Death is Blooming By: Jenna Van Weelden

Every generation has its “event”, something that defines it, that pushes people to their utmost limit until they are able to fight their way out to the other side. The World Wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and now the coronavirus. It isn’t the first epidemic humanity has faced, and it isn’t even the deadliest. Yet we are confined to our homes, entire nations are on lockdown, and it seems like the whole world is holding its breath. Life seems to have just stopped. Like we are all just floating around in a miasma of depression and suffering and death. But life cannot be beaten back that easily. Things may seem hopeless now, that all this pain is just another notch in the bedpost of the world spinning into its own demise. But the thing about pain is that it wouldn’t be painful if we didn’t know what it feels like to not hurt. And if life was just pain all the time, if the word “life” — which we use to describe everything green and new and precious in this world — meant an existence of dread and grief, then hope would not exist, strength would fail, and we would believe in nothing but futility. But with every step death seeks to swallow the world, life takes a step right back. Two years ago, I visited the Hoh Rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula. It still remains one of the most beautiful places I have ever been to, but it also is the location of an extraordinarily inspiring sight that I can still picture clearly. A tree had fallen, I don’t know when or how. It was old though, thicker than I could wrap my arms around and tall enough I couldn’t see the end. It was covered in moss, the wood rotting away so perfectly the tree melted into the ground and was nearly indistinguishable from its surroundings. And from the middle of the tree’s corpse, roots wound around it in a crushing embrace, leading up to a much younger, but much more alive, tree. Within the emptiness and death of the fallen tree, new life bloomed and reached for the sun.

Some would call that sort of relationship parasitic, but when I consider the overall ecosystem of the forest, I see symbiosis. A constant cycle of death and rebirth, each only existing through the effects of the other. For every fallen tree, new growth emerges; for every painful moment, a moment of laughter. While reading through the plays for this class, I noticed this type of synergy multiple times, despite the extreme diversity of the stories. But it is also a theme that has permeated all of culture. Around the world, in different languages, books, poems, songs, these ideas have become an inescapable facet of art. The concept of freedom, the beauty of youth, the delicacy of life, the pain of early death, and above all, the cycle of life that marches on indomitably. Even if it takes years, life always moves forward. Even when we cannot see an end to this sadness and chaos, something is happening, and we continue on. In “Endgame”, Hamm asks in anguish for Clov to explain what is happening. Just as we ask ourselves, our parents and friends, our teachers and pastors and maybe even that stranger on the bus “what is happening?”. Clov responds so simply, so perfectly, “Something is taking its course” (Beckett 20). Whatever is ahead, it is coming towards us; life cannot, will not, be stagnant. We step forward, the pendulum swings, and the clock ticks forwards.

For reference, the image above will be a wall-sized mural on my wall, but due to the circumstances, I was only able to sketch out a rough scale model. The first piece of this mural I knew I wanted to include was a Japanese cherry blossom tree. Although cherry blossoms grow on several varieties of trees across the more temperate zones of the Northern Hemisphere, Japan has made the Japanese cherry blossom, or sakura, its national flower. These trees hold a significance within Japan that goes beyond national identity though, a fact I have been increasingly exposed to as I progress in my studies of the nation. The short life cycle of these flowers, a cultural event in Japan, has grown to symbolize the ephemeral nature of life, precious in its beauty due to its fleeting nature. But while representing the fragility of life and inevitable nature of passing on was important to me, I wanted to focus more on the cyclical nature of life, of the balance between life and death and the elegance of this symbiotic relationship. In his book Essays in Idleness, hermit monk Yoshida Kenkō writes:

Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be unaware of the passing of the spring - these are even more deeply moving. Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with flowers are worthier of our admiration. (Shirane, 406)

There is just as much to be admired in times of pain and loneliness as there is in times of joy and plenty. A phrase my parents have said to me since I was a child is “growth requires discomfort”. Just as a tree grows from the corpse of its predecessor, so we must also grow where we are planted, turning whatever our situation is into an opportunity to learn and appreciate life. And it cannot be done begrudgingly, something we do because we are forced. Just as Kenkō writes, we must choose to look for value and inspiration in all seasons, in all environments. There is beauty to be found in the empty spaces and in the struggles, because there is so much room for something new and powerful to develop.

The second key piece of this mural is the Chinese characters next to the tree. At first, I was hesitant to include this aspect of my thought process, because I was unsure if I could clearly communicate how I connected them to my point, but I decided it was too important to leave out. 花樣年華, pronounced “hwa yang yeon hwa”, roughly translates to “the most beautiful moment in life”. Some of the poignancy of this phrase gets lost in translation, which makes it difficult to explain without a thorough understanding of the language, of which I have very little, but I have tumbled the idea behind this phrase extensively to attempt doing it justice. The structure of the phrase itself is poetic: the word “hwa” is mirrored but is translated as two different words. The first character translating to “flower” and the last translating to “China”. This is actually a Chinese metaphor, talking about the beauty of youth by comparing it to the blossoming of a flower. As a young adult, being in the prime of youth, I often feel off-kilter, caught in a strange limbo between childhood and actual adulthood. Here I am, or anyone else around my age, 20 and living through a global pandemic, doing school online, and seeing no one but my family for almost two months now. But even without coronavirus, being young — but not a child — is still an odd limbic state of existence. We’re simultaneously being told that these are the best years of our lives and we should be living freely, but then told that we need to stop playing around and be responsible members of society. When I first stumbled upon this phrase it made me wonder what youth actually is. This suspended time where I’m old enough to make decisions and discover who I am but I’m too young to have any experience or anything worthwhile to contribute to the world. I know that every generation, every age group, has its strengths and weaknesses, and far be it from me to sound like a whiny teenager declaring that nobody understands me. But at the same time, considering our current situation and the ramifications that will follow, I believe there is something fundamentally different about being a young adult during this time. We are old enough that we will have clear memories of this time, young enough that this is one of, if not the first time we’ve experienced a global crisis, and as we come up into adulthood, we will be dealing with the aftereffects much more directly than those younger than us.

As I read through these plays and attempted to relate them to my own life, I kept stumbling over the ages of these characters. Many are in their mid-teens, early twenties at best, yet they are thrown into complex, even life-threatening situations and have to react in a mature manner. Whether they make smart decisions or not is up for debate, but each play I read through reinforced this feeling of connection, between the young adult me and the young adult them. “Endgame” is the only exception to this, unless you choose to count the young boy Clov supposedly sees out the window. But as the flipside to this notion of flowering youth, “Endgame” fits in as the reminder of the nonsensical, cyclical nature of life, and that it always leads to the same ending. This was a rather depressing conclusion, so I kept looking. Fortunately for me, as an Asian Studies minor, I’ve been exposed to a decent amount of literature from Japan. The irony is that only a few weeks before this, I was reading through a Japanese play that dealt heavily with the concept of loyalty, what someone should be willing to sacrifice to lead a worthy life, even if it comes at the cost of their future. (Chushingura is a fascinating play, I highly recommend it). Once I began looking beyond these four plays, into literature I’ve been reading or have read, I found this theme repeating itself everywhere. This duality, responsibility and freedom, and the journey of self-discovery, pain — and ultimately death — that begins with the vivacity of youth. Life should not be valued only when it is without pain, or even in spite of it. Life is most precious, most beautiful, when its flowers bloom because of the pain. Having the strength to grow as a person through the obstacles that plague our way is what leads to understanding and development. Everyone is suffering right now, either due to the coronavirus or some other trial. But it is up to the individual to blossom where they are, to turn whatever moment they are in into their most beautiful moment.

The final aspect I used is the one that interested me the most and is unfortunately the one I could not accurately depict. Although the tree and the phrase itself are interesting, and tie together very nicely, the ultimate goal of this project was to focus on the plays we read for class. So, when I am finally able to paint my wall, I will be copying this image except for one key difference: the trunk of the tree is not going to be a painting of wood, but of quotes from all four plays that fit into this narrative. Of course, I quickly realized this would not be enough, but somewhere in between looking at the twisted trunks of cherry blossom trees and highlighting thought-provoking lines in my books, I figured out what I was missing. The universal nature of life and death is obvious, but beyond that, literature itself is a global event. Even as I mentioned reading Japanese literature earlier, I realized that I couldn’t confine this theme to these four plays. But I also did not have the time or the resources to read through every book that I thought might have a connection. So, I reached out to a wide variety of people; former teachers, friends, people I knew who were well-read, even friends of my parents who I have never personally met. I explained my project to them, and asked for their help, for them to share quotations that had touched them in a way similar to what I was describing. I received quotes from books, short stories, poems, and songs. I was given quotes about the fragility of life, the futility of mankind, but also about hope and strength in the face of distress. Once I can paint my wall, I will split these quotes into phrases and mix them all together. Weaving them together, pain and despair starting at the roots, growth and realization making up the trunk, and joy and peace making up the branches reaching for the sky. I also intend to continue to add to this mural until I no longer live in this house, adding in new quotes as I come across them or remember them from something I’ve already read. Just as literature is universal and eternal, and the same story can be told in five different languages, thousands of miles apart, suffering and hope will continue to interact as the foundational conflict of the human condition. No one is immune to pain and no one is ignorant of love and hope. Learning to accept this cycle and use it to appreciate life for all its trials and triumphs is what leads to peace within oneself and true joy even amidst pain. As the ever-loyal Samwise Gamgee points out in Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers, “There is some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for”.

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Works Cited:

Beckett, Samuel. Endgame & Act Without Words I. Grove Press, 2009.

The Lord of the Rings--The Two Towers. Directed by Peter Jackson. New Line Cinema, 2002.

Shirane, Haruo. Traditional Japanese Literature: An Anthology (Beginnings to 1600). Columbia University Press, 2012.