A state of ghosthood

Rilke's Orpheus:

is a book about death and the lyric, how we are a product of two realms: the here and the not-here, the temporal and the a-temporal (or the eternal) because we have foreknowledge of our own deaths. [1] So essentially we're in a state of ghosthood, which is unusual for a mammal so how do you deal with that? Well, the way we deal with it is by singing across the gap and listening to the echoes that come back from the realm.

-- Don Paterson in interview

Note

[1]  Scot Atran's phrase for this state is "the tragedy of cognition"