the big sleep

Constant Companions Although We Wander, We’ll Meet Again In the Milky Way

By in poetry, the big sleep No Comments

Stephen Pentz informs me that the poet Sam Hamill died this past April. As I’ve mentioned several times here over the years, his translations, especially of Chinese and Japanese poetry, were truly life-changing for me. His book Endless River: Li Po and Tu Fu: A Friendship in Poetry was the first poetry book that inspired an almost-religious devotion from me. It’s also the only book I’ve read so many times that the binding has cracked and the pages are literally falling out.

I would usually Google him every year or so to see what he’d been up to. Obviously, I hadn’t done so since the spring, at least. It used to be that new articles were hard to come by, but there were several obituaries, including one in the New York Times. Most of them focused on his political stances, especially his “Poets Against the War” initiative from 2003, which I suppose might be the closest he ever got to the mainstream. One remembered him spending a lot of time on Facebook in recent years, issuing political updates concerning anti-racism, Donald Trump, Palestine, and “contempt for the ‘Repugnicons’.” I have to admit it’s a little disappointing to have my memories of his work now diluted with images of him ranting on social media like a million other tedious bloggers in a hyperpolitical age, but I still have a happy memory of reading a Buddhist magazine in a Barnes & Noble and seeing a letter to the editor from him, making fun of a recent article about Buddhists whose Gnostic-like contempt for earthly existence manifested itself in disdain for a meditation center located above a sex shop in NYC. From Hamill’s Zen perspective, life is the sex, blood, filth and suffering of everyday life, not an otherworldly realm of intellectual abstractions. His poetry was visceral like that too.

The Echo That Is Love

By in marriage, the big sleep No Comments

It’s knowing that this can’t go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we’ll get forty years together
But one day I’ll be gone
Or one day you’ll be gone
If we were vampires and death was a joke
We’d go out on the sidewalk and smoke
And laugh at all the lovers and their plans
I wouldn’t feel the need to hold your hand
Maybe time running out is a gift
I’ll work hard ’til the end of my shift
And give you every second I can find
And hope it isn’t me who’s left behind

— Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, “If We Were Vampires”

I heard this song a few months ago while out driving. The melody did nothing for me, but the lyrics struck me immediately, especially the poignancy in the realization that a “mere” forty years can seem paltry to a couple in love. There’s also the endearingly honest weakness in the line about hoping to not be the one left alive to mourn. The next time I stopped, I looked the lyrics up on my phone, then texted the Lady of the House about them, saying that they made me think of her.

In Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he added a reincarnation romance to the familiar story, with Gary Oldman’s Vlad Dracula furiously renouncing God after the tragic death of his wife. After 400 years of undeath, he encounters his beloved again in Victorian England and sets out to reclaim her. Later, he refrains from allowing her to join him in his vampiric state, saying that he loves her too much to condemn her. As Isbell’s lyrics recognize, the price of invulnerability is too high; it kills the very sentiment it’s meant to prolong. Cut loose from the tether of mortality, we float off into meaninglessness rather than freedom. Fantasies of afterlives or reincarnations, however understandable, are just another means of avoiding that painful reckoning.

My greatest fear, without question, is the possibility of having to survive her. Statistically, at least, that’s unlikely. But the threat of accidents and disease weighs more heavily on the mind than actuarial tables, and whatever selfish comfort I could take from the reassurances of probability is offset by the feeling that I love her too much to condemn her to years of aching grief. Would I stoically endure for her sake if I had to? I can only hope to have that much courage. I can only hope to never be called upon to demonstrate it.

I Think That I Shall Never See a Tomb as Lovely as a Tree

By in books, the big sleep No Comments

And incidentally, no real sacrifices need to be made to make this happen, as the community of Hümmel has demonstrated for years. They have put entire old beech forests under protection and found innovative ways to market them. Part of the forest is used as an arboreal mortuary, where the trees are leased out as living gravestones for urns buried under them.

— Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate

Well, I’m convinced. Sign me up for a burial plot among the roots. I still prefer the DIY ethic — no need to involve money-grasping middlemen in such a private affair — but I suppose a little commerce is necessary to facilitate progress on a wider scale.

Luck’s Last Match Struck In the Pouring Down Wind

By in foolosophy, music, the big sleep No Comments

Despite ample evidence to the contrary, I still find it difficult to accept that a life spent creating music and becoming rich from it could ever feel pointless. Oh, believe me, I’m well aware that many celebrities are utterly miserable and self-destructive, despite seeming to have it all. It’s just that music is still as thrilling and meaningful to me as it was when I was an adolescent, both as a listener and as a creator. How could anyone talented enough to create beauty out of nothing but imagination fail to be rejuvenated by the healing waters of musical creativity? Perhaps asking that question indicates that I’ve only ever been splashing around in the shallow end, safe from the dangerous undercurrents out where the truly gifted swim. Or perhaps, to borrow religious terminology, salvation is purely a matter of grace, not works. Maybe talent and undying passion are just more false idols. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, and he became unlucky, and there’s no more reason to it than that.

Doubtless, subsequent reports and eventual biographies will fill in further details, and they will likely offer seemingly clear reasons for why a man with a happy marriage, three kids, and a successful musical career would kill himself. Goodness knows, even a brief reading of his lyrics over the years can plausibly seem, in hindsight, to suggest inevitability rather than impulsivity. Was it depression? A relapse into substance abuse? Some other kind of personal trauma that became overwhelming? Any name will do; any rhetorical candle to provide a comforting, explanatory glow against the inexplicable darkness.

It’s not quite survivor’s guilt, but the shock of something like this almost makes me suspicious, wanting to look closely behind and under all the things that provide so much meaning in life for any telltale hints of gathering shadows. What if love, music, books and writing all desert me one day? Asking that question reminds me how quickly powerless we can all become, even as we build our lives around the illusion of control. And so we tremble and comfort ourselves with ritual words and behaviors while waiting and praying for the periodic darkness to pass without something in it lingering and turning its gaze in our direction.

Dreaming of a Skeleton Key

By in foolosophy, the big sleep No Comments

Douglas Dalrymple:

If man is born in freedom, with infinite possible futures open to him, the fact of living at all will require that he is locked out, finally, from nearly all of them. Sometimes further accommodation is simply not possible. We age and grow and so lock ourselves out of the womb, out of childhood, out of our parents’ home, out of youth. We make friends and pursue lovers and so exclude ourselves from other friends and other lovers. We make any number of choices, but eventually there comes a final door for each of us. We will step through it and it will close and we will find that we have left the key inside. Eventually, then, we do step into a night (cold and black, or warm and bright with stars – who can say?) which locks us out of tomorrow morning. Dithering in the hall, however, you find that straining to hold open multiple doors at once will get you – precisely – nowhere. Like death, life only happens when you lock yourself out.

This is the third of three poetic, beautifully written paragraphs. Go read the other two.

A Brief Spark of Sweetness In an Aching World

By in animals, the big sleep 2 Comments

12/1999 — 7/24/14
There will be years and years, each small forgetting a betrayal, each small betrayal a comfort, each small comfort another death. There is no lesson here, no lesson. Narcissus sought himself reflected in the world and found only death. Plums will bloom until there are no more plums. I will join him diffused into the soil, our component atoms intermingled one day soon, a dog and a man who walked together for a time, a brief spark of sweetness in an aching world.

Tom Junod:

The number of rescue dogs rises almost as inexorably as the number of pit bulls, and for good reason: The rescue movement came to its current prominence addressing the impossible plight of pit bulls—a plight that lent moral prestige to the cause of unwanted golden retrievers and Labradors. This is not to minimize the challenges faced by unwanted dogs of any breed; there are, after all, nearly four million American dogs in American shelters. But an unwanted pit bull is different from an unwanted golden retriever in that a market exists for unwanted golden retrievers and golden-retriever mixes; they are literally shipped from animal shelters in the south to animal shelters in the north because there are not enough of them. There are plenty of unwanted pit bulls. An unwanted pit bull generally stays unwanted, and the moral reward for rescuing one—okay, the moral self-congratulation—is doubled by the knowledge that it beat overwhelming odds just to stay alive.

…Every year, American shelters have to kill about 1.2 million dogs. But both pro- and anti-pit-bull organizations estimate that of these, anywhere from 800,000 to nearly 1 million are pit bulls. We kill anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 pit bulls a day. They are rising simultaneously in popularity and disposability, becoming something truly American, a popular dog forever poised on the brink of extermination.

My heart is broken again for the sixth time in seven years. If there’s a perspective or a mental trick one can play on oneself to somehow make this more bearable, I haven’t found it yet. “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.” Whether that came from Dr. Seuss or Gabriel García Márquez, I try my best to appreciate the wisdom of it. It happened, and it was good. It could so easily have been otherwise.

This one, like several of my others, came from a shelter too. A friend of ours ran the overflow for her county’s shelter. That is, she had dozens of kennels on her personal property where she would house dogs who had used up their time waiting to be adopted, but whom she felt deserved an extra chance. At that time, I was already beginning to feel the exhausting strain of being involved in pit bull rescue, but my ex convinced me to go out and see this ten month-old puppy her friend was raving about.

He was the absolute cutest, friendliest, most docile dog I’ve ever had. A true ambassador for the breed. It is utterly heartbreaking to think that a chance intervention saved him from being just one more puppy euthanized before he ever had a chance to discover how much he loved the taste of pizza, how good he was at singing along to the harmonica, how his terrier bloodline made him an expert mouse-catcher. It’s astonishing to think that such a perfect dog could sit in that shelter for two weeks without anyone wanting to take him home. The thought of thousands, or millions, more like him who weren’t and won’t be so lucky is unbearable. My mind just blanks out trying to contemplate it. Whenever I win the lottery that I don’t play, that’s what I’ll do with my money — give as many of them a chance to live out long, happy lives as possible. 

You’d Go Out — Bang! — Just Like a Candle!

By in extraordinary popular delusions, the big sleep No Comments

William Boyd:

I want to start with a luminously beautiful – and luminously profound – quotation from Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography Speak, Memory. He writes: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

“Common sense”. I believe that the knowledge of this state of affairs is the fundamental truth about our human nature: the fact that our lives simply amount to our individual occupation of this “brief crack of light” between two eternities of darkness shapes everything that makes us human and is responsible for everything good – and everything bad – about us.

I want to start with an acerbic suggestion that all this melodrama about eternal darkness is just so much overwrought adolescent angst. Where is this darkness, except in the gothic imagination of one still living? When one dies, who is there to be conscious of the experience of being dead? As wise old Epicurus said, when we exist, death is not, and when death exists, we are not. Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo. The animals whom you pity for their lack of awareness already know this. If you do your funeral arrangements right, your corpse will be just another feast for the other participants in the neverending circle of life — how narcissistic is it to think that your consciousness is the electricity that keeps the party going?

Death Rehearsal

By in foolosophy, the big sleep 3 Comments

I saw my old car off to the scrapyard after it finally died last week. That mileage is all on the original engine. Allow me to get all old-folksy for a moment and aver that they don’t make ’em like that any more, no sir.

There’s a lot of things I won’t miss about it. As you can imagine, a car that’s traveled that much isn’t the most comfortable ride anymore. I hate bucket seats as a rule, especially since it takes more effort to haul my rheumatic joints up and out of them. Stickshifts are just an unnecessary pain in the ass. Cars in general never seem to have enough room to suit me, and I’m a pretty average-sized fellow, not particularly tall or wide. The rear windows wouldn’t go up all the way, leaving about a half-inch open. The automatic window motors would have cost over $200 apiece, though, whereas a strip of black duct tape across the opening only cost a couple dollars — easy choice. The glovebox latch had first broken loose, then mysteriously vanished, so it was held slightly ajar with a velcro strip. The AC stopped working a long time ago and would have needed to be completely replaced to bring it up to current standards anyway, but I never wanted to go to that much expense — getting from point A to B has always been my main concern. Still, the fan only blew hot air no matter how far the dial was turned toward the blue. A dark-colored car with hot air leaking out of the vents on an August day in the South — it was like riding around in a four-wheeled toaster.

Perhaps I’m just inclined to be a little bit mournful today anyway, but despite those gripes, I did feel genuinely sad to see it go. I’ve heard it said in many ways, and I agree, that significant changes in life make us a bit uneasy because they remind us of the inevitability of the most significant change of all. However easy it will be to replace my means of transportation as opposed to a loved one, there’s still a noticeable hole in my routine. Another chapter, however banal, has been brought to a close. Watching it rise onto the back of the tow truck was like plucking a string on a web, sending vibrations through all sorts of dormant memories — the places it had been, the passengers it had carried, and all the myriad associations attached to each. No, I won’t really miss the car, but I will take a moment to rue the separation.

The Undiscovered Country

By in animals, the big sleep No Comments

The study of animal grief is a young field, largely because studies of any animal behaviors that one might think of as “human” were ignored for much of the twentieth century. It was commonly held that nonhuman animals were only reactive beings, lacking thoughts and emotions, and responding to stimuli as unthinking, unfeeling robots. Scientists were cautioned about being anthropomorphic, that is, regarding animals as they are often depicted in naive films and storybooks—as if they were people dressed up in fur or feathers. Researchers who thought they detected animal emotions—especially those that we think of as uniquely human, such as love, joy, or grief—were considered to be sentimentalists. And their reports (such as Darwin’s about the grieving cows) were dismissed as anecdotal.

In the last few decades, though, wildlife biologists have amassed so many firsthand accounts of animals caring for and mourning their dead that the idea of animal grief is no longer as suspect as it once was. Two recent books, both published in March of this year, explore the subject. How Animals Grieve, by anthropologist Barbara J. King, collects anecdotal and scientific data on grief in many kinds of animals, even some that most researchers ignore, such as rabbits, goats, and turtles. In The Bonobo and the Atheist, primatologist Frans de Waal examines the biological roots of religion and morality. Since our awareness of death is often cited as the reason we developed religion, de Waal investigates whether other animals have a similar sense of their ultimate end. While King doubts that even our close chimpanzee relatives are “aware that death is coming,” de Waal suggests that older apes or elephants may have experienced enough of life to comprehend that they, too, will die. “When an old ape notices that trees are harder and harder to get into or an elephant has ever more trouble keeping up with the herd, might these individuals not apply what they have learned about life and death to their own bodies?” de Waal asks. “It’s hard to know, yet impossible to rule out.”

Forgotten Children Conform a New Faith

By in identity, music, the big sleep No Comments

\m/(>_<)\m/.

American guitarist Jeff Hanneman, a co-founder of the heavy metal band Slayer, died in southern California on Thursday, the band said in a statement posted on their website. He was 49.

South of Heaven was one of the very first thrash metal records I ever got. A metalhead friend and I skipped our afternoon class one beautiful September day and spent a couple hours sitting in his old diesel rattletrap Mercedes listening to his collection of cassettes. I went immediately out and bought my own copy of that record, along with Exodus’s Impact is Imminent and Sacred Reich’s The American Way (the latter two didn’t hold up quite so well once the novelty faded, but I can still enjoy listening to Slayer un-ironically). A few weeks after that, as it happened, Seasons in the Abyss came out, and the slightly less-aggressive atmosphere of eerie dread pervading those two records still make them my favorites. Less than a year later, the Clash of the Titans, with Alice in Chains, Anthrax, Megadeth and Slayer, was my first concert.

One of the trade-offs of increasing maturity and sophistication is the tendency to experience things from a distance, via critical perspective. Seeing how this or that event fits into a larger narrative takes away some of the spontaneous enjoyment, the direct immersion in the experience. Late-eighties thrash is a strange little subculture: influenced but not accepted by punk rock, not really related to the hairspray glitz and glamour of their mainstream lite-metal peers, and not culturally significant enough to merit wider sociological notice the way grunge did a few years later. And a lot of the music is nowhere near being timeless. What I’m getting at is, it’s hard to look back nostalgically now without being fully aware of what a relatively small cultural space thrash metal occupied and feeling somewhat old and self-conscious about it. And yet, that knowledge exists in tandem with the strong perception, perfectly preserved, still just as intensely vivid after more than two decades, of a vast new world opening up in front of me as I sat there in that old car listening to those twin guitar lines, that manic, chaotic drumming, and those trademark Tom Araya shrieks. That moment, at least, is timeless.

Thanks for everything, Jeff.

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