Wild Hereafter

The Hereafter portrayed on screen is awash in shades of grey.
If only a character as strong as the great necromancer himself, Jacob Marley, had been written into Clint Eastwood’s tepid film HEREAFTER, then perhaps we’d care about the characters who live on the fringes of death. Instead, we’re shown three interwoven stories, none of which can seem to take a stand about the afterlife, or at least allow the audience to emotionally invest in what happens to these people who are grieving their own losses.

George, the one who sees dead people, ably played by Matt Damon, is a reluctant psychic. Everyone who is a real psychic is a reluctant psychic. Eastwood says screenwriter Peter Morgan “doesn’t believe in an afterlife,” and in his lack of understanding of what it would be like to experience occult phenomena – initially it’s both decidedly normal and completely terrifying – what we’re left with is the vague George, a stoic construction worker with a love for Dickens. Nothing to help us learn who he is, and what his conflicts are.

Two of my family stories relate to coming back from the dead – my grandmother died in childbirth and returned to life; and my husband died in ICU in front of me, and returned minutes later in surgery, without his former personality or memories. I’ve had a swipe or two at seeing ghosts as a teenager, and once saw my mother-in-law after she passed (and that’s only slightly less frightening than Jane Fonda playing one on the big screen.) I have written about the effects of such reluctantly lived events on me and my family here, and I can tell you that just like any event in one’s memory, we grow to both question our perceptions and stake a claim to them. Sometimes in the same moment. The people I’ve talked to who have experienced this phenomena, (and yes, I now know a motley crew of psychics, shamans, poets and ne’er-do-wells,) aren’t making a fortune off their sudden mediumship, nor are they particularly confused about ‘what to do about it.’ They’re too busy being great parents and professionals. But if they were conflicted about this odd ‘gift’, they wouldn’t articulate that problem by running away from people who recognize them as psychic. Like this script has Matt Damon doing every fifteen minutes.

When I started writing, I was afraid to tell what I saw and heard in the imaginal realm -- that place from which characters and story arise. And with daily practice, I’ve come to know that the imagination is a real place. Where ghosts walk and spirits talk is the land of the instinctual, and it is neither hokum nor domesticated. As every child who has found a storyteller knows.

Almost every review I read of the film following my weekend trip to see HEREAFTER mentioned how fantastic it was that Eastwood didn’t descend into the wackiness of spiritualism. Roger Ebert says, “This is a subject that lends itself to sensation and psychic baloney. It's astonishing how many people believe New Age notions, which have the attraction of allowing believers to confer supernormal abilities on themselves and others without the bother of plausibility. Eastwood's film will leave such people vaguely uneasy. It believes most psychics are frauds.” You’d think the journalistic high-road involved everything that can be scientifically proven, and that film isn’t mastered by the wizards of magic and the surreal. From the radicalists Godard and Bertolucci, to Camus’ BLACK ORPHEUS, to Brooks’ DEFENDING YOUR LIFE, to Burton’s BEETLEJUICE, to Matheson’s WHAT DREAMS MAY COME, film is full of exploration of the thin line that divides life and death, and what those who have gone there envision our (non) existence to be.

If only the HEREAFTER storytellers had thrown their passion and belief behind their main characters, then we wouldn’t be left with a story that was so trivial and indistinct. {The opening scene's tsunami is the film's greatest moment, not only for its special effects but for allowing actors to register trauma and grief.} I don’t care whether you believe in the afterlife, but if your character experiences the effects of the dead in his own waking existence, you’ve got to imagine enough to specifically realize his visions and traumas and consequences. You can’t intellectually prove what’s uncanny in the human experience. But you can take what’s unknown to most people, and make something mesmerizing from it.

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Film

Wild Lover

The past several summers I have been taking other lovers. Every August my husband says goodbye from our home in Seattle, and watches me drive north. I travel across the border into Canada, and then west to Banff National Park, eleven hours and entire world away from the city I usually inhabit. Banff is my soul home, and her vast dogtoothed, sawbacked, castellated, matterhorned mountain ranges are my lovers.

Making relationship with these mountains – Rundle, Cascade, Tunnel, Sulphur, Norquay in town, and the vast ranges that cross the continental divide, and the thrust faults of Yoho and Kootenay Parks, and the Waputik and Wapta icefields, and the glaciers of Peyto, Bow, Vulture, Crowfoot, Hector – has been much like learning to love another human. Anyone who is creative knows that one can be spiritually companioned by a being who is not necessarily human. The lover can be the spider, the tree, the raven, the rock. For me, to be with the mountain is to be ensouled.

To become a lover with a mountain, reciprocity is required. I ask for peace, grandeur, timelessness, perspective and expansion; the mountains expect the same from me. I enter into our union knowing I’ll not urgently scamper to the top in some conquerer’s takeover, but instead gaze at the minutae. I’ll spend time in solitude, watching who this mountain being is. Reciprocity means that I work on behalf of the mountain – her streams, lakes, trails, flowers, boulders, animals – and that I will not disregard the sensibility of creatures whose language and role is different from my own.

I’ve become aware this trip, in a manner unlike any form I have ever known, how much the mountains have to teach me about expansive energy. I no longer end at my skin. Or even at the few feet around me, as I project my strong personality. Instead, in this grand Precambrian force, my sense of “I” is altered. In these wild places my being leaves my known self and moves outward, sometimes for an entire mountain pass, through dense forests and deep gorges, over meadows and montanes, around alpine lakes and glacial rivers, and within that breadth, I become as they. “I am large, I contain multitudes,” said Walt Whitman, and he spoke the lesser known too – “I… am not contained between my hat and boots." Like the poets, the wild can take us beyond a conventional knowing of self, to a transcendental identity. And when such wilderness traverses occur, unlike in the city, amongst noise and pollutants and urgencies, I don’ try to protect my heart or my mind or my body. I reel. In the wonder that is living large, my ‘self’ scatters beyond my cells, blood, organs, brain, and I receive the persistent mystery. “Who am I?” is the question my Zen master assigned as my koan some two decades ago in these Canadian Rockies. How strange that I stand alone and hear these very mountains echo – “All of us.”

On the day that I left Banff, there was new snow on the mountains. The rain clouds lifted revealing granite edges swathed in crystalline powder. Another season, another transformation that I would be absent for. These mountains are the beloved to me, in as tangible and erotic a manner as the dear man to whom I’ve been married for twenty-nine years. This isn’t an amusing metaphor. I have been taken by the mountain lover. We belong to each other. I must return.