Walking in your footsteps

26 04 2009

REM’s It’s the end of the world as we know it or Lou Reed’s Fly into the sun (opening lyric: I would not run from the holocaust/I would not run from the bomb) are the more obvious titles to a meditation on the apocalypse, but what the hell, we here at AbsurdBeats like to mix it up once in awhile.

Where was I? Ah yes, little blue-green planet goes boom, death, devastation, et cetera, et cetera. It’s a great theme for books, and I have a particular weakness for B-grade movies about an imminently-imperiled or just-toasted Earth. I’ve also had my share of nuclear nightmares, and the movie 28 Days Later added zombies into the nighttime bad-dream rotation.

As a general matter, however, I don’t much worry about the end of the world. Oh, I’m not really joking when I tell my students that I’m glad I’ll likely be dead before the environment collapses, and I won’t be suprised (though I will of course be shocked) if a dirty bomb is lobbed into some urban center. And yes, I keep my eyes open to the damage microbes can do (thank you, Laurie Garrett, for that), and am not uninterested in reports of a nasty strain of swine flu flying around.

Still. If the world ends, it ends. It’s sad to think that we as a species would have blown our chance (and the chances of our fellow creatures) to have figured out how to join the universe, and that in ending ourselves we probably will have destroyed the evidence—the art, architecture, music, literature—that we were more than just violent and greedy idiots.

But this is a detached sadness: if we’re gone, there’ll be no one around to mourn or regret. Death is sad for survivors, not the dead themselves.

C. recently posted on her ‘go’ bag, a pack to which she’s been adding what she’d need to survive if she had to get the hell out of the city. It’s not a bad idea, and given my predilection for preparedness, I should probably put a pack together as well.

But, as I noted in a comment to her post, I have no desire to survive a truly world-ending event. To tramp down ash-laden roads, as do the father and son in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in search of some place beyond the fire? Forget it. Or to wait around a few days or weeks or even months for my skin to fall off? Pass. Maybe one shouldn’t go gently into that good night, but when the world ends, so do the good nights.

What of disasters which simply alter, but don’t end, the world? Rod Dreher at Crunchy Con isn’t exactly waving a ‘The end is near!’ sign, but he’s mighty interested in those who do. Sharon Astyk (at Casaubon’s Book) similarly waives any claim to apocalyptic thinking, but she’s preparing, nonetheless. Gather ye rosebuds (and corn and whatnot) while ye may, because the times they are a-changin’.

I dunno. I tend to skim those pieces on how This Time! we’re gonna be thrown back to the farm, what with this modern way of life collapsing under its own decadent, alienated ways and all. Neither Dreher nor Astyk is a particular fan of modernity, and each seeks a return to a less individualistic, more communal way of life. It’s not that I’m accusing either of actively wishing for The Big One, but they do sense opportunity in a series of little earthquakes.

I’m more po-mo than pre-mo, and have had my own arguments with modern theorists and my own criticisms of modern life. But it’s also the milieu of my life, and that of my friends and family, and we have been shaped by this modern world. Yes, I think there’s got to be a better way to live—but until I come up with that better way, for all of the inhabitants of this little blue-green orb, I’m not about to cheer the end of this fucked-up, violent, compromised, weird old world.

And if things change drastically? Well, that happens, periodically. Unless we do manage to blow ourselves to smithereens, we’ll manage with what comes next.

That’s what we do.


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Her body trembles with the effort to last

1 01 2009

Emma Bee Bernstein, 23, killed herself.

I didn’t know Emma, didn’t know anything about her until Courtney Martin ran an obit for her at Feministing.

All I could think, upon reading the obit, was, Awww, Jesus.

This is how I know I’m over my own folie a deux with suicide. Before, when I heard or read that someone had killed themselves, I’d be envious. Ah, I’d think, so they managed what I could not. But this time, all I could think was, Awww, Jesus.

Twenty-three. One lifetime. She could plausibly have had three more lifetimes, but chose not to.

What do you say to someone? There’s so much to live for. . . You’re so young. . . Things’ll get better. Not necessarily. Even if you believe it, she won’t.

Would it help to say, There’s no point to life. Live anyway.?

Live anyway. Through it all, live anyway.


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Here is my blood shed for thee

13 12 2008

Last thing about Ainadamar (for awhile): Did I mention that after the performance I trekked up to Corporate Bookstore and bought two books on the Spanish Civil War?

Wait! There’s a reason for this! The libretto  included broadcasts from Radio Falange, and I wanted to know if these were the product of David Hwang’s imagination or actual transcripts. Here’s a sample (translated)

Our youth must be ready//to shed their blood generously/ for the sacred cause of Spain//Whoever is not with us/is against us//We’ll exterminate the seeds of the Revolution,/even in the wombs of their mothers//Long live death!

And later:

. . . And if we find them dead, we will kill them again. I give you permission to kill them like dogs, and your hands will be clean.

Well. I just started Anthony Beevor’s The Battle for Spain (c. 2006) so I don’t know if these are actual transcripts, but he does note, on p. 56 that the nationalist Foreign Legion, ‘Composed in large part of fugitives and criminals. . . were taught to be useful suicides  with their battle cry ‘Viva la Muerte!’‘ And, skipping ahead to p. 424, Beevor notes that ‘Ideological and religious invocations deliberately tried to make the violence abstract. . . . Carlist [nationalist] requetes were told that they would have a year less in purgatory for every red they killed, as if Christendom were still fighting the Moors.’

So much for the notion that Al Qaeda invented the (anti-)political cult of death.

In any case, I was seized by the notion of the ideological underpinnings of massacre. What makes it killing those who are not trying to kill you okay? It seemed—seems—a tremendously important issue.

But as I thought more about this, I remembered the work I did a lifetime ago in a human rights seminar in grad school. We were trying to theorize about human rights abuses, and, frankly, having a terrible time doing so. There were too many massacres, across all populated areas, from all different ethnic, religious, and ideological groups: how does one find a way through such a fog of data?

One key feature, as discussed by Leo Kuper in his book Genocide, was the dehumanization of the victims. They were a cancer, an infection, rats, insects—anything which not only removed them from their fellow humans, but which also made it a positive good to eradicate.

But the casting out of humanity of the victims is only part of the story; what of the killers? There have certainly been a number of studies of the sociology and psychology of mass killing—cf. Ervin Staub The Roots of Evil; Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors; Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, among others—but what of the specific ideological indoctrination? Robert Proctor gets at both the material and ideological aspects of Nazi scientists and doctors in Racial Hygiene, as does Benno Muller-Hill  in Murderous Science, but even these are more sociological than political-ideological.

What kind of ideology posits mass murder as a good? National Socialism was proudly genocidal, but does all fascism necessarily lead to the valorization of massacre? And Stalinism was clearly genocidal, but that seemed more cultic or psychopathic than ideological. (That said, Bolshevism wasn’t all sunshine and daisies, and Bolshevism clearly shaped Stalin. And no, I’m not one to think Lenin was somehow betrayed by Stalin: ol’ Vladimir may have been more pragmatic than Stalin, but he was a revolutionary, after all, with all the ruthlessness that implies.) The errors and crimes of Leninism and Stalinism are clear to me (if not their precise etiology), but Marxism is an ideology, if not always a practice, of liberation.

Capitalism? Certainly, in practise it has sanctioned the treatment of humans as ends rather than means, and there is plenty of violence woven into long history of the emergence from pre-capitalist economies and societies as well as colonization. And, oh yes, there were more than a few killings commited in the defense thereof during the Cold War. Yet, as with Marxism, as an ideology it pitches liberation.

Furthermore, I think it makes sense to distinguish between massacres, such as My Lai, and concerted extermination. It may make little difference to the victims of such massacres whether their deaths were the result of  a (morally, psychologically) chaotic situation or a fixed program, but as I’m trying to get at the programmatic content of mass murder, the distinction is important. In the former case it is a kind of criminal accident, a breakdown of ordinary operating procedures: Even if the soldiers or killers are not ultimately punished, the massacre itself must be explained [away] as something extrinsic to the (political, national) cause itself. In the latter case, however, massacres are intrinsic to the cause, necessary as both means and end.

Hm. I think that’s a part of it: an ideology in which death is not a mere (unfortunate) means, but a desired end. And this bifurcates: it is necessary and good to kill these others, as it is necessary and good for ourselves to die in battle against the others, and for ourselves.

So back to the ideology of death. Is this its own ideology, or a component of other ideologies? Can it be integrated into other ideologies? Does it require a belief in some kind of life [for the killers] beyond death?  And whatever its status as a freestanding or constituent part of another ideology, does the embrace of death mark the ideology as anti-political?

That last question, at least, I can answer: Yes. Politics is about the world, a particular kind of being-in-the-world which is predicated on human life (yep, Arendt again). To disdain such life is to disdain politics.

I’m not saying anything particularly shocking here: What violent dictator hasn’t asserted his triumph over politics? And while I think there is a political (i.e., worldly) agenda of Al Qaeda, from what I’ve read of bin Laden or Mullah Omar’s speeches, ideologically, they’re all about wiping out politics.

Sigh. Don’t know how much this helps me with the whole exterminationist-ideology thing, tho’.

Anyway, I did at least discover that one line from the opera is authentic. It is the response of the fascist Ramon Ruiz Alonso, to the question of the crimes of Lorca:

He has done more damage with his pen,/than others have with their pistols.



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Dead can dance

1 11 2008

Dead dead dead. Death with a scythe. Angel of death. The big sleep. The worm crawls in, the worm crawls out.

‘Tis the season of death!

I am not a spiritual person, but the time of Halloween/Samhain/All Hallow’s Eve/All Soul’s Day brings the contemplation of death into the public realm. Usually, we Americans deal with death privately—no Day of the Dead for us! No, to be an American is to be all about life. Forward! Forward! Into the future! Death rather interrupts that ride.

Death used to structure my life—well, no, it didn’t. It’s true that I was determinedly self-destructive for over twenty years, and was firm in my sense that I had to cut out my life from under me, but this sense was more about my distaste for life than it was any appreciation for death. I wanted an end, nothing more.

It was terrifically important that I not think beyond my end. I didn’t want to ‘taint’ my suicide, didn’t want it to be a gesture or a kind of weakness, thinking that somehow it would all be better after I died. Certainly, when you’re thirteen years old and trying to kill yourself, you tend to desire surcease, if only because a permanent separation from life is unimaginable. Let me die, I thought, and it will be better.

But as I aged, and more importantly, as I considered my self-destruction as a moral issue, I determined that any notion of ‘better’, any notion of ‘after’ would muddled my understanding of what I would do. I was to kill myself because that was the correct action, the only corrective to a badly disordered existence.

The argument behind this conclusion would take me too far away from where I want to go with this post; suffice it to say that the experience of failing to kill myself (and the reaction of those around me to such failures) sharpened my sense of the necessity of a morally clean (i.e., shorn of any emotional encumbrances such as a desire for comfort) exit. In any case, the issue was the break with life, not the entrance into death.

Now that I have walked away from the artifice of self-destruction, however, I need a new relationship with death. I don’t know what an ‘ordinary’ relationship would look like, not least because it is not a part of everyday conversation, but I’d like at least to begin to think about a life that will end in the same expected/unexpected way as those around me. I never, truly, had to think before about what it means to be a mortal being.

Thomas Lynch, in an essay in today’s NY Times, notes

We humans are bound to and identified with the earth, the dirt, the humus out of which our histories and architectures rise — our monuments and memorials, cairns and catacombs, our shelters and cityscapes. This “ground sense,” to borrow William Carlos Williams’s idiom, is at the core of our humanity.

To be human is to be mortal. there’s nothing particularly original in this observation; in fact, it is such a central part of our being that artists and writers—to say nothing of religion—regularly turn this upside down and inside out and stretch this notion in order to make some sense of this fundamental boundary. What does it mean to die? What would it mean if we were to live forever? While believers may be ecstatic at the thought of eternal life in the presence of a loving God, those who consider the notion of immortality on this earth tend to take a dimmer view of things.

In Jose Saramago’s latest book, Death with Interruptions, death takes a holiday. I haven’t yet read it, but from the reviews, it’s clear that, for the inhabitants of this novel, life without death lacks sense. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, noted that natality is the founding condition of humanity; implicit is that for natality—birth—to have any meaning, the new life must eventually come to an end. For humanity to be renewed, humans must die.

While taking the larger view, Lynch also offers a more prosaic perspective:

[T]here remains something deeply human in the way we process mortality by processing mortals in the journey between life as we know it and life as we imagine it, in whatever space the dead inhabit. Wherever the dead go or don’t, it is the duty of the living to get them to the edge of that oblivion.

Since the first cave-dwelling Neanderthal awakened next to a dead kinsman and knew something would have to be done about it, we humans have looked into the tomb or grave or fire and asked ourselves the signature questions of our species: Is that all there is? Can it happen to me? What comes next? Only the dead know the answers. And the living are well and truly haunted by them.

Considering death, we are thrown back on to ourselves. How often do we take up such considerations, take up ourselves?

We prefer, as a people, to keep such hauntings limited to a day or two a year, paint it up in costumes or guide it down the hallway of a fright house. We can tame it, master it, keep it on a leash long enough to thrill us, but leashed, nonetheless. Then we scrub ourselves clean and begin our anticipations of Christmas. Lights! Presents! And, oh yes, new birth.

Enough with the cultural gloss. What does it mean not for a people, but for a person? Marjorie Williams, trying to see past her own death, felt keenly her prospective absence from her children’s lives. ‘Who will talk to my darling girl when she gets her period? Will my son sustain that sweet enthusiasm he seems to beam most often at me?’ As she witnesses, for the last time, her nine-year-old daughter’s preparations for Halloween, she dreams forward, writing that ‘I’d just seen Alice leave for her prom, or her first real date. I’d cheated time, flipping the calendar five or six years into the future. The character I’d played was the fifty-two-year-old mother I will probably never be.’ Her children will live, without her.

But in the meantime, she lived. For awhile she comforted herself with the fact that ‘I’ll never have to pay taxes, I thought, or go to the Department of Motor Vehicles.’ None of the irritations! But, as she recognized, in not having to deal ‘with all the error and loss and love and inadequacy’ of living, ‘I won’t have to be human.’

As her life lasted beyond its expected expiration date, she, too, moved beyond this sentiment. ‘The passage of time has brought me the unlikely ability to work, simultaneously, at facing my death and loving my life.’ It was often ‘lonely’ work, she noted, but it did not take her out of her life. Death, unwanted as it was, had to be taken into account if she was to have a human life, her life.

Jon Katz makes brings together the observations of both Lynch and Williams in writing about his hospice work. He writes repeatedly of people ‘on the edge of life’, knowing they are heading into death while trying to make sense of their lives. Hospice can offer them a way to a gentle reckoning, an easing through a process which is often un-easy. On their way to death, these people become alive to him, through the stories they tell him, the presence they bring to his life. To attend to someone in their final months or weeks or days is an honor, he says, and one which deepens his appreciation for their lives and his own.

And then there are the moments after death. Lynch, as an undertaker, has written quite a lot about this (go read his book, The Undertaking), but what stays with me is a story Anne Lamott told, about the death of a friend’s mother. I can’t find the exact story (so apologies for any misremembrance), but she writes how she and the friend cared for the mother in her home, how they touched her and held her and lay next to her while she lived, and then continued caring for her after she died. They washed her entire body and, although I’m sure my imagination has added this to the story, wrapped her in a clean shroud. It was a final act of love, for her and for them.

Perhaps this stays with me because I wonder who would wash and wrap me, after my death. Who will care for me? For whom will I care? I have a complicated relationship to my own solitariness, alternately protective of and resigned to it, and although I know (or think I know) that we enter death alone, I don’t know that I want to end my life alone.

Yes, Lynch had it right. To think about death is to think about life. Thrown back on to myself, I am uncertain of whether I can catch my self, by myself.


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When the devil comes blowing through your door

19 10 2008

It needs to be said: Beth Orton did not save my life. And it’s always dicey to attribute too much personal meaning to someone else’s words. Nonetheless, I took her devil as my own, as this song accompanied me on the way out of a decades-long tunnel.

Did I save myself? Hmmmmmm. I guess. I decided to live; is that saving myself? I hesitate to say yes for two reasons: One, I question whether one can save oneself, i.e., what is saving, anyway? Two, and more concretely, I question whether I did, in fact, decide to live.

Yeah, I’m alive, and that works for me. But at that crucial moment, my toes stretched across that thin thread, I didn’t so much decide as happen to lean this way rather than that. To illustrate this point, I sometimes put my hands together and let one fall back: ‘it could just as easily have gone the other way’, I say. Why live? Why die? I had no answer.

Hm. I wonder if that wasn’t the crucial question, Why die? I never asked that question (though others, of course, did); the default was death. But at that moment, sitting in my apartment with my palms over my eyes, I allowed myself the question: What am I to do? For the first time in over twenty years, I didn’t know. That un-knowing, which I mentioned in my last post, gave me that chance to fall this way rather than that.

What I did decide was to go with that chance. I fell into the net, and decided not to cut through it. Very well. My life is in my hands. I will take it.

How did I get to that night, that chance? I don’t know. It’s entirely possible that I had neared such moments previously, but couldn’t recognize them; certainly, I didn’t ask, before then, why I should die. Perhaps it was the work done prior to that night which cracked me open enough to allow that question through. Lucretia puts it quite nicely:

That I managed to get through that has a lot to do with learning to live with pain, and that was a redemptive experience. It’s like a zen trick; it’s not that “suffering ennobles” or some bullshit like that. But, by accepting that the pain was there whether I wanted it or not, and there was nothing I could do about it and nothing redemptive about it, that’s how I set my feet back on the path to redemption.

Yes, exactly. The pain would always already be there, as it is for every other human being on the planet, and that there was nothing either romantic or shameful about it. And despite all of my anti-romantic protestations, I did hold it rather close, as if it were something I was in danger of losing. I wrote about this years ago, some months before my turnaround:

[Kay Redfield] Jamison notes [in an Unquiet Mind] that in coming down from a manic high, “I had a horrible sense of loss for who I had been and where I had been.” This loss was magnified—rationalized, certainly, but also magnified—as she settled into her lithium routine. She was not just missing the swooning highs, but a self which, terrifically flawed, was nonetheless valued. To get better is, in a fundamental sense, to lose oneself.
To repeat: to get better is to lose onself. The idea behind treatment is that one gains a more complete self, that whatever loss occurs is mitigated by the wholeness of who one becomes. Nice idea, and I believe it insofar as I take part in treatment, but I also don’t believe it. As much as I try to make sense of my troubles, I also resist making sense of some its aspects: loss is loss, period.
Actually, if I understand therapy as leading to a more complete me, I can sign on, but if you tell me it will make me “better,” I want to bolt. Better?! Better, how?! More normal? is that what you mean? To fit in, to be like everyone else, to conform?  To not be me, that’s what you mean. Why not just stick an icepick in my brain and get it over with.
I’m a little sensitive on this issue.
But even as I recognize overreaction, I still hold to the notion that there is something in this withered and distorted life which is meaningful. Not good, necessarily, but not everything which is meaningful is good.  I can see things, living as I do, off to the side and peering at the rest of you in some bewilderment. There are things you take for granted as good or normal that I just think, Huh. . . .
[So I worry] that I will lose this sight of the unsightly. . . . More primordially, I grasp at this sight as something which is mine, which I have earned in years of living perched in the branches of a barren tree.  God. Dammit. I’ve survived out here, and now you’re telling me, Forget it? None of it matters?  . . .
My life yields strange and bitter fruits, but there is fruit and it is mine.

I protected that pain, that depression, out of sense that it was all that I had. Oh, I knew that other people felt bad, that I could not (even if I wanted to) monopolize suffering, but, somehow, I thought that my troubles with life gave me some kind of special sight into life itself. Yes, these troubles would kill me, but in the meantime. . . .

Hah. Who knows, maybe I did see something most others did not. So what. Every other person, by virtue of being every other person, will see something most others did not. This is the most basic condition of existence—that we are separate beings, with experiences we may only uncertainly communicate to others—and one which I missed, so frantic was I to take myself out of existence.

So much I missed. So much I don’t even know to look for.

Still, I am, finally, looking.


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