Going Hence....

Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither....

Shakespeare, King Lear, V.ii

This blog is about journeys, including the last journey.  Shakespeare knew this journey somehow too intimately.

One of the things that distinguishes Shakespeare among even today's writers is his nuanced use of ambiguity.  He allows us to peel back layers of meaning that exist, often, within a single line.  His ambiguity in the word "their" in this quote from Lear shows Shakespeare's intimacy with the problem: that we must endure both coming into the world and leaving it.  Look:

Does he mean "Men must endure their [own] going hence"?

Or

Does he mean that we who live "must endure their [our loved ones'] going hence"?

Yes -- both meanings, I believe.  And it's an arduous thing to endure for both the one who departs and for the one who remains.

The character who delivers the line is Edgar, who leads Gloucester towards what he supposes will be his death.  Edgar asks his ward, "What, in ill thoughts again?  Men must endure/Their going hence, even as their coming hither:/Ripeness is all: come on."

And the dual meanings here are multiplied: we not only endure our own and others' going hence, just as we endured coming into this world, but we must also endure the people "coming hither" into our world who will offer only malfeasance (as so many characters do in Lear ); these persons are mere travesties of the attributes that make a human to be [link] (in the most positive sense).  The presence of such people is all but impossible to endure once it's clear to us just what they are and what harm their presence brings.

My nephew, Michael, came into this world as one of the happiest beings I have seen, and he was ever so.  I have seen him delight at simple things encountered in this world, and I have known him to be as innocent a soul as I'd ever met.

Beaming Boy

He was a delight to play with in his infancy and toddlerhood, and growing older he has distinguished both his life after coming hither and his life going hence with a dignity uncommon to a young man.  Not to raise him above being merely human or to idealize, but he's been quite a fine lad.

I have known people who attempted to endow their departure (or, more accurately, their funeral) with a dignity that their lives failed to warrant.  That is a vanity decorated with funereal baubles -- a sham of empty ornamentation.  I have heard of, read about, and have met others who departed without a dignified remembrance -- with little to no recognition of the dignity with which they led their lives.

It is rare when these two balance: a dignified endurance of going hence at the end of a life lived in dignity.  That this balance exists with Michael has been emphatic to me as I consider his short life and his long endurance in passing.

His days grow short -- probably a mere few now.  And both he, and we along side, endure his going hence.

Michael, Thanksgiving 2011

 Michael, Dec. 2011

The Rest Is Silence

"And there was silence in heaven for about half an hour." -- Rev. 8:1

Whether or not you believe in a literal heaven, in God, or in something beyond is not the importance of the above quotation just now.  If you don't believe in such things but are sentient enough to read this quotation as you would read any other bit of literature -- by suspending your own, immediate responses and stepping imaginatively into the literature even if it has nothing to do with your own experiences or beliefs -- then read like that now.

What I notice is how this quote points to a recognition -- occurring, ironically, in the place that is the epitome of peace -- but still: it's a recognition that terrible things happen, things that even those who dwell outside the events, those who forever dwell with and in the Ideal, can understand to be devastatingly traumatic.

I'm not talking about the Holocaust, 9/11, a world war, or a tsunami, although remembering such events brings one to profound silence -- and should do so.  There is nothing to say.  That is precisely the point: silence is the only fitting response at times.

And so...my nephew, Michael, is nearing his death due to brain cancer after nearly nine months of slow decline.  He has thus far been gently lowered into that good night.  But even so --.  There is this silence where once was elation, amusement, wit, humor and laughter, serious talk, and young insight.

I have nothing to say except that silence is the appropriate response.  What exasperates is precisely this: too many words -- WORDS! -- have, over these months, been led out to battle a reality that came silently upon him, slowly took away the happy sounds emanating from his young life, and will leave an immense silence in its wake.

It is understandable, yes, that people have tried to find the right words along the way -- the right words to comfort, to empathize, to sympathize.  And some of these people have listened to themselves as they tried to articulate something fitting, and as they listened to themselves, they sensibly found their words were failing to deliver their good intent.  They would stop...and finally understand that silence was the thing they sought to express.  I thank these people not only for their empathy but more: for their good sense.

Others?

For these nine months I have read insipidly trite messages that people repeatedly posted for Michael on his Caring Bridge and Facebook pages -- all those lengthy statements about healing, that the writer just knows God will provide healing, and here are the scriptures to prove it....  God in a box: pull him out, like a spot remover, and advertise what He can do, like the Almighty Mr. Clean.

God, so far as I've experienced Him, is never so commercial a product as he is among many of these people of a faith -- a faith that is both unexamined and devoid of understanding that we all -- the just and unjust (if you must say it this way) -- share the same human condition.  That bit of understanding is just what too many people of faith are devoid of, especially in America.  They are too often thoughtless, tactless, without depth or sensitive understanding in a moment deserving nothing but silence.  Instead, there's the self-ordained, the self-justified, talk-show mentality with its free and freely-associated advice imposed on the situation -- as if everyone is obligated to hear their opinions.  One friend observed how these people's "compulsion to fill up the emptiness with banal, meaningless comments can be more painful than not."

The ability to wait in silence -- even while holding hope for a miracle and anticipating praise to be sung at such an event should it occur -- that act of silently waiting holds compassion and depth of soul.  It shows Negative Capability in the most positive sense.

Question: what is appropriate (let alone compassionate) about preaching a trite sermon on healing from Philippians to a 13-year-old boy who is losing every single thing in life -- his parents, all of his family and friends, his dreams for the future, his ability to play sports, his favorite toys -- and at the end of all these losses, life on earth itself?  Or what about a delivering a mini sermon on "firey trials" to a boy who is past moving, drinking without choking, eating, speaking his last words to his parents, or focusing his eyes in a last look at them?

It's taunting.  It's rubbing his nose in "what ought to be." It's to say "now, boy -- you make absolutely certain that you understand this last little lesson before you take your final breath!" Nothing whatsoever is appropriate in such words, nothing resembling empathy.  It is appallingly calloused, shallow, and indicative of the worst vestiges of faith.  To do such a thing speaks of what one book calls "The American Disease": an inordinate sense of entitlement.  And when the sense of entitlement is "sanctified" because it's from a believer?  All the worse.  They believe their words have a special warrant to violate a heaven-sanctioned silence.  At root, it is only pride and a desire for control.  You know what a martyr is?  It's someone who has to listen to a saint.

What is the worst part of such inane messengers?  They feel (not think, but feel) that they have a license to babble, which issues from the fact that they "mean well."  God save us from people like these who mean to do us good.  They don't think and, consequently, will not understand.  Yet they will smile at their own "goodness" and "understanding" while they spread more pain.

When I was yet in my teens, it struck me that a shallow brook makes a great deal more noise with what little water it has than does a deep and silent river.  But which has the greater power?  And shallow we have all been at a time, another time, and some time again.  I know my own lines here....

So it goes here on Earth.  But the quote: what's the scene in Heaven?

"...silence in heaven for about half an hour."  Yes.  The dwellers of heaven know, apparently, when to shut up.  Ironic, that.  Those -- having a clearer knowledge of Him and the answer to the paradox of how the giver of life is involved in the workings of death -- they know when to shut up.  There isn't some tres chic Archangel stepping lively and clapping to get everyone's attention -- then rattling like a choreographer on the set of a musical rehearsal: "OK, EVERYONE! Thank you!  Great job, Suzie!  Now we're just going to have a moment of silence."

 No.  These beings know when to shut up because of their own humble prescience and understanding of Him who is just and sovereign -- and because of their simple recognition that terrible things happen on the earth, things that their words do not have the power to undo.

Job -- the guy in the Old Testament -- had "friends."  When they first came to Job in the midst of his devastating calamities, they did what?  "For seven days and seven nights they sat beside him on the ground, and none of them spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great" (Job 2:13).  They had the right idea that week.  They went wrong when they opened their mouths to deliver their little sermons and lessons.  They knew nothing of what God was doing.  Yet in their petty self-concern for offering the best word for the situation, each "friend" had to add what he knew.  They undertook to explain God and His ways to Job, nothing about which they understood.  And...they were dead wrong.  In their self-entitled, ego-driven, and uninformed "opinions" (the very pablum of thought), they cruelly increased their friend's suffering.

And think: is it not the absolute worst irony in Job's story that the only family member left to him was his wife (it doesn't matter that she was a woman; it only matters what her advice was)?  At the start of his troubles, she simply tells her husband to "curse God and die."  Helpful advice, that.  This is who is left to Job beyond his "friends."  And such people most often think they are serving God by their words....

When Jesus went to his friend, Lazarus', grave, we are told merely "Jesus wept."  An action only.  St. Paul remarked, "rejoice with those who rejoice. Weep with those who weep."  Again, action only.  What about words?  And what about the woman caught in the very act of adultery? (Um...if it takes "two to do," where'd the guy go?  Setup, eh?)  There she sat, moments before suffering a horrible death from stones thrown by the religious elders (ironic, is it?  No -- that's invariably typical ).  And -- from Jesus she hears merely, "Neither do I condemn you.  Go and sin no more."  And then silence.  Silence to live in or silence to die in, but silence.

And Jesus' own suffering?

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth

                               (Isaiah 53)

Tradition is that we should remember horrible events, remember those who perished and those who sacrificed, with a moment of silence.  Charles Hamilton Sorley, a British soldier and poet of WWI killed on 13 Oct. 1915, wrote this:

When you see the millions of the mouthless dead

Across your dreams in pale battalions go,

Say not soft things as other men have said,

That you'll remember.  For you need not so.

This is precisely why speaking is prohibited and silence enforced at the great ossuary at Douamont, where people still today take new-found bones of soldiers of WWI, lost in the mud of the fields outside Verdun.  Beyond the silence, the only occasional sounds you might hear there are the aching strains of Faure's Requiem...itself largely a lament for our condition and prayers for God's mercy in it.

The Ossuary at Douamont, France (Source: Naidoo)

In remembering the victims of 9/11 this year, there were "six silences and a prayer" [Link].  Paul Simon sang his old song -- movingly, memorably -- "The Sounds of Silence" [Link].

Terrible things happen on this earth -- whether to a throng of people in some great and sudden conflagration or to one young boy in the lingering decline of an insipid disease.  They happen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia..., on the highway outside, at the house next door.  As someone once said (in a quote given in an earlier posting), "sometimes the mountains have nothing to say."  So should it be.  Shakespeare, who lost his young son, Hamnet, also knew this. While grieving for his own son, he wrote the play Hamlet and gave this as the dying Hamlet's last words: "The rest is silence."

Into Thin Air (1)

 17 July: 12,800 ft.  Near Independence Pass

The mountains of Colorado (and I assume mountains elsewhere) seem to exist without change.  Obviously, they are the same as they were when I went to college here.  Well, except for one mountain in Clear Creek Canyon by Idaho Springs which some company is literally removing in order to extract a mineral and leaving a massive mess of loose gravel in its place.  It would be nice if someone would force the company to "put it back," but two problems would result: 1) HOW?  2) Some poor workers would be set to gluing the bits back together for an eternity, a task I could not wish on anyone except the Ass-of-a-CEO and the derelict and weasely politician(s) who authorized moving the mountain in the first place.

Otherwise, the mountains stay pretty much the same.  They tower in their magnificence and inspire in their majesty (as everyone says).  Yes.  They do.  My experience is that they speak volumes to us at one moment and then, at another moment (perhaps when you most need a perspective, a view on life, some inspiration), they face you with stark indifference.  One person I knew put it this way: "Sometimes the mountains have nothing to say."  A mountain's indifference to us is not a sneer.  It's not malevolent.  It's simply that you are no factor within nature's on-going equations.

But you can get caught in the equation.

They can fall on you or let you fall off of them with no concern over your fate whatsoever.  What seems unbelievable, Ueli Steck, humble carpenter and climber extraordinaire who set 3 "time-climb" records on the north face of the Eiger among many other magnificent feats, fell in April of 2017 from Nuptse, near Everest.  In June 2011, a climbing accident in the French Alps left 6 people dead (men, women, and a teen) after they all fell from a high snow field [Link].  Dr. C. Everett Koop's son also died in a mountaineering accident: a rock fell on his leg, trapping him, and he bled to death.  On 6 Oct. 1979, the day I first made the summit of Long's Peak (14,259 ft.), one climber, Charles Nesbit [Link], died in a fall from Lamb's Slide, a steep snowfield to the left of Long's Diamond Face.  The snow moved — so a ranger told me that day: if Nesbit had been roped to his fellow climbers, they all would have gone.  I remember seeing his friends late that day as they left the ranger station, silent, staring — blank.  And the mountains stand, indifferent to whatever happens to whoever is on them.

Long's: A Serious Presence

A More Trivial Presence atop the Serious Presence
6 Oct. 1979

While hiking in Colorado last week, I thought about the unchanging nature of the mountains — mountains as a constant factor in life's equations.  Yes, over-worn truths offer the usual emotional fluff about spring after winter, that even as winter comes, the evergreens, covered in feet of snow, stay green beneath.  The bright green lichens under all that snow — they will emerge, still green, once again.  The aspen will go into leaf again, the flowers bloom.  But it's the mountains' massive presence that is, for me, the constant.  And their constant includes both their indifference and eloquence.  These are part of their personality.

From under the Snow

But it was while hiking around the Maroon Bells that I had a sudden epiphany, an awareness not of a constant but of change.  It is we who change with that sort of thing Wordsworth spoke of in "Tinturn Abbey" — when, in the moment of writing the poem, he looked back upon "the thoughtless type of youth" he had been, and the man he was years later.

A "Deadly" Marmot at the Foot of Maroon Peak (Very Dangerous Photo: author)

What struck me was how we pass through generational lines without realizing it.  It's like when you read a book you're absorbed in: you look at the clock and three hours have just passed in but a moment.  You live, go about daily stuff, absorbed in it all, and then look up at the clock of life and . . . you've become an older you.  One moment, you're 20.  Then you're 35.  When did that happen?  And then you're 50.  When did that crap happen?!  And, no, you can't go back.  At 19, I trudged up Long's in boots so heavy they should only be used to hold down a house in a tornado.  Today, I can't imagine how it was done.

My Retired Dogs, Weighing a Mere 36 Tons

Somehow we assume we're constant, unchanging.  We look ahead at others, see them a generation ahead of us and wonder vaguely (if we think about them at all) what it's like to be that age, what the "rules" are, and what few prospects for fun are left to them.

The generation ahead?  I remember that when I was very young, I looked at my baby sitter and wondered what it would be like to be so old (she was 17) — unbelievably, she no longer played with toys!  Or I looked at my high school teacher and thought, "man... shouldn't he retire?"  He was, I realize now, only in his 40s.  And my dad: what happened to him?  And I realize I am now the age he was when I had been in college in Colorado and climbing mountains.  And I look up and -- I've crossed the line to that generation.  No one welcomed me or explained the rules, the proper decorum.  I just continued being myself (for better or worse).

1970s: Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

1980s: Lookout Mt., GA -- It's Just Not the Rockies

 1990s: Alone in Roosevelt Nat'l. Forest as Seen though the Wayback Machine

Then we see someone younger give us that look — obviously thinking the things we once thought about our elders.  We answer mentally, "don't you DARE think that.  I'm still young, and, yes — a wrinkle here and some grey there — but ... inside it's all the same.  I'm still green under this snow, babe.  Just more experienced."

There's no initiation.  You don't hear a chime on a clock striking the next generation.  You don't see a sign on the mountain trail marking the fact you've reached "50's Peak" — or have perhaps fallen off it.  You just look round and find others reminding you of the fact.  But inside ... you're still 19, still at times Wordsworth's "thoughtless type of youth," but now more careful on the narrows, the peaks, the snow fields.  Where's the right of passage across a generational line?  I don't really care to have one.  The less said....

2000s: 20s or 50s?  Both and Neither

Nearly 2020: Down from the Hornli Ridge, Matterhorn

It was perhaps being in Aspen that made me think of all this (or maybe it was my wheezing away on a trail somewhere above 12,000 feet).  In Aspen, you see a nubile young woman and realize — "no, that woman is actually about 65, just dressed like a teenager."  Or some young buck — "but no, that dude is 70!"  And it's not one, but everyone: men, women, and -- well, no, not children (who somehow dress more maturely than they are, but that's a different blog entry).

Aspen's a place where fighting age is the sport everyone competes in.  Apparently it's a crime to age there.  Cool.  I'd like to live somewhere where people are simply blind to your age.  But that's definitely not Aspen.  Nope.  People there seem to be fighting age because they are too aware of it.  It's a great town for denial, and every clothing, sports, ski, jewelry, or health-product shop will help you with that denial.  While I myself wouldn't "go gentle into that good night" (but rather continue to climb mountains literal and metaphorical), still — I can't try to fool myself that I look even 30.

The mountains don't change.  They are a constant.  They watched me at 18, at 30, at...well, I'm not going to tell you.  But change...?  Change is the constant for humans.  It happens while you're sleeping.  Even so, there's something in us like mountains under the snow: there's still a spring beneath, something that's evergreen.

Age Growing Old, perpetual youth, 

A Pledge of Compatriots

The writers of the Declaration of Independence closed their document with a pledge:

And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor. 

Nice.  It seems comfortably fluffy because of our familiarity with it.  In reality, it carries an extreme weight.  To decide to oppose your king by force, to declare that he has no authority over you or your land -- that's treason (in a royalist's perspective).  So when they say, "pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor," they mean it literally: if the colonists had not succeeded in their endeavor for independence, they would have all been killed--those who signed the document (with John Hancock placing his signature in very large script to be prominent -- a message to the King).
 

If they had failed to secure liberty from the king, they would literally have forfeited every last thing they possessed; their families would have suffered in destitute circumstances.  None of them would have retained a shred of honor for their cause as they all would have been made examples of -- the signatories at least being killed ignobly.  (And just why is it that the concept of "honor" doesn't seem to weigh very much in the collective American mind these days?)

John Hancock's Huge Signature: "In Your Face, Georgie Boy!"

During the American Revolution, one of my ancestors, Capt. Fredrick Cramer, from New Jersey, fought along side George Washington.  The story goes that during one battle Washington's horse was shot out from under him.  As all officers rode white horses -- an honor and a duty as your men could see you clearly as you led them in battle (and while the horse was also making you an easy target) -- Cramer handed his white horse to Washington.

Another ancestor, a Richards from North Carolina, ran into the woods with his son as the British invaded his village and tried to rid the place of patriots.  The document indicates Richards "was murdered and his wife killed" for their support of independence.  I'm not sure there's a great difference between "murdered" and "killed" -- "dead" seeming pretty much the same for one as for the other.

It's a serious undertaking to oppose a king.  That is just what the "protesters" and "rebels" in any country have gambled: their actual lives, and fortunes, and honors in order to be free of despots and dictators, manipulators of the laws and industrial-political connivers.  They, too, risk literally everything, and many, like my ancestors, have paid with their lives for freedom.

There are ironies inherent in this independence we have: we still pay taxes on tea and windows.  Imagine that.  And who doesn't think that tax dollars (billions) are wasted every day in Washington?  Even given the inconsistencies and ironies, the freedoms to be had in the US stand apart from those in other places throughout the rest of the world.  Simply put, freedoms are immense in the U.S. -- absolutely immense when we think about the histories of many other countries.

Still...I've come to think that Americans' right to pursue happiness is often taken well beyond reasonable, equitable, or beneficial.  Does that "right" seem today to mean solely, "I can do whatever I damned well please," but fails to include my responsibility for how my actions impact the welfare of others?  So it seems to many Americans I meet here and abroad.

The Greeks (whose ideas of democracy largely became our own) saw such a person as an idiot.  Idiot is a word we get from the Greek, ἴδιος -- someone who is a private person, concerned only with their own affairs and pursuits without consideration for how their deeds affect the good of the city-state, the good of all the people, the πολλοὶ -- the very people around them who share the same community with its rights and responsibilities.  These are people with whom you have a social contract to abide by the same laws for the good of all, even at the expense of limiting some of your individual, private freedoms.  Read your Hume and Locke, if not also your Plato.  

In this context, idiocy means, say (on a large scale), collusion between crooked politicians, big-business magnates, or a collection of Bernard Madoffs (am I being redundant here?) who ferret away their own special-interest packets while not working for the public's or their constituents' best interests -- who work against the rights of all within their society.  Lobby-ism.  "Corporations are people, too."  Not.  And when that idea undermines the Constitution, the people's rights, and laws that were written for and protect the individual, not a corporation, then it all comes at the public's expense and the demise of their rights and freedoms.

On a smaller scale, idiocy means the self-serving individual who stands in the middle of the aisle at the grocery store, blocking the way, oblivious to others in the aisle, or the person who rides sloowwwly down the interstate in the passing (left) lane...blocking traffic.  Idiots.

Watch the police (from the Greek, polis, city) move one of these idiots over:

The writers of the Declaration knew this word, ἴδιος (Jefferson and others knew Greek and had read their Plato...).  We were never meant to be so free as to climb over others or impede others' freedoms while pursuing our own.  The writers saw it as Freedom with Responsibility for others.  (Is it just me, or is it contradictory to this sense of responsibility that "Capitalism" has come to mean getting ahead -- and doing so in predatory fashion -- at the expense of others?).  But responsibility: that's a large part of the Greek way -- um, the ancient Greek way.  I have no idea how this all applies to Greece's current financial situation; it will take the European nations a while -- and require much sacrifice -- to pay Greece's national tab, if they must.

But the "pledge" in the Declaration, that is a pact made among friends, among compatriots -- I have friends of over 30 years now, friends I can lean on, who know my worst and best, and of whom I know the same, and we don't throw these important connections away.  I like to think that friendship is based on not only what the friends share in common, but on a sacrifice to support each other in both freedom from things we do not desire and freedom to pursue things we do desire.  Isn't that called "happiness"?  And it's mutual.  It involves respect for an individual's sovereign independence as well as respect for our mutual good.

Friendship is a democracy, then, enabling individuals to pursue their own and others' best interests. Friends "mutually pledge to each other our lives...," as the Declaration says.  If that breaks down, notice how friendship ends -- or should end, by common opinion.  So I see it.  And that's what happened in the 1700s between King Georgie's England and the colonies: an end of friendship.

This 4th of July, I celebrate not only the "friendship" of my ancestors who sacrificed much for what I now enjoy, celebrate not only our past and current military personnel and friends like Corpsman Vinny C., "General" Ruxlow, Maj. Hurt, and CW2 Shawn, "Majormajor" Tom, Purple Heart "Owie" Brekke, and many others who have personally sacrificed to retain freedom for us, but I also celebrate well-loved friends who have shared freedom and mutual good with me over many decades.

What a very rich place this land is -- rich no less in friendship.  It was personally costly to create, is personally costly to retain, and well worth sacrificing for, I think.  And it's always a sight nicer without idiocy.

Optimism, Pessimism, and Realism

Thomas Hardy called himself a meliorist (someone who believes everything is getting better) although many people saw him as anything but that -- he wasn't even a realist but a pessimist.  One of his poems, for instance -- "The Darkling Thrush" -- is about the old century waning as a thrush sings at the dusk of its last evening -- Dec. 31st 1899.  Hardy hears the bird sing of

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

No hope for a brand new century?  Grim.  Hardy's pessimism may echo from such poems as Shakespeare's more optimistic lines in Sonnet 29, a poem beginning in despair:

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my *bootless cries,    [*useless]
And look upon myself and curse my fate....

It doesn't end there, but turns more hopeful:

*Haply, I think on thee, and then my state,    [*by chance]
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate.

Nice.  Suddenly "things is better."

Shakespeare, I think, was more of a Realist although he had his Pessimistic days (Hamlet -- dark and brooding over human fates, was written after Hamnet, Shakespeare's son and twin to Judith, died.  And King Lear is probably the darkest play in English literature).  But was he a Realist?  Well, Shakespeare, after all, could write lines like "love and reason keep very little company nowadays" and "young men's love then lies/Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes."  There's some Realism for you.

But since we're working backwards from Hardy to Shakespeare, let's look at something from just before Shakespeare's day: Henry VIII's armour, preserved in the Tower of London.

A Man's Optimism is His Castle

You may just notice the codpiece.  Yes.  Well.  Some men may view that as pessimistic.  Let us not befriend them.  Others may see it as realistic.  Let us not befriend them.  But really.  As Mae Western-Holly-Wood (16th-century movie actress) asked, "Is that a cannon in your codpiece or are you just glad to see me?"  As my good friend Major Hurt observed the other day, "it's Henry the VIIIth because the codpiece was only 1/8th full."  Is the glass half empty or half full?  Neither: only an 8th....  It's sheer, blind Optimism -- hopeful winking with ego-wanking.

And please note: the realism of my friend can pose a Major Hurt in only one case: if he leads you in your workout.  He flies helicopters, but he's solid as a tank with a perpetual motion machine in him.  One day he'll be merely a General Hurt.  Just so he's past a Private Hurt, which could be major.  Realistically, he's the man you want in a situation that looks optimistically like it is going to turn pessimistic.

Major Hurt in His Heli

The thing is, we seem to grasp for excuses when our optimism comes face-to-face with the real.  One excuse, from Garrison Keillor, speaks of men having to pee when ice fishing: "When it's cold out, all men are created equal."  Realism.

Any of Those Purported Health Benefits of Optimism Here?

I have no real point in all this (that's Realism); you shouldn't hope for more than that (which is Optimism).  But I do think (without undo Pessimism) that we humans will choose any of the three that would suit us in a single moment, as with the lads pictured above -- or with Henry, Shakespeare, or Hardy.

How so? Could we possibly choose Pessimism in any situation?  Well, yes we could!  Just try having a Pity Party and inviting Optimism over to entertain.  Doesn't work.  We would need Pessimism to come over to start a fight to straighten things out.  And Realism?  True: he could come over and at least be persuaded to admit there is a darker side to things.  But for a Pity Party, Pessimism is your true friend.  Great party!

To celebrate a really big event, however, it's Optimism you want.  Sir Optimism, apparently, was an armour maker to royalty in the early 1500s, protecting nether egos with steeled and bright opinion.  If Henry had invited either Realism or Pessimism to his party, it would have been off with his cod.

But what about Reason?  Seldom invited.  Boring lad at a party.

Reason and humans keep very little company nowadays.

Chosing to BE.

A few years ago in my Shakespeare course, we had finished discussing Hamlet just as spring break approached.  In returning from the break, I asked students what they had done during their vacation that was exciting.  One student said, "I got a tattoo."  On her calf, just above the ankle in a very simple typewriter font, were two words and a period:

Just like that.  It took me a second to get the affirmation.  The student remarked that she had thought very seriously about Hamlet's question -- whether to remain in existence, albeit having to face life's many troubles, or to die and sleep, "perchance to dream" through eternity, a prospect bringing up other questions ("what dreams may come?"  They might be perpetual nightmares, worse than any trouble life might bring).

She said it was better to live, live fully -- and To be through it all, no matter what life brought along.

I am still today impressed by that tattoo.  Not being tatted myself, if I ever were to get inked, those two words might be an apt statement.

The significance lies in the undercurrent of those small words.  My nephew, as some of you know, has had his fate decided for him (unlike Hamlet, who wishes that his flesh would melt and allow him a quick end).  Michael has brain cancer.  He was given -- at the end of March -- 6 months to live, but things seem to be moving faster than expected.  Daily he weakens, can scarcely stand without holding onto something, whereas mere weeks ago he could hit a baseball (although not run the bases).  His right arm and hand are debilitated.  His face muscles have stopped working, so he has no expression even in laughter, no ability to smile.  His brain is incredibly sharp, but his body fails in new ways daily.

This is, obviously, hard to watch -- but how infinitely more so for him to watch?  At thirteen...?  And this week he grew very angry at it all.  Yes, indeed.  We all are.  But where does one direct anger at being dealt such an unfair hand?  I recall Dylan Thomas's poem:  "Do not go gentle into that good night....  Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

It is a choice, "to BE."  It may be that one's fate is decided, and the decision is that "you shall not be."  But to BE until that time -- Michael chooses every day to be.  It may be to accept; it may be to be angry.  But he still chooses: to BE.

His cancer is not unheard of.  Another young person to have this cancer was Elena Desserich [Link].  She spent her last months in an affirmative decision to be.  She wrote notes to her mother, father, and sister Grace -- even as her ability to write and draw deteriorated.  Elena hid her notes all over the Deserrichs' house, so her family would continue to find them long after she was gone.

One of Elena's Notes

Is it possible "to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them," as Hamlet asks?  Is it possible to war against this disease and by opposing end it?  To quote E. M. Forster (writing about the sea of troubles inherent in human relations), "Not now.  Not yet."  But even still, to look on these troubles, on this disease, and to be overwhelmed, to be put off of living in the face of it all, to "lose the name of action" as Hamlet says?  Not so.

Hamlet's decision is the hardest question we face whether living or dying.  If dying, we must BE.  If living, we must BE.  It is not to divert ourselves from troubles but to face them, clear eyed, honestly, not least -- as Michael teaches me -- bravely.  He's a soldier doing his duty in the midst of the hardest imaginable situation.  And, as Milton observed, "they also serve who only stand and wait."

Michael, BEing: Right Seat, UH-60 Blackhawk

In Time of War II : Lipstick for the Dying

Children of the Holocaust

The  Imperial War Museum houses, among its many displays, an assertively reverent section devoted to the Holocaust.  Of course, the photos overwhelm; the stories leave holes in us, and the shoes of children devastate.  Molded to the shape of the little feet they once carried, these shoes now carry implications heavy beyond those of adult suffering.

Who Can Lift Such Weight?

Bansky, if you do not know already, is a street artist with great wit and vision.  He has become a very sought-after "artist-with-stencils," and one would have to possess a packet to purchase a piece of his work.  His is well-earned success [Link].

One of his bits is this:

Banksy's Holocaust: Serious or Trivializing? Read on.

I used this image in my course on "Life in Wartime," and -- in an exercise of visual rhetoric -- asked students to analyze its message.  They invariably thought it trivialized the seriousness of suffering in the concentration camps and was, thus, unfit as "art" was concerned.  So, perhaps, it appears.

About the time I first saw this work, I also found this account from a military official involved in the liberation of the Nazi camps:

_________________________________________________

An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Source: Imperial War museum

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In reading this account, my students saw into the dilemma.  There is, of course, life after Holocaust for the few that survived, which meant the need to be a person, the need to reject institutionally-defined non-identity, and the need to re-establish oneself as a sovereign entity -- ultimately the need to become and to assert an individual life in the face of nameless death.

Primo Levi, a survivor of the camps, recalled this about the total erasure that the camps effected for the individual:

"For the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of man.... They will even take away our name" (italics, mine).

One producer of a documentary on the Holocaust said this regarding Levi's words: "It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term "extermination camp" -- that is, both body and entity, including their very names -- something that goes on still [Link].

The students also became aware of the dilemma of the artist.  Most often, the artist (in words, in paint, in performance) must express something outside the experiences of the audience. Who has experienced the Holocaust?  Very few remain.  And who, not having been in a camp, can communicate that experience truly?

Banksy and I haven't seen one another in some years and haven't talked about this piece.  Oh--right.  I don't know him (or her).  But the sensitivity of this piece speaks movingly about the sovereignty of human existence.

A statement in the Imperial War Museum deeply impressed me (it was posted next to a dissecting table from a concentration camp -- used to dissect and analyze mentally "unfit" children who had been killed).  The statement was from a Catholic churchman in 1941:

If we allow the mentally challenged to be "euthanized" as "unfit" and essentially "unproductive," it is but a moment more and other elements of society will conveniently be deemed "unproductive" and killed.  Next are simply the physically disabled who are mentally fit but costing society too much.  Then the elderly.  And then...?  You.  No one is safe.

So the message has proved true in various places on the globe since the 1940s.

Equivocation and the flowing robes of state-sanctioned license have a long history of working to justify politicians' inhuman endeavors.  Inhumane acts have been precipitated regularly and repeatedly within civilized societies--nearly as a standard of operation and sanctioned by shiny laws.  It was illegal to hide Anne Frank in the 1940s; it was legal for her to be murdered.  That is not ironic: that is literal.  It is real.  As the woman at Honfleur (quoted in the previous posting) said to me in exasperation regarding repeated German exploits in France, "Quand encore?!"  --When again?!

Questions anyone?

 A Survivor of Institutional Expedience

On our day at the Imperial War Museum, I told a couple of my students about a Holocaust survivor who spoke at one of my classes -- Peter Pintus [Link].  I told them his story, and, although they had read and had heard many other stories in the museum, they somehow fixed upon his as more -- what? -- immediate?  actual? -- because I had worked with him?  I don't know.

He was not only a gifted person, but a very funny man, once surprising me with his wit in a moment of bawdy humor.  Before speaking in my class, a young coed with a rather large bosom came into the coffee shop in a low-cut top as he and I were talking over a cuppa.  And he noticed her.  Finally, when the young woman left the cafe, he turned to me and said, "That young woman had a top like a nuclear bomb."  I: "What do you mean?"  He: "It was 90% fallout."

About his suffering, and his life after war -- well, the students didn't want to leave the class after his talk; indeed, they wanted to take him home, he was such a gentle, funny, delightful man, respectful of any human being regardless of race, gender, religion.

But the real story: when a child, he was a blue-eyed, blond-haired little boy.  Aryan by all appearances.  So when his mother took him to see Hitler drive by in various parades, this short little boy stood at the front of the crowds who were spread along the street to observe.

At one parade, a black-booted SS member parked his car in front of the boy and his mother.  Then the soldier saw the little boy standing there, unable to see over the car.  Because the boy was blond and blue-eyed, he was picked up by the SS man and seated on the hood of the car to see the parade up close, and (as Peter said to me), "When Hitler drove by, I was as near to him as you are to me this moment."  If Hitler (or the SS Ass) knew that this little blond, blue-eyed boy was half Jewish...?  You know the story.  And that's why -- when the Nazis in fact found out -- this boy was eventually placed in a work camp from which, after some years of hard labor on starvation rations, he escaped and survived in the woods by eating grass.

Shiny Murder

Stuff hits the fan for someone in every century of human history.  But the amount of it that had hit the fan early in the last century for so many led Churchill to name it -- even before the end of its second decade -- "the terrible Twentieth."  That was before the Holocaust and before the nuclear age.

Lipstick perhaps doesn't cure the ills of a society that precipitates such immense wrongs.  But it can help when there's little to appease the pervasive ills of an age.

Who knew so little could do so very much?

Thanks, Banksy.  Keep talking.

Antiques: The Presence of the Past

No Label Necessary Here

Camden Passage. Every Saturday in a little street just outside the Angel tube station is a place where some antique dealers have shops -- and others have card tables set up or even cloths spread on the ground -- to display the residue of human pasts.  You can find anything there: a used light bulb, Victorian door key, 18th-century nautical paintings, Louis XVIII chairs, an early 16th-century whale's tooth with a sex scene carved upon it -- and there's everything between.

I have all the light bulbs I need, no door for the key, no place for the chairs to fit in, appreciate the painting, but the whale's tooth says something: things (and maybe sailors) don't change much over centuries, do they?

While it is true that the antique market on Saturdays has diminished in quality and size over the last decade, there was a section of Camden Passage years back where you could find military paraphernalia.  I mean, for £11,000 (this is a little expensive: today that is $18,040), you could purchase a First World War DFC (Distinguished Flying Cross) awarded to a man who did some unheard-of stunts in a kite made of cloth and wood that had a heavy, metal dynamo with a fan on the front and which hurled him past bullets (or not) at the amazing top speed of 115 miles per hour.

A 1918 DFC

Bits, pieces, flotsam and jetsam: antiques.  The things that flow in and out of people's lives.  Sometimes, obviously, people internally move away from the things they owned, selling them as they grow beyond the import of the objects.  At other times survivors of the deceased are left to figure out what to do with the objects left behind.  But the objects indicate one thing that the Modernists knew very well: the past is always present with us.

T. S. Eliot put it this way (in Burnt Norton):

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

In buying an antique, there is the hope that collecting an item of someone's past may give our own present a missing element -- and make our future moments more blissful.  True, no?  Well, that's bleak.  But is it solely our own discontents that force us to purchase?

I'm not so certain.  Some years back I bought a brass, black-powder cannon in Camden Passage and built a heavy carriage for it so I wouldn't harm the more delicate, original carriage when I fired it.

On New Year's Eve, I load the little noise-maker with black powder and a paper wad, take it out onto the deck over the snow, and light the fuse.  The fire and the bang bring in the new year with a lively POP replete with a flash of light; the cannon rolls back, and the neighborhood echoes the report.  On the 4th of July (which the English here would rather not mention), it's the same -- but without the snow.

Cannon from Camden Passage, with Heavy Carriage (above)

In firing the cannon, I don't think so much about the person who made this exquisite little object, nor about who sold it to the antique dealer in Camden Passage; I'm thinking of the miniature marvel of how it works.  But there's this: the previous owners' past has made a number of my present moments a delightful (and brightly noisy) place.

Other objects bring more somber thought.  For instance, in Camden Passage years back, there was a section of the market where Nazi paraphernalia was sold -- swastika flags, busts of Hitler, WWII iron crosses with swastikas on them (which WWI iron crosses did not have).  These things I do not want to see, touch, nor -- obviously -- own.  They are illegal to sell or purchase on the continent.  Some people, then, come to the UK to purchase them.  Still, in Germany two years ago, I found some of these items being sold at an outdoor antique market despite the laws.

I like my celebratory cannon.  It makes a humbly grand sound on a holiday.  In thinking of it going off this New Years' Eve with friends present, I anticipate its happy influence in future, even while it sits this present moment at my home gathering a little dust.  And in its past....who knows where it was?

Eliot was right about external time even though he was speaking about the internal significance of the past on our present moments.  Perhaps head to an antique market.  Find something of the past for your present and, in consequence, enjoy a unique moment in your future.