Danse Macabre. N. Thomas Johnson-Medland
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My pager went off. When I returned the page, the nurse told what house to go to. That is where I went.
Chapter Two
The Medieval paintings, and drawings, and woodcuts that depict skeletons rising from their graves and tempting the living to join them in “The Danse Macabre”, are not far off. They are not wrong. There is a clear reality that hangs on them like those wisps of smoke—like that carbon around the fire. Those images are clothed with hand-me-downs of the truth.
The macabre dance of the dead is something that goes on all around us. The living and the dead are always interacting. It is happening at the level of muons and quarks. Everything is in a transition from one state to another. Everything. We call it growth. The cosmos is bursting with things that are, things that have been, and things that will be. They are all always in relation to one another.
The freshly dead, the wandering dead, and the spirit-angels of Death himself all try to entice us to follow them. They are lonely. They want company. They need to create a reality that is communal. Without a community, they would feel dead and alone. That would be too much for them to bear. So, they mingle with us looking for companionship. They want us to join their reality. They need something we have.
We are pulled and pushed into growth and evolution by the play of energies and forces. The negative charge draws a positive charge. Things diminish to emerge renewed. Living begets dying and dying begets living in everything.
It is richer than this. Endings are everywhere around us. We are becoming adults and dying to our youth. We are becoming single and dying to our marriages. We are changing jobs and dying to our vocations. We are deepening in our understanding and dying to our ignorance. We go to sleep and wake up; we wake up and go to sleep. We remember; we forget. We are all always engaged in a process of dealing with life and death. That is the Danse Macabre.
Just as we are finding out in the New Physics, one event in our lives exists at the same time as all the other events in our lives. The thing we call time and the thing we call space are not as concrete as we had earlier depicted them—or, perhaps as we had hoped. There is more of an exchange between local and non-local events. There are wormholes and black holes in space, time, and in a human life as well.
Dying and death are whirling about us in a cosmic motion. One thing is transforming into another every second of time throughout all time. This is part of the macabre dance. This becomes that, and that becomes this. Cutting the atom of all life has revealed a massive force and dynamism behind everything. One thing is always dying into another—transforming into newness. We are no different.
Countless Classical authors wrote about these happenings, this dance under the titles of “The Nature of Things”. They tried to put the pieces together in everything that was. Contemporary scientists resurrected the idea when they began to search for the unified theory of everything. That theory would be one that would isolate and identify how each and everything fits into the whole of this thing we call life. The dance of life is also the dance of death.
* * *
When we start to tell the tales about Death and when we start to tell the tales about the nature of things we are weaving our own tapestry of myths. The stories are coming up and out of us; dancing if you will.
What makes myth so critical in the life of a human is not its simple ability to calm and soothe us—stories do tend to deescalate the anxieties in us and calm us down. What makes myth so critical is how it enhances our word power—it helps us merge the two hemispheres of our brain.
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