To metamorphose is to transform from one stage of life into the next. For insects and amphibians the process of metamorphosis is physically drastic and takes place from adolescence to adulthood. But this is not the only type of morphing that occurs in life. All creatures change in someway or another--it is the process of time that generates this type of transformation, from birth into adulthood, old age, and finally death.
However metamorphoses is more than just physical changes, it also changes the mental and spiritual self. A journey must happen in order to metamorphose mentally and spiritually. A trip away from home, away from what is known, and out into uncharted territory. Where exploration of the self is part of the larger exploration of places. T.S. Eliot uses the metamorphoses of life in his collection of poems The Four Quartets to take the reader on a journey of thought. Moving from one element to the next and season to season, his interpretation of metamorphoses spans to all walks of life because it itself is a walk through life. Eliot travels through each quartet explaining the excursion that takes place during mortality and the place that we are meant to visit and eventually returning to, “were we started, and know the place for the first time” (Eliot 59).
In life we have our physical home, and our mental home, both places where we revisit to keep us centered in our choices. The mental home is our still point, a place that is reached only by leaving it to explore the world as well as deep in the mind. In the beginning there is only divinity. When a baby is born and brought home, the baby has in fact already left their true home (that humans forget once they are living beings on Earth, and has started their life journey. This home is the home of divinity and immortality, where times is no constraint.
Literature has been a way to morph the mind into thinking in new and more divine ways. Transformation is apparent in stories to help explain reality. Ovid’s The Metamorphoses is devoted to the process of transforming all that is in existence. In the beginning Chaos and in the end the death of Caesar. This tale is the transformation of Rome, “the Eternal City,” and the people of that time.
Reality is hard to comprehend. The concept of time being an ongoing process that never truly ends proves to be a daunting mental hurdle. Human life is centered around time, it is what causes change in life as well as brings us closer to death in every moment. We are always trying to beat the clock or turn back time in order to preserve our youthfulness and our life on Earth. But alas, time continues on once your bodies no longer moves with breath, and your soul has removed itself from his cage. The only way to escape time is to die, transforming from mortal into immortal.
In Cees Nooteboom’s novel The Following Story, Herman Mussert--a classical literary teacher--is in fact stuck himself in the process of morphing into his next stage, death. The book takes but two seconds out of his life, and they are the two most profound seconds of his existence, the last two before death.
In the first second--or rather the first section of the book--his life flashes before his eyes while in Lisbon, Portugal; the place where “Europe says goodbye to itself” and the sea of limbo begins (Nooteboom 45). Portugal is the port that will take him on his last journey, his journey home. Portugal does in fact state its purpose in its name and can be read, port-u-go. It is a Joycean way of reading this countries name, but Mussert makes it a point to define this place as the last of the land and the beginning of the sea. “This entire city is a good-bye. The fringe of Europe, the last shore of the first world” (Nooteboom 44). This is the place where life ends and limbo begins. And Lisbon in fact can also be read in a Joycean fashion; lisbon--libon--limbo. Our entire life time is held in one moment, a second of our life. We carry our story with us wherever we explore.
When figuring out his undying love for another professor, Maria Zeinstra, Mussert remembers back to a time when he attended one of her lectures on the subject of death. During the class the story of the sexton beetle mating ritual and birth is played on a large projection screen: “...a dead rat appeared on the screen. It wasn’t a big rat, but it was extremely dead. The broken body lay somewhat arched, in the pose that bears the irreversible mark of death...Then a sexton beetle appeared...began to push against the stiff, unyielding corpse, shifting it slightly with each nudge...a sculptor working...the corpse grew rounder, the legs became tangled, the rat’s head was pushed deep into its soft belly, the beetle danced its danse macabre around a furry ball...of rat flesh, slowly rolling into the trench. Now she is going to mate with the male in the grave...the female started digging a second trench ‘for the egg chambers’...she gnaws a hole in the carcass...making food...taking a bit of pureed rat, the larvae lick the inside of her mouth...” (Nooteboom 39-41). The lifeless rat metamorphose into a bed and breading ground for the metamorphose of the sexton beetle to regenerate and create new life. Life is haunted by death. “And the time of death is in every moment” (Eliot 42). It is something that life cannot defeat, death is undeniable and overpowering. But out of death comes life creating a cycle of repetition and metamorphoses.
In Mussert’s last second of his life he leaves the port or Portugal and enters into the sea of limbo the last stage, “Darker than Hades and less sure than death” (The Metamorphoses 20). He must travel though the sea of limbo in order to complete his journey. Once he returns home, he starts a new beginning. “I was permitted to remain as small and coincidental as I was, you had shown me my true stature...then I told you the following story” (Nooteboom 115).
Death is the same in the beginning of life as it is in the end. Reverting back to what we started as, immortal souls, divine beings, unattainable moments, moments not in time, but outside of time. Entire lifetimes in simple moments; moments that pass by with little recognition. And in the end when Herman Mussert is passing on from limbo into eternal death he recognizes each illuminated moment in his lifetime. “You had taught me something about infinity, about how an immeasurable space of memories can be stored in the most minute time span” (Nooteboom). He now understands that life is not filled with a few grand epiphanies, but rather petit moments occurring every day. “As long as poetry speaks truth on earth,/ immortality is mine to wear” (The Metamorphoses 437). His immortality rested in those moments, and his acknowledgement of those moments in his last second granted him his divine life and the passing from limbo into the afterlife.
Years ago, a young girl wrote in a paper, “I would wish for the power of morphing into anything I wanted to be.” Little did she know that her dream of physical metamorphoses would one day help her finish her college career as an English major. The revisit to her portfolio was like Herman Mussert’s last visit to Portugal. A farewell to one life, and a journey into the unknown, a place of limbo, where she would wait to find out what is next. The transformation of both individuals are profound, a moment of reflection and a chance to recapture little illuminations of the past that had been missed.
She sat looking at this piece of wide ruled lined notebook paper. Her hand writing hadn’t changed much from when she was 15. And as she studied her adolescent work she began to write, starting her next journey; What it is to be young, to be open, to listen to the unheard music without having to understand how you can hear it. Or to dance to the unheard music and know the rhythm. What it is to transform into the environment around you, and feel the moment, see the moment, hear, taste, smell, and live the moment. Transforming through desire not through forcefulness. We control the metamorphose of our own lives, but we must choose to let the divine shape these transformations into more than our mortal hands can do. Sculpting them into moments of enlightenment: all that is divine, all that is above, and all that is inside. Finding the strength in letting go, de-cluttering and dismembering in order to immortalize my life’s illuminations.
eh...
~L.
