� The Shores of Tripoli | Main | Why AA Is Like Church �
April 04, 2004
Dread
Two summers ago, I was reading Martin Amis in Houston. His book on the crimes of Stalin, 'Koba The Dread' opened a wound in me that has never healed.
In some ways, after reading what I could never finish for breaking down into tears, I felt that I had lost my individuality. It is the acknowledgement that 20 million people can be killed, the enormity of hubris and evil, which destroys the pretension of uniqueness. One cannot be unique when one is dead, one can only symbolize what is missing in what remains. You become a memory like everything else, you fail to arouse reactions, you become one with the spirit world. You are passive when you are dead, and even as you live, in everything you do, you are only preparing those around you for how you persist in memory. Or not.
It is this understanding of humanity that stays with me now. And somehow I think it returns me to the constant angst of adolescence. Nobody understands what I feel - nobody cares about me. It's not that they actually don't, but that the chances that this understanding will persist beyond my contribution to its maintenance are slim. I think that is always true of everyone and the presence and the pressures of love or work makes us forget it. We believe that those who know us will always know us more or less fixedly. We assume the consistencey of meaning. A kiss is always just a kiss. So you kiss those you love, but as time goes by a kiss becomes something else entirely. Your dead body cannot be kissed.
In memorializing my grandfather, I could never tell you what his kiss was. He buried the woman who kissed him most, and if he wished to be known in that dimension of love, he would be eternally frustrated. He would have to go around kissing people. It seems hardly worth the effort, and what can one do to be ever what one was in the days beyond the grave?
I think such dissapation would cause a great deal of anxiety, but I am not particularly anxious. I have my Buddha, I consciously humble myself to the infinite possibilities beyond the dusty concerns of domestic tranquility. I may never be known in any way I wish to be, and this is the case for all of us. We know not the hour nor the circumstances of our death, and we must finally acknowledge the probability that the significance and meaning of our death may completely overshadow the significance and meanind of our life.
I don't know where it is written that a man at middle age comes to contemplate death. I never really bothered to read about Rabbit. But I'm at that spot. As many things have happened over the past 3 years, I've hesitated to call it the period of death, but that is what it has turned out to be not only symbolic.
So as I work through the ethics of death and loss:
- I sit with thousands of dollars in the bank waiting for the inevitable robbery.
- I stand in opposition to the optimism of American youth.
What is to be done about conformity?
More later..
Posted by mbowen at April 4, 2004 06:51 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.visioncircle.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1723