Eyre Lines

There is a scene in James Clavell’s book “Shogun” (and in the film of the book) where the hero, Blackthorne, decides to kill himself in the classic samurai style, sets himself up to do it (including a “second” to cut off his head to prevent him suffering too long, as stomach wounds are wont to do), goes through with it to and including the muscles tensing to drive the sword home, and is at the last microsecond prevented from going through with it.

Blackthorne is never quite the same again thereafter. He has fully accepted the fact of his imminent death and committed himself to it.

On 30th November 2006, I was in the depths of a long clinical depression (which, in all, lasted for 17 years, ending in March 2013), and was facing at the same time the end of my career, major legal problems and imminent bankruptcy. It came with PTSD and chronic anxiety, and I had been self-medicating for some years with alcohol, which had landed me with alcohol dependence as well. (If you have these kinds of problems yourself, please don’t self-medicate with alcohol – it may seem to alleviate the symptoms short term, but makes them much more difficult to handle long term). That had led to my wife leaving me a week earlier.

So I decided that the world would be much better without me. Knowing myself well enough to realise that my instincts would cut in to stop me doing something like Blackthorne’s solution, I settled on pills. I researched the lethal dose, ensured that I had a sufficient supply and settled down to take them. First, however, I apologised nicely to God, and attempted to apologise nicely to my wife over the phone…

As it turned out, this provoked a call to emergency services which led to an ambulance arriving at the house. I tried to run from the ambulancemen, but having taken a significant overdose, didn’t move quickly enough and was piled into an ambulance (I remember only flashes of this, but have pieced together the narrative from other people). Some hours later, I woke up in hospital, and thought “Well, that didn’t work; what do I do now?” My best metaphor for what then happened was the screen in a computer game which says “Game over: New Game? Y/N”.

I chose “Y”.

It was pretty much a coin toss as to which it would be, but I was going to commit myself to whichever course of action I chose – and, as it turns out, I’m still here 13 years later, have solved the alcohol dependency, have prescribed medications which keep the depression and anxiety at a manageable level (as from 2013) and suffer relatively few PTSD symptoms.

Like the fictional Blackthorne, however, things have never been quite the same since. The acceptance of my death remains – I just don’t feel the need to do anything about it at the moment, confident that it will arrive some day.

One of the elements in this years “Atheism for Lent” course has been a reflection by Katherine Sarah Moody on one of the events in Peter Rollins “Ikon” community, called appropriately “The End”, as it was the last event Ikon produced before winding up the community, which was always planned to be time-limited. It was a piece of “transformance art” which used a host of symbolism in order to provoke a visceral appreciation of the participants’ eventual death. I wonder whether some or even all of those who were there had something like what I experienced myself in 2006, or which is described by Clavell in “Shogun”.

All of this is, of course, particularly relevant as I write this on Easter Sunday, when we celebrate the resurrection of Christ. Personally, I cannot bring myself to believe that this was in essence a revivification of the dead body of Jesus, although I retain sufficient doubt to say that I am (just) agnostic as to whether that took place, and in any event, my reading of the various gospel texts as a lawyer looking at them as eyewitness testimony (which, incidentally, I don’t think any of them actually are) strongly indicates to me that the “best fit” for what actually happened involves a set of apparitions. Some of those may have been tactile apparitions, but as I’ve actually experienced tactile apparitions a few times, I have no hesitation in saying that, for instance, Thomas touching Jesus’ wounds could have been a tactile apparition. And no, I don’t know what happened to the actual body if, indeed, there was an empty tomb. I do, however, think that the actual body, revivified or not, could not have entered a closed room without passing through a doorway, nor could it have suddenly disappeared in other accounts. Those are the territory of apparitions, not of real physical objects.

I rather fancy that Blackthorne and I understand resurrection in a way which most people might not. Paul may have, however, when he claimed to have died with Christ, and that not he but Christ now lived in him.

I’m not sure I’m as completely transformed as Paul’s words indicate him to have been (and as elsewhere he complains that he knows what he wishes to do and actually does otherwise, I think those words were dictated by him at a “high point”), but I was transformed, and perhaps transformance art may do something of the same thing. Certainly I don’t recommend getting to that point via an overdose or a wakizashi.

What is, however, the case is that I not only do not fear death intellectually (that came from peak mystical experience many years ago) but I am confident that I don’t fear it physically either (though I have a strong aversion to most of the means of getting there). There is an additional factor; as a friend said “Since then, you’re playing with house money”. Yes, I am. Every day is a gift when by all accounts I should have died 13 years ago.