Eulogy to Cristina Downing

Ernesto Cardenal
Cristina, my mothers cousin was 15 in those days with a delicate waist and thin legs I recall and I was 7 years old it was the period of Doa Carmela Noguera wrote Joaquin Pasos (Doa Carmela, remembered for evenings at the school where Cristina shone as a student) and it was the period of Greta Garbo Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, Chaplin the bride of the vanguard poets she didnt remain a 15 year-old nor I a child the last years inside four walls I remembered nothing Not even who I was Babe Ruth, the one known for the home runs that was when I was a child perhaps you dont know who he was he died a long time ago Dickinson used to say: If I am no longer living give to the one with a red tie a crumb on my behalf Merton died The stars will die without heat cold like their surroundings and Eliot: everyone falls into the blackness The black holes also disappear In my poetry workshop of children with cancer a child wrote about children who have lost hope waiting their turn All of us in the cosmos wait our turn Orphans in the mechanized world At the mercy of accidents and chance The Ford I get into can be that of death What is life? made of particles 1 16 elementary particles that are not alive? the world is as it is we all say quantum mechanics has proven that it is not the way it is or computers would not work Just as we grow older we ought to un-grow-older there is no symmetry this asymmetry of time where did it come from? where did we come from? children of time in the midst of a perishable beauty wishing for a lasting beauty? If there is a God we are immortal and if there isnt then we arent there is no other no other alternative to being either eternal or eternally not being eternity or nothing; there is nothing else only the bit of time when we are alive only those days already past and there will never be anything else nothing at all, ever not being for all eternity One day consciousness turned toward itself an awareness of itself and unfortunately of its death The only animal that knows it is going to die Had to be conscious that it knew the universe And in knowing the universe knew that we would die The appearance of awareness was another biological existence Not only knowing but knowing oneself not only knowing but knowing that one knows The certainty of death as fruit of that advance The animals know but not about themselves to know oneself

Managua, Nicaragua

Translated by Richard RENSHAW

was to know that we die or a mechanism for the defense of our species The awareness a danger to the species in the face of the paralyzing consequence of the consciousness To be able to survive the certainty of death of death and in spite of that to not have been extinguished Thats how we survive Religions or superstitions Hunter-gatherer there was always faith In the black jungle in immortality without doctors the slightest uneasiness The day will come terrorized when there will be no astronomy and among lions and the heavens will be empty defenseless and nude the galaxies will be separated a walking meal and they will remain alone picking the strawberries without any other in sight looking all around and in each isolated galaxy fearful of death the stars will die out looking at the beautiful stars and when the last one flickers out without understanding them everything will be darkness what might they be? (this is not science fiction) The Hunter-gatherers Thats the way it is Cristina Downing aware of being aware In this cosmos there is no salvation aware of death Except the wounded stag died a biological prodigy and the killer knew - the Incarnation that he also would die A biological evolution that ended up as God Up there among the branches there was no death We are a single Body the monkey was in the present that of the one risen intensely from among the dead without any past Humanity is one or future organically one There is no death for children if anyone is resurrected if only we were always children! we are all resurrected when I was four years old If he has not risen, we are screwed (1 Corinthians 15, 17) I killed a parakeet with a coconut Evolution has a direction and cried out for what I had done moving towards the unity of the universe: (thats the way I knew about death) the Love belonging to a humanity without loneliness incompatible with total death In the black jungle Everything is set and for that reason we say: where anything can happen So that the Scriptures might be fulfilled death is the only It was not prophesized because it would happen certainty we have but it happened because it was prophesized Ever since humanity has existed there have been religions Everyone rises (superstitions if you want) those who are one or perhaps there was faith? in the past future present So we are not extinguished Cristina Downing knowing that we die Present! Or perhaps it will be like being born once again: There is a God or the universe is absurd a new life in a new universe And if there isnt we die forever The Scriptures say In this sense transcendence would be he had to die q an adaptation of evolution in the mind in order to rise again 1 1 7

Jos Mara: I am not a writer of essays but a poet. I offer this recent and unpublished poem as a contribution to the Agenda on religion. Ernesto.