Woodpecker

Chapter 11 / Sam 5 / 31 Days Left

Gott ist tot! Sam is sat at the dining room table rereading an old essay of hers that carries this title. God is dead! She had written it just before her ignominious return from Amsterdam years earlier. The essay was unfinished, and she wished now that she'd completed it while her brain was youthful and flexible enough to creatively interpret Nietzsche's ideas. Perhaps therein lay an answer to how she had been feeling this last couple of weeks. Weighed down with an anxiety that lived like fireflies in her fingertips. The feeling made her feel as if it was impossible to move forward with anything. Washing is piled up in the basket by the machine and unopened mail lies in a disorderly pile by the front door. She has managed to force herself to go to work when needed, but the effort always leaves her flattened and in need of a hiding place. The doctor has told her this is a normal part of the grieving process. It will most likely lift by itself.

Sam has never been religious or held strong beliefs about the existence of a God or any particular system of faith. When she first read it, the philosophy of "Gott ist tot", had been the most natural explanation of the world as she encountered it. It either already was or became the way she viewed existence right through her adult life. Rather than a direct attack on God, this famous statement was an assault on the worldly view that had held sway since the time of Plato. That to understand all things metaphysical they must be split in two. For Nietzsche this dualism of heaven and earth, body and soul, life and death, only served to enslave us, to make us wretched. The eternal utopia of heaven reducing earth to a purgatory upon which we must walk in suffering until called. The soul, eternal and belonging to the heavenly realm, the body weak and decrepit. Life something to be endured until death opened the gates to the unending and infinite bliss of godly embrace. When analysed like this, man is left despising the body and longing to escape the physical world for what lies beyond.

But no! Sam liked the logical neatness of Nietzsche's idea of "Body" as distinct from body. Body being body, soul, heaven, earth, life, and death all in one, not split. Composites and amalgams but as one greater than the sum of elemental parts. But now this world view had been shaken. Another naiveite of the childlike Sam that lingered in this body of forty something years old. Now everything around her seemed broken in two, and undeniably so. Man and wife, Mother and daughter, truths and untruths, herself and this-self, all life and all extinction, this world as is and that other quiet world of comforting stillness that accompanies Woodpecker each time she flies down. What else could this signal if not the existence of some higher order? How wrong she had been her whole life. Is this why loss shakes us so much? Because whatever we believe and have faith in can when the end comes only crumble, if only at the edges. What other deceptions am I deluding myself with?

There lying next to the essay, where it had sat all week, was possibly another of those deceptions. Truth or untruth? Photocopies of the Guardian from the 30th of March, Page 7, and this unfathomable academic paper from Professor Stuart Levitsky, just like Woodpecker had said. She still doesn't know what she is supposed to do with them. She looks again at the newspaper page, laid out as a patchwork of four pieces of A4 paper clumsily sellotaped together. There are four headlines on the page, two major and two minor. The larger of the headlines reads "Major Cyber Attack on SENA Bank" and details a sophisticated theft of an unknown quantity of money, believed to be in the region of twenty million pounds. Foreign powers are suspected of being behind the attack given the level of knowledge and planning required to pull it off. Then there is a story about an argument over fishing rights and the protection of North Sea stocks. The environment agency is pushing to reduce overfishing to protect the future of domestic supplies, but the fishermen are angry and worried about their livelihoods. A smaller story about reforms to the state pension system sweeps the long left-hand column of the page, and then nestled bottom right is a small story, three paragraphs long, about an unidentified body that had been found in a flat in Pimlico.