On my recent trip to the US, I brought a copy of Frank Kermode’s majestic The Sense of an Ending in my suitcase, over-optimistically planning to write about models of the end of the self, the end of the world, and how they relate to Bye Bye I Love You.
I’ve looked at this book once or twice in the past decade, but I always bounced off it for whatever reason, and it also came up in the late 1990s when I taught a course on the rhetoric of the end of millennium, but I bounced off it then, too. It’s highly compressed and requires that the reader be already immersed in these topics; it has also seemed to be a transmission out of a specific terrain of Cold War preoccupations, but when I picked it up again last fall, it somehow grabbed me. Kairos, Kermode, and me: aligned for once. Unfortunately, BBILY was already in the can, which I say because Kermode’s book—specifically, its first three pages—turned out to be one of a few things that have made me wish I could start writing my book anew with these vitamins in my system. (Another is Jacqueline Stone, a Buddhist Studies scholar, on “moral physiology,” but that’s a story for another time.)
Fortunately I think of BBILY as a multimedia cluster of projects, so there’s time to fit these thoughts into the cluster, and now that I’m back in the Netherlands more than a month later, I can realistically address the appeal. (I obviously didn't do it earlier.)
How does The Sense of an Ending speak to Bye Bye I Love You? The part that set me thinking appears at the beginning of Kermode’s book. There he cites Yeats’ poem, “Sailing to Byzantium,” arguing that the golden bird speaking to the emperor takes on the “task of pure being.” That artifical creature is outside of life, outside of existence. That phrase called out to me.
Then Kermode cites an ancient Greek physician, Alkmeon of Croton, from one extant fragment of his writings, who said, “Human beings perish because they are not able to join their beginning to their end.” Of the several possible interpretations of the fragment is the idea that they do not live in a cycle. Basically, once they end, they can’t go back to the beginning, a beginning, their beginning. This also called out to me, the author of an odd book that ties the beginning of language to its end.
Kermode uses Alkmeon to launch one further thought: “What they, the dying men, can do [in the face of that failure, presumably] is to imagine a significance for themselves in these unremembered but imaginable events. One of the ways in which they do this is to make objects in which everything is that exists in concord with everything else, and nothing else is.”
Something was screaming out loud and clear to be unpacked in relation to Bye Bye I Love You. To get at that something, I want to start with Kermode’s “unremembered but imaginable events.” These are our beginnings and our ends, of which our first and last words are a kind. Are they the most important such models to consider? Given that I write about language, of course. Yes, yes, in the grand scheme of things, first and last words, either taken individually or as a group, they’re not so important, but I’d argue that, as is the case with many linguistic matters, they’re overlooked symptoms that point to a larger condition, grains of sand in which the whole is reflected. They’re cruxy, to use the parlance of my rock climbing days, which means they bring to light previously invisible paradoxes while offering the means to resolve them. That’s the “significance for ourselves”—that they’re our utterances, coming from the interiors of our bodies. They must occur; they must have occurred; they will occur. But because we weren’t or won’t be there, because we didn’t participate in them in a way that makes any sense to us, we rely on others to tell us about them, meaning that the culture inculcates us to believe they exist and what they’re like—that they are models, in other words, which may or may not be informed by actual events. These markers of self aren’t accessible to the self, not in any substantial way. (Sure, you might have a fleeting 200 milliseconds in which you realize you’re dying, but I mean substantially, in an identity-forming way.) Yes, you can extrapolate from what you see of others’ first and last words to how you imagine your own, but this too is an act of modeling.
One critical aspect of BBILY is how people assume their models of the unremembered and imaginable (in language, in everything) are the same as others. (Linguists do this annoyingly when talking about parents’ expectations of first words). People also assume their models are static, that historical forces and material facts don’t change them. That they don't have pasts or origin points. They also assume their models can account for the underlying facts. But in the case of death and dying, the underlying facts have changed while the models have (it seems to me) remained the same. This is unlike babies’ first words, which are, for evolutionary reasons, the same.
This brings me to the other ingredient from Kermode, which is the phrase “existing in concord.” He is referring to, among other things, the exegesis of prophetic texts like The Book of Revelations, which has been combed over for centuries for parallels with events and actors of the day. Prophecy is concord across time. But it makes me think of my friend Joe, so many years ago in Texas, who conflated the end of the world (back then it was social collapse in Y2K) with his terminal cancer diagnosis. He couldn’t escape the magnetism of the imperative for a matching between his death and the world’s. One thing was thinkable only in terms of the other. The denial of the individual dying could be muted in the overwhelming inevitability of the world’s. Concord across scale.
What emerged for me first is the fact that for most of human history, the beginning and end (singular or plural) have not been seen through language per se, but modeled in other forms and at the level of the world or cosmos, not the individual human existence. But for moderns the two scales can be conflated, to the detriment of our understanding of ourselves (again I think of Joe, an avid atheist, who displaced his terror until the very end and apparently recanted—to my eternal shame, I wasn’t there).
As far as first and last words go, they’re not necessarily in concord. I fear that’s how people will read BBILY first and foremost, as a forcing of parallels. (Some of the reviews and summaries interpret things this way, but that’s not what I’m doing.) So even if I were to force “first” and “last” “words” together, that’s not the most interesting thing about them. I treat “first” and “last” “words” together not because they are necessarily the same (though it turns out in some ways they are) but because the modeling activity, the reasons and methods for constructing these models, resemble each other—but then also not.
It’s very simple, actually: you’re going to make sense of models of the linguistic end, then it helps to have, as a contrast or control, what models of the linguistic beginning look like. Models across cultures; models across time; models across the lifespan. What I do in BBILY is to bring these two models into view on the same plane and put them in conversation with each other, keeping in mind the urge to model, to capture the unremembered but imaginable. To map one with the terms of the other to see what shows up. It’s a model made of two models, in other words. In the book itself I mention many of the fruits of this mapping.
This makes BBILY a modeling activity that no one appears to have ever undertaken before: first and last, the linguistic unremembered and imaginable.
And yet the book is also a meta-modeling activity. How have people at different places and times gone about making models of the beginning and end? What would they want from such a model? What would I want from it? And is it possible to see beyond the model, to predict the unremembered and to make empirical observations about the imagined? That’s the frontier that I’m moving toward. That’s the frontier I want to open up with BBILY. Not asking these questions, not taking a critical stance toward the model-making, is naive. But of course it’s not possible to see beyond models themselves. I am not a golden bird, a pure being living outside of existence, and yet I acknowledge the very desire to achieve that. I don’t want to alarm anyone here—I’m actually fine--but I just want to articulate aloud a thought that I’d carried with me for several years, which is that writing a book about beginnings and ends together (and any beginnings and ends) is the negation of the negation of the suicide note. The negation of the suicide note: I don’t want to kill myself, I want to live. The negation of the negation: I do want to stand outside of existence, mine own and that of others, to see what’s there, and “to be related to a begining and to an end,” not as an imagined and remembered thing, but as something seen for what it is—but I still do want to be alive, living my life, going to the US, reading Frank Kermode, coming home to the Netherlands. Beginnings and endings: we live them in all sorts of ways.
Already sprinkled throughout BBILY is attention to these models of the beginning and the end as well as the meta-modeling, but never stated explicitly as such: this is a model, this is the critique of the model. Maybe it would have been useful to the reader? When I look back at what I’ve written, this is one of the interpretive lenses that I use to understand what I did. Part of me wants to move on to other topics, but part of me wants to continue to digest what I wrote. Partly because I don’t want to admit it’s over. Partly because I believe something bigger has just begun.
