Steven G. Kellman
Talking to the Dead
In Memoriam Wendy Barker
Can we talk to the dead? Of course. But they never answer.
A passion for language and each other brought the poet Wendy Barker and me together and kept us together for more than twenty years. We thought we would converse forever, about books, films, politics, basketball, birds, trees, and everything else. After Wendy died, of a heart attack, on March 11, 2023, I continued talking to her, addressing the brown wooden urn I placed on our mantelpiece. But the ashes remain obdurately mute. Anyone seeking a dialogue with the dead must settle for a monologue.
In “The Window,” Sufi poet Rumi communicates with a deceased loved one, though the connection works in one direction only.
Your body is away from me
but there is a window open
from my heart to yours.
From this window, like the moon
I keep sending news secretly
No news comes back. Similarly, in “A Quoi Bon Dire,” whose title emphasizes the futility of words, Charlotte Mew addresses someone who has long been dead:
Seventeen years ago you said
Something that sounded like Good-bye;
And everybody thinks that you are dead,
But I.
The poet alone persists in addressing the deceased, who has not said anything beyond farewell two decades ago. Likewise, addressing the assassinated Abraham Lincoln as “O Captain! My Captain!,” Walt Whitman soon realizes there can be no response: “My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still.”
Lincoln himself tried to communicate with his beloved son Willie, dead at eleven of typhoid fever. Refusing to accept the impervious boundary between life and the afterlife, his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, organized seances in the Red Room of the White House. Her husband sometimes attended as she and others attempted to summon the spirits of the departed. Mrs. Lincoln came to believe that she was visited nightly by both Willie and another son, Eddie, who died at four of tuberculosis. “Willie Lives,” she wrote her half-sister Emile Todd Helm in October, 1863. “He comes to me every night and stands at the foot of the bed with the same sweet adorable smile that he always has had. He does not always come alone. Little Eddie is sometimes with him.” [Jean Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography, p. 220] The First Lady was so distraught by the premature death of her son Willie that she took to her bed for three weeks and was unable to attend his funeral. The Spiritualist quacks she recruited did not entirely allay her bouts of severe depression.
William “Willie” Wallace Lincoln is a principal character in George Saunders’ 2017 novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which imagines the boy and others in Georgetown’s Oak Hill Cemetery, in transition from inert skin and bones to a disembodied afterlife. Overcome by grief, the young Lincoln’s parents visit him, cradle him, and speak to his inanimate corpse, but there is no response. Willie and the others who inhabit that liminal space can communicate among themselves, but they have lost their connection to the living.
Edgar Lee Masters does give voice to the dead in his Spoon River Anthology (1915). But the collection, consisting of statements in verse by 212 deceased inhabitants of a cemetery in Spoon River, Illinois, is addressed to no one in particular. They are dramatic monologues; the dead are talking only to themselves, with no real link to the living. We, the breathing readers, are eavesdroppers, not interlocutors. To find a genuine case of conversations across the boundaries of mortality, you have to turn to the Divine Comedy, in which, while journeying through the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise, Dante often stops for spirited exchanges with the dead. A notable exception occurs in Canto 28 of the Inferno, where, among the sowers of scandal and schism, Curio, who persuaded Caesar to betray his friend Pompey and invade Rome, cannot say anything, because his tongue has been cut out. By contrast, in the third ring of the Seventh Circle of the Inferno, reserved for sodomites, the late philosopher Brunetto Latini and the living Dante each lavish affectionate praise on the other. Nevertheless, Dante himself read his poem as an allegory. The possibility of schmoozing with the dead poets society of Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, as Dante imagines it in Canto IV, is just a literary fantasy. They do not talk to us except in the poetry they composed antemortem. Two-way exchanges between the living and the dead occur occasionally in literature, but no one can document them in reality. Hamlet’s conversation with his murdered father raises more questions than it answers.
Commissioned by Pope Julius II to create sculptures to adorn the papal tomb, Michelangelo labored from 1513 to 1515 to wrest the huge, glowering figure of Moses from rough, unshaped marble. When it was completed, the artist was thrilled by the lifelike majesty of his work. It lacked only one crucial faculty: speech. According to legend, Michelangelo commanded his marmoreal Moses: “Why don’t you speak?” Enraged by the resulting silence, the sculptor flung his hammer at the lapidary prophet’s knee. Many notable poems and songs – “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “To a Skylark,” “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” – take the form of apostrophe, a direct address to a person or thing. However, the addressee never answers. Although John Donne proclaims: “Death, be not proud,” death maintains a haughty silence. “Hello darkness, my old friend,” sings Paul Simon, but the darkness is mute. Perhaps all art is a quixotic attempt to summon the sound of silence, to elicit a response from a cosmos scored con sordino.
The fact that such illustrious figures as Alexander Graham Bell, Arthur Conan Doyle, James Fenimore Cooper, Marie Curie, Pierre Curie, Horace Greeley, William James, and Sojourner Truth were all attracted to Spiritualism, a belief in the possibility of communicating with the dead, is not in itself probative. News that Noam Chomsky endorsed Nike would knock my socks off, but it would not impel me to change my shoes. Nor does the fact that, according to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, thirty-three percent of Americans believe in reincarnation persuade a secular skeptic to embrace the faith. It is so very hard to accept the permanent disappearance of people we love. I find it harder to accept shamanism and the various traditions such as Candomblé, Santeria, and Voodoo in which the dead take possession of a living priest. The dybbuk is a fascinating literary trope, though ultimately only a bubba maisa. Spiritualism is the sly transformation of grieving into believing. Confronting the conclusion that I will never ever again see or touch my cherished wife Wendy, I could be tempted by the fantasy of revenance. However, ghostwriters are hired to create texts credited to others; they are not poets who return as ghosts.
In the First Book of Samuel, Saul, desperate for a strategy to defeat the Philistines, pressures the reluctant Witch of Endor to summon up the spirit of the dead prophet Samuel. However, the conscripted séance brings bad news. The ghost of Samuel prophesies the defeat of the Israelite army and disaster for Saul and his sons. The next day, the Philistines triumph, and Saul commits suicide. Perhaps nothing good can come from attempting to communicate with the dead. In fact, Deuteronomy 18:10-12 provides a stern injunction against mediums, clairvoyants, and others who would beckon spirits from beyond the grave: “There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch. Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the Lord: and because of these abominations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee.” Talking to the dead is not something to be done lightly.
Despite efforts by the Dublin City Council to repatriate the remains of James Joyce from Zurich, the author of Finnegans Wake can no longer be counted a resident of either Switzerland or Ireland. If Joyce can be said to speak to us, it is in the words he wrote while still alive. In the popular folk song “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” it has been ten years since the labor leader was executed by a firing squad. The lyrics, by Alfred Hayes, constitute a conversation between the speaker and the late Joe Hill. They conclude with the repeated insistence: “’I never died,’ says he/ ‘I never died,’ says he.” We all understand that Joe Hill did die, but the song conjures up a wish fulfillment, in which, despite defeats, the fight for workers’ rights remains alive, and so does its revered champion.
Early in his journey through the underworld, at a liminal moment of passing from this life into what is beyond it, Dante looks about him and exclaims:
non averei creduto
che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta.
(I never would have believed that death had undone so many) [Inferno, Canto 3, ll. 56-7]
He is touched by the wretchedness of the throngs he observes. Their afterlife is unrelenting torture. (At the end of the first section – “The Burial of the Dead” – of “The Waste Land,” T.S. Eliot appropriates Dante’s lines to describe the comatose crowds crossing London Bridge). Death obviously “undoes” those it takes, but what it does to their survivors is also dramatic.
The foundations of my existence were shattered when the doorbell awakened me at 12:30 a.m. It was a policeman asking why I was not answering the phone. He gave me a number to call, the hospital Wendy had been admitted to with a bleeding ulcer. We expected her to be released in a day or two. I had visited her that evening but then gone home to sleep. When I called the number the police officer gave me, I was summoned by the hospital to view what was now, after a sudden heart attack, merely a corpse. The sight that night left me undone. Wendy impressed everyone with her beauty and vivacity. Several generations of students adored her. But the inert torso stretched across the hospital bed was incapable of responding to my anguished words.
Mourning is self-centered. When I grieve over the death of my beloved, too late to benefit her, it is an exercise in self-pity, in lamenting my own depleted state. I have lost a companion who was everything to me – cheerleader, advisor, partner, paramour. Suddenly the world has been leached of meaning – the phrases, places, and rituals that held significance uniquely for us. My daily lexicon has been looted. The colorful names we assigned each room of the house. A comically bungled flight to Santiago. The stuffed animals we anthropomorphized with names and personalities. Our song: “Mountain Greenery” by Rodgers and Hart. Without Wendy, I am a shriveled version of myself, forced to confront my own contracted mortality. John Donne advises “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.” Donne’s point is true not merely in the platitudinous sense that each death diminishes me because I am involved in all (hu)mankind. Of course I am, but, more ominously, the tolling of the bell announces my own inevitable, impending death and the paltriness of the life, sans Wendy, that still remains. Grieving is an exercise in vanity: in the vain prospect of touching the deceased, and in the narcissism of futile melancholy.
On October 18, 1931, in the final hours that remained of his life, eighty-four-year-old Thomas Edison drifted in and out of a coma. According to his wife Mina, he awakened long enough to report: “It’s very beautiful over there.” He said: “over there,” not “over here,” so, even if reliable, Edison’s statement does not quite qualify as dialogue across the boundaries of mortality. And how much credit can be ascribed to an utterance made in the delirium of the inventor’s terminal moments?
For most of his life, Edison prided himself on being a practical man of science who scoffed at beliefs in the supernatural. “Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions,” he told an interviewer for the New York Times in 1910. He went on to explain that visions of an afterlife are a symptom of human frailty, our inability to accept mortality. “No, all this talk of an existence for us, as individuals, beyond the grave is wrong. It is born of our tenacity of life – our desire to go on living – our dread of coming to an end as individuals.” [Oct. 2, 1910, “’No Immortality of the Soul’ says Thomas A. Edison.”] Nevertheless, during his final decade, Edison tried to fashion a device that would enable the living to receive signals from the dead. He called it the “spirit phone.”
“I don’t claim that our personalities pass on to another existence or sphere,” he explained in Scientific American in 1920. “I don’t claim anything because I don’t know anything about the subject. For that matter, no human being knows. But I do claim that it is possible to construct an apparatus which will be so delicate that if there are personalities in another existence or sphere who wish to get in touch with us in this existence or sphere, the apparatus will at least give them a better opportunity to express themselves than the tilting tables and raps and mediums and the other crude methods now purported to be the only means of communication.”
Although Edison succeeded with the electric light bulb, the motion picture camera, the phonograph, and hundreds of other technological innovations, he failed to construct a functional spirit phone. Perhaps there are no personalities in another existence or sphere. Death means non-existence. No one else, not even the engineers at Apple, Samsung, or Huawei, has been clever enough to devise a smart phone so smart that it can receive messages from beyond the grave. And the spirit phone is just another vain attempt throughout the millennia to imagine a dialogue between the living and the dead. My iPhone has preserved some messages in Wendy’s voice, but those were sent while she was still alive.
“Take comfort in the memories you have,” I am told. But memories are finite and fleeting. As a poet, Wendy left us something more enduring. According to the familiar Renaissance trope, the immortality of art is the only way we poor mortals can hope for immortality. When, in Sonnet 18, William Shakespeare compares his beloved to a summer’s day, he notes that the beauty of the natural world is doomed to fade. However, the concluding couplet proclaims the beloved’s immortality through the triumphant power of this very poem:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Of course, poems lose life when eyes no longer see them, and more than eighty percent of classical Greek literature has, by some estimates, been lost. Wendy’s words, at least, are still available, in print and online. Without a spirit phone, though, her voice has been cut off, and all we have are old pages and recordings. In “Gathering Bones,” a prose poem she included in her 2020 collection Gloss, she evokes the scene at Squam Lake, where the family gathered to spread the ashes of her mother. “The night before the family’s ceremonial scattering of Mom’s ashes on the New Hampshire lake she’d loved, I slept with the cannister beside me. Sunrise, I carried it down to the dock, opened the lid. Her bones crushed, but in one place. I reached in, gathered a small handful, and over my arms and legs spread powdery flakes. I slipped then, into the water that carried them, glittering, in the light.”
Wendy’s lovely body has itself been reduced to ashes now, sitting in an urn within our house (How difficult it is to surrender the first-person plural). She will never speak again, but it is only fair to grant her the final words here. In a spare, elegant poem in her 2005 collection Poems from Paradise, she anticipates what she might have told us if there were a spirit phone:
I Have Become
imperceptible
as dry seed scattered,
cast from familiar
ground, wisp in air.
Steven G. Kellman. Professor of Comparative Literature and Jack and Laura Richmond Endowed Faculty Fellow in American Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His books include: Rambling Prose: Essays (Trinity); Nimble Tongues: Studies in Literary Translingualism (Purdue); The Restless Ilan Stavans: Outsider on the Inside (Pittsburgh); Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (Norton); The Translingual Imagination (Nebraska); The Plague: Fiction and Resistance (Twayne); Loving Reading: Erotics of the Text (Archon); and The Self Begetting Novel (Columbia). He served four terms on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and received its Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing,