Misericordia, the surgeons want to be cool!

"Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit." -- George Santayana

My brother had a radical retropubertal resection of his prostate to treat aggressive prostate cancer. Due to the relationship we have, I could not have offered him any advice. If I had, it would have been ignored or operated in reverse. My opinion of his opinion of my opinions is not relevant here. The point is that I had told our intermediary, our father, that I hoped he would not get the surgery done by a DaVinci surgical robot. He did.

My dislike of the surgical robot was based on reading on the benefits of robotic vs. manual surgery. So far, the story of the robotic assistants is mixed. There has been no clinical advantage in outcomes for using robotic suites thusfar. The robot surgeries have a much higher incidence of surgical complications, though.

Additionally, I was against the idea because of how much of a fashion there is for them. When "everyone" is in favor of a brand new treatment, and the old treatment did not have noticeable deficiencies, then cui bono? Pro Publica has been watching the corporation behind the two robot prostate surgeons pretty carefully and has documented several instances of dangerous, unethical, and shady practices. Essentially, the companies that make the robots are investing in getting their surgical suites bought and used. They are also investing in medical research and ensuring that the report on whether the robots are clinically worthwhile points the right way.

As a patient, it turns out that the best bet is to go with a surgeon manually performing the surgery, if she or he has many repetitions. The robotic suites are responsible for more accidental injury than traditional surgery. However, the robotic suites discharge patients to home quickly. A patient who has a robotic surgery goes home quickly. This may give a better clinical outcome in the sense that such a patient is not exposed to hospital pathogens. However, the real benefit of the robotic surgery is to the health insurance company and, at least theoretically, the hospital administration, as both benefit from getting the patient out of the hospital bed as quickly as possible, whatever the surgical outcome.

When I was in graduate school, I was fortunately unfortunate enough to have to work full time and to do that work in a biochem lab. There, I worked with people developing bench science into a medicine, and the things had to be researched against and with everything. I was aware that any university researcher would investigate an agent every which way, so when the first Cox-2 inhibitors appeared on the market and advertised that they were good for patients taking Coumadin, I asked the local School of Pharmacy to check into the studies on patients on Warfarin. Two weeks later, they got back to me and said, "There aren't any." "What do you mean." "There aren't any." "Does that sound screwy to you?" "Yes. I wouldn't take the medicine, if I were you, and we're going to have to investigate this further." It was eighteen months later that enough people had died for the Vioxx scandal to begin.

"MBA culture" is notoriously slimey and wicked. It's the whole, "If the law lets us do it, then we have to do it" mindset. It's the mindset that leads to doing anything for this quarter's profits, even if it means destroying the productive capacity. MBA culture has been running the pharmaceuticals since 1990. Aside from a few wild-eyed hippie start ups, it runs medical device makers, too.

There are surgical fashions and fads. This fact alone ought to make every human who depends upon blood and oxygen freak out (i.e. everyone but Dick Cheney).

You only realize the perniciousness of surgical fashions and medical fads when they've passed. Where I live now, it is automatic that every hyperthyroid patient will have a thyroidectomy. It's automatic. Personally, I think that's barbarism, since there are good ways of suppressing thyroxine without hacking away at a fairly small organ and thereby making a person dependent, for life, on daily purchases of Synthroid. Oh, it's easy to say, "They have no endocrinologists in the turnip fields where you live, so let 'em get to zero thyroid function and replace physiologically," but that is admitting that "Paying every month to a pharmaceutical company" is a way of life. (Hyperthyroid patients can go into remission.) Similarly, every inguinal hernia here gets the mesh. Good old mesh. Nothing bad ever happens with mesh. Every atherosclerotic gets a stent. (Re-occlusion is less common now than it used to be, I admit, but the rates of reliance on stents is unaffected by this. It was the fashion here. No bypasses: stents.)

Whenever there is a fad or fashion in medicine, the question is who is making the decision? Usually, it's the health insuring group. They, in turn, make it for all patients, and not just their own.

Yesterday, I was at a used book store, and I mentioned that I had just had a lumbar radiofrequency ablation of nerves getting pinched by spinal arthritis. The proprietress told me about her husband. You see his problem was really that one of his legs was longer than the other.

Remember that one?

That was a scam that went around in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Faith healers and quacks alike used the gag. Put the patient in a chair, hold up his legs at a very slight angle to his body (coinciding with dominant leg/hand), and one leg will be "longer" than the other.

"He used to go to ______, where he'd get these inserts for his shoes that would let him walk right, and he'd keep them until he'd wear 'em out, and then he'd go get more. But _____ isn't in business anymore, and when he went to the orthopedist, they didn't want to do that!"

She was unhappy with the orthopedic surgeons who didn't want to feed him more rubber heels.

"He went to his chiropracter to be sure it wasn't an alignment issue."

So, because the fellow went to an orthopedic surgeon, you can guess what happened next. The surgeon wanted to surgically repair the herniated disks. Two surgeries, much pain, and the patient is still convinced that it was all a matter of walking "wrong" and needing special soles.

For my part, I just had nerves killed. There was no promise of making anything better except pain. I have arthritis in my spine and cannot take any anti-inflammatory drugs. However, commercials are airing now for all the people who don't take Warfarin but do take blood thinners to take a new pill instead.

If "everyone" is having something, someone is wanting it to be that way. Make sure you know who it is, why it is, and that you agree completely.

Nature Abhors the Vaccuum

[No one need bother me about the spelling of "vacuum/vaccum/vaccuum," as the word has three legitimate spellings. I go for the one with the most letters, of course.]

Aristotle was the one who said that nature abhors a vaccuum. The personification in the statement is interesting, because, as we now understand vaccuums, it is enough to say the noun to imply the activity. Vaccuums are absences, and thus all presences rush toward them. There is no need for any one or any thing to be horrified or angry.

When Christians imputed a directly intentional and affective value to forces in nature, Aristotle's statement had more profound rational and cosmological ramifications than a simple induction. First, his statement affirmed the plenum. (Contra the prior link, it was not "Descartes" who had the plenum. It was everyone. It was Newton, too. I hate scientists with heroes and villains stories to tell.) This cosmological outlook did not hold that the universe is varied and rich, but that it is so rich that there are no discernible gaps between orders and classes of living and non-living things. Creation is so full that there are infinite steps of quality and complexity between ranks and infinite ranks overall along Jacob's ladder. (Jacob's ladder, meanwhile, is not merely a metaphor for a vision Jacob had (Jacob sees angels of the Lord going up and coming down from heaven, and then that graduated ranking is described by means of a figure of speech, "ladder"), but a vision of the order of the universe (the universe is composed of moving ranks and graduations reaching from Heaven to earth) that is eternal and may be understood by multiple figures of speech.)

The plenum itself reflected God. This was not code, but rather nature. While the enlightened soul and those in a state of grace might contemplate God's love in the plenitude of creation or by imagining and constructing with art a microcosm/macrocosm, whereby the whole perceptible and spiritually experienced universe was, like a vast fractal, infinitely reproducing and consistent, the intent behind all things was love, being, and essence rather than a message. God is God, and the infinitely full universe might give intellectual delight or emotional solace, but the fullness was not there for a statement, but simply because of God's nature and creation.

The second effect of Aristotle's statement for Christians in the renaissance was that some popes (Leo X on, basically) grew so famously pleased with the coherence of the cosmology of the plenum that they made a Scribblerian mistake. Martin Scribblerus, hero of The Memoirs of Martinus Scribblerus, is a well read fool, and he consistently insists that whatever is logical according to deduction is true, no matter what evidence or reality says. So, too, these popes took a bold and brave stand against the vaccuum. Arguing against the real in favor of the logical is a losing proposition, but only in the end. Nobody likes to give up on logic just because some smart-Alec claims that Archimedes made a vaccuum pump.

It's grimly amusing that fractals these days make Fibonacci numbers look more and more like justification for the old faith in the plenum, but there's no irony in it. In the event, zero had enough of a reality to demonstrate, and soon scientists and mine owners began evacuating all over Europe. Volta guns and light bulbs would appear apace.

There was another kind of vaccuum that inventors played with. Boil your cabbage in a tin pot, and then seal it shut with solder. The molecules in the air will be very far apart, and, as the cabbage slurry cools, the air will compress. The can of cabbage can be sold to Napoleon, and he can take it to Russia, where it will be somewhat fresh three months after the cooking.

Canning started with Napoleon's army -- although they really began with bottles -- and that meant a need to find ways of holding seals and temperature. The Thermos bottle was the German patenting of a Scottish invention, and our Apollo rockets, like some of our missiles, are just grand Thermos bottles at heart (and you thought "Thermos" was an English word? Did you also think Robert Goddard invented rocketry?). Now we even offer to have super-cooled electrical transmission lines, and people propose liquid nitrogen in the field.

We never have found nothing, by the way, nor might we. A simple vaccuum of air is easy, and the pope could have kept his seat cushions untussled. A zero, though, is imperceptible by definition, and I agree with Kant that it's really a foul ball in intellect.

Loss, cooling, and vacuum seals are another matter. Them I believe in.

Before Christmas, during one of the freestyle bits of the liturgy, when the priest fills in the blanks ("May we, along with _____ and all your saints, be in your eternal kingdom"), he mentioned Saint Joseph, as he rightly would and should. Back in 2001, I heard a deaconess at the Church of the Heavenly Rest in Manhattan talk about Joseph. She talked about his role as the patron of adoptive fathers, about the acceptance and humility he had. He did not reject Mary, and he went as a refugee to Egypt to protect her and the child that was not his. I have never since been able to approach Christmas without thinking about Joseph, or without why he stands out so.

In 1999, the children left for Rhode Island. I can't criticize. There are many gripes to gripe, but there is no point. When they left, I lost a deeper part of myself, a deeper connection, than a limb. I have a missing place where two children were, and it is permanent. That cavern is hollow, and there is no way to fill it. There isn't a way to reconnect, either, because I didn't lose friends. By 2003, I didn't mourn every day, but the stone was formed. I was a drum.

My mother's death is surprising. There are practical manifestations of such a loss. When the branch from which the leaves hang is gone, the leaves have no connection to one another anymore. Without children and wife to be interconnected, I am untied from the large mass that was family. Each holiday, therefore, sounds out against the hollows where once there was a messy complication of family.

Aside from that, when I am not working every day, I dream of her death's fact four nights a week, more or less. It might be dreaming of a tree in the backyard that is no longer the back yard. It might be neighbors casting paving stones at birds and killing the pileated woodpeckers. It may be having to drive my mother to see the family. It may show up in a dozen different disguises, but it's the same event, the same fact, the same concavity.

I wish to finish this essay soon, so that it will be nominally in 2013, because 2013 is its subject.

I'm lying. The subject of this essay is, of course, the surprising vaccuum. I have not changed, as I am as baffled by career as ever. I am as honest and friendly as before. At the same time, it is shocking that some things, some events, are not plastic, that some clippings and removals are permanent; they leave their profiles in consistent places that will never more be regained. When I am alone, when I hear my own thoughts, I don't regret anymore being alone. Instead, I regret the fact that there is no use in arguing with fact, that there is no use in complaining that things do not work out justly, and I have these resonating losses, this vaccuum seal, that moors me in zero.

What Changes

Brought to you in GLORIOUS

The utterly inexplicable Stand by Me opens with gang #2 mesmerized and propelled into action by the question, "Hey! Want to see a dead body?" Gang #1 has claimed the corpse, they discover after their Odyssey. I would like to reiterate, here and now, my initial reaction to the movie, since no amount of pay could have moved me to read the book: Who the hell would want to go see a corpse?

Oh, sure, might as well ask, "Who the Hell would read a Stephen King novel," since the questions are equivalent. After all, what is the question except a promise that, some pages ahead, King is going to describe a corpse? In that regard, he is providing pornography for virgins. If he gets it right, the readers who know he did will not get any reward except a trip to a place in memory that cannot bring any joy, and, if he gets it wrong, his readers by and large will be none the wiser. He is not, generally speaking, describing a corpse as much as he is describing what pathology photos look like or what a corpse feels like to an objectifying gaze. Thus, the virgin gets the joy of self-fulfillment or self-abhorrence, but no real experience has changed hands.

The little blighters of the story are supposed to Change and Learn, and the experience Refines the character from the dross, revealing, like Buonarroti's marble chips, the prisoner within. The thing is, King missed everything. I know, or suspect (I cannot really speak to the man's state of mind, only the narrative), because of what has changed in me.

You see, we think of the dead and living, and we fear thinking of dying, but Death. . . death the thing, the moment, the extinguishing, is something we cannot think of. For centuries, poetry has spoken of the pale rider, the midnight visitor, the hungry stranger, the guttering wind, and we have mistaken these as parables. They are not. They are as literal as our minds can accept of death itself.

At the time of her death, my mother and I had nothing unsaid. We were sympathetic to an enviable degree. There were still times, of course, when she would refuse to say and I could not intuit, but our feelings were open, and I had no apologies to give or accept. This does not, of course, take even an atom off of the scales (on my eyes or that I eye) whereby guilt is measured. It was my job to keep her alive, to swat away medical mistakes, to hear all the doctors and translate into English, to call in the family when deathly ill turned to moribund but then to be wrong. I knew that I couldn't win, but I also knew that losing, as I had to, was going to be bad -- very bad. When, therefore, my mother's death did not cripple me, I knew that this was just a sign that what was coming was going to be a wave spawned from a deeper shock -- slower to arrive and higher when it arrived. 

I tread water furiously as she died. I fairly ran from the deathbed. I told myself a true lie -- that I was giving up my place to her sister and to the rest of the family. I had nothing to say to her, nothing to hear, for we had spoken often of our love, and my own prickliness was something she was finally understanding. (I confess: she still could not tell my "exasperated" and "sad" faces from "angry" faces. When your own Mama thinks you're pissed off all the time, the problem might be in the face. (Then again, I've never been too in love with this one. (A very short line of ex-girlfriends can endorse the sentiment, by the way.)))

In truth, more was happening. (I cannot, by Goggle, find the true source of the definition of a swan as "Grace and calm above; furious paddling below." I was told it by an absent friend.) I was trying to avoid the evidence. If my mother was going to die, I didn't want to see it. I simply didn't need to, I thought. Let it be a fact, as abstract as my own death. Let it be a case of here and then gone. Let me drive in to the funeral and comment on the coffin. That's the modern thing, after all.

As I'm sure you know, I was there at the death. I arrived fifteen minutes after the actual death, but it's not long enough that the stranger was not still in the air. The skin's color changes in a flash, and the full relaxation of the face into a droop did not suggest rest, to me. My mother's life force was five times that of anyone else I've known. It was furious, and she barely had any flesh. Without animation, the corpse was and is a negative affirmed. It wasn't loss: it was lostness.

Prior to my mother's death, I had put two dogs to sleep in my arms, and the swooping in of death in those circumstances was frighteningly sad. This is similar, because now there is a body that bears only a resemblance to a being whom you love passionately and fully, but this is worse, because the body fights. Even as the hospice personnel were making it "easy," there was nothing easy at all. If I were to have an angelus that said, "All was well at all that time," it would not change the effect on me, because what struck deeply was the core of the core -- life itself versus ceasing. 

Prior to this grief, I would sing odes to death (mine only) daily. I considered it rather normal. After all, I knew that I was praising rest, not death, really, and, when I last came near to genuineness, I had shuffled away from suicide as being an insufficient improvement over living. Nevertheless, I had, and still actually have, little relish for the days. I have a mighty slate board in my mind of wins and losses, and the latter have been etched, while the former keep getting erased or forgotten. Every month, my poverty runs me against abject failure as an adult, and without feeling qualified as an adult, asserting my skills as anything else are unlikely.

That has stopped now. Now, I think that I want to live. I don't have a good reason for it. I won't even say, "I'll quit when the stupid people do." After all, they replace themselves, and more. I can only say that we should know Death. We should know the unreasoning enemy who bears us no malice. Death is behovely. We are the ones who fight it with more than just our will.

Tolstoy wondered what value any of his work had, in the face of death. The Death of Ivan Ilych is one explanation, but it's not Tolstoy's own. No, that story is not about meaning, but about meaningfulness during life. It is about one very, very narrow question: "What are you living for?" The contemporary Kierkegaard would say,

"And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not." -- The Sickness Unto Death

Despair is any state wherein the infinite (soul) and finite (mind and body) and the barrier between them (self) are unaware of their own heterogeneity. (It works out much more simply and profoundly than it seems, but you can do that on your own.) Tolstoy was right, though, that we will never get out of despair if we never see death.

I am miserable (sum quod eris) (non posse non peccare) ("I am a man -- reason enough to be miserable" (Menander's Epitrepontes, I think, because it isn't Dyskolos), but to even feel that requires the flame. I have changed from my experience with dying, but not heroically. I am grieving, and not myself. Instead, I am, I think, far, far sadder than I was, because I have seen the inescapability of the flesh, the way that the rock refuses to let go of its figure, and I have heard the groans that must accompany the liberation.

 

Pain and Suffering (the usual)

"Probitas laudatur et alget."--Juvenal Satires I 74

Virtue is praised, and it starves.

I've been in a dark, dark place for a while. Last Wednesday, before I found out that I had $88 to last until September 30th, I was faced with a choice: do I tell my first year students about 9/11 or not? If I do, then I'll have to go there. If I do not, then they may have no idea that their entire world was created out of an act of instinct rather than thought. As I have before, I chose to go. My thinking is that I may be the only person who lived through the two months that were "9/11" in New York City that these people will ever meet, and, if I do not tell them, they will never know.

I began, therefore, with the day. I have written about it before -- how the sky was more perfectly china plate blue than any sky I have ever seen in any place, how the temperature was the sort of chill that teases at one's senses like a lover, enticing and exhilarating at the same time, how the air was so clear that it was possible to see all the way from 90th street to the end of the island, how sparkles appeared on the painted steel lines, how sky scrapers popped one by one across the edge of the window frame on the #6 train. It was a day when even I wanted to play hookey, and I was a) new on the job, b) never skip. (I've taught with high fevers, with tubes running into my bile duct, and once while hungover.) I told them how a full house in the WTC would have meant up to 40,000 dead, so God (or random meterology) saved a lot of lives, because a whole ton of folks went in late.

I told them how, at 10:30, I went on my religious pilgrimage to the bodega for a bowtie donut and a cup of coffee. "You guys will learn that I am very religious," I said, "about lunch." I told them that I gazed down the vast hill and saw a snuffed candle and didn't know what I was seeing. I told them how we knew that we had orphans in front of us, that we were teaching children who had no parents, but we had to be cheerful and normal. Teachers whose own children worked in the towers had to show no signs of concern.

Then I told them about the young woman. I said that she was very attractive, and they seemed puzzled, so I had to add, "I'm a heterosexual man. I'm going to notice. You may think I'm old, but I'm not dead." I told them that she confirmed that people had jumped from the towers. She was filthy, and on 9/11 I silently upbraided her for it in my mind. I now know that it was the 120 mph dust cloud that made her dirty. She had said to me and another stranger, "I was in Liberty Plaza. I was where the bodies landed." I mentioned to the students that, all her life, she would have to deal with seeing people alive, falling, and then, in a fraction of a second, dead.

"What a jovial and a merry world would this be, may it please your worships,
but for that inextricable labyrinth of debts, cares, woes, want, grief,
discontent, melancholy, large jointures, impositions, and lies!"--Sterne

The people who saw 9/11 on their televisions received a different thing. They felt pain. We humans have only had movies and television a very, very short while, and we neither evolved nor were made with these technologies. If you see or hear a person get injured, you immediately wish to respond. This is human. Despite those people who say that we are all indifferent to one another and out to line our own pockets (shouldn't someone who says that be placed on a malarial island somewhere?), the fact is that we're pretty social. The sound of babies crying is used as a torture. We can't watch or hear another person get hurt without wanting to react to it, to make things better.

Out in America, and perhaps the world, people saw the planes hit the towers, heard the firemen calling for help, saw the towers fall, and then saw it all again and again and again. However, they could do nothing . . . nothing at all, to help. There was no "donate money here" button on the screen.

Television presenters are accustomed to narratives, to stories, and they told 9/11 through a narrative structure. Before the afternoon had come, they were saying who did it and going on to "Why do they hate us?" By the next day, the television news had a complete arc: "They hate us because of our freedom, and they struck us to take our freedom, and now the sleeping giant will get them for what they did."

When you feel pain and cannot respond, pain leads to frustration, and frustration leads to anger. People lined up to enlist in the armed forces. They were angry. W. Bush played on that anger. He might even have genuinely felt it for all I know. The fact is that watching a huge amount of pain delivered and being unable to anything to, about, or for the situation is going to make anyone angry. This is extremely potent stuff for the amygdala of anyone.

In New York City, however, we did not see it. Even the people who were at Liberty Plaza could not have seen it without incredibly bad luck. Had they seen one impact, they'd not have seen the other. Had they seen both, they'd not be standing there to see the collapses. Had they seen the collapses, they'd not have seen the ash and debris cloud. Instead, everyone heard the part that directly affected the individual. The people in New York City knew less about what was going on than the least attentive viewer in Hawaii.

Whatever we saw, heard, or felt, we responded. We had no choice but to respond. If we wished to, we could go down to the pile and volunteer, too. Many civilians volunteered on the first and second day. Even people in the outer boroughs, though, had to respond to the attack, because all had to get food. No trucks were allowed across the river. We had to get transportation. We had to find out if the people we knew were lost or had lost people.

Also, 9/11 never stopped for us. It played all night, each morning, all day, every day. The ash floated down for days. The smoke blew for over a month.

New Yorkers had an a) unrelenting, b) unexplainable, c) irreducible, d) meaningless and constant suffering. Pain makes you act. If a person has pain and cannot remedy it, the person feels anger. Suffering is otherwise. Suffering will not listen to anyone saying, "They hate us because of our freedoms." Aside from that statement being irrational, the statement is entirely non-ameliorative. No one and no thing is made better by understanding that someone hates us for freedom. If the fires burn today and will tomorrow, it does not matter. Furthermore, there is no "make them pay for this." Not only did "the evil men who did this" already "pay" for what they did (they were in the pile), but the fire would burn tomorrow just the same, whether some Afghanistani village were blown up or not.

Suffering is knowing that the air is harmful and that it will be that way for a month. It is seeing ash-covered bicycles being discovered long after the event. It is men with submachine guns suddenly showing up in the subway station to "reassure" us! Suffering teaches no lessons. Suffering has no meaning. Suffering is not sent or received.

Job is the greatest book about suffering ever written. Job does not learn anything, precisely. However, Job grows as a soul in the course of his suffering. You and I are not Job. At the apogee of his growth, Job is able to say, "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." He is not happy with the giving or the taking, but rather saying that the power is God's and that God remains good irrespective of which act is involved or how it affects us. He is not, I think, saying what Leibnitz says -- that what is painful or bad to a human is good in the grand scheme of things -- but rather that however giving or taking treats the happiness of a person is incapable of lessening God's glory and goodness.

To arrive at a conclusion like that and not be a quietist or defeatist, to keep insisting that he will not confess a false sin, nor lose faith, Job's soul is truly great. There is no lesson, though. Had Job not reached that wisdom, the suffering would have been the same, and coming to the understanding doesn't make the boils drop off.

If you are punched in the arm, you will want to match aggression for aggression, but if you suffer, you won't think that more suffering will help. I think about a bomb or missile that blows up a building and kills four or five innocents but also kills the most lethal terrorist. The village will neither know nor care about the military value of killing this aggressor, but it will know suffering, as it has to have funerals, tend to orphaned children, live with seeing that flash of light and the flicker between life and death. It will have to repair a building, constantly aware that here was where this or that man died. This is why it was hard for those of us who went through 9/11 to agree with the Bush administration's need to go "get" the bad guys.

On the other hand, for those who felt the pain and frustration and, honestly, impotence, of seeing that much pain without redress, a vast act of aggression was on the cards. The nation's instinct was pushing, and that allowed for politicians with dark ambitions and black hearts to get passed unthinkable laws and to reverse America's position on human rights without a discussion, much less a vote, even less a judicial review.

Me and My Brain

My mother died at the end of March, during Holy Week. Since then, I have discovered that, just as no one in my family knows me (and I'm easy to know -- I've left a pretty wide swathe across the Internet), so I don't really know them, either. Alike, we know where people were, and we do not know what time has done, or what they have done during the battle with time.

I knew my brother as a man of slogans, bluster, intimidation, and basic goodness. Hard times had not done good things to that kernel. I have become, since they knew me, maybe lazier.

First, I don't argue with dumb people anymore. Well, I very, very rarely do. I'm far more apt to explain something once and say, "I can see that you're not trying to understand" and then let them go hang. This is a function of security in my opinions. I now know that they're not weak, so I can be more certain that the person disagreeing and wheeling out anecdotal evidence and "This one time" proofs is self-deluding.

Second, I don't have much in the way of hopes. Quite a while ago, I scaled those back to simply no longer being a host for parasites and staying out of the elements. Being free of parasites is important, but it's not easy to achieve these days. You get a cell phone or some cool new service like Netflix, and the next thing you know it hatches out into a parasite that eats your bread before you can.

Third, I expect disaster. I have learned not to expect it, expect it, but I have seen arbitrary firings and layoffs, and I have seen nepotistic promotions and replacements far too often to hope for a meritocracy in any sense where my merits might count -- provided I even had any.

So, about that being lazier, I think I can explain.

Oncet, I'd blame all my bad features on birth defects. Finally, I realized that that was stupid and counter-productive.

Let us suppose that the psychoanalysts of the Tavistock school are correct and children who are hospitalized frequently and for long periods of time are liable to depression. So? Let us suppose that any boy disqualified from sports will have some maladjustments in social skills. So? All of the things that might have been true could be interesting explanations of past phenomena, but they bore no relationship on any present tense. I.e. you know why you felt or were more likely to feel a particular way, so bully for you. Now, though, you make yourself.

After that, I even got free of the physical complaints. I got all better, thanks to medicine. Hooray.

[Essayists always have digressions. This is supposed to look like one.] I always knew that my feet hurt. . . a lot. They hurt much more than anyone else's. They hurt when I was twenty-two, and twenty-five, and thirty, and forty, and forty-five. In other words, they have been constantly painful, every day. I can wear rubber sneakers or hard soled shoes, and my feet hurt. I can get Dr. Scholes's most expensive orthotics, and my feet hurt. I can even get a foot rub from a pretty girl, and my feet hurt.

A neurologist the other month, when talking to me about my spinal arthritis, said, "Oh, that? That's probably neuropathy." I began to protest that I was not some slovenly diabetic, and he explained that all the radioactive tracers and compounds I had gotten in my veins for all those years tended to settle in the extremities and kill nerves. In other words, it was medicine killing nerves in my feet, and thus there was nothing to do for it.

I have also always gotten tired more quickly than other people. I hear the same thing in response to this as I heard about the feet: "Lose some weight." Ok. I have. I'm just as tired. "Lose some more weight." Alright. I have no objection to that, but I rather suspect it won't have the magical properties being touted. In fact, now that I think back, "Dyspnea" is a side effect of every medicine I take and a primary symptom of what I grew up with. Also, the warranty I got on my last surgeries said, "Normal lifespan," not normal life.

I may, eventually, be able to forgive myself for how tired I get. I will never be able to convince anyone else, though, that I'm not getting lazier as the days go by.

Where's My Montage?

Cinema tries to imitate life, both as it occurs and as it is perceived. When it imitates the perception of life, it's expressionist, and some expressionist marvels have been so true, so accurate to our perceptions, that they've been repeated to the point of cliche.

You know what I'm talking about, even if the terms are unfamiliar. The person in an accident on screen has everything go into slow motion. Real time doesn't do that, but we experience time that way sometimes during traumas. Some director decides, during a climatic scene, to have a single flower in a brilliant color to indicate the real way that human perceptions work, where a detail that seems irrelevant may stand out more to a participant than the materially important events.

Well, how about the early parts of "The Graduate?" You know what I'm talking about. Dustin Hoffman puts on his new SCUBA gear and walks into a party of people speaking gibberish to him and sinks to the bottom of the swimming pool. The replica of his tropical fish tank and his private metaphor (being on view, being an object), as well as the director's (being cut off, being unintelligible, having dialog streams that belong to different languages/species) is perfect. You loved it. I loved it. After all, we were always Dustin Hoffman's character, because we were the camera.

Then came the fast motion montage. You know this, too. The framing character is impassive, stunned, catatonic, and the rest of the scene is filled with a stop-motion or slow-film-stock film of people running at sixteen times normal speed and interacting. They're all doing things, while the character (you) is out of it (out of time). The point of view character has declared a separate peace.

In the days of rock videos, the technique was a cliche, if only because the feeling was a cliche. It's a large part of what adolescence and young adulthood is: being overwhelmed, like The Graduate, and incapable.

However, the heart of it, of the humanity that affirms the cinematic gesture, that makes us resonate, is in much graver circumstances than the prom or graduation. The heart of it is the inconsolable and unreasonable. The heart of it is birth and death. The lie of it is that the point of view character who becomes a cork in the maelstrom does not end up safe and saved, but farther at sea, with dilemmas that cannot be reconciled.

In short, it is a cinematic lie. It is an expressionistic truth that is a living falsehood.

Nevertheless, I sure as hell wish I could have one right now. My mother is in hospice care for her last days, and her death is all going to be on me. All the decisions are mine, and all the financial burden will land here, but, more to the point, her death will explode my life, because my life for seven years has been devoted, first of all, to looking after her. I always figured that, after that did not really matter: my job would be done. It sure would be good if the montage were true, and not mimetic.

The Crude Matter

"The Curious Joy of the Flame" Copyright & stuff to me

Each place shows hard times in its own way. Only the poor neighborhoods demonstrate the change of fortunes immediately, and eastern Baltimore went from doors to plywood masks over the wounded facades of row houses in 2002-4 as the Inner Harbor prosperity turned out to be another Baltimore County extension. Wealthy places show that hard times have come by admitting low end shopping into their world rather than by diminishing the opulence. The middle does as the middle does -- it slowly slides back and forth between fewer and more loan offices, gold buyers, gold bugs, recycling centers, and Fiat dealers.

Rural America is not very much like suburban America. It has grown like it in speech and in many sexual mores and outlooks, but the society of the small town is generally quite different from the lack of a society found in a suburb or the duress society of an urban core. Land and ownership of major businesses keep the top stratum of a rural town where it is. I could tell hard times had come when the drive from home to work was suddenly a drive through a clear cutting camp.

The SUV's don't disappear, nor the Lexis cars. The trees do, though, as rural towns are land based, and people will believe that the trees on their land can give emergency money during a disaster. In 2010, I saw an entire region sell trees. The perspective of the world got much shorter all of a sudden. I'm no fan of this thinking, but I'm no fan of the pine tree -- which is the most common citizen taken from the soil (Roy Barnes ran for governor of Georgia last time saying that Georgia was the "Saudi Arabia of pine trees"). My opposition, though, is not simply aesthetic.

In North Carolina, the botanical garden is pretty cool. They have all the pwetty flowers, but the real botanical garden is along a series of trails that go miles through the woods and rise in elevation by a couple of hundred feet. Along the way, there are plaques marking out the zones the trail is emulating and illustrating the plants of the state present there. That's how a state botanical garden ought to do it, I think. It was there that I was walking and came to a mature tree fallen over a creek, and it had a plaque.

The botanical garden explained that this mature tree fell over because of run-off. 1. People put in parking lots and roads that do not absorb rain water. 2. The rain water hits local streams in vaster amounts and at greater speeds. 3. This stream, way back in the woods, is fed by those streams running behind subdivisions of houses. 4. The water is running fast and digs out the dirt underneath the tree. 5. A tree that had been growing comfortably for 120 years falls over.

1999, outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina

My employer faced a briefcase nuke of debt. When it had needed a grant, it had gotten a loan, and the interest on that loan had consumed all of its proceeds and then some. It sold a vast lot of land that fronted the highway in 2011, and its trees of value were gone quickly, then the rest were burned before bulldozers went to work on the soil.

These last few months, I've been grimmer and less operatic in my morbidity. This is because all of the talk of lingering shadows has been closer.

My mother's condition is puzzling. She will not initiate any actions. She will sit or lie and stare, with a mind fully active. She is not vacant, and any conversation with her reveals how vivacious she is, but she won't stand up, won't walk, won't move around anywhere. As for whether or not she is confused, that is a question of which six hour period you speak to her in. One segment is good, and another is bad, and another is acceptable but trending good or bad. This means, for me, that I have to be extraordinarily involved in ways that I had and do and will dread.

Yesterday, a colleague of mine died of liver cancer.

Also, as I was coming home and praying that my car's wheels stayed on, I passed a horrible wreck, where a tan sedan had its top smashed in and torn off sideways. A large -- very large -- tree from the lot the employer had sold was down across the roadway, too. I prayed for the ambulance workers that they have skill and success, and I prayed for those involved, that their lives might be spared.

Two college freshmen had been in that tan car, and the tree had fallen on them as they were going 40 mph or thereabouts. They were both killed at the scene.

Death mocks the young. It turns the sententious old men's voices to cruelty. Those who had said, Think of your future, and Plan for your life after college, are moved from the wise to the vicious, and those who said, Listen to the voice, for you have been called here must choke. The death of young men is vinegar and ash. They die in the high tide of life, when passions are stronger than reason or body, when the heart's truths can't be contained.

The middle aged death is the explosion of worlds. My colleague's wife becomes a widow, which is no thing to marry. The children, below ten years, have to hear echoes of God's purpose and not understand that death is not a judgment, not an evil, not a sentence carried out on this person or that. They have to know that love is undimmed and undiminished by death, and that death can quiet the body, but it cannot remove a father, truly. All changes, and bills mount, and the future looks to have been written in black on black, night in night, because of the jeering interruption of death, which said "No" to plans.

Death to the old is no better, for it sounds the bell. As one friend goes or another, or as one acquaintance or another goes, the generation and all the world a person has known announces that it is passed and that you, you too, belong in that quiet. The constant funerals become death's repeated tattoo: "Isn't it time for you, too?" Then one sits waiting -- fully alert and hoping for a catastrophic blow that will spare the dribbled out life of the thousand indignities.

I am taking a break from talking about suicide and gloom, myself. Instead, let's look over at those fields. The reason the trees are worth keeping is the vast roots. They make a city underneath the surface. They are interlaced fingers of roots clasping hands. When death comes to them, it comes, but it should not be because we took the soil from beneath the roots. It should not be because rain, the life giver, has cut through our breast.

Normal Town

I used to live in Normaltown. In fact, I lived on Normal Avenue, in a house that dated from the 19th century and was owned by a woman whose avarice was the only quality that exceeded her vanity. She bilked me out of about a thousand dollars in rent, in the end, and I endured much there. Normaltown meant having half the floor devoted to a woman who got her 12 year old son only when his father was in prison, so I kept hoping that he would go straight. This child loved to roll a skateboard across the wooden porch in front to make my dog bark, and he would pound on my front window, when he thought I wasn't home, to torture my dog. It meant a cranky man upstairs who could only have downward thrusting sex with his old lady.

We should not dwell too often among the normal, for they are a nasty group, as I learned. They were, however, peppered with generations that sported faces of normality past. There was a grandmother nearby who was called Goody. Her grandchildren were famous, and she was sweet -- adopting neighborhood strays. I cannot imagine her having to confront the blind, indifferent killer of AIDS when it struck down one of her beloveds, and I do not wish to.

The letter carrier violated the Sabbath?

 My colleagues there, in Athens, were pretty normal, too. They were a collation rather than collection of hipsters and haircuts that could be cowed fairly easily, but they drove down knowledge as if it were a secret lover or a conquest. Honestly, I had a feeling that at any moment one of them would give another a swirlie. Nevertheless, they had wit enough, betimes, especially in service to cruelty. They were, as I say, collated, as they were each indexed, marked at the corners and arrayed orthogonally. Each had feet planted against the root of the middle class, and the attitudes and angles each particular one assumed from that base simply made a fuzzy orange.

Beside a cliff made of kudzu, or an ocean wave of kudzu stopped for a moment while you're looking, only to crash over house, road, car, and stream as soon as you look away, inflicts a sort of reality on the landscape. REM's first album had come out, and people around the country were wondering what the vines on the back of "Murmur" were. Whatever the intention of the band or art director on the album, the effect I got of the design was that there was a suffocation in the South. All during that time, I agreed with the theme. It was a very Harry Crews point of view -- this idea that something essential, or essentially wicked, was being starved of breath beneath what was quaintly termed southern culture. It was fashionable to wonder what southern culture would be in a few years, too, since we were already hip to the K-Marting of our land and the malls of the city. I regard such talk as blather now.

What I was feeling, anyway, was intimidation. The bigness of the inexorable is always present. It is never easy to shake, either. If the kudzu doesn't shake your confidence, then the river might. The small thing that, unattended, takes on its own way and dwarfs all your work is real in a way that eternal law is real.

I was also feeling the smallness of Normaltown. The expectation that of course you would scam your renters, if you could was normal. I knew it then, and the years have simply increased the font. In the Bronx, the buffet steakhouses had plaques up with lists of rules about how far away people had to stand from one another, how many pockets could be on their coats, etc., all because a buffet was of course a thing to scam. The phone company has online bill paying, of course so that they could close all their regional offices and make the mailed-in bills due at offices as far from the customer as possible so as to increase late fees. They made the online bill pay instructions small and hard to follow of course to trip up older customers because it's normal to maximize "profits" in late fees.

What's WRONG with me, if I don't learn to rip off every company I can? I should sign up for the free six months and then change to the next company after that. It's normal.

I am not better than the normal. In fact, their cars are not broken and dangerous. They do not worry about surviving until tomorrow for the paycheck as much as I do. I may be too smart to have an adjustable rate mortgage, but I also have no mortgage at all. My decade of not having to worry about every day's totals has never come, and it never will, because I do not have the normal preoccupation every day of finding a way to screw up and over. It is not normal to wake up and hear grinding from a disappeared ball joint.

I do not like Normaltown and its mania. When we were short of money recently, I sold my 24k gold class ring. I needed $100, and so I asked for it. The pawn broker agreed in a flash. Gold fixed at $1,800 an ounce. How weird was I being? Well, to even blame myself for not having gotten the maximum is to admit that I was seeking a profit, that I was buying and selling and that the trafficking in misery and memory is legitimate. I do not. I do not accept that normal.

I wish, before I had moved away, that I had planted kudzu in the backyard.

What I am learning

"The greatest pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him, and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself, too." -- Samuel Butler (of Erewhon).

I missed church again today, and I was going to write about my new literary revelation, which is that no age deserves to say that it has poetry of any sort until it can approach what has already been written in Job 14:18-22:

"But the mountain falls and crumbles away,
and the rock is removed from its place;
the waters wear away the stones;
the torrents wash away the soil of the earth;
so you destroy the hope of mortals;
You prevail forever against them, and they pass away;
you change their countenance, and send them away.
Their children come to honor, and they do not know it;
they are brought low, and it goes unnoticed.
They feel only the pain of their own bodies;
and mourn only for themselves." (RSV)

When anyone gets blinkin' near that, then there is poetry. Until then, everyone needs to shut up the shop and wait patiently, reading.

I'm not going to say that, though. I'm also not going to go into renewed raptures about "books that changed my life" and tell you all to buy a copy of At Swim-Two-Birds, especially since Dalkey Archive Press seems to be run by a bunch of jackanapes, and getting an old copy is dodgy and a foreign copy is expensive.

No. Instead, I'm going to take back something really depressing I wrote before. In "Where Do Babies Come From," I wrote about how youth signs to age, how the old "hear the mermaids singing" with despair. It's one of my less read posts, but it's one of the more maudlin ones. I was non-plussed by the commercials made by the director of "The Immortals." They weren't homoerotic as much as. . . queerly erotic. . . in that they weren't aimed at getting young people hot and bothered about being young people. I wrote:

"The youth of beauty, and the beauty of youth, demand those who lost years to watch and demand them to seek out the joy of their own vital pulse, the concerns of the overhang and undertow that remove their exceptions, and who can blame either party? The one who missed and misses longed and longs and surfaces briefly in the filling of senses, and the one in potential is compelled and curtailed, devoted and dovetailed by and in time. Nature could allow no exception, and will complies."

"We, like the commercial, long for what is lost, and we will buy some jeans. We will need some help, perhaps, need a supply, but we will avoid that longing and shovel dirt into the hole."

Ptui!

I take nothing back, but I should point out that a hidden caveat is necessary: these statements are true for the fragmented. J. Alfred Prufrock, Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, L'Etranger, the Misfit -- these folks, when they get to the old age home, slaver pointlessly and go back to their rooms for the knotted rope. (You guys noticed that I'm not linking my allusions anymore? I have. I wonder why that is? Probably lazy rather than stuck up.)

Oh, I shouldn't be exclusionary: we would find Mrs. Haversham, Catherine, and Cordelia at the home, too, although with less grim resolutions or loud complaints, probably. We men whine worst.

Every dog I have had has taught me something. I am convinced that each is an angelos, even if none are particularly angelic. Well, Macheath was. Macheath was the best behaved, most worried and conscientious creature I have ever met on any number of legs. She showed me what duty means and set before me a bar that I shall never meet. As I was missing church, I went to go walk the dog and pray aimlessly (both of the actions).

Let me tell you what Rambolina is teaching me.

Other than that you can have a trepanning scar in the top of your head and show no ill effects, except an inability to house train, she's showing me that a ball really, truly, cannot move if no one is there to throw it.

While we were out, she began scanning the tree tops for squirrels. Now, we all know how dogs feel about squirrels, and rabbits, and mice, and shiny bugs, and turtles, but Stella actually watches them up in the trees. She then began to try to climb a tree to get at a noisy squirrel. After she had wrapped herself around the trunk a couple of times, she looked over at me and as much as said, "Now, please undo this."

That longing, that "call of surfeit to loss," is only a sharp pain, a knife in the joints, for we who are broken away. In a family, even with a puppy, the youth's surfeit shares and supplies the old. It is a sweet drug that tempers the melancholy and lifts the gravity soaked mind. It is what is meant to be, as the old remain the cushion against which the young can always punch and declaim, and the young offer strength against the eroding wind and water.

That's my Sunday school lesson for the day.

Dropping the Button

"Now that highway's coming through,
So we all got to move.
This bottom rung ain't no fun at all." -- John Doe, X, "See How We Are"

In 2003, I made the same salary that I make now, until I was laid off. However, I did far better, because I was not in a "right to work" state that was eager to cooperate with any bill collector, no matter how shady, and garnish, pre-tax. That job lasted only three months, more or less, because the year before the head of the schools had written over one hundred million dollars in bad checks. The school system therefore laid off everyone who had been hired that year. However, I had money left over enough, after paying rent and power and the like, to keep paying rent and groceries and telephone for another six months. Today, a paycheck does not last a month.

We have insane inflation. If it's measured by indicators, then our inflation rate is flat or terrifically low, but it is about like the incessant hammering of a man's gaze on a woman's body. It looks for any slip, any weakness, to see the forbidden and then glories on "win." Ritz Crackers now come in half roll sizes for the same price. . . because you might buy them. Your "big" candy bar got smaller and flatter to get wider. The result of shopping anywhere but Mal*Wart is that irrationally selected items of grocery will be $1-$2 above that evil empire of land destruction.

Once, I went to a school that charged $7,000 a year for tuition, and that was the highest outside of the professionally expensive schools (Ivy League, Bard, Sister Cecilia's Special), and the retiring head of Coca-Cola gave the university $110,000,000.00. The school responded by raising tuition, and one VP was honest enough to say they were doing it because Vanderbilt and Duke were raising theirs, and, if we didn't raise ours, people would think we weren't as good.

Businesses seem to be run by the dicta that they have a duty to maximum profits. This is not true even in neo-classical economics. As Henry Ford said, their goal should be the highest quality possible for the lowest cost possible while paying the highest wages possible. Once you believe that your job is "maximize profits," then the job gets easier, and you believe perforce in every other organism as a resource to be mined.

The majestic pile

I was in church this morning, and the offeratory came around. I thought about how I had no cash to put in the plate, and how I was uncertain that I would have money even in two weeks to send off to help pay for the house I'm living in -- much less cover expenses.

I thought that I might put a pain pill in the plate.

(Prescription drugs do not go into the inflation index, I bet. Then again, they don't increase in cost. They all cost exactly the same thing, which is a metered price-per-dose, and that price depends on how far you can be pushed before you would rather die or suffer. These days, $2.00 and $3.00 seem to be popular dose prices.)

"Do you remember that fell evening,
When you heard the banshees howl?
Those lazy drunken bastards
Were singing 'Pity in the Vale.'
They took you up to midnight mass
And left you in the lurch,
So you dropped a button in the plate
And spewed up in the church." -- Shane McGowan of The Pogues, "The Sickbed of Cuchuliann"

Pogue mahoney and all that, but this is not a matter of shame or tradition. This is a matter of relief. Life is beautiful, when once want is gone, which is why want never seems to leave.

"What a jovial and merry world would this be, may it please your worships, but for that inextricable labyrinth of debts, cares, woes, want, grief, discontent, melancholy, large jointures, impositions, and lies!" -- Corporal Trim to Uncle Toby, Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

Critically, functioning in any given context depends upon having the prerequisites. Even the widow's groat is not a prerequisite of church, but it is of being a church member. One always feels insufficient if one is insufficiently integrated. Going to the town commission meeting is free-ish, but one knows that voices carry best when carried by money. Old cars are charming, and then they are not.

When we wonder why the poor do not voice their opinions more or participate more in local politics, we show our own obliviousness. The inverted world we occupy, where a pocket sized computer that plays only games, the DS III or whatever it may be now, is easy to get, but where shelter is dear and food is a war between corporations that own all brands and want to test each buyer's attention to the limit, makes it quite, quite clear that only the wealthy have three dimensions to their social and political selves. The rest of us are fractions and shadows -- sources of revenue or labor or data alone.

I do not want to be a resource, human or otherwise, for the continuation of the lopsided wave that is American capitalism.

I Wanna Be Normal People

Meet the new writing companion.

Photo taken Sept. 7, 2012

She had a name at the animal shelter. She was called "Erin." Since my first dog was "Bounce" (same name as Alexander Pope's dogs), and my second was "Uncle Toby," and my third was "Macheath," it's pretty clear that "Erin" could not stand. However, the name that my heart had decided upon for my next American Eskimo Dog was Garm, and the dog in the photo above is not Garm. For one thing, this one might howl well before Ragnarok or Judgment Day. Also, Garm is supposed to be male, Hel female, so I was going to give the name to a female, just for symmetry's sake.

The dog above (and at my right ankle now) is female. She is spayed, although she went through her first estrus at the time of the spaying. (Oops, as they say.) (That must have been a relief to her, albeit a confusing one.) So, I thought of other names. "Glumdalklitch" was top spot (just called "Glum"), but I finally settled on "Stella."

So, meet Stella:

"Stella" is a stealthy dog, and the name is deceptive as well. I'm sure that you are thinking "Astrophel to Stella," and that's a fine thing, but "Stella" is also the generic 'beloved' name in every bad poem of 1680-1780, so there's that. However, for the really geeky 18th century theme park consistency, there is Esther Johnson. Jonathan Swift's teasing, flirting, but never abused female friend, whom he called Stella in his writings, has left her mark on the public through him, but she obviously left a deep furrow in his life. (If you want more information on Stella, there isn't much. Do NOT go to the Wikipedia page, which uses a fiction as its source.)

Stella was rescued from the needle, for she had been at the animal shelter since May with "zero public interest." The shelter in question tries to ensure that no dog gets euthanized, so she was not in imminent peril, but the choices were stark. As for what she is. . . I don't know.

I know she's at least half a Pointer. The other half could be anything from Border Collie to Labrador. She likes water and sociks. She is a sock collector of the first order. She does not chew them, eat them, or do anything else except own them. Similarly, she wishes to have one shoe of every pair, simply for ownership. (You can't leave without your shoes, I think.)

This is the first dog I have had that is part or whole Working Dog. In short, it is the first "normal" dog I've had. For once, I'm normal. I'm like the average person, and my dog has a normal name. I will do all that I can, of course, to be as subversive as possible so that, like the name, the dog is only a strange critter abiding in a normal wrapper, and she certainly seems inclined that way.

For a decade of my life, my greatest desire was to be one of them -- the normal people. What on earth possessed me, I don't know.

The Gamble of Death

Macheath in December of 2004

In 1998, Uncle Toby, the .75 Pomeranian, .25 long haired chihuahua, had his third bladder tumor blockage. When he had it the first time, we got the tumors removed, and he was fine, but they returned. After the second surgery, he was not himself for a long time, and I told myself that, when they came back again, it would be time to let go. Therefore, in April, as enormous storms came up, I took some pictures of him, and then we went to the vet. I held him as they administered the injection. My friend Mary had gone with me.

I was coldly rational about the thing. Toby was happy, perky, and feeling great, and when the vet gave him the needle stick, he licked the air in mercy, looking for me to help him. The death was instant. I shattered. Mary had to drive me home, because I was crying too hard.

Only three days later, I found an ad in the paper for American Eskimo Dog puppies, with papers. I set out for the middle of nowhere -- the exact center of the state of North Carolina on an East-West line but against the Virginia border. There is nothing up there. The woman selling the dogs had the same name as the street and the town, and so there was a familiar story embedded there of major land holdings diminishing over time and family fortunes turning into dilapidated houses on muddy roads.

She introduced me to her disabled son, and she said she raised them dogs in the back there.

I did some puppy tests, and I picked out one, but a different one got scooped up and given to me. Never mind that. The puppy threw up on me on the way home a couple of times, and it was too scared to walk on the vinyl floor to get to its food and water. It also didn't look like an American Eskimo Dog at all. It looked like some kind of dirty poodle puppy.

However, I named her Macheath -- after the highwayman in John Gay's play whose beauty allows him to get away with murder -- and I washed her to get the fleas off. The puppies had been in a muddy pen, and Macheath was anemic from flea bites.

Last week, I took her to the vet, after she had diarrhea in the house for the first time in her life. They gave her an I.V. and sent her home, but she almost instantly began coughing and spitting up, and I thought they had given her kennel cough. After eight days, when I finally had time during the day, I took her to a different vet, and I received the news that she has a very, very large tumor in her chest.

This tumor is pressing against her windpipe, making it impossible for her to breathe or swallow. What's more, it seems to have grown to this size in only a week or so, so it's an extremely aggressive cancer. If nature does not take her this weekend, I will be back to that nightmarish position on Monday of holding my friend as she dies.

All that has changed in the fifteen years that Macheath has given me is that I now believe as well as think that death is no evil. Death is the same whether it occurs when we're young or old, with disease or with a shock. Death cannot be good or bad, by itself, because it is a judgment given to all animals alike. I cannot this time feel that I am hurting her or letting her down -- a feeling that, cleverness aside, I could never shake with Toby.

However, death hurts. It ends the pain of the suffering one, but it inflicts grievous wounds on the living.

Macheath has been all that anyone could ask for in a dog. She has silently, happily, politely, and with kindness woven her body and mind into my own, so that she is part of my thought, feeling, and living. She is buried deep in me, and when she is taken, it will shred a great hole in me. I don't know how I will react when this dog, who has kept me on the earth more than a couple of times, is gone, but I know that -- fair or not -- I will be hunting up a puppy starting right away.

No matter the devastation when death collects, the gamble always pays off for the player. Would anyone trade fifteen years of comfort for the pain of loss? It's not even close. As awful as it is now and will be, I know that a dog is a condition of life for me.

The Well Tempered Clavicle

I had needed, I think, to say the things I said below, to throw the tiles of the mosaic out. The truth is that I have arrived at a position where I can take satisfaction that one life's work has been achieved, although its consummation has left me barren. Though I do not say it could have been otherwise even with effort and desire and luck, I have achieved the goal of ignominious anonymity. I have worked at not trying, worked harder at not getting, and can now, at the milestone of fifty, say that perhaps I made it, after all.

Before you reach for an air sickness bag, this is not about any talent I might have or lack. This is about the desires. I assume that hundreds with more genius and capacity have felt the same and achieved lack of note, and I do not doubt that some have even less capacity and genius than myself and feel the same call of the mild -- the unlined margin where there is no place to record a name.

"Occasionally...you meet a traveling Englishman who is, as it were, the incarnation of this talent (for boredom) -- a heavy, immovable animal, whose entire language exhausts its riches in a single word of one syllable, an interjection by which he signifies his deepest admiration and his supreme indifference, admiration and indifference having been neutralized in the unity of boredom. No other nation produces such miracles of nature..." -- Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or ("The Rotation Method")

 There has been an innovation in theology of late. My reader may be familiar with the concept of total depravity. I stepped off the train right there, myself, even though we were between stations. (There was a service hut, but it had a sign over it saying, "Closed.") So, if we creatures are totally depraved by nature, then we need grace from God. Ok. The Catholics say that we need grace to get to a point where our free will operates and we, with God's help, will goodness. The Calvinists say that we can't do that, because we're just too depraved, and so God is at the helm all the way. (With me so far?) There's this bit of Paul where he talks about Christ and the spirit. The way I read it, Paul is trying to explain to the Romans how to understand eternal life when it's obvious that the bodies of Christians are easy to kill. He is speaking of metaphysics and explaining -- to my Classicist training -- essence. He is saying that our flesh, which is in existence and fallen, partakes of a sinful essence, but salvation rewrites that and gives us a new essence, a new "nature," and that is eternal and perfect. On the last judgment, we will be resurrected into bodies that reflect this new nature, too (it's the whole of Romans 7 and the earliest bit of Romans 8; if it reads like philosophy, then...).

Ok, back to the innovators. This line from Paul seems to mean, to many, that the conversion experience, which is mandatory (I could link to recent articles in internal publications, but I don't want to condemn or praise anyone), flushes the system of the believer. The believer gains the grace filled nature. At that point, grace is covering sins. Hence the bumper stickers that say, "Not perfect. Just forgiven." This is forgiveness as an ongoing condition, because it is bound in grace, and the new nature is like a new team jersey. What happens, as a practical matter, is that guilt, and especially contrition disappear. Because God forgives automatically, there is no real need for contrition. That scares me.

I have lived a life fitting invariably as unremarkably into a classic description of an under achiever, but I have extended that juvenile maladptation into a philosophy of life (the link I gave is really "blame the kid"). The under achiever does not try for fear of failing. The bright kid who won't study, because then the test will reflect his best and the best will be known, is an under achiever. They usually have a lack of support at home for their talents and a really serious fear of failure. I learned about this profile as a junior in high school, and it fit me to a T. That didn't stop anything, though.

I overcame the intellectual under achiever profile, but the heart of the matter still murmurs. Unlike some, guilt is a real presence for me. In fact, most of my emotions are variations on its motif. My desire for anonymity is not fear, but guilt. When I did overcome the fear of failing, and when I did finally see what I could do and be, I saw no reason to strive and every fault. If I could magnify myself through words or influence another through argument, then I would be responsible for a shadow cast on the landscape or an action taken. By what right should I presume?

Do not mistake this for humility, as I have tried to do in the past. This is flat out guilt. This is the guilt of ability and action. It is the guilt of harming another person. I already feel thick blankets of the stuff for what I say or fail to say to those who care for me, and finding that I give offense or add injury is too much. It is also the guilt of inability. There is a weighted door on most of us, as we have absurd, unjustified and unjustifiable demands placed on us by banks, merchants, advertisers, and the law. We can add to these nebulous forces particular injustices done to the poor -- the "overdraft protection" that is designed to harm the poor, the "buy here pay here" car lots that aim to repossess from the start, the banks that "write down losses" that are actually houses that people have been ejected from and that the bank will not sell or adjust a payment on. Either way, we fail. We fail our children, our parents, our peers, our employers.

Commercially, there is greater profit in indebted than solvent citizens, and so all businesses are seeking to ensure debt. There is more profit in unhappy people who buy out of body hatred, and so all forces seek to uphold irrational beauty. Nothing stands in the way of fear and guilt, and new accelerants come along every year.

Oh, and how's your life life, retirement planning, and hormone level?

Guilt is the wrapping of my life, the substance of my thought, and so it should be no wonder that my personal philosophy is to join the ranks of the invisible. I would love to be as unperceiving as unperceived, as painless as harmless, but that's too much to ask, and I feel bad for asking for such favors. Why do I have a good novel that I have written that I show no one? Why do I have a good novella that I show no one? I have no need to show them, and I want no responsibility. 

The people who go about without guilt do more than mystify me. They offend me. They seem a denial of reality, but, more to the point, they will charge ahead without consequence. 

[On grace: Imagine a coach in basketball. He says, 'When you take a jump shot, release at the high point of the jump, and get your elbow straight behind the stroke. Make sure the angle of the shot is high, and keep your knees bent.' He knows that the shooting guard won't do all of that every time, but it doesn't change the instruction. In a game, the guard goes to try to win the game, hogs the ball, jumps and throws the ball at the hoop, where it's blocked, leading to a turnover and a loss.

If the player comes to the bench and says, 'I'm sorry coach. I didn't do what you told me. I want to work on it,' then it's fine. If the player says, 'Hey, coach, I know you'll forgive me, so what's the big deal. It seemed like a good idea. The important thing is that I'm wearing the jersey that says "Christians" on it,' then the coach will kick him off the team.]

I can look back and forward, and the horizon's the same. I have achieved my philosophy. I wish I could be proud of that.

The Joy of the Loveless

"I decided that if the

shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of

the fragments of the afternoon might be collected,

and I concentrated my attention with careful

subtlety to this end." -- T. S. Eliot, "Hysteria," 1920

Your life, like most lives, is a tale of inappropriate loves that swerved one way or the other in the chaos of time by the impact of mismatched forces. Appropriate love, all the sober gray heads would agree, is of a living object better and bettering than the self; this definition may be behind our stumbles, but, like the naked mole rats we resemble, we feel our way by warmth on our pelts, blindly going "Warmer, warmer... colder, colder," falling this side or that of apathy's zero state.

And you thought Art History wasn't a good major!

 I was at the circus yesterday -- Mal-Wart, I mean -- and my absurd remnant of desire had me looking at women, girls, crones, and mothers, and then each would go from retina to a filter that may not be the same as other men's. I did not go to sexual attraction, but fitness of soul. A carriage, a posture of head, a relaxed face, would say that she was angry or worried or innocent, serious or vain. After that coarse speculation came nothing, really, but a reflected impulse, whereby I thought on time or life. Some women, more girls, did not inhabit their bodies, and others did not master them. Some were younger than their years, but more were older or matched.

I saw several who were in the last of their teens, but their world was older. They had become mothers or already learned to fear a ringing phone, and so their minds were not where their flesh was. Another was about twenty-five, but her eyes never held anything they touched, and her feet never reached the ground when she walked, and I realized, "She thinks seventeen." (There is not a word missing in that sentence.)

There may be more stages, more fixed points than the ones I know about, but it seems to me that there are ages we actually are. The "want to grow old" age is a mind that cannot have a number on it, because it is an age that, by its primary desire, tells itself that it is dependent, controlled, and inexperienced. Then, though, there is seventeen. Some thirteen year olds -- tough kid boys with older brothers who initiate them into beer and drugs early, girls who 'blossom' early and are stunned by the shockwave -- think seventeen, but it's usually the thinking of the triumph over puberty. It is having won against one's own body, feeling its contours as reliable and being relieved, at long last, of daily name calling, back stabbing, and fighting with same sex peers.

Some people are mistakenly under the impression that thinking seventeen is happiness. Ask someone who is seventeen, though. The next year is twenty-three. The graduating college person, the full of information person, the self-confident competent person who announces independence for the first time and competency for the first time and isn't awed by it -- this is the person who has the beer party, who goes to that strange restaurant with her friends, who organizes a potluck on her own. This is the person who writes the famously dense novel filled with every idea he or she ever had. (The genre of the novel of twenty-three could fill two graduate seminars.)

Then there's thinking thirty. Most of us past thirty think thirty. The thrills are gone. It's not neat to get mail in the mailbox. Parties are boring. Dating is dreaded. More money thought than creative thought goes on, and there is worry. One is at full power, but only to find that the world really has only a very, very small spot on the dance floor for each of us to move in.

I have just discovered that there is thinking fifty, too. This is the regretful and the "Oh, no" thinking, as well as the thinking of diminishment. It remains until the last thought -- being the person who is weak, and that, like the first, has no number associated with it. The first mind is one we flee as quickly as we are able, and the last is one we adopt only after we have no other choice.

The women I looked at fell into ages -- ages of mind. I also looked at their kindness, because to me that may be most needed. When I came back to the house, after that trip to the circus, I saw a man my age moving some heavy thing in a ditch. His wife was standing behind him with her arms crossed under her bra, her cropped hair a blond contrast to her red face. He placed the thing somewhere and looked eagerly under his arm behind him, and then bent back down. This is all I saw, but I was going 20 mph, so I saw that much. I also saw that she was a woman of a stunning figure at twenty, a heart of frustration lurking beneath it, and a mind of ways things must be done. (I have no praise for the man, but her stance was a cliche.)

Als das kind kind war
We think and are, at first, in love. Some people mistake this for joy. They are allowed to do so, because it can seem that way later, but it is, instead, trust. When one has no trust left, the thinking "when I grow up" seems idyllic, because it was a time of loving parents and teachers and police and aunts and uncles and the family dog. Even as it meant no self control, no power, it meant love. It was a false love, because it was a temporary one. All those things could be stronger, smarter, and wiser than the child, but not better -- as gummy eyed poets have said, and as Jesus made clear (it does occur to me, now, that, although Jesus in other places says that we must become children again and that the prophecy is fulfilled that the wise are made simple, the simple wise, the particular circumstance of this saying was of sick children and children suffering and having faith). After the completely thoughtless phases of grabbing whatever is wanted are gone, the aspiring young who think about their future are fine.

The next mind we inhabit is the one of self-aware division, where we fall victim to love's mating and lust's warfare, and we know it. I doubt there is a person who has gone through the mind and not been aware of some falseness to the driver. As for falling in love, I could point you at Shakespeare or other Elizabethans who have such precise words for it. ("This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid; /Regent of love-rhymes,  lord of folded arms,/ The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans,/ Liege of all loiterers and malcontents." Marriage, the goal of earthly love, "’T is just like a summer bird-cage in a garden,—the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair and are in a consumption for fear they shall never get out.") Most of the Restoration wits saw love as a disease and lust as its fever, and they had elaborate metaphors for it -- what else but a disease could make a person behave in such a way, and what else but a fever could animate a person to such a degree?

Passing, or not passing, that, we join, or we join around the mind of twenty-three. I now advise teenagers to marry, and to do it quickly, because the false love of seventeen is negated by the false love of twenty-three. At seventeen's mind, it is union. The other person is better than you and has all the parts you lack, and two-in-one will solve the failure of isolation's deficits. Palm to palm and chest to chest, face to face, we have union -- a wonder enough to keep us forever and yet transient enough, mutable enough, to make us aware that it may be a shadow. She isn't better, and he isn't. She makes you a better person . . . somewhat, and he makes you stronger. . . when he isn't ruining everything. Union is so rarely complete, synchronized, and without tugging on the rope that we have a valid love, a good love, but still a misdirection.

Marry, children! Marry soon, or don't, because when you begin to live in the mind of twenty-three, you will fall in love with someone else. Around the age of nineteen, you will meet the most fascinating, compliant, coy, and agreeably cryptic and great person, ever: You.

From nineteen until thirty, you are the most interesting person you know. Why are you like ___? Why don't people like you more? Why aren't you wealthier? Why do you procrastinate? All these questions and more will come to you in time, and you'll answer them and others -- several times over. This is not a quality of the affluent only, either. The first flush of reflection, which occurs the moment the hormones take their claws off the gas pedal, leads to more.

The thirty mind can hit at twenty. It's just when you no longer think of yourself as a glorious subject, and instead think of yourself as a persecuted subject. The thirty year old mind is responsible, dutiful, over-stretched, under-appreciated, and busy. No one knows the beauty and sophistication of the great Self that the twenty-three year old was, and no one will see how wrong he is. Instead, whatever answers to the Big Mysteries of Me the person came up with, those stick, because now we are busy.

Imagine a man who marries at twenty-three -- a normal enough time. He might go into the wonder of self for a short time. That wonder lust wanderlust takes a person to blame first, then persecution, and then understanding, followed by repetition on a more accurate level. First up for most people is "Mom and Dad made me this way." That's the usual answer, but it doesn't usually last. However, if that man has his first child and is running his business the next year, he goes right from seventeen/nineteen to thirty, frozen at the introspective point until the next grand turn.

The love of the self's intricacies, its labyrinth of history and the pachinko game of the future, can better the self or worsen the self and probably does. However, it is not love of an object. The unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates said, but the examined life is not lived at all. The love affair of nineteen to twenty-three is necessary refining, but it's a false love. It precedes another false love: the battering of the body and will against other men and women and against capital to secure against time some light -- a profit, a trust, land, a home, generations, traditions. I don't think I need to argue with anyone very hard that this effort is rarely successful on its own terms and never a proper love. Love of children is great, but it isn't the spur.

Being fifty in mind means a panic, sure. It means knowing that the clock is running down, really. It's not the knowing, though: it's the inescapable, daily pain. Unlike an injury, age picks surprising joints and muscles to fire. So, we look back. We look ahead. We evaluate. The thirty age mind gets disgraced, often when the children are old enough to not need a custodial parent. The seventeen year old mind gets shouted at, often when the marriage mate is doing the same. The nineteen year old seems more attractive than even the seventeen year old: it's time to once again discover the self, to find out where things went wrong, to tap into potential, to talk to people of the opposite sex who are engaged in those quests.

Most of us are sane. We just wish, think, and grunt. We don't go nuts. Furthermore, that foolishness washes off, eventually, but we're left with the self, and then memory as its grist.

As for love affairs, I have no advice. I was rejected by eHarmony. But that love? Well, the soul is big enough to fold and open, and I can't see any love but one as sovereign.