In Borges’ “The Witness” a dying man is briefly awakened by bells that toll the Angelus, by then a common evening sound. But as a child this man had seen the face of Woden, the wooden idol hung with Roman coins, the sacrifice of horses. “Before dawn he will die and with him will die, and never return, the last immediate images of these pagan rites ….”
My eyes too may have been the last to see certain things. I may already be the last witness, of some things that mattered or didn’t matter, holding their last immediate images. As may be true of you (mon semblable, mon frère), though of different things.
Playing in the street outside my grandparents home I heard the soldiers marching. As they turned the corner, their faces like mechanical hog snouts, I ran frightened back inside. Some of those young men must have died when the Canadians came through; some may have lived to old age. By now they are gone, they to dust and their gas masks to landfill, every one. I was four. Do other still living eyes saw these men’s march in the village of Kapelle?
I vaguely sense the straw, in the half-dark cellars of the granary where we hide, with the assault above us. Mama and Oma are holding Marie and me, anxious and afraid, and I feel their anxiety again when it comes back to me. Later my mother tells me they were afraid for grandfather, standing by the entrance with other men — afraid because a German soldier had run inside and was hiding in the corner.
Some soldiers came in, he surrendered, they took him away.
Around when I was about twelve my parents were involved with a Pentacostal group, charismatics. The Apostle, Quist, a large man who had to stoop in the doorway, traveled around the country visiting the little churches held in people’s homes. These were the young churches of the Acts of the Apostles, alienated from the main church, which they equated with the Pharisees. I see Quist in our very small living room, the room with the stove where my father would start a coal fire in the morning for our heat and for cooking. Quist was a forceful man, preaching faith, hope, and love in Christ as the answer to all life’s problems, full of kindness but with not a trace of compromise in him. The congregation prophesied, spoke in tongues. We were baptized by full immersion in the North Sea. Will I be the last to have seen the last true apostle of Christ? In this day, belief worn down to the threadbare, I do not think so. But what worth is a threadbare soul’s witness?
Borges says that an infinite number of things die in every final agony. Borges, Jorge, whatever I may call you, you are only right about the lesser witnesses in this world. Someone’s eyes were the last to have seen the rites at the great stones of Callanish, and we still see the stones and mark them in our lives. There will be someone else’s eyes who, dying, take with them the stones’ last immediate images. But that will only be because they will be the last eyes to die. No eyes will see after Callanish.
Standing in the wind and winter rain, as the last of our imprints on them fade away, they continue in witness, in silent faith, living hope, their unfathomable joy.
Bas van Fraassen's Commonplace Book 