Immortality and what not
by Susan Weber
Martin Scorsese has made award winning movies well into his seventies. Here’s what he said when asked on Fresh Air about what comes after. As in, what comes after—life.
Terry Gross What’s your adult vision of death now, and of what if anything is after?
Martin Scorsese I do believe in something beyond the material… that this machine we’re in, in a way, this body, wouldn’t be the same without the spiritual part of it, whatever that is. And people would say, well that’s the brain—it’s synapses. But the brain is just a piece of meat, in a sense. There’s something that happens that’s transcendent. I’m trying to find a moment of that. I think it approaches sometimes when we create something and we feel something from what we create. That gets us close, I think, to a sense of transcending the material. And if we go there, and stay in that space of transcendancy, maybe that’s where we wind up. Of course we don’t know because it’s probably the same place we were before we were born.
Gross So has work for you become a means toward working toward transcendence?
Scorsese Partially. It used to be. But there are other issues now. I mean there are certain things—family—which have become much closer.
So maybe we all wind up in the same transcendent space we came from. And we get a glimpse, a feeling of this space when we’re creating art and strengthening relationships. I’ve had the same idea. In early widowhood I often asked myself—and the universe—where did he go, exactly? The image of a candle snuffed out was inconceivable. Even in that muddled time, I had a sense that he might be in a certain place I knew about already.
I remembered how it feels to write. A song, a story, a poem. It feels like give and take. The next bit of writing comes to me, as the saying goes. The muse suggests, and I say sure, why not. Or, let’s try this instead. Scorsese calls it transcendence; I call it talking to the muse. Both point to experience within our concrete world beyond the rational or the predictable. That transcendent space is where we might be from, and where we might wind up when our body, this machine, winds down.
Scorsese says he finds transcendence doing art and in relationship to people he loves. I might add relationships with rocks and rhododendrons and the Newfie Golden masterpiece who is our dog. There’s the earthly plane of taking walks, cleaning plates, and restless thumbs on keyboards. And there’s the inner world of wonderment and chaos that informs all that. How do I love thee? I have no idea. It happens, and I’m glad it does.
Artists come to differing conclusions. On the cusp of manhood, the writer who would bring us Zorba the Greek and The Last Temptation of Christ made a pilgrimage through his ancestral land. Surrounded by ruined temples and statues erected by Greeks of old, Nikos Kazantzakis wrestled with the meaning of life. Under his feet, beneath the wild flowers and the stony paths were buried the remains of human struggle.
“You stand on a spot of Greek land and find yourself overcome with anguish. It is a deep tomb with layer upon layer of corpses whose varied voices rise and call you—for the voice is the one part of the corpse that remains immortal.” —Nikos Kazantzakis, Pilgrimage Through Greece
Kazantzakis wasn’t afraid to feel that vastness rising into him. Did listening to the immortals prepare him to write beyond the nuts and bolts of literal survival? I wonder if acknowledging death is a pass code of sorts into full-fledged creativity. Here’s a line from a place he landed much later in his writing. He was watching cranes.
“The voice of those cranes, echoing once again within me, was the terrible forewarning that this life is unique for each human being, that no other life exists, that we may enjoy it, enjoy it here, that it passes quickly, and that no other opportunity will be given us in the whole of eternity.” —Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
Life after life. Two world class artists look beyond the meaty brain to entertain the meaning of existence. Kazantzakis devoted his cannon to crossing terrestrial boundaries. I’ll ask him to close us out.
“What were the most precious spoils of this intellectual campaign? I believe they were these: I saw more clearly the historic mission of Greece, placed as it is between East and West; I realized that her most supreme achievement is not beauty but the struggle for liberty; I felt Greece’s tragic destiny more deeply and also what a heavy duty is imposed on every Greek… I believe that immediately following my pilgrimage through Greece, I was ripe enough to begin the years of maturity.” —Nikos Kazantzakis, Pilgrimage Through Greece
Photo by Ввласенко CC BY-SA 3.0