Death's Brother Gayle Greene Scripps College

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1-1-2012 Death's Brother Gayle Greene Scripps College

Recommended Citation Greene, Gayle. "Death's Brother," Canadian Medical Association Journal v. 184 no. 1 (January 10, 2012), pp. 1-2.

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Scripps Faculty Scholarship at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in Scripps Faculty Publications and Research by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CMAJ Humanities

Poetry Death’s brother

And there the children of dark Night have their dwellings, Sleep and Death, awful gods. The glowing Sun never looks upon them with his beams…. But Sleep roams peace- fully over the earth and the sea’s broad back and is kindly to men; while Death has a heart of iron, and his spirit within him is pitiless as bronze: whomsoever of men he has once seized he holds fast: and he is hateful. Hesiod, Theogony (Origins of the Gods), c 750−650 BC

In the fables they are twins, Hypnos and Thanatos, sons of Night. She reigned before light breathed upon the waters, before electricity, that’s sure, Darkness primordial, p a force to be reckoned with — m a h c for besides u a e B Sleep and Death, y r n

Night brought e H

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Doom into the world, 6 2

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Strife and N

Retribution: u e s u

What a brood! M

h s i t i r Sleep was the younger brother, B and as youngsters do, he imitated his elder, (even then, humankind yet no sacri"cial altars which is why knew about those poppies), burn to him, the sleeping and the dead and I have seen him no voices rise in supplication, are look-alikes: depicted with wings no Orphic hymns, limbs slack, growing out of his head. as to his "erce twin — mouths agape — Why wings? and isn’t that always the way it goes? “sleeps like the dead,” Perhaps because The mower-down of men “dead to the world,” he’s !eeting, gets cast in bronze, we say of sleepers — never deigns to stay the nice guy never gets except that sleepers for long that kind of esteem. wake back up. (not with me, anyway), I even hear it said, whereas Death “Sleep is for sissies,” In the old paintings holds you forever, “You snooze, you lose” — Hypnos snoozes in a cave, that iron grip of his. such disrespect! Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, (I guess !ows nearby, An altogether gentler deity he does look a little silly, while all about is Hypnos, those wings nod poppies kinder to mortals, sprouting out of his head.)

But take care! where we’ve been They cannot tell us Sleep has powers nor how we were what goes on as mighty as his twin: transported in Hypnos’ cave the way they there or back, that restores us seize us, nor who we were to ourselves spirit us away in the time or say how Sleep to an underworld we were away, knits up that confounds all sense and the tales we return with the ravelled sleeve of self — of who we are — tell more about ourselves They say for I can say, “I die,” than the regions we’ve traversed. Sleep is a mystery. but if “I” am not there to say it, And here’s the paradox: And so what “I” are we talking about? that “I” — Sleep is a province And so it is with Sleep: that wakeful self as "t I am not “I” in sleep, I pride myself on being, for philosophers that “I” sapiens, sentient, self-aware — with their imponderables, I know myself to be, need this stupefaction: and for poets conscious, cognizant, in control — without it, with their paradoxes, that self gets I’m a tattered rag, as it is for scientists, checked at the mouth with Sleep, whose scrutiny of Hypnos’ cave, I am myself again. Sleep gives the slip: drowned in the waters of oblivion. Men of science This twin of Death who But if death is an undiscovered in these enlightened times gives the kiss of life. country admit that they know from which no traveller returns, nothing, Gayle Greene Sleep is a realm neither the how of Sleep Professor, English from which we do return, nor the why. Scripps College emerging dazed They speculate it may be Claremont, Calif. into day’s light, gamma amino-butyric acid rubbing sleep from in concert with Author of Insomniac, a "rst-person crusted lids, the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus narrative about living with insomnia shuf!ing back into that !ips the switch, and an exploration of the world of our mortal coils, their terms describe, sleep science. knowing not do not explain: CMAJ 2012. DOI:10.1503/cmaj.111182