He has turned his face towards Spain.
Many things began to pass through his mind:
All the lands which he conquered as a warrior,
The fair land of France, the men of his lineage,
Charlemagne, his lord, who raised him.
He cannot help weeping and heaving great sighs
But he does not wish to be unmindful of himself."
(The Song of Roland, translated by Glyn Sheridan Burgess, Penguin Classics)
It's a long jump from Augustine to a world where there is suddenly a concept of France and Spain-- the first signs of Europe as we know it start showing in the Song of Roland. Technically speaking, I shouldn't be a big fan of this 12th century French poem-- it's all about Muslims and Christians bashing each other, God knows I'm not a fan of that. But I still love it-- I love it because even though it's madly macho and full of hate, it has these amazing moments where the human in these warriors shines through, and the power of this transformation is what reminds me that underneath our tough skins, we're all the same.
Here, Roland, Charlemagne's nephew and a brave fighter, lies dying on the battlefield. This is without doubt one of the greatest deaths in literature (for a full appreciation of it, I'd suggest reading the whole scene). But I want to read this death as just Roland's death, the death of an individual who even as he feels life leaving him, "does not wish to be unmindful of himself." I want to try and understand what it means not to be unmindful and what is the self that guides us towards rejecting this state of abandon-- even when the sustaining force of narrative is about to depart. In other words, is their any virtue to the narrative of death and dying?
In the moments before he is arrested by this thought of unmindfulness, we entertain the idea that Roland is allowing himself to be human, to engage in the luxuries that memory allows, and most importantly, to allow these thoughts to capture his being in such a way that it is no longer existing in the present, but rather attempting to see the future through the eye of the past. In other words, when we die, it is the past that informs our emotion not the present moment.
So what is the role of the present moment, then? That's where unmindfulness seems to play a role-- Roland's arrest of his unmindfulness moment is to attend to the present of death. Unmindfulness, essentially, lures the dying man away from the urgency of the present, towards the possibilities silhouetted by the past. It reduces, rather than gives agency. Roland's snatch for the present is a kind of "Death be not proud" moment, insisting on his sense of living each moment as it comes rather than taking death's kind anesthesia of memory.
On the other hand, it is the "weeping and heaving of great sighs," that make him human-- and thus immortal in a sense of the word, for it is the ability to feel that continues on in the species, undisturbed. Does he weep, then, in the present or for a past that tells him of the future that's been closed to him? Is his weeping possibly for the utter lack of a present he experiences-- the extreme distance of all things close and beloved? Or is Roland more alive than we can imagine in the way that his wishes still inform his actions? I would think in death, Roland is perhaps the strongest he can be because of the way all three spaces of time are suddenly captured in his form-- and experienced so powerfully in his mind. If we can be three places at once, no matter, the pain, are we not superhuman for just that small moment in time? But we don't live to tell it, and I think maybe that adds an extra element of the super.
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