A FAREWELL TO ROBERT

How does one bestow words upon sorrow? In which language can one speak to the dead? There are key questions raised by Vrasidas Karalis in his elegiac “Farewell to Robert,” an outpouring of grief at the loss of his partner of twenty-nine years, Robert Meader.

“My lament is for my love, be near me, eternal void, I will call out of the depths, keep my heart warm, make my soul light. I am engulfed by waves of the netherworld, I am thrown into the depths of darkness, I want to fly, I want to see your face… and Robert, the man I love.”

Few understand better than Karalis, the dynamic of suffering by which the proper words are sought in order to reach across the void, to say the unsayable: “I struggle to orchestrate in words, what is beyond language.” Highlighting the author’s plight is that departed Robert was a noted musician, whereas the author has devoted himself to the written word. “My purpose,” he confesses, “for there is no other purpose anymore, is to deliver your existence to the sanctuary of language, erect your monument against futility.”

Finding the correct words to address Robert is vital, if the author is to successfully undertake his νεκυία, the ancient Greek rite by which the dead could be called up and questioned about the future, for without them, Karalis admits: “I am lost, have no language, cannot announce things, and call them into existence.” If Carl Jung holds that “the Nekyia is no aimless or destructive fall into the abyss, but a meaningful katabasis ... its object the restoration of the whole man" then Karalis’ nekyia is “a redemption hymn...” albeit in the form of a “threnody to appease the panic of mortality.”

Significantly Karalis has little to say about the afterlife. If Shelley, while weeping for Keats in his pastoral elegy ‘Adonais’ feels carried “darkly, fearfully, afar” to where the soul of Keats glows like a star, Robert’s metastasis to the resonant emptiness of the hereafter is viewed from the perspective of the topos he has left behind, as if the memory of that topos will ensure his continued existence. There is no rebirth or transformation. Spiritual metamorphosis is of no importance, nor are the remnants of his corporeal manifestation, with Karalis’ superseding his Pieta-like lament over Robert’s body with “Dust and fluff and dirt, which I can see time and again and care not to remove. I am afraid that anything I do could erase your presence from the world…” In the face of the greatest of changes, all that matters then is that nothing changes.

Whereas Marina Tsvetaeva, in writing her “Elegy for Rilke” insisted on seeing the dead poet continue his normal routine in the afterlife, for Karalis, what is of priority, is that Robert’s routine remains unchanged in this life. Karalis hears Robert’s words as sybilline oracles, he reconstructs him in birds and wind and salt and in the flight of aeroplanes and while this periphrasis grants us the illusory confidence to dare to yearn that his beloved is with him still, a constantly repeated, heart-rendering refrain, reminiscent of those  brings us crashing down from the soaring heights of hope: “He has moved on… He has gone elsewhere….You have moved on. You are elsewhere. Yet you are here. You left all these birds behind.”

Here Karalis, in Davidic psalmody is subverting the traditional elegiac genre in that in order to achieve a metastasis of the deceased, they must first be acknowledged as being so, and thus capable of being transformed, as in the case of Milton’s Lycidas within the natural world, whether this be as “the ocean murmur” or as “fallen leaves.” Yet Karalis’ both acknowledges and denies the death of Robert, the undulations of his vacillation paralleling the undulations of a voice and of a chest wracked with sobs. Karalis’ Nekyia may require the correct words for its invocations, but it is above all else, a visceral process, as visceral as the Greek laments which call upon the dead to turn their nails into hoes and their feet into shovels and to dig themselves out of their graves. Karalis in turn calls upon Robert not to abandon him, in a manner that evokes Psalm 38, for Robert is not only his love but also, his deity. (“By you, with you and in you, I received my instruction and my creed”). He may be gone, but he is omnipresent, and it is Karalis who has been uprooted, lamenting his expulsion from a Promised Land of love, as if in Babylonian exile: “I sing in a foreign language in alien shores uprooted from the ancestral burials of my homeland. Who will deliver me from the wastelands of exile What clemency, what mercy, what pardon will release me from the mists of this perpetual purgatory?” Such a deliverance is necessary for in Robert’s absence, “I will never be given rest now, my unconscious will take over my being, my iniquities will devour my face….My body was deformed. My soul regained its fallen nature.”

While Kochanowski in the boundless grief of his  “Laments,” a work with which Karalis’ Farewell is intertextually linked, pours scorn upon his his previous writings, which had advocated such values as stoicism and presents himself at a moment of crisis when he is forced, through suffering and the stark confrontation of his ideals with reality, to re-evaluate his former humanistic philosophy of life, Karalis also presents Robert as a “true stoic,” in the eyes of others, transcending the grief of Kochanowski by implying  “you were more than a Stoic,” and compelling himself too to reassess his philosophy of life. While “the world of grace… is much more intriguing than the margins of the terrified or the abyss of the damned,” “life itself is the enemy now.”

Ultimately it is memory in connection with Robert, that Karalis identifies as being potentially salvific. Yet it is not clear whether he means his own memory of Robert, Robert’s memories of him, (“Only your memory, only if you remember me,”) or indeed a confluence of both: “Hold on to our memories,” he entreats. “Do not throw me into the pit of oblivion.”

Whereas in the traditional elegiac form, the death are lamented over, due deference is given to their daily life and habits, and an extensive enumeration of the all of the causes of grief is undertaken, only for the dead to be relinquished or released, Karalis’ “song” is unable to resolve itself, not only because his process of simultaneously relinquishing and retaining Robert is ambiguous, but also because Karalis negates the entirety of his undertaking: “Mourning is alien to my nature. Less than three months after you left, it has grown roots in me, it has become a poisonous weed which destroys my vision, my gaze, the smile that we both cherished so much on our face.”

At a time when youth is fetishised and the public, communal rites of mourning are increasingly relegated to the private sphere, Vrasidas Karalis’ “Farewell to Robert,” reminds us of the essentially public nature of the elegy. As we participate in his rites, something about us is revealed in the process, delineating the ties we have to each other and to the world which frames our perception in a reciprocal fashion. According to Karalis’ favourite saint, Augustine who famously wrote: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You,” human longing and desire find their true fulfilment in a loving relationship with God, he seeing human desires as reflections of a deeper longing for the divine. Karalis, will in turn reflect that what holds people together is the quest for completeness: “Love answers the only question worth pursuing: “What is it that us human beings really want from each other? Sometimes, unexpectedly and unconsciously, love offers us the answer.”

How then do we preserve the integrity of the self when those who have beheld us no longer do so? Herein lies the central abiding paradox of Karalis’ complex farewell to a beautiful man. “Love subdues us to the dominion of the unseen and the ineffable… Death is our atonement for aspiring to regain our wholeness…the last reconciliation with our own ephemerality.”

On the flyleaf of my copy of Karalis’ Farewell inscribed in pen are his words: “Love is Strong as Death,” for more than an elegy, more than the moirologi it becomes at times, more than a threnody, “Farewell to Robert” is a love lyric, one’s soul set in motion, as the poet Joseph Brodsky once wrote, the place where “Love crucifies time and makes space for our transfiguration.” And in that place, the very concept of Farewell is confounded.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday, 19 August 2023.