Elizabeth was ten years old when I was born; nevertheless, I regarded her as my contemporary. We had a satisfying relationship. She got on with her duties and was seldom ill. She had been there all my life. She helped me through the war. She was a soldier, herself.
When she and I were young, we looked alike and as she grew older she looked like my mother. My mother had been very ill and checked out early, but I still had the Queen. She even showed up at Christmas. Sort of.
Then in my 86th year, when I was busy sorting out two potentially fatal conditions my big sister, Elizabeth, slipped away. Fatal conditions and I are not strangers. Fortunately, medical science keeps moving forward and by the time I get whatever, doctors speak of it offhandedly. Their latest slight procedure may involve heart surgery.
When I looked up Elizabeth was gone. That was very annoying. Just when I needed her there, anchoring me, she vanished.
Other people threw themselves into the Queen project. They watched the 24-hour news and planned their calendar around her funeral. I suppose I was working through the denial phase. If I didn’t pay attention. It wouldn’t be true.
Then our Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau came to my rescue. Some killjoy sneaked a video of him singing Bohemian Rhapsody while Gregory Charles played the piano in a public room in their hotel. A bun fight ensued. Righteous Canadians like Coyne objected. Unrighteous ones didn’t. It was Saturday night, personal time, not intended for eavesdropper’s consumption. And if you can’t sing someone on their way, what has the world come to?
Like everyone else I no longer have the Queen LP, nor even their CD, but in a few minutes I owned – or rented until my password gets lost -2- versions of Bohemian Rhapsody, the original and remixed version. Then I decided why not the whole albums?
So, after a blue day, including a long walk in wind and rain, I set about making a pot of soup, wearing earbuds and blasting Queen into my brain.
I was too old be a rock fan, but I taught high school, so I had to support the kids who saw themselves as Freddie or Mick. I bought the hard rock and my then-husband bought the Beatles. Our children were the right-aged audience, so they didn’t complain.
Elizabeth and I were young in those days, at the top of our game even. In my case, it was a period of time, just before the first fuel crisis, when we were all still living in ignorance,in a beautiful house under a wooded hill with quail. It was just before the night crawler crept in a back window, causing the door to slam and stealing a $12 watch. Elizabeth was still summering at Balmoral and we were swimming in the pool or sailing on Lake Ontario.
When then-husband passed away, we gave away the sailboat, more or less wrecked by wear and sitting at anchor. I had vowed to see to his estate, an act of love if ever there was one. He hadn’t filed/paid taxes for 5-years. If I see him across the veil, I am going to yell at him first.
Elizabeth will be delighted to see Phillip. Remember Elizabeth sitting in Covid isolation at Phillip’s funeral. I understand why she had to leave.
I am prescribing several repeats of Bohemian Rhapsody every night for two weeks and various other Queen songs. I’ll swallow the miracle drugs first, but more miraculous will be the music.
Elizabeth was ten years old when I was born; nevertheless, I regarded her as my contemporary. We had a satisfying relationship. She got on with her duties and was seldom ill. She had been there all my life. She helped me through the war. She was a soldier, herself. When she and I were young,…
According to the news hound in my family, Peel County where I live in Mississauga, west of Toronto, Canada, had the longest lock down on the planet. I don’t know. I do know it was very long. It began when our premier told those over 70 not to leave home. Eventually I discovered that chewing…
There is an ancient Chinese story about an old farmer with one son. They are very poor, so poor that the son has to pull the plow to cultivate their field. Seeing this, a wealthier person gives them a horse. The village is jubilant, “What a good piece of luck,” they say. “We”ll see,” says…
Went to a post-op appointment with my surgeon, said, “I’m so grateful that you and the Trillium Hospital System were able to do the mastectomy so quickly despite Covid and give me a chance at a longer life.”
He said, “Not if you don’t get this heart workup.”
Hum!
On the day, Oct 1 when I woke up from the anesthetic, I seemed surrounded by people, including my daughter and they were all concerned about how I felt. It would take me a while to figure that out, I thought. Not too bad, not like waking up from abdominal surgery, feeling as if someone had hit your belly with a 2 by 4.
“They’re going to keep you in overnight,” my daughter said.
“I’m okay. Why can’t I go home?”
“You developed a very rapid heart beat and arterial fibrillation. You still have it.”
“No, I don’t. I feel fine. I’ve had missed beat a few times. I always feel it. I haven’t had it for years.”
“You have it right now,” she said.
Something was beeping at my left shoulder.
“They’re just waiting for a room where your heart can be monitored.”
All these busy professional people, I thought. They’ve got this so wrong. My daughter had been in health care until her health mandated her retirement.
I had been given something to steady things out, but now they were debating about not giving another dose because it had done what it was supposed to, but now it was doing the opposite. They concluded no more. I lost the plot on whether a doctor signed off on that, but it was good because it was time for more morphine. I sort of remembered what they said because later, I seemed to be the voice of record. I kept reciting it when a new nurse came on shift. Then I totally forgot it.
My daughter was allowed in my new hospital room for 5 minutes. Covid, you know. All my paraphernalia was piled in a corner. I was hooked up to lubricated pads and wires and a machine that rang bells. My daughter, from California, had just arrived the day before but I couldn’t chat with her. No,sir. She was for the chop, out the door. We were having the pandemic of the unvaccinated. She and I were vaccinated and tested and generally certified. All of us were wearing masks – provided by the hospital. Just in case we had actually been wearing our own for a week straight.
She went away.
But it was time for more morphine. Who can complain? It was hard enough to form words.
Oh, the other problem was blood pressure. Typically I have a slow heart beat even after exercise. Typically, I have low blood pressure. The initial drug had slowed down the heart but plummeted the blood pressure -? I listened carefully to what the nurse said. When he finished, I said, “I have a question”. “Yes,” he said, standing ready to explain. I replied,”What is your name again?”
I think he said Walter, but I do remember doing a review later in the middle of the night. I just don’t remember his name.
I couldn’t sneak a glimpse of the incision. Way too much bandage and an evil plastic ‘grenade’ that was squashed for negative pressure and pinned to my gown. Nobody said ‘negative pressure’ nobody said ‘has to be squashed to suck’. Nobody said ‘leaks”. But I knew these evil devices. They liked nothing more than to start spitting. The nurse did something with it out of sight, recorded something and emptied it. I had to shuffle along after him into the washroom, hospital gowned, on a tether of plastic tube with a trailing tall apparatus, and watch what looked like my good red blood drain away. My favourite part was staggering back to bed.
Every time I lapsed into sleep, the machine screamed. All night. Finally, I analyzed it with all my remaining intelligence.
“It does the alarm thing when I hold my breath,” I announced.
I’m not sure it was then, but eventually, someone put oxygen into my nose.
Why was I holding my breath? You should have lived my life!
There were other memorable and either traumatic or funny incidents. The evil drain leaked. My bandaging was blood-soaked, drying into what felt like armour. We raced to the Home Care Office. (Yes, truly.) It was 5 p.m., closing time. That was bad enough, but I had no file. I had just been released – file – not available yet. The first nurse backed away from me, her arm straight out defensively, shouting, “I can’t touch you. I can’t touch you.” She was doing a tai chi move called ‘Stepping back to ward off monkey’.
A second nurse took us into a treatment room. I lay down musing upon my untouchable status. Through the thin wall, we could hear the two nurses screaming at each other. One finally prevailed. She would work overtime, one hour, and do the job. She was not the one warding off the monkey. I will draw a curtain there, without mentioning the quickly hidden text book or ‘negative pressure’. I came out with half my chest encased in a clean wide covering, like a 20’s breast concealer.
We learned much by consulting Dr. Google after that.
But, back to today, I sat in one of the few remaining coffee shops in our city after my appointment, ate sugar and drank chai – not very good chai- hint -not the green siren’s.
I came home. I phoned my sister first because I was whiny, worked some of that out. Then I phoned my daughter on a mountain in So Cal. She helped me see things more rationally. I ate lunch, I took 1/2 dose of lorazepam, I set the timer for 25 minutes. When I woke up, I drank a glass of water and sat down on the couch.
I have always had a good relationship with the dead. They drop in to see me soon after their demise. My father phoned me in the middle of the night, but avoided my questions. I don’t doubt that they still exist. Some of them I am quite fond of. It’s just that at the moment, I am invested in earth and the people on it, including two little Texas girls, who carry my genes.
The doctor had inspected my incision and pronounced it excellent or very good or maybe even perfect. When I caught a glimpse of it changing my clothes, I acknowledged he was right, but I had been very attached to that right breast. It had been the best breast, the other one had already had its problems.
I got to thinking about all the parts of me that had already gone up in my smoke and been reduced to ashes. Surprising how many parts a woman can lose and still appear more or less normal and still have a body that functions. I hadn’t caught Covid, for example.
Yet.
So, I had my own grief before dying session. It involved that those old words, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” This caused a stir among the spirits that had come drifting down to comfort me. You can hardly move in my apartment sometimes.
Patently, I hadn’t been deserted. I found the cancer. I had half a dozen doctors and technicians who proved it was cancer in two weeks. I got a surgeon. My son, and my doctor grandson (on the phone from Dallas) were part of the surgeon interview. My daughter came to care for me. Home Care got progressively better and Dr. Google can answer anything. And such gifts and cards and laughter at least til the morphine stopped.
Sure fine!
It’s going to be a long process letting go of earth, so I’d better see that I get more time or failing that, speed up.
If you are in that process, good luck. You are not alone.
According to the news hound in my family, Peel County where I live in Mississauga, west of Toronto, Canada, had the longest lock down on the planet. I don’t know. I do know it was very long.
It began when our premier told those over 70 not to leave home. Eventually I discovered that chewing chair legs was not nourishing and boldly went forth in search of food. Terrified at my advanced age – I could actually have a child of 70 – but well-informed and masked and hand-washed, I went into grocery stores.
It went on and on. I had a solitary birthday in May and a solitary Thanksgiving and a Christmas on video chat, which made me crazy.
The year swung around and I was back to February when the whole nasty plague thing had hit a year before. My daughter forwarded an item from the New York Times about the Anthropocene Era -the era when we humans are doing our best to wreck the planet and probably bring about the end of civilization as we know it.
I decided to read Roy Stanton’s book Learning to Die in the Anthropocene in which he analyzed how our civilization developed in concert with the geological eras, describing, for example how early humanity fled rising temperatures in Africa, migrating to more temperate climates. He went on to describe the climate warming that is now upon us with catastrophic storms, rising temperatures and sea levels. The summer of 2021 provided so many examples that the argument against climate change changed in a week. Well, okay, so it exists. Now what?
I went on to read a second book by the same title by Bringhurst and Zwicky, as well as The Mushroom at the End of the World, The Collapse of Western Civilization by Oreskes and Conway, The Great Derangement and The Hungry Tide by Ghosh and The Water Will Come by Jeff Goodell
Then I began reading Cl Fi (Climate Fiction). I didn’t know such a thing existed. I read New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson. (New York streets are now deep canals and the high rises have been waterproofed and are still inhabited although some apartments are underwater.) Robinson has a series of such books. NK Jemisin’s books, beginning with The Fifth Season, a series of 3 novels. Flight Behavior by Kingsolver, Leave the World Behind by Rumann Alam.
Suddenly, I realized I was happy. I have never been a happy person. Circumstances mitigated against it. But now I had an idea. Oddly enough, I woke up from a dream with the opening scene in my head. I would set the story in Colombia a hundred years in the future and tell of how the people there were dealing with the physical challenges of the new climate and the attendant civil breakdown. I had, after all, watched what looked like the breakdown of a great democracy during the lock down. I started mainlining books about Colombia, although Gabriel Garcia Marquez had set me up with a wealth of knowledge beginning with A Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in a Time of Cholera.
I could hardly wait to get back to my desk every morning.
Finally in the summer, fully vaccinated, I traveled to California to meet my great grand daughters, their parents and my daughter. I had seen the 4-year-old only once when she was an infant and I had never seen the 2-year-old.
Why are you telling us this?
Because my hand had discovered a knob on my sternum. My hand knew it wasn’t really a knobby bone. It knew and my subconscious knew that after 23 years, I had breast cancer again. But I might never at the age of 85 see these children again, so I went. I came back delighted and wrote without cease. I haven’t watched television since late June.
I knew that the key to the meaning of the book lay in the ‘Breaking News’ inserts between each chapter, but repressed knowledge led me to send the first draft without the inserts to Beta readers. I would say they hated it, but it is more accurate to say they couldn’t understand it.
So, I started all over again, but I also went to the doctor. Having delayed for too long, I was now aware that hospitals were overcrowded with the Covid D Variant and surgeries were being delayed. Not, it turned out if the diagnosis was breast cancer. A month after my first doctor visit, I had day surgery at one of the Trillium Hospitals. Only it wasn’t day surgery because I developed rapid heart beat and Afib. I felt fine, except an annoyingly loud bell rang every time my heart went crazy. I figured out it happened when I held my breath. Funny thing. I endeavored to breathe. And brilliant idea – they hooked me up to oxygen.
So, home again, home again. Two weeks where every day has been a new and different problem. No machine, no loud bell. A lot of deep breathing. First it was pain, then a leaking drain and then constipation. Finally, the drain had done its job and I could stop worrying about bloody bandages, Removing the plastic tube felt 100% better until it didn’t, because now I was free to feel all the bruises and muscle pain and raw places from the steristrips. And it must be said, no matter what your age losing your best breast is a grievous thing.
Today I planned to get back to writing a scene set in Cali, Colombia, after a 1000 year storm. It will be a lunch meeting of the local Narcos to convince them to support the decriminalization of Class A drugs. They are already ‘legal’ in Colombia, but the goal is to legalize them worldwide. The results in terms of loss of life and reduction in criminality as well as easier access to healthcare for addicts has proven itself in such countries as Portugal.
This is one step in the protagonists’ – Salvador and Alena – plans to reduce the risk of attack on their own Hacienda. Someone is clearly trying to kill Alena. Not only are the Narcos threats, so is the government, including parts of the air force, random roaming gangs, Mossad and Alena’s former mother-in-law.
I couldn’t write though. I was wrestling with getting enough fiber into my system. Salad, pears, vegetable soup, metamucil, magnesium, raspberry jelly made with mineral oil and dried fruit. But I did find I could read my research notes. They inspired me all over again, but I also got a glimpse of the size of the project.
Now that I am not going to die of cancer, I’m just going to have to slow down and take it step by step.
The Beta readers were prone to saying, “You seem to have a good novel in your head, but not on paper.”
There is an ancient Chinese story about an old farmer with one son. They are very poor, so poor that the son has to pull the plow to cultivate their field. Seeing this, a wealthier person gives them a horse. The village is jubilant, “What a good piece of luck,” they say. “We”ll see,” says the old man.The son doesn’t know much about horses, but he sets off to ride to their field and begin to plow. Halfway there, he falls off and breaks his leg. The villagers carry him home. What a terrible piece of luck, they say. The old man and the son will starve to death. “We’ll see,” says the old man. Then the ruler of their district declares war and orders all the men to report for military duty bringing their own weapons. It is a war they are sure to lose against a powerful enemy, especially as they have only shovels and scythes for weapons. How lucky you are, everyone says, that your son cannot go to war. “We’ll see,” says the old man.
I have read versions which go on from there to 7 or 8 different circumstances, but always with the same reply, ‘We’ll see.”
At present, I am waiting to see.
After 10 months of Covid isolation, depression, terror, hand washing, mask wearing and prayer, I suddenly felt very happy. I had a dream, which I could see could become a novel. It wrote itself. It was like taking dictation. I loved the characters and the challenge of imaging Colombia in 2120, when sea level rise is wrecking havoc and civilization is going down hill. I especially like the humor of the book, the answer to the question, how do you live in a dying world.
I plugged away at it, eventually producing a revised version, 370 double-spaced lines or about 90,000 words.
On Tue. August 31, 2021, the following happened: -the dentist said I have no cavities, -three of the Beta readers of my novel report they can’t understand it, although it seems as if I have a good book in my head. The other two haven’t looked at it yet -I discover that the funny rib knob at my sternum is a very large breast lump.
By good luck, I get an in-office doctor visit with my GP. I get a mammogram and an ultra sound two days later. I get a biopsy two days after that and am told because of Labor Day, I will get the results on the 14th of September, but by good luck, my GP calls and tells me the cells are positive for cancer and by further good luck I am already signed up for an appointment with a general surgeon, although, bad luck, not until Sept. 20th.
I begin rewriting my novel (I trust You to Kill Me) https://115journals.com/2021/08/11/new-novel-goes-to-beta-readers/ following the advice of the 3 crazed Beta readers, who can’t follow version 2 to the extent that they have lost their minds.. On Sunday evening, I finish for the day and save version 3 on the desktop (thus on iCloud) and on my backup drive. On Labor Day, I begin to open version 3.
It isn’t there. Not on the Desktop, not on the backup drive and icloud hasn’t heard of me. I spend 3 hours with Apple helpers. Sorry dear!
But there is hope. I have printed up to page 211 of version 3 and given it to an uncrazed Beta reader, who has not read anything yet, but she is 3 hours away at a cottage. Never mind. I have 151 pages printed and lying on my desk.
So, I start out again with short breaks to mourn my mortality – I am 85. Short breaks to be comforted by a) booklovers and b) relatives. Short breaks to comfort relatives. Short breaks to lose my mind utterly. Short breaks to lie down and stare.
Today, I have rewritten up to p.150.
The lump has the same steep, volcanic contour as one of the Andes mountains in my book and is spreading out into the llanos or grasslands.
I am not a stranger to cancer diagnosis, having had breast cancer in the left breast in ’98, 23 years ago, and a carcinoid in my ascending colon in 2001, that memorable month, 20 years ago. By the time, it was my turn for surgery, I hadn’t eaten sold food for a month and fitted size 8 jeans.
I threw out the ‘cancer’ wardrobe in a fit of optimism two years ago after my ex-husband died – of cancer..
I miss those carefree winter days vaccinated, taking dictation from some heavenly muse, never having heard of the Delta variant. I thought I was lucky then.
It’s not a good idea to try to change the future, so I’m just waiting to see – and writing.
“But surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” 23rd Psalm
Here is the prologue to my new novel set in 2120, as climate change is undermining civilization.
I Trust You to Kill Me:
Al-Hallaj Mansour, a Sufi master, uttered these words on the banks of the Tigris when he was martyred in Bagdad on March 26, 922.
The charge against him was that by saying ‘Anal al Haq,’ (I am Truth.) he claimed to be God.
Was he saying ‘I trust you to kill me’ directly to God or was he speaking to his executioner? If all of us are God, then the executioner was merely God’s agent.
Mansour was hit in the face, whipped into unconsciousness, and finally decapitated or hanged while thousands watched.
Whatever else, Mansour’s words mean that he accepted his death in expectation of union with the Divine.
This story begins On December 18, 2119, 1200 years later in Colombia, a violent and volcanic land, home of cocaine, heroin and magic realism.
I Trust You to Kill Me should be ready for publishing in in late April. It asks how should we live in this perilous time and answers with laughter and love.
Hope is a thing with feathers That perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words And never stops at all. Emily Dickenson
Imagine being told that you have to spend a year inside and not see your beloved friends and family.
Oh that happened to you too!
It has now been a year and two weeks for some of us. Maybe you as well. I have an underlying condition called old age. I didn’t enjoy those news stories out of Italy last year, when they had to triage hospital patients with Covid or pictures of the ice arenas and churches full of bodies. I didn’t enjoy the stories from New York City of bodies in freezer trucks, or even just in trucks. I got hot under the collar when politicians suggested I was old, so I didn’t count when measured against the economic loss. Having said that, I hand-wrote an addition to my will, opting out of ventilator treatment, with the hope mine would go to someone younger.
Spring did not cheer me up. I was having my groceries delivered and I had finished watching Tiger Joe. Even Schitz Creek couldn’t pull me out of my slump. I had been writing a third book, a second mystery. I couldn’t figure out who the murderer was and I didn’t care. On Twitter, I followed other writers who wanted to encourage me by challenging me or telling me what they were accomplishing. I thought they hadn’t caught the bus, that they didn’t know we were dying in great numbers and nothing else mattered. Summer! Well who cares? It was like the summer of 1914 or 1939. Australia and California were burning as well. Nobody cared. The leader of the western world certainly didn’t.
I wrote blog posts titled by day, as in Day 36, etc. I could think for the hour and half that took me. Then I was gone.
Finally, my province allowed me to see one other singleton household. I saw my sister up the road, and once we knew we could trust each other, my niece, her daughter. I could not go to the U.S. to see my daughter or even to Barrie, an hour and 15 minutes north to see my sister’s large and boisterous family as I usually did at holidays. The three of us soldiered on at our small feasts, with or without video feed.
Then – drum roll please – everything changed. I had written a number of posts about Global Warming and the end of civilization as we know it and suddenly, an entirely new and paradoxically warm and even funny story started writing itself in my head.
The upshot is that I have to get it down before I forget it, so I don’t have as much time to write blog posts. I apologize for that and also for feeling interested in life again, especially if you are still not loving it and not writing or whatever. Rumi says, “There is one thing in this world you must never forget to do,” ( Rumi: The Book of Love, trans. Coleman Barks p.181) What I am learning is this is not a puzzle for serious study and introspection. It is a matter of learning how to play.
(Also I’m so old, I was able to get the Pfizer shot two weeks ago. I apologize for that as well.)
A few days ago, I posted my first discussion of Learning to Die: wisdom in the age of climatechange(2015). In it, I talked about the first essay in this small book “The Mind of the Wild” by Robert Bringhurst. He said that in order to remain sane in this tumultuous time, we need to calibrate our minds by going into the wild. In the second essay, Jan Zwicker recommends practicing the Socratic virtues. Roy Scranton in his Learning to Die: reflections on the end of a civilization (2015) depends on cultural narrative (see earlier posts 115journals.com) and practicing a thoughtful pause before re-tweeting or otherwise passing on hysterical news., contemplative practice and compassion
Most of us, even if we have not had to read Plato’s account of the life of Socrates, know that he administered his own execution by drinking hemlock, subsequent to being found to be an enemy of the state. Jan Zwicker calls her essay “A Ship from Delos”. This ship is, they say the tribute ship that Theseus sailed to Crete, which sails in memorium of the saving of Athens. It sailed away decorated for celebration and no execution can take place until it returns. It has been sighted. Socrates must die.
Zwicker says, “Humans collectively are now in Socrates’ position: the ship with black sails has been sighted.” She goes on to detail facts that show no adequate preparation has been put in place to avoid the ‘catastrophic global ecological collapse ..on the horizon’. (43) Zwicker does not advice ‘duck and cover’ or even ‘shelter in place’. She recommends we each become an ‘excellent human being’ by cultivating Socrates 4 virtues, amending the list to 5 to be clear. As Zwicker interprets them, they are knowing what’s what – with humility, courage, self-control, justice and compassion. Roy Scranton would certainly agree with self-control, while his cultural heritage idea encompasses the others.
IMO as they say on Twitter, knowing what’s what has been a bad problem here in the U.S. and Canada for the last several years. And, yes, sorry, this small country to your north has sheltered Trumpers and anti-maskers, Proud Boys and Jordan Peterson, although they may not have done the same degree of harm. We have only about 24,000 dead of Covid and no assault on the Parliament Building in Ottawa.
The common theme, I have found in the 2 Learning to Die books and in The Mushroom at theEnd of the World: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015) is that they require not more recycling or technical progress, but more character building, more attention so we can endure the future with a measure of grace. (The mushroom is the matsutake, Japan’s favourite.)
The heart of Plato’s portrait of Socrates is ‘How are We to Die?’ Socrates is affable and ironic and demonstrates the 4 -really 5 – virtues that make an excellent man. He is not grieving, although he has compassion for the students he is leaving behind, who certainly are. In the David painting above, Socrates is reaching for the poisoned cup willingly despite his unjust conviction.
The virtues are those that we need at this moment as a pandemic and a serious threat to democracy need to be handled. Of course, global warming needs to be handled as well but this book, like the others I have mentioned is based on the idea that climate change is like Covid-19 in March 2020. It is already too late. The trend is downward toward catastrophe. Our feeble actions may produce some improvement but, as we know 550,000 Americans and about 24,000 Canadians have already died. It is possible we are facing a third wave from variants. Similarly, civilization as we know it is doomed and possibly the race itself. The earth may survive without us. These effects are approaching more quickly than we thought they would. How are we to die?
We die well when we have cultivate the virtues: sophia– wisdom but better translated as knowing what’s what, having the savvy of a person of affairs, yet recognizing there is much we do not know. It is the robust willingness to question belief, to pause as Roy Scranton advised us before we retweet the latest scandal and take the time to question before we magnify an ill-founded lie.
Courage is not just manly spirit. It is the morality and strength required to be aware and not let opinion pass as understanding. We will need physical courage to handle the pain and hardship of civic strife, civil wars, mob violence, death tolls from disaster and pandemic.
Humility is a deep unconcern for the fate of the self. Self-control means not wanting more than enough. Some of us in the economic downturns, such as Covid is giving us, have had that thrashed out of us by events.
Justice, living with the hierarchy of the soul in mind: intelligent governing, warrior safe-keeping and skilled application of virtue, a workmanlike excellence. Contemplative practice works to make us aware of the world and our self.
Compassion is other than a contempt for fear, which leads to denial and and anxiety. Compassion listens and provides companionship in suffering. Awareness of grim truth does not preclude hope. (As I advance into old, old age, which starts at 85, I see that wallowing in despair is not a saving grace. A 95-year-old retired priest once assured me, he felt as if he were going to start kindergarten any day.) Hope involves humility: earth is prodigious and in many ways still very much alive. Our present beauty might fade, but there are other kinds of beauty.
The writer quotes from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace,”The poet produces what is beautiful by fixing attention onto something real… Love, awareness and the desire to respond: these are the distinguishable but inseparable aspects of genuine intelligence.” Later, she is quoted as saying that “prayer is nothing other than the absolutely unmixed attention.”
I never watch CNN now. I gave it up because I can now see such intelligence at work, but for over four-years, like many other Canadians I fixed unmixed attention on the failing democracy to the south. Now I have time to look at Global warming with clearer eyes and to acknowledge responsibility. Weil tells us that our refusal to do so blocks our grief at what’s to come.
“Mourning returns the soul to the community… When we point with our hearts to what we have destroyed, to our addictions and to our self-deception about our addictions”, we are freed into a cleansing grief.
Every family has sayings of wit and wisdom: “Is this where your cookies live?” 3-yr-old English boy, “Not my guinea pig,” one small girl to her sister when their pet dropped dead, “Gee, Lenny, it’s all f—ed up,” 2-yr-old gazing into the engine of a stalled car. I have a new one my family will have to learn. It is at the end of “A Ship to Delos” (71). It is the answer to what did the pilot say as he realized his plane was going to crash?
Many years ago, my mother-in-law, who was not aging well, came for Sunday dinner – roast beef and mashed and brussel sprouts, her favourite. She choked. I leapt to my feet, seized her under her ribs and jerked with all my might. No luck. Her son leapt up and walloped her on the back. No luck. He picked up her tiny body, yelled ‘call the hospital’ and raced for the car.
An ER doctor somehow tweezered out the sprout leaf and she breathed again after 10-minutes, fifteen (?). Whereupon she kicked him.0
I happened upon Roy Scranton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: reflections on the end of a civilization (2015), advice about how to live in its waning days. The title intrigued me for several reasons. It is outrageous, for one, of course, but it just so happened that a 92-year-old friend made a run at leaving the world at the same time. She got such good care from her daughter-in-law and her son for the next 6-weeks, that she got much better, but the care was killing the carers, and it was 5000 ft. up a mountain in winter. She had a crisis in the middle of a bad snow storm, hours from a hospital, so she had to move to a long term care home in Bakersfield. She calls this $6000 a month accommodation, a prison.
This coincidence lead me to write a number of posts, 115journals Nov 2020- Feb 2021 the first six about learning to die as I observed it and what compromised a good death. The last two posts dealt with the book itself. Scranton like many others, who understand climate science, holds out little hope that our race will survive, but he recommends that we take refuge in our culture, the narratives that have sustained Homo Sapiens throughout its 200,000 year history. Since I had built my life on the study of literature and philosophy, it resonated with me as did his experience as a private in Baghdad. I didn’t serve, except in the private army that was my father’s family. We had spies, assault and defensive units and despite indications to the contrary, we four children survived and grew old. Believe me when I say that we practiced dying every day. We had seen what our father could do.
I was surprised to find there was another book called Learning to Die: wisdom in the age of climate crisis (2018). It is a very small book by two Canadian academics, Robert Bringhurst and Jan Zwicky. It contains three essays, the final one is part of the footnote section and refutes the optimism of Steven PInker’s Enlightenment Now: the case for reason, science, humanism and progress (2018) by pointing out its logical flaws and use of questionable science.
Bringhurst, Zwicky and Scranton are not ghouls smirking and rubbing their hands at the bad news. They have looked at climate science and seen the obvious conclusion: it is already too late to avoid disaster. Yes, it’s good to eliminate plastic from your life, stop flying off to Mexico for the fun of it and driving a gas guzzler, but do you really believe ‘they’ are turning your recycling into new products. Might ‘they’ be sending a lot of it to the third world on barges. Canada has had one such barge returned lately. Oddly, when I surveyed my friends – not a large group, to be honest, but informed and intelligent, they all admitted they also thought it was too late. Seven billion of us and another billion every decade.
Bringhurst advises us to seek grace in the wild in his poetic essay ‘The Mind of the Wild’, first given as an address in British Columbia, Canada. He begins by referring to Mark Twain who said, “It was wonderful to find America, but would have been more wonderful to miss it?” He goes on to tell us that the sailors in 1492 carrying their Bibles with them, like even the best scholars, did not hear the Hebrew text laughing to itself, weaving… puns, reversals and half-rhymes to tell us hubris and pride are a widespread disease. ‘But in translation, no one hears the laughter.’
My first experience of a synagogue was, – these fleeting thoughts are almost subliminal, arising from habituation and actually a profound relief and source of joyonce I’d dealt with the shock -‘Why don’t they sit down and stop chatting and act respectful in a house of God?’ Even if the service hasn’t started yet. Not like Church of England people. The synagogue people are jovial and outgoing at weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, maybe funerals, I never went to a Jewish funeral. A joke in the Bible?! Bringhurst has just quoted the bit where humanity is exhorted to ‘be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it’. Oh, unhappy choice of words for ‘upright’ ears. I have spent a 35-year career speaking in public, but casually ask me to speak at Passover dinner.’But I’m not…’ I manage to do as I’m asked but only just. To me that is a kind of wildness, such as I see in African American church services – on TV. I haven’t been lucky enough to have family like the latter, although I’m grandma to a bunch of Rosenbergs.
But even a White Anglo-Saxon can love the wild. When the government took a few feet of my grandfather’s farm to widen the dirt road, he acted as if they had abused his soul. One family lived beyond him and they didn’t want or need a wider road, but look. ‘They’ve moved rocks. ‘They”ve gouged out the slope.
Bringhurst describes the wild as ‘various and rich’ although at least 98% of its species is extinct, ‘so the wild is not only rich and complex but at the same time economical and lean.’ If our species followed its model, there would be fewer than a billion of us.
I have driven across most of America three times, once by myself, once a few weeks after 9/11. Driving west, I got a sunburn on my left arm. And every single day, even on the throughways, I was goggle-eyed at its immensity, its density, its numberless vehicles, its ‘wealth’ of consumer goods. I drove to Chase County, Kansas to see what William Least Heat Moon describes in Prairie Erth as the centre of the county. In the grasslands, I saw crowded pens of cattle getting fed fat and had a delicious steak dinner. The wild punished me by locking my steering wheel. I sat in pitch dark with the light on, reading the owner’s manual for the Toyota Tercel and rereading it until I figured out how to unlock it. (Reef like mad.) Then into the desert. I knew this desert, having come several times from LA to a hot pool near Victorville, so I started out before dawn. I came finally to Fourth St. in Santa Monica and the left turn just before the Pacific Ocean.
I got to know the partially wild ridge trails near Los Angeles – Topanga Canyon, Malibu State Park, Will Rogers, but it was not until 2014 that I found myself in the wilder, forested mountains of Kern County where it abuts Los Angeles County. By then I was flying not driving and requesting wheelchair assistance. I could walk the edges of the wild, but that was all. Fortunately, my daughter could hike the wilderness. She tells me when she is setting out, but since I am stuck in Toronto these days, she also tells someone there and checks in when she gets home. She hikes up to 18 or 20 miles a day, gives me detailed accounts and sends me pictures.
Bringhurst says that in order to stay sane, we have to calibrate our minds by going into he wild. In winter months, I have to settle for ‘virtual’ hikes. Soon I will be able to drive up the Niagara Escarpment to Rattle Snake Point and do the relatively easy climb along the edge, letting the green energy of the woods bring me down to earth.
America is a miracle to me, so huge, so various, so resourceful, so adaptable, so resilient. I really never believed it could be taken down until 2016. In 2020, I knew it could. Because it could be taken down politically, economically and by disease, I lost that faith. My faith in the wild was more resilient, but government was stripping so many protections -both mine, Canadian, and American – that I finally began to get it. Just as Covid testing and Covid protection was too late and too little when it began, it was already a done-deal in mid-March 2020. Nearly 600,000 Americans have died as well as 24,000 Canadians. Before the vaccine and herd immunity can control it, the total for the two countries will be well over a million deaths. So too, our recycling, our pathetic ‘promise’ to keep temperature rise to just over 1 degree centigrade, our efforts to control global warming are doomed. The human body cannot survive a wet bulb temperature of 35 degrees celsius, (Wet bulb – bulb thermometer wrapped in wet cloth for humidity.) no matter how much water is consumed. Sure you can do it one day and maybe more with cooling stations, but not as a matter of course.
Bringhurst uses long term futures to alleviate the reader’s angst. But as my daughter is threatened by California fire, an in-law is flooded in New Jersey, my grandson lives a few blocks from the tsunami line in Culver Ciity/the Marina, the other hunkers down under the stairs in Dallas until the tornado warning lifts and even in Canada, the summer heat keeps us indoors, I have little faith in global warming measures.
The essay tells us that the myth of constant human progress cannot be supported by the wild. We are already asking too much of it and our demands are going to double in a decade. I remember being able to handle that world in the 1950s when we were a billion. Only just. Moving back to a country village 33-years ago, seemed to cool things down for me, but at the cost of a two-hour-long commute every day and fenced-off, tamed wilderness. I could hear packs howling at sunset and peepers singing in the spring, but economically, the hundred-year-old house ruined me.
The author doesn’t think we can save the world. Only the wild can possibly do that. What we can do is save our self-respect. He concludes, as MLK did, that we have a moral obligation, not only to cooperate with good, but also to resist evil and extend civil disobedience to cultural and biological issues as well as unjust laws. Invading the sanctified halls of democracy on trumped up, disproved pretexts doesn’t pass the test of justification.
If we start thinking like an ecosystem, we can go down singing.
Next a post on ‘A Ship from Delos’, an essay on the Socratic virtues as a saving grace, the second in the book.
To prevent the inevitable hysteria, riot and social breakdown, according to Scranton, we must learn to die. In other words, stop. Don’t react. Don’t amplify your own reaction by passing it on. Suspend the stress chain by pausing, taking time to assess the information, to question the source, to debate, to place it in the framework of cultural history, to “rework the stock of remembering”, to let go.
115 journals 