I read something today that gave me pause. I won't link to it here because I don't feel it's the sort of thing one ought to link to, however important the sharing of knowledge and life and personal experience. I will say, however, that it has got me thinking of that very grim, difficult (for so many reasons!) topic, which is to say... death.
I didn't want to write on this at first, mostly because I had the notion that it's still too early in the life of this blog for certain kinds of heart-break, but then I realized that's just silly. My father has been stressing the unpredictability of death every day of his life — thanks to this, there's hardly a moment now when I don't wonder if I've somehow, inexplicably, lost him — and setting parameters for when I ought to talk about something that remains defiantly without parameter would be, I think, missing far too much of the point.
In fact, today started, rather abruptly, with a death entirely unrelated to the one implied above. At 8:30 this morning (I was still in bed, but not asleep), there was a violent pop and an eruption of dogs barking. The power went snapping out all over the house (and, it turns out, all up and down the street). A squirrel, dashing madly from one telephone wire to another, had leapt full throttle into a transformer box, which, housing live, uninsulated currents of electricity, exploded on the spot. My town being low-crime and mostly sleepy, the fire department had a truck on the scene within minutes. They removed one very small, very charred body from the damaged box and had our power restored by 9:45.
Shocked though I was by the unexpected violence of this event, I still managed to grouse to my mother about my inability to check e-mail. She responded with the following:
Ignoring, for a moment, the unlikelihood of this particular anthropomorphism (even if that squirrel were capable of communication in English, it would no doubt have been foiled by the still-recent condition of its non-existence), I felt immediately horrible. My mother was right, of course. As I write this now (and as I paced my living room this morning), I am not dead. There was, I'll admit, a considerable period of my life during which my first instinct might have been to envy the squirrel (if not its method of self-destruction, then at least the end result), but I am no longer that girl (however necessary she was to my overall growth and development), and I'm fairly certain I now value what life is left for me. Unfortunately, this has the added effect of making death seem cruel and disruptive and unwelcome, however thoroughly unavoidable.
So, death of squirrel firmly in mind and feeling genuinely remorseful, I managed to find my way to a truly draining Helen Simpson short story, the overwhelming message of which was something along the lines of 'we're all going to die, not least because we refuse to change the way we live our lives' and 'as one gets older, one starts to view life as a postponement of death, and therefore becomes grateful even for plane delays'. Helen Simpson is a fantastic British author whom I absolutely adore, and she is responsible for one of the most beautiful mother-son short stories in existence (Early One Morning; I wept at the end of it), but today she succeeded in further unsettling me, and I reacted not unlike her willfully ignorant main character. Which is to say I got a bit dour, attempted to shrug it off, consumed some food, and thought about Eva Marie Saint.
This proved successful in the short term, but then, shortly after dinner, I wound up reading something absolutely heart-rending and was struck numb with vicarious grief. I realized that if I am to go on as always (which I, being young and ridiculous and fairly devoted to not being miserable, undoubtedly will), I need, at least, to recognize the feeling, set it down and measure its weight.
There was a period in my life (in no small way tied to the above-mentioned period in my life) when I was obsessed with human tragedy. I believed the more I knew about it, the more complete I would be as a proper human being. I believed the best (most brilliant) sort of people were fundamentally damaged and that my own lack of damage made me insufferably naïve, unworthy of attention or respect. I attempted to amend this lack first by reading everything I could find on war and poverty and genocide, and later by driving myself as near to madness as I could manage in an effort to claim some small sliver of loss for myself. Clearly neither solution served its purpose — not least because said purpose was ill-conceived and its necessity ill-perceived — but only recently have I begun to understand the complexity of why.
We are, for the most part, desperate communicators. We want to know what has happened and where and why and when, and we want to know as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. We believe this knowledge will somehow complete our understanding, not only of the world we inhabit, but also of ourselves, and we therefore find it convenient to equate what we hear (read, see) with our total appropriation of it. Granted, we bicker over the accuracy of news sources and gossip and rumor, we grill our friends and teachers and therapists, we master the skeptic's brow. But we also seem, for the most part, to act as though it is possible to indisputably know something, given the right sort of fact acquisition.
This illusion shatters in myriad little ways, every day, but it is well and truly vaporized in the face of tragedy. When something devastating happens, we are thrust back into ourselves and the stubborn idiosyncrasies of our individual perceptions. Horrific situations strike us as intensely, irredeemably personal, wholly resistant to outside comprehension. When we are outside a catastrophe, looking in, we want every piece of information we can find because we want to know what it was like. When we are inside, looking out, all the people looking in seem to us like naïve, if well-meaning, alien lifeforms. No matter how sympathetic we might be to their will to understand, we believe such understanding — vicarious as opposed to experiential — is impossible.
This last is likely true. We will never perceive the world through any lens but our own, and no matter how many other perceptions we expose ourselves to, we will only be able to claim bare, heavily qualified, approximations of them. We are inherently untouchable to each other in this regard and our comprehension of the world is inherently limited.
Yet we persist in our efforts to communicate. Because death is ever imminent and (in most minds) permanent. Because we realize, on some level, that even bare approximations, however pale and pixelated alongside the real thing, expand the fabric of human consciousness, heighten our raw capacity to react to each other with genuine respect and compassion.
However sorry I am that my hearing or seeing or reading of death is painful evidence of its having occurred (particularly when it strikes closer to home than I might have anticipated), I am decidedly not sorry to have been trusted with the knowledge. I accept that my understanding of most things will remain eternally peripheral and that my understanding of some things will remain fundamentally (infuriatingly) inexpressible. What inspires me from day to day is not some questing desire to fully apprehend the dimensions of existence, but rather the quiet fact that we have not grown so hopeless in our difference to cease interacting and stripping ourselves bare.
Our views may be at times obstructed, but it appears, at least for now, that we would rather be reminded of our flaws and limitations than shut our eyes entirely and think ourselves alone.
I didn't want to write on this at first, mostly because I had the notion that it's still too early in the life of this blog for certain kinds of heart-break, but then I realized that's just silly. My father has been stressing the unpredictability of death every day of his life — thanks to this, there's hardly a moment now when I don't wonder if I've somehow, inexplicably, lost him — and setting parameters for when I ought to talk about something that remains defiantly without parameter would be, I think, missing far too much of the point.
In fact, today started, rather abruptly, with a death entirely unrelated to the one implied above. At 8:30 this morning (I was still in bed, but not asleep), there was a violent pop and an eruption of dogs barking. The power went snapping out all over the house (and, it turns out, all up and down the street). A squirrel, dashing madly from one telephone wire to another, had leapt full throttle into a transformer box, which, housing live, uninsulated currents of electricity, exploded on the spot. My town being low-crime and mostly sleepy, the fire department had a truck on the scene within minutes. They removed one very small, very charred body from the damaged box and had our power restored by 9:45.
Shocked though I was by the unexpected violence of this event, I still managed to grouse to my mother about my inability to check e-mail. She responded with the following:
"Ha! Your power is out, but think of that poor squirrel. That squirrel is saying, 'You think your life is tough, but what about me? I'm dead!'"
Ignoring, for a moment, the unlikelihood of this particular anthropomorphism (even if that squirrel were capable of communication in English, it would no doubt have been foiled by the still-recent condition of its non-existence), I felt immediately horrible. My mother was right, of course. As I write this now (and as I paced my living room this morning), I am not dead. There was, I'll admit, a considerable period of my life during which my first instinct might have been to envy the squirrel (if not its method of self-destruction, then at least the end result), but I am no longer that girl (however necessary she was to my overall growth and development), and I'm fairly certain I now value what life is left for me. Unfortunately, this has the added effect of making death seem cruel and disruptive and unwelcome, however thoroughly unavoidable.
So, death of squirrel firmly in mind and feeling genuinely remorseful, I managed to find my way to a truly draining Helen Simpson short story, the overwhelming message of which was something along the lines of 'we're all going to die, not least because we refuse to change the way we live our lives' and 'as one gets older, one starts to view life as a postponement of death, and therefore becomes grateful even for plane delays'. Helen Simpson is a fantastic British author whom I absolutely adore, and she is responsible for one of the most beautiful mother-son short stories in existence (Early One Morning; I wept at the end of it), but today she succeeded in further unsettling me, and I reacted not unlike her willfully ignorant main character. Which is to say I got a bit dour, attempted to shrug it off, consumed some food, and thought about Eva Marie Saint.
This proved successful in the short term, but then, shortly after dinner, I wound up reading something absolutely heart-rending and was struck numb with vicarious grief. I realized that if I am to go on as always (which I, being young and ridiculous and fairly devoted to not being miserable, undoubtedly will), I need, at least, to recognize the feeling, set it down and measure its weight.
There was a period in my life (in no small way tied to the above-mentioned period in my life) when I was obsessed with human tragedy. I believed the more I knew about it, the more complete I would be as a proper human being. I believed the best (most brilliant) sort of people were fundamentally damaged and that my own lack of damage made me insufferably naïve, unworthy of attention or respect. I attempted to amend this lack first by reading everything I could find on war and poverty and genocide, and later by driving myself as near to madness as I could manage in an effort to claim some small sliver of loss for myself. Clearly neither solution served its purpose — not least because said purpose was ill-conceived and its necessity ill-perceived — but only recently have I begun to understand the complexity of why.
We are, for the most part, desperate communicators. We want to know what has happened and where and why and when, and we want to know as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. We believe this knowledge will somehow complete our understanding, not only of the world we inhabit, but also of ourselves, and we therefore find it convenient to equate what we hear (read, see) with our total appropriation of it. Granted, we bicker over the accuracy of news sources and gossip and rumor, we grill our friends and teachers and therapists, we master the skeptic's brow. But we also seem, for the most part, to act as though it is possible to indisputably know something, given the right sort of fact acquisition.
This illusion shatters in myriad little ways, every day, but it is well and truly vaporized in the face of tragedy. When something devastating happens, we are thrust back into ourselves and the stubborn idiosyncrasies of our individual perceptions. Horrific situations strike us as intensely, irredeemably personal, wholly resistant to outside comprehension. When we are outside a catastrophe, looking in, we want every piece of information we can find because we want to know what it was like. When we are inside, looking out, all the people looking in seem to us like naïve, if well-meaning, alien lifeforms. No matter how sympathetic we might be to their will to understand, we believe such understanding — vicarious as opposed to experiential — is impossible.
This last is likely true. We will never perceive the world through any lens but our own, and no matter how many other perceptions we expose ourselves to, we will only be able to claim bare, heavily qualified, approximations of them. We are inherently untouchable to each other in this regard and our comprehension of the world is inherently limited.
Yet we persist in our efforts to communicate. Because death is ever imminent and (in most minds) permanent. Because we realize, on some level, that even bare approximations, however pale and pixelated alongside the real thing, expand the fabric of human consciousness, heighten our raw capacity to react to each other with genuine respect and compassion.
However sorry I am that my hearing or seeing or reading of death is painful evidence of its having occurred (particularly when it strikes closer to home than I might have anticipated), I am decidedly not sorry to have been trusted with the knowledge. I accept that my understanding of most things will remain eternally peripheral and that my understanding of some things will remain fundamentally (infuriatingly) inexpressible. What inspires me from day to day is not some questing desire to fully apprehend the dimensions of existence, but rather the quiet fact that we have not grown so hopeless in our difference to cease interacting and stripping ourselves bare.
Our views may be at times obstructed, but it appears, at least for now, that we would rather be reminded of our flaws and limitations than shut our eyes entirely and think ourselves alone.
