Nadine Gordimer - Loot and Other Stories

And within her, a maleness I harbour resents this being— hers —as the victim she is in this phase of possible existences.

The first fish propelling itself by its fins over the slime to sand. That’s when it all started.

They tell so.

And death: that’s the end. Dead. They think I’m gone, but it’s a process, lingering, between this past and that, lived. Can’t call it memory? Something not even collective memory, because nobody comes back from the dead do they, to tell? I’m only some kind of answer — invented, dreamed into being? — to their awful fear of death everyone has from the beginning of earthly consciousness.

They think I’m disappearing, but always they’re disappearing from me. Left behind. For this time.

I don’t know in which Return I first heard about it. Read about it, it seems. I wish I never had. I believe if you don’t know of some possibility, you’ll never have to live it. Outside your orbit. Absurd, really, because I then must already have been a Return, the only sure, actual beginning is the fish — and even it had had a form of being in another element.

It must have been one of the Returns in which I had become middle-aged, even old — certainly adult, with a developed intellectual curiosity. Most times I was young, or a child. Short-lived: at once available again. Must have been when I was a being dissatisfied with the explanations of human life on offer: given in churches, synagogues and mosques; or simply had the kind of restless mind that seeks out explanations in etymology and philosophical tracts and treatises. ‘Karma. The sum and consequences of a person’s actions during the successive phases of his existence, regarded as determining his destiny. Fate, destiny. Sanskrit karman (nominative karma ), act, deed, work, from karoti , he makes, he does.’ The garble of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. And there are other interpreters. ‘The doctrine of karma or transmigration … is intimately associated with the philosophy of the Upanishads.’ I don’t believe I ever read the Upanishads. Then there’s: ‘Officials, too, are subject to the laws of karma — that sooner or later every action brings its retribution, in this existence or in one to come.’ And another: ‘ … karma can be seen as the law of “eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth” … but such an interpretation is not only a simplification, but also a severe limitation. ’

Yes. Well, perhaps I don’t understand and know I never shall what force sends me back to existence, but my experience doesn’t bear out a process of either perfection or retribution. It has been written: ‘Many people worry about the issues of “unfinished business” whether it be psychologically or karmically.’ The being I become to continue unfinished business in the life of another is not always, seldom is subject to any retribution owed by or to another life; and perfection’s something I’ve never attained in a Return … This force I once heard, read about, they called karma — isn’t it a questioning going back again and again? Here we are: ‘Within such a search no single, narrow angle of perception is sufficient … From Hinduism and Buddhism; the doctrine that the sum of a person’s actions in previous states of existence controls his or her fate in future existences.’ That’s mostly been my existences. Even the one where I was — how to put it — waiting, was called back from existence I might have had.

After life.

The earthly term for what is hoped for after death. But here’s a version of immortality for one who can’t believe in an after-life somehow of a similar, if exalted, nature of the one they’re living: when you die your body decays in earth or the process has been anticipated by cremation. Right? You are humus or ash; heat and rain, in the course of seasons cause the matter to rise in the form of evaporation and microscopic particles, to the atmosphere. It reconstitutes as clouds. When you’re aloft in a plane and you gaze at the hillocks of cloud through which you are passing, underneath and above you, drifting: that’s where the dead are, beyond their number and time (heaven is surely too crowded to believe in), constantly forming and reforming matter. Returning.

Dead. Death sentence.

But there’s also such a thing as life sentence; going back again and again, no escape; this is infinity: reward, forgiveness, another chance or final punishment for all the misdeeds of all the karmas so far … only so far.

I understand.

It means you are condemned to live forever.

… how few Westerners grasp malaria’s devastation …. ‘Catch As Catch Can’, Los Angeles Times Book Review (12/5/02), review by Dr Claire Panosian Dunavan of The Fever Trail by Mark Honigsbaum (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).

… so man is continually peopling his current space with a world of his own. A. P. Sinnett, The Occult World (Kessinger Publishing, 1981).

Aorist: Denotes past action without indicating completion, continuation.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

Many times man lives and dies,

Between his two eternities

That of race and that of soul.

W. B. Yeats, ‘Under Ben Bulben’.

… sooner or later every action brings its retribution, in this existence or in one to come. National Geographic (3/1/32), quoted by Ruth White, Karma & Reincarnation (Weiser Books, 2001).

I have been part of it always and there is maybe no escape, forgetting and returning life after life like an insect in the grass. W. B. Yeats.

It turns out that something that never was and never will be is all that we have. Amos Oz, The Same Sea , trans. Nicholas de Lange and the author (Harcourt, 1999).

Just as everything is always something else … it may also throw some light on the procreative god. Harry Mulisch, ‘The Procedure,’ trans. Paul Vincent (Viking, 2001).

The Pestle of the moon

That pounds up all anew

Brings me to birth again—

To find what once I had,

And know what once I have known.

W. B. Yeats, ‘On Woman.’

The individual’s choice of a future earthly body is limited, however …. T. C. Lethbridge, Witches (Lyle Stuart, 1969), quoted by Ruth White, Karma & Reincarnation (Weiser Books, 2001).

The doctrine of karma or transmigration …’ ibid.