The Marginalian
The Marginalian

And So It Goes: A Lyrical Illustrated Meditation on the Cycle of Life

And So It Goes: A Lyrical Illustrated Meditation on the Cycle of Life

“What is it then between us? What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?” asked Walt Whitman in his iconic ode to the unstoppable succession of being as he contemplated the generations who, long after he has returned his borrowed atoms to the universe, would walk the same streets and traverse the same waters and burn with the same human passions. Half a century down this generational river, Rilke insisted that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.” But even if, long after Whitman and Rilke have gone, the physicists have come to agree with the poets that our mortality is the wellspring of our existential vitality, it remains — and perhaps it shall always remain — a towering triumph for the human animal to view its own existence from this placid cosmic vantage point. To grow up is to learn to manufacture “antidotes to fear of death” — in marriages and mortgages, in products and possessions, in the various illusions of stability and permanence that allow us to go on averting our gaze from our finitude, from the fact that we too will one day be washed into the impartial waters of time.

This, perhaps, is why the not-yet-grown are the rare few in possession of an imagination spacious and porous enough to see the cycle of existence and non-existence as the basic mechanism of life, to see its beauty as that Rilkean portal to presence and love.

That is what Chilean illustrator Paloma Valdivia celebrates with great soulfulness and sensitivity in And So It Goes (public library), translated into English by Susan Ouriou — a lovely addition to these uncommonly wonderful children’s books about making sense of death.

Reading more like a poem than a story, and feeling very much like one, this lyrical meditation paints life as a wonderland of possibility, to be visited and relished, all the more intensely for the knowledge that we are only temporary visitors.

Reminiscent of Jane Hirshfield’s spare and sublime poem “Jasmine,” the opening line is a subtle, tender reminder that we are but links in the chain of being, preceded by other links and, by inference, to be succeeded by others still: “Some have already left,” Valdivia writes, gently listing “the neighbor’s cat, Aunt Margarita,” and “the fish in yesterday’s soup” among the departed. “Others will arrive,” she adds. “Some were longed for, others come out of the blue.”

As vignettes of loss and life unfold across the pages, grief and delight take turns — a see-saw, a syncopation — and from that clam rhythm emerges the naturalness, even the loveliness of the cycle.

We are reminded, too, of how little we know, and how even littler we control — but even the passengers on Valdivia’s existential boat of uncertainty have curious, contented smiles as they bob on the ocean of life.

Those who leave don’t know where they’re going.

Their destination doesn’t depend on the wind or how old they are.

Those who arrive don’t know either.
Life’s just like that, it seems — up to chance.

We don’t know when, but those who arrive will leave one day as well.

What arises from these illustrated verses, more than the sense that we are born of a mystery and die into a mystery, is the wondrous awareness that we live a mystery — that the true wonder is the interlude between the two, the visitation, the mirthful miraculousness of existing at all.

Complement And So It Goes with Carson Ellis’s lyrical illustrated meditation on the eternal equilibrium of growth and decay and a subtle Japanese pop-up masterpiece about the cycle of life, then pair it with a grownup counterpart in Carl Sagan’s wisdom on how to live with mystery.

Page illustrations courtesy of Groundwood Books


Published May 3, 2020

https://www.themarginalian.org/2020/05/03/and-so-it-goes-paloma-valdivia/

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