Woman reads Flaubert as twelve-year-old wanted to blow heads off passersby because he was bored which is theme woman remembers being used by poet Joseph Brodsky in commencement address at Dartmouth College in which he told graduates that contrary to everything they’d been taught they would not necessarily find wealth and success on the road ahead but instead a great deal of their lives would be claimed by boredom and possibly the desire to blow their own heads off.
93.
Woman reads in Walter Benjamin’s book The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility that humanity was once object of contemplation for gods but is now object of contemplation for own self having reached point where it can experience annihilation as supreme aesthetic pleasure which woman supposes might be true considering the awe involved and the need to put it somewhere and also considering the limited supply of awe-producing material presently available mainly of a technological or scientific kind and how these things are meagre because it is hard to be awed by gadgets or data.
94.
Sam Hamill’s introduction to Tao-te Ching says Lao-tzu came and went like wind but left behind thunderbolt though woman wonders how many of the best of us have gone without trace as did writer W.G. Sebald commenting on iniquity of oblivion.
95.
Woman enjoys cartoon of dazed husband holding End Is Nigh sign in kitchen being asked by wife if she should bother making supper while registering own sense of interfering irony.
96.
Woman is not first to wonder if Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief to cope with dying namely denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance could not be applied to our present predicament on earth particularly the last stage acceptance so that we could use as James Lovelock urges in The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning our creative intelligence to find ways to survive coming hot world and thereby save our species.
97.
Woman agrees with sentiment in anonymous punk quote that continuing to live constitutes only possible future.
98.
Woman who was likened by stout person to Biafran child because of thinness notes grimly that obesity in world is replacing undernourishment and infectious diseases as significant cause of poor health.
99.
Kurt Cobain lyric Here we are now entertain us from song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” reminds woman of Chris Hedges’s book Empire of Illusion in which he states sole purpose of celebrity culture is to hold attention and satisfy an audience the end result being diversion from fact we live in a world of make-believe.
100.
Woman remembers punishment for foretelling future in ancient mythology is blindness or disinterest in case of Cassandra so treads nimbly on sock, platform, or cross-trainer feet all the while remembering that point is to see what’s here, feel time passing, be alive in what is happening in the smallest register of motion as Don DeLillo wrote in Point Omega.
101.
The only thing we learn from history woman reads as quote is that we never learn from history which seems self-evident though woman has never read Hegel.
102.
Woman understands destitute people can no longer be romanticized as vagabonds, gypsies, hobos, and bums with their possessions held in scarves tied to sticks, their lives spent jumping trains and travelling the country, their well-being ensured by kind farmers’ wives, their souls fed by Woody Guthrie songs, not when reality of individual despair and heartbreak is encountered daily on city streets and the numbers overwhelm.
103.
To keep up morale while writing through dark times Norman Levine bought wine-tipped cigarillos and smoked meat while woman doing same loses own mind to loud music or walks dog.
104.
While reading War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges woman is pleased to find quote by Victorian writer G.K. Chesterton that the strange truth about man is that he is a very strange being almost in the sense of being a stranger on earth and further that alone among animals man is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter which is something woman hopes G.K. Chesterton had in everyday life because his written wit was said to not quite rival that of Oscar Wilde.
105.
Asking computer I Ching to forecast hope for present time woman learns it furthers superior man to cross great water though no mention is made of superior woman and no specifics are given as to what great water exactly.
106.
Insurance company brochure delivered to woman’s mailbox claiming eight thousand home invasions occur in North America every day with weapon of choice being knife or other cutting instrument while another brochure selling alarm systems calls perpetrators loathsome criminals causes woman to consider ways in which junk mail is antennae of class.
107.
Data from 2006 Canadian Census stating barely 10 percent of people working as guards had postsecondary education while 56 percent of them had not finished high school leaves woman to wonder if remaining 34 percent which are unaccounted for made it through elementary school.
108.
Woman is delighted with Oxford English Dictionary’s example of usage for word us and also with word immediately preceding which is urus meaning wild bull but perhaps now useful as definition of fear.
109.
Woman knows human error has been attributed to disasters such as Three Mile Island, Space Shuttle Challenger, plane crashes, and medical mistakes but has no faith in predictive science of human error systems since human errors continue to occur perhaps because human beings are not wired for perpetual success.
110.
With reference to human error computer I Ching describes state of all-round darkening including man lowering his wings and not eating for three days which woman reads as grief.
111.
Woman prefers Roger Grenier’s statement in The Difficulty of Being a Dog that literature is a dog tagging along beside you night and day that you must love, take out, and feed rather than cold claim by Canine Information Library listing Rottweilers, female Dobermans, and German shepherds as top guard dogs also noting black dogs are more effective as deterrent than white dogs while neither it seems has anything to do with literature.
112.
Woman who tries to overcome gnawing fears by replacing them with sense of profound absurdity at amazing nature of existence occasionally succeeds in doing do.
113.
Woman remembers during 1980s hoarding wheat, water purification kit, and vacuum-packed yeast for coming end time as suggested in book Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson H. Kearny copies of which she bought for family and friends reminding them if properly stored wheat lasts two thousand years and can be ground using bicycle-powered mill.
114.
Woman remembers during zeros of twenty-first century hoarding hand sanitizer, Tamiflu, frozen homemade soup, and face masks for threatened pandemic all of which remained unused except for soup.
115.
Fearful woman who attempts to predict future while wishing to feel sane and blessed by life nevertheless considers she might be via Alain de Botton nothing more than vaporous consciousnesses in incidental universe not that she likes words vaporous and incidental or phrase nothing more.
Part Three.
Other Prose Surrounding Absence
Out of the distance into the foreground they come, Hansels and Gretels dropping egg shells as they come ...—“Fairytale,” Russell Edson
a.
Our Secret
This First Person—me—has been travelling with a Second Person—you—through a time which is always now.
For much of the journey we have worn Third Person disguises which reveal our bodies and our minds as male, female, old, young, bright, dull, round, thin, and which show our heads opened like tins of spaghetti. Inside: one or two notable facts. The he and she of a splendid existence. The him and her of a sorry state.
Where do we fall?
Somewhere between, like most.
&n
bsp; Third persons are not essential persons but fictions created by a consensus of thoughts, beliefs, likes, and dislikes and involve thinking in a minimal range. We have liked the invention and appreciated the ease with which we’ve been able to slide into Third Personhood while maintaining a secret interior life. Third Persons are the extra skins we wear for our extra lives as shoppers, fans, voters, patients, viewers, readers, and so on.
Something of late, though, has been bothering me. I’ve been wondering if you, the one sharing my bed, are still the Second Person I married. Or have you been hiding exclusively in Third Person disguises these many years without my fully realizing it?
And am I still your Second Person, the one who was once, I like to believe, unique? Or have I, too, through laziness, become a permanent resident of Third Personhood?
Is this the truth of our secret interior lives and the secret we’ve been guarding?
You dreaming endlessly about the purchase of a new mattress? Me devouring demographic reports to discover what’s next?
Movie Emotions
Before he left he pulled up my shirt and fondled my breasts. At the prospect of separation we clung to each other desperately. It was an unusual goodbye for someone driving to the grocery store yet it made me think he was about to fly missions over Germany, that I’d never see him again.
In the truck he waved four times. I stood bereft on the porch as if it was a dock and I had been left behind while his ship slid into the distance.
We had movie emotions because that was the only dramatic leave-taking we knew.
It must have been the see-through pyjama bottoms he’d worn the night before that caused us to behave this way. That was another movie, the one about jubilant sex while the bombs fell.
The bottoms were sheer white with a faint pattern of leaping dolphins on either leg.
When I’d bought them I’d thought, Why not?
Highway 17 Revisited
They were Rockateers, Keith and Ray, and he was the first person after five years of building rock stacks to be invited along.
Three men in their fifties.
It was a hot clear day in June. They parked the truck and walked some distance across a stony field to reach the site. As they walked Keith brought out a joint. Part of the ritual, he was told, but declined because he felt unsure of himself—nervous about how he’d perform with the rocks.
At the edge of the field where the rock stacking took place they were in full view of the highway. He said the amazing part was the way people honked their horns in encouragement, or shouted out as their cars sped by: “Way to go!” “Good for you!” He said building the stacks was like giving a performance before a continually applauding audience—only the audience kept changing, kept whooshing by.
They spent three hours at the site. For a while he helped Keith and Ray lift and carry rocks—there were some large ones—and then, like a disciple, he was invited to make his own stack and made, in fact, five. He said each man, as he worked, became absorbed, quiet, even though the intermittent honking of horns continued.
Keith told him there was a current of energy that travelled from rock to rock as one was balanced upon the other and that because of this the rocks seemed to snap into place in the most delicate, yet unlikely of ways.
He experienced this for himself.
Ray made stacks that resembled animals and searched for some time for small, round, matching stones to represent ears. Keith made beautiful geometrical shapes, several over seven feet tall. His own stacks were modest but one, an oddly balanced spiral of four rocks, was said by Ray to be stunning.
Each stack, he said, looked like a monument. Looked as if the earth had produced it in praise of itself and he and Keith and Ray were merely helpers.
When they finished there was the satisfied walk across the field to the truck. Then a stop at the Prairie Inn for a beer, another part of the ritual.
Afterwards, at Keith’s house, Keith lit another joint. This time he had a drag. When he came home he looked happy but bewildered. My daughter and I made supper while he lay on the bed staring out the window. It was some time later when he told me all this.
Marriage with Dogs
Laddie, a German shepherd cross, all white, belonged to an aunt and uncle of mine. The dog was deaf and wandered. It was always, “Where’s Laddie? Where’s the damned dog?” And it was always Grandma, who lived with them and was also deaf, standing at the end of the driveway calling the dog’s name.
“In la-la land,” said my uncle.
This time it was a summer’s day. I was nine years old and visiting for the afternoon. As usual Grandma was calling from the end of the driveway. Laddie had been gone since morning.
It was a quiet street with tidy yards. There was a pale blue sky.
After a while the front window flung open and my uncle hung out of it yelling, “For Christ’s sake, Ma! Get in the house!”
My aunt was on her hands and knees weeding the rose bed and didn’t look up.
Grandma went on calling and my uncle yelled again, “Is anyone listening to a damned thing I’m saying?”
I’d climbed the apple tree and was peeking through the leaves.
My uncle was red-haired and scrawny and had a cigarette going. The following winter he would drop dead while shaving.
A few streets over another uncle had a golden cocker spaniel named Buddy. He fed the dog at the supper table. This uncle was short, bald, and round. He’d put a piece of gristle between his lips and get Buddy to take it. It was a delicate manoeuvre and their lips touched.
“He kisses that dog more than he kisses me,” my aunt complained.
Buddy could sit and beg, shake a paw, roll over, and play dead.
“If only wives were like that,” my uncle joked.
One time my uncle squatted on the kitchen floor and started kissing Buddy’s head. “Kissie, kissie,” he said. Buddy licked his face.
My aunt was at the sink washing dishes. She was tall and skinny like Olive Oyl.
“Ernie,” she said.
“What?”
“Pretend I’m the dog.”
I heard a third aunt say she bonded better with dogs than with humans. This was at a Thanksgiving dinner; there were fourteen of us around the table.
Uncle Eddy, her husband, put down his fork and looked around in triumph. “I’ve always thought that about you, Audrey.”
“I didn’t realize,” said my aunt, “but with a dog the love lasts longer. Even with their shorter lifespans. You get love at a consistently high level. Fifteen years of solid love.”
“What are you saying?” said my uncle.
“That we should get a dog. It’s time we moved on to the next phase. The one where we’re just nice to each other and have a few laughs.”
“Christ,” said my uncle. “I hate getting old.”
Soon after, they got Sandy, a long-haired Chihuahua. Uncle Eddy taught him to drink beer and dance on his hind legs. “Look!” he’d say. “A drunken sailor!”
“They’re devoted,” said his wife.
The Outlook for Quirky
He is fond of quotes. During one telephone conversation he said he’d found a good one from Pascal, the one where Pascal says the sum of all evil would be greatly diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms. This means younger men, he told me, not someone who’s just turned eighty-eight, but then, he said, I don’t spend a lot of time sitting quietly in my apartment and any evil I commit is of the modest kind such as with the bank teller today who wouldn’t let me close Brigit’s account without me providing her will. Look, he said he told the woman, I am in the business of dying and you are obstructing my course and whether you like it or not the world is full of old people who are in the business of dying and soon enough you, too, will be one of them.
He got his way about closing the account and that pleased him but also left him feeling troubled that he may have upset the woman by reminding her she would eventually die. This feeling
brought to mind, he said, another quote, one by the aphorist Eric Hoffer: the statement that the three ways to get through life are by realizing your talents, keeping busy, and identifying with something apart from yourself—cause, leader, group, possessions. A fourth way might be to obliterate and repress, he said, as Don DeLillo wrote in White Noise but that, he believed, was the coward’s way.
He also said during this call that he thought he had early Alzheimer’s disease because he’d forgotten if he’d taken his morning pills and was afraid to take a second dose in case he had. When you’re at this stage of life, he told me, your body keeps changing—bumps and lumps and all sorts. You keep getting these different pieces of information and you don’t know what they mean. For this reason I’ve created a new word—symptomaniac.
He ends each call with Cheers for now.
He and Brigit got together in their forties having run away from their marriages. They were like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, living the intellectual life. Brigit spoke five languages and when they were first together got a job at the university library; he gave up his job delivering heating oil to play drums in a trio, do odd jobs, and then enrolled in university at age forty-six. They lived on boats.
He has four friends from that time who have remained close: three men and a woman—me, his executor. All of us are at least twenty-five years younger and he has formed these friends into a legal group to administer his bequest. I have no family I care to bother myself with, he has said, you four are my family.
During a late afternoon call, he said he’d been cleaning out bank accounts, giving things away, visiting his lawyer, and doing further planning about his bequest. When I go, he said, I want nothing left in the apartment but dust. Then he quoted an elderly Stephen Leacock—Old men live in a world of horrors—adding there is nothing funny about that. Keep moving, is my advice, he said, that way you’re more efficient at dodging bullets. And there are many bullets, he said. I have the apnea problem, the blood chemistry problem, the water in the lung problem, the kidney problem. I’m deaf as a post. Although, he added, there are no alarms on the horizon today. He’d just returned from picking up Brigit’s ashes from Telford’s Burial and Cremation Centre.
The Strange Truth About Us Page 5