The First Person Singular

24. Eclipse

114 24 Eclipse The story of the I is not the whole story. I act on my own when I am visited by what is important, and it reveals how it has to be urgently safeguarded, nourished, repaired, or brought into existence, and I recognize I am the one who is there and who has the resources. I speak with my own voice not continually but at moments when others come to assist me or to contest me. I find myself on my own in childbearing, combat, compulsions to divest myself of all that I have accumulated, traveling in strange lands, and in prison, refugee camps, the killing fields of malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDS. The child to whom I have given my life lives now with her own life, irrevocably separated from me. The forest I have protected, the birds and fish I have nourished, the plants I have rescued from the weeds and the storms now flourish with their own inhuman energies. The paths, roads, and buildings I have built, the books I have written carry on their inert existence without me now and after my death and retain nothing of the pulse of my life. TheBhagavad-Gita enjoins action without attachment to the results of action. It is the ethics of the doctor who must not falter although so many of his patients die; of the psychiatrist who continues to work with neurologically damaged, incurable patients; of the researcher who stays at her post the months and years that her work yields no results; of the adventurer who brings back nothing from his voyages but the scars of accidents and diseases. I lose sight of myself, absorbed by the outbreak of a street fight, the coordinated operations of firefighters, the samba of street carnaval, the murmur of hospitality. In my intimate contact with external beings, their existence comes to invade me. In laughter before someone bungling and dysfunctional, my own body becomes indulgent of and indulges in the dissolution of its working mobilizations; in tears the loss of a friend, the death of an animal wild and free, or the destruction of an ancient building or an archive is my own loss. In orgasm the lover’s dissolute laughter and spasms of torment and pleasure invade me and overwhelm my sense of myself; in orgy my self-control and self-respect are triumphantly dissolved . In the laughter and tears of conversation, in feasting, in carnivals, and in collective anger over injustice, I dissolve in waves of life no more 115 M Y O W N V O I C E separate than the waves of the sea. I give up the posture that mobilizes my body to become a prolongation of the lunge or saunter of the horse I ride, or to float among the fish in the coral seas. In the meadow and the forest I am invaded by the stirring of plants emerging from the ground and unfolding in the sun. In the night the darkness invades me, extinguishing my positions taken before things, dissolving me in the beginningless, endless oncoming of existence, the sea of tranquillity. ...