I’m old enough to have passed over an internal divide that I didn’t see coming:
I’m dying.
Not in the sense that I’m about to keel over, but that I can feel that I’m decreasing, becoming less, moving toward an end. The end?
As a kid I never envisioned death in any conscious way. Odd, too, because on Hastings Ave., when I was about five, the guy across the street died and I watched the hearse pick him up. And I already knew that we were able to rent our house – right after WWII, when almost nothing was available – only because the owner had fallen off a ladder and broken his neck, so that his wife had moved out and rented the place. But I never attached death to myself or to the world. It was a “something,” at best.
In Catholic school (4th to 12th grades) I feared the afterlife, not death as such. Heavy-duty Christians, according to various studies, often have the greatest fear of death – Perhaps they feel they can’t make the grade into Heaven. Whew, I was sure I couldn’t.
But since I first entered college, I’ve never for an instant considered the possibility of anything remaining beyond death. What? My brain turns to soup, while a wispy “self” flits off into the Beyond? I gained a horror of death in my 40s-50s from not being able to picture a world continuing without me there to observe it. Unfair, damn it!
Now, I still want to know what happens next, as observer, much as I wish I’d been around throughout all of history – OK, maybe not the last ice age or the Inquisition. And I still can’t wrap my mind around the idea of not-being, even though I haven’t read Sartre.
But about 30 seconds before death, an “Aha!” will arrive that will make not-being obvious, even enjoyable? Total horse crap.
The altered outlook that led me to this ramble doesn’t feel lugubrious, just a realization that something has changed that I didn’t want to change – but that doesn’t matter now that it has changed. Things peter out (Peter Out – the last philosopher of the middle ages) in an inevitable way. There’s no glory in it, certainly, but no shame either – shouldn’t even be a reluctance, I suppose, but there it is.
Along the way, I see this evolving in tandem with the wind-down of the country, which, despite its equal inevitability, saddens me. The obvious and predictable end of the American empire was fine by me – we’d bumbled and annoyed the world long enough, imposed on it, taken from it, given back quite a lot, but most of it destabilizing, debilitating. So, no more empire: Good thing.
But I didn’t think that we’d choose to slit our own national throat in the process. That too is probably inevitable. Our elections, decided by an anomaly of the Constitution rather by than any “will of the people,” show that a massive percentage of the “people” prefer national suicide to a possibly enlightened decline.
How can decline be enlightened? Through acceptance, through a bit of relaxation. We could sit back in our comfy chairs with a good cocktail or a shot of rotgut and reminisce, laugh over the good times, frown and shrug over the bad. It’s not a nasty way to go when the exit sign’s flashing.
So many of us don’t see our national choice as suicide; we view the invitation to political and social insanity as a form of salvation. Is this a normal approach to death? Any death?
Damned if I know. But I feel a huge sorrow for the country that I don’t feel for myself. And I know it’s misplaced, because when I’m dead, I will be truly and certifiably gone – vanished – whereas our country could conceivably experience resurrection.
It’s not likely, but possible. The horror that the country and the world will be put through in coming years could be what’s needed to reign in our decline – not of empire, but of human decency. Can we find the best, rather than the worst, in our collective soul?
As for me, I’ll go on dying, and it bothers me far less than I would have thought. As I said, in middle age I didn’t at all like the thought of the vacancy of non-being, the certainty of blankness, the eternity of no-knowledge. But maybe it’s all been enough. Enough of everything.
* * * *
When I was growing up, it was the age of departments stores. 8th and Market streets in Philly had three: Gimbel’s, Srawbridge and Clothier, and Lit Brothers, all situated at what was rumored to be the busiest single intersection in the country. (Can’t recall who lounged on the southeast corner; can you?)
Lit’s, with its Christmas Village, and Strawbridge’s, to some degree, made the holidays a semi-interactive joy. Lit’s also held smaller gatherings throughout the year for local kids-show radio hosts, etc.
But he thing I most remember from Strawbridge’s was that, instead of lighted push-buttons to announce whether an elevator was ascending or descending, once the doors opened, you were greeted by a canned female announcement. It was delightful yet startling to hear a purring, sexy voice announce, “Going down!”
* * * *
Tune: “There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Lisa, dear Lisa”
There’s a hole in your logic, Lord Berkeley, Lord Berkeley,
There’s a hole in your logic, Lord Berkeley, a hole.
With Hume shall I fill it, dear David, dear David,
With Hume shall I fill it, dear David, with Hume?
* * * *
Dream #13
I ‘m taking a part-time job with the FBI, and my boss introduces himself as J. Edgar Hoover. He is a kindly, bumbling old man, like the one in Being John Malkovich. His office has no files, just a cramped space with a couple pieces of furniture.
I’m sure that Hoover died years before – “under Nixon,” I suddenly remember. I’m talking to a friend who’s a level of hierarchy above me: “Maybe it’s J. Edgar Hoover, Jr.,” I say, but we finally decide that it is the original Hoover, preserved or somehow resurrected, which makes me uncomfortable, not quite believing and wondering if there’s some other boss figure around.
But the most ludicrous aspect is that all the office records are slices of bread collected in 3 or 4 wrapped commercial loaves tossed on the floor in a corner. The slices aren’t encoded, they are the records themselves. Whenever you want to find something – and Hoover is continually asking me to check for things – you have to rummage through them.
My partner/higher-up is trying to convince Hoover that searching through the bread is not efficient and to establish a reasonable filing system – short wall shelves with little boxes on their sides, about the size of DVD cases. Hoover seems confused but not averse to the change.
That’s all that remained of this dream.
* * * *
While in my late teens, working one summer as an Ordinary Seaman on a Sun Oil tanker, I was told by a fellow Ordinary (not Smitty), in part-drunken seriousness:
“There’s only two things in the world that smell like fish, and one of them is fish.”
Another fellow worker (Bell, as I recall) was the first to alert me to the six categories of farts: fizz, fuzz, fizz-fuzz, poo, tearass and rattler.
You may have picked up a similar but slightly different hierarchy, but you probably weren’t listening carefully.
lickhaven 