Tantalus
By Nicholas Becher
I am writing this piece for a very specific reason. And although I say that with conviction, I am not really sure what the reason is.
When I was very young, I went to my first funeral. It was an uncle I never knew. I watched my grandmother weep as they lowered her son into a grave. My father, a king in my eyes, bellowed into my mother’s shoulder as the rest of us prayed. To this day, I have never spoken to my family about any of this. I was just there. An observer. An innocent, ignorant child. But I will never forget my grandmother, now in her late stages of Alzheimers, or my father who has told me a hundred stories of his brother, and the pain I felt in them at that moment.
This last weekend, I was reminded that I am human. It’s funny. Times I begin to lose myself I am shaken awake by an all too familiar and inescapable pull. I was back home in the Midwest. My parents own a house in the country on a 5 acre plot of land. In Missouri, around October, clouds roll in from every direction, and they spark and shimmer in the blackness of the night. The air is still beneath you. You can feel yourself hovering in the breeze. And in the distance, while I sat in a lawn chair inhaling cigarette smoke and polishing off the last sips in a bottle of whiskey with my best childhood friend, I could see a flittering blue and purple cloud flicker above the far-off city. My friend and I had nothing else to say to each other. So we just watched the purple and blue fill the spaces between the expansive black night sky.
The next day I met up with a woman I hadn’t known for very long. She had a smile that made me remember that I had skin, and that I had a pulse, and that I could breathe. We walked through a cemetery in the twilight with a hundred stars staring down at us. I told her that the people beneath us, all the bodies in the ground being melted by time, that they were all thinking, conscious things at one point. I told her that they spoke to people and made those people cry, or hurt, or love, or laugh. And that just by mine and her’s being there, adrift in a sea of corpses, recognizing that they had existed at all, that we were tapping into something eternal. I held her hand and we stared at the grey tombstones. A hundred thousand names etched into marble. The air was still cool beneath us, and I felt safe, like their breath from underground was holding us in place.
In Greek mythology, Tantalus was punished for butchering his own son and offering him as a meal for the Gods. His punishment was to stand in a pool of water with a fruit tree above his head. When he grabbed for the fruit, the branches would rise out of reach, and when he went to drink the water, it would recede so that he couldn’t drink. Tantalus became the symbol of wanting something unobtainable.
Most of the time, I am moving. And I fool myself into thinking that is what makes me human. But there are moments - subtle moments - when I am reminded that movement has nothing to do with life, or with being human. These moments occur when I am perfectly still. And when I allow myself to stop trying to eat the fruit or drink the water, to listen to nothing and know that it is all there - those moments are where I belong.
There is a mountain on Oahu where the road winds up and up and up into heaven. You can get into your car and see the island from every angle. You can hear the wind blow down from space and taste the meteorites falling from the milky way. I was there by myself, staring out at Honolulu on the day I arrived back from the Midwest. I was waiting for something to happen. For a cloud to roll in and spark with that beautiful blue and purple electric. And not long after I found myself hoping for that electric cloud, I realized that I was reaching both up and down for an answer. For a way to hold on to this fleeting second of my life.
They call that mountain Tantalus.
I’ve been trying to figure out what I should say to those people who have lost someone they love. I guess most people who have to give the condolences assume some kind of responsibility; that their words are supposed to help in some way. But honestly I think that is a bunch of bullshit. And most everybody realizes that a simple ‘I’m sorry for your loss’ just doesn’t quite get the job done. I think that ultimately we say these kinds of things because we know there is nothing that can be said, and the sentiment itself helps, even if it is in the smallest way.
But what I wish I could say is that I can still feel the sweat between my fingers from when I held that girl's hand. I can still feel the cold air beneath me keeping me afloat in that cemetery. I can still see the flashes of purple and blue in the blackness of the Midwest autumn. I can still feel the smoke in my best friend’s lungs as we looked out across the place we had grown up in together. I can still hear my father howling in my mother’s shoulder at his brother’s funeral. The moments we feel have gone forever, the people we believe we have lost, become tangible again, palpable, non-illusory, resurrected in the stillness, defining our character. And only when we are still do we realize how beautiful all of that is, and how lucky we are to have been a part of it.
