the big sleep

Holding Tenderly to What Remains

By in foolosophy, the big sleep No Comments

Just like autumn leaves
we’re in for change
Holding tenderly
to what remains

— TV on the Radio, “Province“

I remember early July, 1980. I was following my dad around in the woods surrounding the house that he would buy the following month, checking out where our property lines were. I would diligently inform him every time I saw a tick climbing up his pants or shirt. (I think I remember him collecting around twenty to my six.) I remember being thirsty afterward, and my mom holding me up to drink straight from the long, curved faucet in the kitchen sink, my first taste of well water. I remember how huge the house seemed, with all those empty rooms. I remember the smell of sawdust in the garage, since it was still a newly-built house. I remember the smell and feel of the grey wall-to-wall carpet as I lay there playing on the floor in the room they said would be mine. My mom and dad were both thirty-four years old then.

I’ve always been the neat freak of the family. Not obsessive-compulsive neat, not autism-spectrum fussy, but still, I can’t tolerate clutter and filth. When I get stressed, I soothe myself by cleaning things whether they really need it or not, a quirk which the Lady of the House considers quite the value-add. At twelve years old, once I no longer had to share a room with my messy brother, I started vacuuming and dusting my own room, doing my own laundry, etc. I gamely defended my little swath of tidy territory in the upstairs, battling the encroaching forces of sloth and entropy to a standstill, until I moved out at nineteen. My childhood homeland has since become a makeshift cat sanctuary, I believe. I haven’t verified this; I prefer to honor a dignified memory of the room as it was in its prime.

I was back out at the house last week. My brother called me, asking if I could help him get our dad to the hospital the next day if necessary. Both my parents had been diagnosed with the batflu earlier this month, but my dad seemed to be getting weaker, unable to drink or eat on his own now, let alone keep any of it down. After a quick confab on the phone about his condition, we decided there was no better time than the present. I told my brother to call an ambulance and we’d meet him there. When we arrived, Dad was in his chair, too weak to stand, severely dehydrated and disoriented to the point of near-incoherence. The hallway was too crowded with boxes, books, and other detritus for the EMTs to get a gurney in there, so they brought a wheelchair in. My brother and I had to do a modified fireman’s carry to get him out of the chair and set him in the chair, which then had to be carried down the back stairs to the driveway, where we hoisted him onto the gurney and into the ambulance. I’ll always remember his wide, staring, uncomprehending eyes as the EMTs asked him routine questions, the groan he made when we lifted him, somewhere between pain and fear, and the way his trembling hand instinctively reached out to clutch the railing as we carried him down the stairs. My brother and I followed the ambulance to the hospital, while the Lady of the House stayed behind with my mother, eventually convincing her to come to the hospital as well. (Both of them had gotten pneumonia, in addition to the dehydration. My mom was admitted to the ICU with an oxygen sat of 84, six points lower than the point at which home oxygen is typically called for.)

The garage which once smelled sweetly of sawdust was long ago converted into an office, which has since been further converted into an office/ground-floor bedroom. It’s filled with boxes, filing cabinets, and tons of books, among other things. (Both of my parents have been selling books online for many years, and have accumulated thousands that have never even made it to the point of being listed for sale.) With my parents determined to “age in place,” we convinced them a few years ago to install a full bathroom down there, since the other full baths are upstairs. Part of the reason my mom resisted going to the hospital at first was because she wanted to take a shower before allowing anyone to treat her, but in her weakened state, she couldn’t walk upstairs to do it. (There’s something inappropriately amusing about the thought of Vanity, even as you stand on Death’s very doorstep, nagging you to make sure you’re wearing clean underwear.) Why not use the one in the “garage”? Well, even if she could have easily gotten to it through the manmade maze, it has boxes of books stacked in it.

Most of the house is like that. Entire rooms are essentially just indoor storage containers now. Worst of all is the smell. The smell of dust, of stale air, of old furniture, of pet dander (and worse). After visiting there, my clothes always go straight into the laundry with the same sense of slightly-angry disgust, just as they did back in the days when I’d go to a club to see a rock concert and come home reeking of cigarette smoke.

Ironically, I remember, somewhere on a shelf in the attic (which was renovated a long time ago into yet another room), there’s an oversized metal pin, like the smaller type you’d pin to a jacket, that reads, “Someday I’ll Get Organized.” I’d guess it dates to the mid-80s. My mom has been making lighthearted excuses for the mess as long as I can remember. “Spring cleaning” was the excuse even I learned to give to friends who came over, even when it was summer. I recall a live Christmas tree that stayed up in the living room until early March one year, when I was around ten or eleven. There’s always something that prevents her from acting on her imminent plan to clean everything up. The details slightly change, but the pattern remains the same. In recent years, the backlog of books has been blamed on various things, but now, after a year in which there were no sales to attend, no new inventory to buy, there are no more excuses to hide behind. If these didn’t get listed, sold and shipped during a year of enforced isolation, when will they ever? My parents are seventy-five now. Are they going to have more time and energy when they’re eighty? Eighty-five?

Obviously, like all people, my folks are too complex as individuals to be reduced to one flaw. But as I stood there last week, stunned by the level of squalor that they had come to see as normal, it was hard to not see this episode as a cautionary tale about the danger of forty years of inertia, of bad habits, of avoidance and willful blindness and empty promises. Today, while eating a quick lunch at work, I saw a link to a review of what appears to be yet another exercise in pointless, Teutonic-academic, pseudo-radical, masturbatory stupidity presented in book form. The argument seems to be…well, as far as I can make out, that “fitness” is a sinister thing because blah blah “neoliberalism” blah blah “late-capitalism” blah blah. I’m not sure whether, in this analysis, people who work out are ominous ubermenschen shock troops for the fascist new world order, or pathetic humanoid hamsters unwittingly serving their capitalist masters, but either way, it helped clarify something for me. Why do I like exercising and staying in shape? Because I have a tragic worldview, one in which the forces of entropy and chaos are insatiable and constantly threatening to break down our dignity, to destroy the fragile solace and beauty we create in our small little gardens of order. Our bad habits, our fears, our weaknesses inexorably enclose us, shrink our horizons, limit our potential, and intimidate us into submission as long as we allow it. Those forces can’t be held off forever, of course. The barbarians of age and disease will eventually breach even the gates of our bodies and destroy them from inside. But perhaps there is dignity in putting up a good fight in the meantime. Perhaps we can stand as reminders that there are more options than cynicism and surrender. I stay fit for the same reason I keep my house tidy. It’s a practice, in the religious sense, a ritual expression of my deepest principles. Set your sights on beauty and order, and never stop fighting for them, even when it’s ultimately futile.

My dad came home from the hospital today. My mom has been moved out of the ICU and should be home soon. Now, my brother and I have to convince them that things need to change. Part of the resistance to change will come from the resistance that most of us feel toward thoughts of our mortality. It’s not just about getting rid of “stuff.” It’s about admitting that the place in your life where that stuff used to fit is closed and locked forever. It’s about admitting that all the “one days” have been used up. It’s about admitting that you’ve been living falsely in some sense, a prisoner of fears and vain hopes, and worst of all, only realizing it when there’s little time left to fully redeem yourself. I hope they’re strong enough to bear it gracefully, and I hope I’m strong enough to support them.

Kitteh

By in animals, the big sleep 3 Comments

Kitteh had to be euthanized this morning. She had apparently had a couple of strokes in the last year, leaving her mostly blind and suffering from vertigo. We brought her inside about a year and a half ago, when it became clear she wasn’t capable of fending for herself anymore. We figured she deserved some time in an assisted-living facility in recognition of her long service — she was already living on the premises when I moved in almost thirteen years ago, and despite the presence of several dogs who weren’t particularly fond of cats, she steadfastly hung around, eventually outliving them all. I’m glad we at least got to let her enjoy one winter snuggled up to the woodstove. Thanks for your company, old girl.

Obiter Scripta, no. 79

By in obiter scripta, the big sleep No Comments

A frequent and attentive prospect of that moment, which must put a period to all our schemes, and deprive us of all our acquisitions, is indeed of the utmost efficacy to the just and rational regulation of our lives; nor would ever any thing wicked, or often any thing absurd, be undertaken or prosecuted by him who should begin every day with a serious reflection that he is born to die.

— Samuel Johnson

Just over ten years ago, I reported that I had indeed been waking up each morning with a strong awareness of my own mortality. Those kinds of reflections tend to appear at more random intervals these days, though still regularly. (Thoughts of his own death/Like the distant roll/Of thunder at a picnic — Auden.) But I’m afraid I must stand as the living (for now) disproof of Johnson’s conjecture, for while I may have avoided outright wickedness, I have undertaken and prosecuted much absurdity since then. Like rock smashing scissors, folly easily beats memento mori.

Roger Scruton

By in the big sleep No Comments

Theodore Dalrymple:

In his last and moving article in The Spectator, indeed in the last paragraph he published in his lifetime, he stressed the importance of gratitude for what one has been fortunate enough to inherit. Take nothing for granted, preserve what is worth preserving, understand the fragility of things, remember debts to the past as well as to the future, take delight in the world. Such was the lasting message of this exceptionally gifted man.

When I heard yesterday of Roger Scruton’s death, I sat down with my copies of his books and leafed through them, looking for a representative paragraph or two capable of summing up what he has meant to me. Frankly, there are too many, and my thoughts about them aren’t very interesting for a tribute. Luckily, Dalrymple has done an admirable job here naming the main themes that I, too, will carry with me. Several years ago, I wrote to Scruton directly in an attempt to express my appreciation for his work. He didn’t respond (and of course I didn’t expect him to), but I do hope my letter made him smile.

Immortal Longings

By in alan watts, books, foolosophy, juxtapositions, the big sleep 1 Comment

What is this joie de vivre that they talk about nowadays? Our hunger for God, our thirst of immortality, of survival, will always stifle in us this pitiful enjoyment of the life that passes and abides not. It is the frenzied love of life, the love that would have life to be unending, that most often urges us to long for death. “If it is true that I am to die utterly,” we say to ourselves, “then once I am annihilated the world has ended so far as I am concerned—it is finished. Why, then, should it not end forthwith, so that no new consciousnesses, doomed to suffer the tormenting illusion of a transient and apparential existence may come into being? If, the illusion of living being shattered, living for the mere sake of living or for the sake of others who are likewise doomed to die, does not satisfy the soul, what is the good of living? Our best remedy is death.” And thus it is that we chant the praises of the never-ending rest because of our dread of it and speak of liberating death.

…And they come seeking to deceive us with a deceit of deceits, telling us that nothing is lost, that everything is transformed, shifts and changes, that not the least particle of matter is annihilated, not the least impulse of energy is lost, and there are some who pretend to console us with this! Futile consolation! It is not my matter or my energy that is the cause of my disquiet, for they are not mine if I myself am not mine—that is, if I am not eternal. No, my longing is not to be submerged in the vast All, in an infinite and eternal Matter or Energy or in God; not to be possessed by God, but to possess Him, to become myself God, yet without ceasing to be I myself, I who am now speaking to you. Tricks of monism avail us nothing; we crave the substance and not the shadow of immortality.

— Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life

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That man desires immortality is understandable, but were it not for the influence of the Christian religion, it should never have assumed such a disproportionately large share of our attention. Instead of being a fine reflection, a noble fancy, lying in the poetic realm between fiction and fact, it has become a deadly earnest matter, and in the case of monks, the thought of death, or life after it, has become the main occupation of this life.

…Many people have substituted for this personal immortality, immortality of other kinds, much more convincing—the immortality of the race, and the immortality of work and influence. It is sufficient that when we die, the work we leave behind us continues to influence others and play a part however small, in the life of the community in which we live. We can pluck the flower and throw its petals to the ground and yet its subtle fragrance remains in the air. It is a better, more reasonable, and more unselfish kind of immortality. In this very real sense, may say that Louis Pasteur, Luther Burbank and Thomas Edison are still living among us. What if their bodies are dead, since “body” is nothing but an abstract generalization for a constantly changing combination of chemical constituents! Man begins to see his own life as a drop in an ever flowing river and is glad to contribute his part to the great stream of life. If he were only a little less selfish, he should be quite contented with that.

— Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

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However, in an entirely friendly spirit, I would like to take issue with Alan Harrington’s fascinating article “The Immortalist” (May 1969), on the desirability of abolishing death, and the possibility of doing so through medical techniques.

The immortalization of any biological individual runs into the same logistic problems as building indefinitely high skyscrapers: the lower floors are increasingly taken up with channels for elevators. It’s called “the law of diminishing returns.” A brain that continues intact for 100, 500, or 1,000 years is increasingly clogged with memories, and becomes like a sheet of paper so covered with writing that no space is left for any visible or intelligible form. Thus a human being 500 years old would be as inert as a turtle of the same age.

Consider the following points: (a) Death is not a sickness or disease; it is an event as natural and as healthy as childbirth or as the falling of leaves in the autumn. (b) As the “natural childbirth” obstetricians are training women to experience the pains of labor as erotic tensions, there is no reason why the “pangs of death” should not be reinterpreted as the ecstasies of liberation from anxiety and overloads of memory and responsibility. (c) Suppose that medical science achieves a method of getting rid of the overload of memories and anxieties: Isn’t this what death accomplishes already? (d) The funk about death is the illusion that you are going to experience everlasting darkness and nothingness as if being buried alive. (e) The “nothingness” after death is the same as the “nothingness” before you were born, and because anything that has happened once can happen again you will happen again as you did before, mercifully freed from the boredom of an overloaded memory.

Along with most of us, Alan Harrington doesn’t see that this “nothingness” before birth and after death is simply the temporal equivalent of, say, the space between stars. Where would stars be without spatial intervals between them? The problem is simply that civilized and brainwashed human beings lack the perception that we are all one Self, marvellously varied and indefinitely extended through time and space with restful intervals. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, “it is the silent pause which gives sweetness to the chant.”

— Alan Watts, The Collected Letters of Alan Watts

I Stumbled On and All the World Fell Down

By in the big sleep No Comments

We signed up a new client today, an eighty-year-old man. That’s unusual enough, but further along in our email correspondence, he told us that his wife and business partner of over fifty years died last year. He knows he has to keep busy, he said, so he decided to try this new venture. He had polio as a baby and he’s “getting more decrepit by the year,” so he walks with a cane now, but he’s still fairly active, and still plans on packing and shipping merchandise to us himself. I don’t mind saying that I feel a bit awestruck.

As I said, in my circumstances, the worst thing I could imagine is having to outlive one’s spouse. I remember reading a poem a long time ago where the author reflected on various types of fame and glory and concluded by saying something to the effect of “I’ve lived long enough to only be impressed by those who simply do what they have to do.” Amen to that.

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.

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