Drove home tonight at 9:30pm, daughter asleep in the back of the car. And the sky was still lit, darker than turquoise, and bluer but still more green than blue. We come up against things every day that cannot be said, or cannot be said with precision. And we rely on the fabric of our shared humanity, rely on the intuition or wisdom or insight of those around us to interpret what we say.
So cumbersome, words -- and "words" itself sounds so pedestrian, ordinary things like bent 10-penny nails -- perhaps exchangable, more likely not.
The two of us visited my father's grave site earlier today. My 4 year old (soon to be 5) wrestled with the idea that her "Poppy" was under the ground. "Can I dig down and see him?" (No, he's not really down there, only his body.) "But can I see him?" (He wouldn't be Poppy any more if you did.) "Who would he be?" (Indeed.)
I wish I could report at this point that I felt better, that I was coming to terms with his passing... But I'm not. I feel worse. I think more about my own health, my mortality. I am quicker to anger, less inspired to correct the unhealthy habits in my life. If there is a way to attack this, I do not see it. I feel quite passive in the face of it all. And the ephemeral nature of all that I do and have done in the days and years prior... is painful.
This is not right living because it is divorced from action. Something will have to yield. There ought to be a word for this waiting... waiting for something terrible or magnificent, possibly both, for something to rend the veil. Or else not, and I will diminish as my father before me has. The novels unwritten, the promise unfulfilled -- what will my little kindnesses mean against failure on that scale? Will they stack even so high as my transgressions? Or will even that be a matchstick cabin to set beside a matchstick shack? Yes or no.
Saturday, June 9, 2007
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Normalcy
Sorry for the long break over Memorial Day Weekend, but that really hasn't been what's put me off posting for the last 2 weeks.
The fact is that I'm up against intractable problems here, and doing so from two distinctly different directions. On one side, there are the posts that draw upon my personal pain. They portray the challenges that come with dealing with loss, the anatomy of one psyche coping against the void. On another side, there are the posts that try to abstract from that personal realm into something that might apply beyond me. Something that might strike a chord somewhere in the world.
Neither approach resolves, and my failures here make me feel... diminished. Robert Frost once wrote of "what to make of a diminished thing." And in my own poetry I tried to capture that at times, but not tonight. Tonight, let the thing remain diminished -- because the world is big, and we are small.
Instead let me talk for a little bit about how I come to terms with being a diminished thing -- I don't mean this in a self-derogatory sense. It is our mortal fate, and as such it comes about naturally that we must ask: what is the value of this life? Of my life? Against cosmic timescales and black holes and the births of galaxies?
Several people have spoken to me of feeling my father's presence. I myself have on a few occasions felt his presence very strongly, and yet I know he is not there in any supernatural sense. So how do I account for this?
Beyond the genetic inheritance I carry within me, my father is deeply imprinted in the fabric of my mind. It gathers up the layer upon layer of two dimensional information and three-dimensional memories, and now that he is gone, that information churns and fabricates and constructs him there. And when the mind is freed of the constraints bound to "Dad is gone" -- it re-constitutes him here for me. Just as your minds re-constitute him to varying degrees.
The significance of this, I think, is that it returns us to the fabric of humanity and our impact upon it. The warp and woof of my father continues long after the thread is cut. The community that accrued to him is a fabric that persists and carries forward. The chapter of any individual life is short, but the book is long. And the book requires those chapters, every one of them. The chapters accumulate and influence the narrative going forward. It establishes "normalcy" and creates "inertias" that can never entirely be countermanded or erased.
Now as to why the narrative of Humanity might have any significance... that's a question for a different day.
The fact is that I'm up against intractable problems here, and doing so from two distinctly different directions. On one side, there are the posts that draw upon my personal pain. They portray the challenges that come with dealing with loss, the anatomy of one psyche coping against the void. On another side, there are the posts that try to abstract from that personal realm into something that might apply beyond me. Something that might strike a chord somewhere in the world.
Neither approach resolves, and my failures here make me feel... diminished. Robert Frost once wrote of "what to make of a diminished thing." And in my own poetry I tried to capture that at times, but not tonight. Tonight, let the thing remain diminished -- because the world is big, and we are small.
Instead let me talk for a little bit about how I come to terms with being a diminished thing -- I don't mean this in a self-derogatory sense. It is our mortal fate, and as such it comes about naturally that we must ask: what is the value of this life? Of my life? Against cosmic timescales and black holes and the births of galaxies?
Several people have spoken to me of feeling my father's presence. I myself have on a few occasions felt his presence very strongly, and yet I know he is not there in any supernatural sense. So how do I account for this?
Beyond the genetic inheritance I carry within me, my father is deeply imprinted in the fabric of my mind. It gathers up the layer upon layer of two dimensional information and three-dimensional memories, and now that he is gone, that information churns and fabricates and constructs him there. And when the mind is freed of the constraints bound to "Dad is gone" -- it re-constitutes him here for me. Just as your minds re-constitute him to varying degrees.
The significance of this, I think, is that it returns us to the fabric of humanity and our impact upon it. The warp and woof of my father continues long after the thread is cut. The community that accrued to him is a fabric that persists and carries forward. The chapter of any individual life is short, but the book is long. And the book requires those chapters, every one of them. The chapters accumulate and influence the narrative going forward. It establishes "normalcy" and creates "inertias" that can never entirely be countermanded or erased.
Now as to why the narrative of Humanity might have any significance... that's a question for a different day.
Monday, May 14, 2007
The Cancer Patient
On the radio today I heard a story about an 11-year old girl with cancer. An interviewer is asking her questions and finally says, "What are those beads you're holding?"
The girl says, "We get a bead for different things we have to do at the hospital."
And the interviewer asks, "What kinds of things? I see that you have different colors."
And the girl answers, "We get a black bead for each day of chemo. A white bead for radiation treatments. A red bead when they take blood. A yellow bead for each day in the hospital. Stuff like that. When you get enough, you can make them into a necklace."
And the interviewer says, "And do you have enough for a necklace?"
And the girl, "I have five necklaces. They're in this box right here, see?"
She asks, See?
It sounds very simple. Look here... Do you see?
How could any feeling human "see" that? I see... something. Through a glass darkly. The vaguest outline, the faintest contours of this innocent child's life.
Do *you* see? Would you put yourself in the shoes of Job's accusers and dare explain that to me? To her?
What is the mode of being to account for this? Where is an answer that could on the one hand comfort her and those who love her; and on the other value this world, this life, as something precious beyond all riches, beyond all wisdom, beyond all ken.
The girl says, "We get a bead for different things we have to do at the hospital."
And the interviewer asks, "What kinds of things? I see that you have different colors."
And the girl answers, "We get a black bead for each day of chemo. A white bead for radiation treatments. A red bead when they take blood. A yellow bead for each day in the hospital. Stuff like that. When you get enough, you can make them into a necklace."
And the interviewer says, "And do you have enough for a necklace?"
And the girl, "I have five necklaces. They're in this box right here, see?"
She asks, See?
It sounds very simple. Look here... Do you see?
How could any feeling human "see" that? I see... something. Through a glass darkly. The vaguest outline, the faintest contours of this innocent child's life.
Do *you* see? Would you put yourself in the shoes of Job's accusers and dare explain that to me? To her?
What is the mode of being to account for this? Where is an answer that could on the one hand comfort her and those who love her; and on the other value this world, this life, as something precious beyond all riches, beyond all wisdom, beyond all ken.
Mode of Being
What are the modes of being conducive to an ethical life?
1 An awareness of our finitude, of our mortality, of our fragmented and limited nature...
2 A sympathy for the humanly inexhaustable finitude of other conscious things...
3 A grounded understanding that the world is real, and real in a way that transcends us, precedes us, and will continue after we are gone
4 An acknowledgement of our fallibility -- of the inaccessible nature of final Truths
5 An acceptance of our vulnerability -- because the world is big, and we are small, we can be and inevitably will be hurt by the world
6 A willingness to interpret and thereby make contingent judgments (an ethics incapable of judging has made itself impotent; just as a theology incapable of ascribing goodness to god has rendered itself pointless)
The foundational premise is that we can only better ourselves by attempting to better the world around us. The Self is a cage, and a terrible cage at that. Unrelenting, morally neutral, inscrutable, self-referentially contextualized and thereby capable of justifying any action. It makes the best of human ideas terrible and ugly. It turns freedom into oppression. It commoditizes altruism. In its rage for reification, it makes us all the same. It turns every conceivable act into expressions of power.
The only possible ethical action must be grounded in the effort to liberate self from Self, and must at the same time acknowledge that you can never succeed, except in the most peripheral, limited, qualified ways. Saying "I am not all" is one such route, a route that extends due libation to Self in the "I" and then takes it away in the negating "not".
1 An awareness of our finitude, of our mortality, of our fragmented and limited nature...
2 A sympathy for the humanly inexhaustable finitude of other conscious things...
3 A grounded understanding that the world is real, and real in a way that transcends us, precedes us, and will continue after we are gone
4 An acknowledgement of our fallibility -- of the inaccessible nature of final Truths
5 An acceptance of our vulnerability -- because the world is big, and we are small, we can be and inevitably will be hurt by the world
6 A willingness to interpret and thereby make contingent judgments (an ethics incapable of judging has made itself impotent; just as a theology incapable of ascribing goodness to god has rendered itself pointless)
The foundational premise is that we can only better ourselves by attempting to better the world around us. The Self is a cage, and a terrible cage at that. Unrelenting, morally neutral, inscrutable, self-referentially contextualized and thereby capable of justifying any action. It makes the best of human ideas terrible and ugly. It turns freedom into oppression. It commoditizes altruism. In its rage for reification, it makes us all the same. It turns every conceivable act into expressions of power.
The only possible ethical action must be grounded in the effort to liberate self from Self, and must at the same time acknowledge that you can never succeed, except in the most peripheral, limited, qualified ways. Saying "I am not all" is one such route, a route that extends due libation to Self in the "I" and then takes it away in the negating "not".
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Anger
The value of anger is that it asserts the chasm and the dependency between Self and World. Anger is the difference between the World-as-it-is and the World as I would wish it to be.
I have been angry with my father for the past few days... I passed through grief, the "torrent" I referenced in a previous post. Then settled into exhaustion for a while. But on Monday I visited his gravesite and felt angry. The flowers were gone. The headstone is not yet in place. He had only an index card in a plastic holder: Name, date of death -- April 13, 2007.
And I thought to myself that this man never did speak to me as a peer. He tried to protect me -- a man in his forties. Tried to protect me from his doubts, his dark moments, his fears... But all his "protection" did was to put an insurmountable distance between us. He could have said at some point, "I feel that way, too," or "I felt that way at one point, and then this happened..."
I understand that I am and always will be his child... But would it not have been worth more now to establish that commonality with his grown son?
Or perhaps I never did learn to ask him the right questions.
So I feel anger, and that anger makes the world more real to me. It makes the world matter, just a little bit more. It makes my own efforts at understanding, and my own actions in that world relevant. The shared fabric of humanity must indeed be shared. The alternative is a nuclear model of reality that continues to seek a core, an atom of the ineffably physical, never finds it -- atoms to electrons to quarks, etc. -- and is left with dust dissolving to nothing.
I have been angry with my father for the past few days... I passed through grief, the "torrent" I referenced in a previous post. Then settled into exhaustion for a while. But on Monday I visited his gravesite and felt angry. The flowers were gone. The headstone is not yet in place. He had only an index card in a plastic holder: Name, date of death -- April 13, 2007.
And I thought to myself that this man never did speak to me as a peer. He tried to protect me -- a man in his forties. Tried to protect me from his doubts, his dark moments, his fears... But all his "protection" did was to put an insurmountable distance between us. He could have said at some point, "I feel that way, too," or "I felt that way at one point, and then this happened..."
I understand that I am and always will be his child... But would it not have been worth more now to establish that commonality with his grown son?
Or perhaps I never did learn to ask him the right questions.
So I feel anger, and that anger makes the world more real to me. It makes the world matter, just a little bit more. It makes my own efforts at understanding, and my own actions in that world relevant. The shared fabric of humanity must indeed be shared. The alternative is a nuclear model of reality that continues to seek a core, an atom of the ineffably physical, never finds it -- atoms to electrons to quarks, etc. -- and is left with dust dissolving to nothing.
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