he moved every heart in the Underworld), but because he is too eager to look upon the face of his dead bride once again, turning back just before the threshold to watch her fade forever. Too eager we are, too much in a hurry, too passionate for things to give them their time, and let them go. Yearning and desire nails us every time to foolish hopes.

Oregon Garden Rose Garden, July 2007.

Timm would have loved that music. Church music was dear to him, he sang and played it with gusto despite his impairments – deaf in one ear (from his auto accident in ’81) and carpal tunnel syndrome crabbing his hands (oh, so many bruisings he took over the years). He was especially fond of “Benedictus,” a contemporary treatment of the Latin mass by Hayley Westernra on his album “Pure.” The yearning of Timm’s soul for God was great in him, and there was nothing more pure than making music of that feeling, a poetry of communion and beauty which he brought to his photography.

But what I remember most about James’ funeral – hard to believe, now a decade ago -- was the graveside service. We’d driven to a cemetery in Winter Garden on a bright January afternoon. There was something almost mocking in the fairness of the weather that day; an almost obscene brightness beaming over such great shadowing within. It was exactly like the day in April of this year when we learned of Timm’s death: spring had come too early to the land, our grief making that blossom appear as if in the snow of deep winter. A pure contradiction.

Much like a scene from a pre-Raphealite painting by Rosetti, all of these young women gathered around James’ gravesite for a last farewell -- friends, lovers, party-fellows, schoolmates, who knows. In a strange and beautiful procession, each walked and dropped a long-stemmed red rose on the cover of his white coffin. There on that impenetrable surface there grew a rich, rich garden of roses, each one a prayer, a kiss, a farewell, the chorus of roses become our collectively broken heart, joined with his mother Karen in the inconsolable act of failing to wrest her dead son back from the awful end he had blithely driven himself; failing, as Orpheus, to alter the course our common eventual fate.

The priest read a prayer and intoned consummatum est, the final words of Christ this side of his mortal life: It is finished. That was all. The friends hugged and slowly walked off, leaving the family to a few more minutes of last vigil, and then we all walked up to the coffin to touch it one last time and left.

Mother and child in the Oregon Garden Rose Garden, July 2007.

James’ family still grieves his loss, now ten years into oblivion. His mother (my wife’s sister) has taken it hardest, as all mothers do (maybe it has something to do about the physical presence of a child in a womb which can never be forgotten); his brother and father have had a wounded history since, going on with that absence heavy in the middle. Some grief stays in us like rocks, immobile despite the endless tears and tidal heavings of the chest; we go on with that heaviness as a permanent citizen of our hearts, forever changed. What we do with that heaviness makes all the difference in the world …

Young couple in the Oregon Garden Rose Garden.

James’ friends have all scattered to whatever winds that rule their young lives, going on, if not blithely, less afflicted as the still-invulnerable young commonly do. It’s doubtful that James’ death caused most of his friends to take their feet any less off the gas pedal; doubtful, too , that any of Nick’s friends were cautioned off their careens for long. James’ girlfriend remained close to his mother for a couple of years, coming by just to talk, visiting James’ grave at Christmas and on the anniversary of his death-date and his birthday; she sent Christmas cards for a number of years though I’m not sure she still does. My mother remains in touch with Christie, Timm’s girlfriend, but that’s about the only connection our family has with Timm’s life in Oregon.

We all go on in our own ways. I spoke at AA last Saturday night wearing Timm’s black wool sportcoat, the first time I had worn it since speaking at his memorial service; it felt good to have that part of Timm close to me as I talked of things which were intimate with his own recovery, his own love and service. Wearing his jacket was a way of remembering him; not a rose, exactly, but something heart-felt and real, as carrying the message of recovery is bouqet-work, offering back was has been so abundantly given.

Veteran couple in the Oregon Garden Rose Garden.

Grief is a slow process; it’s bucket-work, pail after pail of pain washed and cleansed by the salt of our tears. And if the dead are deeply our wounds, they are also necessarily by that proximity the wombs which allow new life to grow. The living go on, forming new attachments, interests, passions, loves; we who survive also suffer other losses, more graveside ceremonies, tossing more roses into the yawning pit, each time rendering a part of the rent heart in a devotion which in some way kills us and fills us at the same time. We heal toward a wholeness which readily surrenders to being rent, again and again and again, praising and grieving in the same heart-space.

The leading cause of death, above all else, is birth: we’re dogged by this thing from the git-go. Consummation and loss, presence and absence, the living and the dead: all of these tandems are conjoined by a single unity located deep in our hearts. To be living and then gone is our common fate. How we choose to live is an immensely varied decision, with implications ranging to the ends of human experience.

Old and young enjoying the Oregon Garden Rose Garden.

But it seems to me, on this cooling-down-again, dark and wet Tuesday seven and a half months after Timm’s death, that the most we can do is to fill our hearts with affirmations of both the living and the dead, praising what is most present as an act of reverence for all that is lost. Calyx and thorn are inherent in architecture of roses, symbol of the heart which blossoms and bleeds; to be mindful of death-in-life and life-in-death at the same time is to be whole-hearted, full as we are permitted to go.

WILD ROSEBUSH

Ranier Maria Rilke

How it stands out against the darkness
of the rainy evening, young and pure,
in its tendrils arched everywhere in givingness
and yet absorbed in its rose-being:

the shallow flowers, here and there already open,
each one unasked for and untended;
thus, immeasurably exceeded by itself
and indescribably self-aroused,

it calls to the wanderer, who in evening
meditation comes past along the road:
oh look at me, see, over here, how safe I am
and unprotected and having all I need.