Life, Death, Hypocritude Etc.

POEM OF THE DAY:

OK, since I have been ruminating on death a lot lately (not necessarily in a morbid way, but simply as a confrontation with life's defining inevitability), I am going to post a poem I wrote ages ago about the death of a celebrated ruminant. Dolly The Cloned Sheep.

"Requiem for a Clone.”

I can see the headlines now: "Goodbye Dolly." The final indignity. A cleverness rendered inevitable at the moment of your naming, at the moment of your strange and celebrated coming to be.

You, ewe (how could one resist?). Wooly Frankenstein Ovine oddity. Unreflective ruminant at the eye of a moral and metaphysical storm.

Curious meta-creature, both more and less than animal. The fate of life as we know it weighing absurdly on your whitish scrag and withers--during your short, strange graze upon the field of time.

Ewe who? Ewe what? Brought forth into this world unparented, unprecedented--and yet perfectly so. Adding nothing to existence but the staggering absence of anything new.

A being radically different for being entirely the same.

Baaa humbug...You were a bleating sheep for god (if there be one's) sakes!

And what of you, ewe? Were you able to enjoy whatever it is that sheep enjoy? The being part of the hillside? The grass? The groupings? The warm closenesses? The sundry weathers?

Did you ever come to feel a part of the fold? Or did you feel forever apart? Did the others embrace you? Or did they smell the peristing scent of your problematic provenance?

Immortalized at birth. Forgotten in life. And now, remembered for a moment in your passing. A life wholey (and wooly) symbolic. Abstracted. The stutter between a headline (above the fold) and a footnote. You, ewe, have finally been granted the dignifying thing that awaits and equalizes all beings.

You, ewe, are dead.
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FRUSTRATION OF THE DAY:

That that stupid slash and "greater than" sign keeps popping up at the end of the poem when I post it and I can't figure out how to make it go away. It's suggesting some obscure and totally unintended sense of significance--when it is really just the unsightly product of some coding glitch. It feels somehow like the final desecration of the memory of dear Dolly.

MIND-BOGGLING CLAIM OF THE DAY:

Dubya, like so many other people, is now likening Iraq to Vietnam. Only he's not doing it as an indictment of the war, but as a defense of it!!!! It is quite simply....amazing. Through the application of an almost inconceivably inverted Orwellian logic, he has somehow managed to convince himself that this oft-observed, oft-lamented cautionary parallel reflects a problem with Vietnam rather than a problem with Iraq. It's sort of like saying...hmm...what, exactly? Sort of like saying "Hey this humanitarian effort is a lot like the holocaust. But in a good way!" Well, no. Not exactly. But strangely not so far from that.

Often, in the past, the administration has performed dazzling rhetorical jujitsu, taking their opponents' greatest strengths and--by the application of shameless dishonesty-- effectively turning it against them. Witness the Swift boating of John Kerry. And of pretty much anyone of anything else that has opposed them. But I do not think that this really conforms to that logical or strategic paradigm. This seems more closely akin to plain old craziness.

Anyhow, I could probably think about it for ages. But it's making my head hurt.

BRIEF MOVIE REVIEWS OF THE DAY:

Speaking of Vietnam: I saw Rescue Dawn--Werner Hertzog's big budget remake of his earlier doc "Little Dieter Has To Fly." Yes, Christian Bale turned in a terrific performance. Yes, it's a really remarkable story of survival and the triumph of the human spirit. (Or at least the plain, dumb, irrepressible will to live.) Yes, it's amazing that he went through all that adversity in the POW camp in Laos--and then in the jungle after his escape. But at the end of the day, it's just another variant on the standard prison escape story and, as far as I'm concerned, Papillon and Shawshank Redemption were both much more compelling. Neither the escape narrative nor the modes of torture (Deer Hunter etc.) nor the jungle imagery (Thin Red Line etc.) felt particularly new. There was no real suspense since you know from the outset that he has to survive in order to have told the tale. And at the risk of sounding horribly desensitized to little Dieter's remarkable ordeal, I have to say...

Little Dieter has to fly
Little Teddy has to nap

--

Finally saw "The Aristocrats." Well ten minutes of it, anyway. I found it to be a slightly tedious and entirely puerile exercise in fecal one-upsmanship.

PHENOMENON OF THE DAY:

Stealth Intergenerational acoustic warfare.

Evidently there is a frequency that people under 24 or so can hear and people over 24 or so cannot. Ring tones are now available at that precise frequency so that kids can get calls in class without the teacher being able to hear. Every time the phone rings, all the students are bonded by their collective ridicule of their pedagogue's auditory irrelevance. Conversely, this very pitch has been used at intolerably high volumes to keep young people out of certain adult environments--as the older folks, blissfully deaf to the hellish din, go about their chosen mature pursuits.

POLITICO-SOCIO-ECONOMIC OBSERVATION OF THE DAY:

Mutli-millionaire pro-war candidate Mitt Romney has come under a lot of scrutiny for the fact that, while he is a strong supporter of the war in Iraq, none of his 5 sons has chosen to serve in the military. He defended their non-service by stating that "they chose to pursue other careers...and happily, we have a volunteer army." Yes, Romney's sons were pursuing other priorities. Because they, like Dick Cheney, could afford to.

We don't have a volunteer army. We have socio-economic selective service. A discrimatory de facto draft.

To be a hawkishly pro-war candidate while defending your children's choice not to serve in the military is a kind of hypocrisy that demands a new name. How about "hypocritude"?

NEW WORD OF THE DAY:

Hypocritude.

SLEEP-INDUCING ACTIVITY OF THE DAY:

Instead of counting sheep the other night, I counted the number of times Thomas Friedman (sporting, as always, the "moustache of understanding") interjected the proper name "Charlie" into his answers during his hour long appearance on the Charlie Rose show. "Well that would make sense, but the funny thing is, Charlie, that...." "Well, Charlie, here's what I think ..." etc. I fell asleep just short of the hundredth "Charlie"--about half way through Mr. Friedman's ever enlightening discourse.

TRIBUTE OF THE DAY:

To the Chinese CEO who killed himself after revelations that his company had produced all kinds of lead tainted products under his command. Of course, I in no way celebrate the terrible misfortune of his suicide. Nor the unfortunate circumstances that lead to it. But it simply strikes me as such a refreshing contrast to the behavior of most American CEOs who have presided over or been directly implicated in some kind of criminal misconduct or spectacular failure. Could you imagine a Koslowski, Skilling, Lay, Ebbers or Reyes (The Brocade Chief recently convicted of backdating options) committing suicide in disgrace or dishonor in the face of scandalous revelations? Unimaginable. In America, you simply deny everything and call in your lawyers. There is, in the end, something to be said for a culture of shame rather than a culture of shamelessness. And if shame is no longer an available option in our society, I'd be satisfied with a culture of simple accountability.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

"The hole in the middle of my face has to stop making noise."

--An exhausted colleague who, after a long hard day in the trenches, realized he was speaking absolute gibberish.

LITERARY FASHION DESCRIPTION OF THE DAY:

She was wearing red and black and was looking Stendhalicious!

LYRIC OF THE DAY: (Overhead on KCRW radio but not able to catch the name of the song)

"You’re a monster…hell is where you are…till you’re back in my arms again. You’re a monster. The Devil is who you are…till you’re back in my arms again."

SIMILE OF THE DAY:

As regretably inevitable as a pee puddle under a public urinal.

CARTOONS WITHOUT ILLUSTRATION OF THE DAY: (Both actually overheard.)

-He has that disease where you forget, Budweiser's or something?

-My brother and I, it's like we have all the same aneurisms...we say everything the same way...we move in the same way.

STORY I'LL PROBABLY NEVER WRITE OF THE DAY:

A woman with life long bad luck decides to move to the southern hemisphere because the water swirls the opposite way down the toilet there. She thinks this will effect a reversal of her fortune. Perhaps she ends up on the equator--due to some political kidnapping or plane mishap--stranded without passport or possibility of travel on an island at the precise latitude of karmic neutrality.

RANDOM PORTRAIT OF THE DAY:

Though he scribbled incessantly and in the first person, he could never quite shake the feeling that he was his own ghost writer.

JOURNAL OF MOURNING EXCERPT OF THE DAY: Days 4-12

You don't think about it until it happens, but being a son or daughter is not a lifelong identity or role. It is revocable. It ends. With any luck, after the role of being a parent has begun.

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As a tribute to my father, I resolve to finally move into an apartment in which he would have been proud (or at least willing) to have visited me.

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After 2 days of shiva-like activity at my mother's apartment in NY (which she had graciously made available for me and my friends), i return to my place. The presences leave. The absence returns. It strikes me that I cannot tell if I am more afraid that I didn't save a voice message from my father on my answering machine or that I did. I do not think I could bear to hear his voice right now--startling me from beyond the grave. It would be too much.

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Terribly touched to learn that the guys observed an official moment of silence in memory of my father during the Wednesday Night basketball game. Ritual gestures. Far more powerful than words.

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I realize that many of the people at the shiva have never met my father and are merely coming to support me in my grief. I set up a little slide show of pictures of my father on my computer and lay out my bar mitzvah album so people can get some sense of what he looked like and who he was over the course of time.

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In a funny way, never having been married, my bar mitzvah and my father's funeral have been my two special days. The two days that put me in the spotlight in the context of a family. A history. A collective story. It is no surprise that I have unconsciously been associating them in my mind. Prior to last Tuesday, my Bar Mitzvah was the last time I really and truly felt part of a family.

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Looking at the Bar Mitzvah photos. My father --younger than I myself am now--toasting me, just after his separation from my mother. Feeling for the pain and awkwardness he must have felt at this event right after the break up of his marriage and his family. Feeling too for sweet, anxious little boy that I was. Forgiving that boy his tragic transgression in his early twenties. For his having sought some final truth beyond god and man as a way out of facing the stresses of life.

Terrible void that I mistook for refuge.

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The Finite > The Infinite. Because the finite has the one thing the infinite doesn't: Limits. This is, I would argue, more that a sophomoric verbal or logical/linguistic trick. This is actually profound.

It is why the angels would weep to be mortal.

(The true infinite would have to be the sum of the finite and the infinite. It would have to include the limited within its limitlessness.)

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Thoughts of "Ordinary People." As I deal with some of the nagging pettiness and superficial concerns of some of the people around me, I can hear my inner Donald Sutherland crying out to their outer Mary Tyler Moore "For God's sakes. What could that possibly have mattered?!? That was the day we were burying our son."

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Strange thought of the Day: I am eating leftover pizza from like 6 days ago. I am eating food that was made while my father was still alive.

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Strange to realize how alone you are in the relationship to the lost parent...and the specific dimensions of the loss. In some basic way, my brother, half-sister, mother and step mother are all burying a different person.

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Although my father was not religious and not observant, I go to temple on Friday night--in an attempt to find some ritual to honor his passing. I attend --at the suggestion of a friend--an Orthodox service at a temple called Carlbach at 79th St and West End. I go to say Mourner's Kaddish and feel like I've done what I can do.

I have only two assocIations with my father and temple. One is my memory of him going to the temple on the High Holidays after his father's death to honor his memory in the yizkor services. In subsequent years, once he stopped observing this annual rite--out of some combination of atheism and inertia--I, the only remotely observant Jew in the family, would offer to do it for him when i made my annual trip to the temple for the High Holidays. It was the frailest remnant of a patrilineal thread.

The other--and, in truth, more motivating memory --was of attending services with him at the Woodlands Community Reform temple as a 10 or 11 year old boy. The congregation had grown too large for the small building which housed it and the High Holiday Services were held outdoors under a big tent. The only time I ever remember being in temple with my father (outside of my Bar mitzvah and--20 years later--my half sister's bat mitzvah) was this particular Rosh Hoshanah service under the tent. And what I remember is not the service so much (although I do remember the melody of the song "La Sh'nah Tova tick-u tay-vu...May this new year bring blessing, joy, peace, love and brotherhood...La shna'h Tova.") as my father sitting next to me and putting his arm around my shoulder and saying "I remember liking it when my father put his arm around me like this when we went to temple when I was a boy. Do you mind if I do it?"

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Listening to my father's favorite show this morning on NPR and one of my least favorite: Jonathan Schwartz. I have always thought of him as mealy-mouthed, inanely and inarticulately sanctimonious, stumbling and semi-simpering. But I discover that in the space of a single week he had somehow suddenly become wonderfully sentimental, articulate, warm and wise.

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Watching the Wimbledon Mens Finals. The match was really poignant for me. I was thinking of my father the whole time. Tennis was one of our biggest life long bonds. I had watched pretty much every Wimbledon Final with him since I was a kid -or at least, if I wasn't able to be with him, I had called him right afterwards to compare notes. Additionally, the presence of Borg evoked the era when my father and I played together on a regular basis....and reminded me of the span of time...the passing of the torch from generation to generation. Finally and more disturbingly, when Federer collapsed to the ground after winning the championship point, I had a quick, involuntary flash of my father suddenly collapsing two weeks ago. I remember seeing the way all the characters just dropped at the end of the of the finale to Six Feet Under and feeling that these depictions of sudden death--these shocking and final submissions to gravity-- seemed fake and melodramatic. That is, until it happened to my father. Anyhow, that's what flashed into my mind as Federer collapsed to the ground in celebration--momentarily tainting the pleasure I took in his great victory. By the time he got back up and shook hands with Nadal, I had already suppressed that brutal intrusion of reality and I had the impulse to call my father and talk about the match.

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I go for a twilight run in the park to try to affirm my body, my spirit and my life. I run uncharacteristically slowly and steadily, allowing people of all age and shape to pass me at will--meditating as I do so that the going at my own pace is the greatest tribute I can pay to my father for the gift of life he has given me. Most of my problems with running and with life have stemmed from going too fast too soon. Or from being worried about whether or not others were (literally or figuratively) passing me. Or from seeking a short cut because I didn't trust that I could handle the established course. I stay resolutely true to my own stride and find that I am able to complete the entire loop without the usual cramps, aches and exhaustion.

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I notice that my near legendary (and oft mocked) tolerance for mess and chaos has disappeared. Perhaps because I feel more viscerally exposed to the entropy of the universe, I find myself scrubbing away any stain that I see or arranging any cluttered surface my gaze alights upon. I experience the domino effect of dusting wherein one cleaned surface exposes the relative filth of the adjacent surface and so necessitates its dusting as well.

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The occasional intrusions of terrible thoughts ...thoughts of my father's body decaying in the ground. I remind myself that his body is not who he was. I push the thought away until it leaves me alone, until it recedes into what Wallace Stevens referred to as "the hum of thoughts evaded in the mind."

The felicitous poetic phrase only affords so much solace. I know the thought is still lurking there.

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Thoughts about the disorientating effect my grandparents' deaths had on me. They were the first big deaths in my life. And after they happened, I could suddenly no longer remember who in my life was still alive and who was just a memory. Not really realizing this kind of radical absence could interpose itself between me and the people I loved and having the mere possibility of it tamper with everything. I'm not really having that quite as much with my father's passing. I am pretty sure which people are still among the living and which are not. I am just feeling terrible pain about the one who--most notably-- is not. Dylan Thomas's claim that "After the first death, there is no other" is not entirely true. Even though it is not the first death for me, this is the first death of a parent. And even if it is not as ontologically disorienting as the first death of a loved one (my maternal grandmother), it is huge and life-altering in a (w)hole new way.

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Thinking about Freud's claim that the death of one's father is "the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man's life."

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My father is gone. Every morning I wake up to this thought that I shoo away like a yellow jacket who, it turns out, has already stung me.

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It's strange. July 4th was my father's father's birthday. And I would always call him or visit him on that day to reassure him that I remembered his father--even though he died when I was pretty young. Feels really odd not to have him to share that memory with tomorrow. Now he has become a memory as well.

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Posted on 8/23/2007 ( Permanent Link )
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