DAY 39) Penultimate Pretensions?

Big words married as a title can be off-putting. Phraseology can do that to us. Many of us easily say ‘what?’ rather than listen for the contextual clues, rather than work it out, rather than go look it up. We seem to want immediate clarity, and obfuscation confabulates. So much so that we can feel a person is being too clever for his boots, too uppity, too pretentious, or too anything but simple. “Like using fancy French words in a menu, in an Italian restaurant.” Poetry! Many of us seldom read poetry. We do not like elusive imagery, let alone enjoy chewing over a rather tough metaphysical conceit. That which requires effort, like delving into an abstraction beyond ‘cosine theta’, might upset angelic predilections. We angle for answers, briefly, or one just moves away.

‘Penultimate’ is one such phrase. At school I guessed it meant great penmanship! (But then it was only my second last attempt.) And as for 'predilections', some of us thought it meant the privilege to vote before our time. But each of us will go by the way of our wants, and just before we die there may well be a life-flashing episode of accountability, but the end indeed arrives for us all. And so, on this 39^th day of 40, I burble as if from an abstract paradigm, for actually to have been in a desert for ‘40 days and nights’ one could but have had metaphysical contact with outside realities. Quite like being here. And tomorrow I am scheduled to open the door, to cross the date-line of my 40 days, and to be forever changed; yet shall in essence likely be seen as “the same.”

We live in the memories of others. Our voices are unique. Our chemistry is unique. Our way with words bears our brand. The way we walk, we talk, we think, we move is known. Even a slight deviation can have someone saying, ‘What’s wrong? What’s the matter?’ And lest we feel otherwise authentically inclined, most of us come up with the ubiquitous answer, ‘Oh, nothing.’

Thing is, knowing someone that way and having a rapport with them are two different things. It takes great trust to tease easily among friends. It takes great insight to relate to another in a flow of discourse that is not self-centered, narcissistic, dispassionate, matter of fact, pragmatic. The more we are able just to let another person be, the more we can be not only ourselves, but enjoy the togetherness. “And we spoke never a cross word between us.” That’s what M’Lady wrote as an end note to the death of her beloved husband, after 47 years of marriage! Truth? Mayhap not utterly, but the conceit lies in the generality of perception rather than in the recorded pin pricks of time. Even John Donne’s compass had its sharp points. And for The Flea to have been honoured it needed first to have bitten both he and she. Such is the conceit. And no, the use of that word has nought to do with pride. It is one of those things we needs work out, by going with the flow.

Rapport has as its essence a counterbalance of tensions, such that dancers protect each other’s backs without words, without being overt. Niceties and pleasantries are not rapport. Favors and gifts are not it either. Compliments certainly do not engender genuine rapport. And ingratiation is an obsequious man’s way to garner more attention than he actually renders. No, rapport is a delicate thing innately understood by the likes of birds. ‘Birds of a feather flock together’ is the proverb (but even then there is the possibility of unfulfilled habituation). No, better to be aware of potential, to care for possibility, especially on a penultimate day; and the day after that too! 

DAY 38) To Be or To Have Been?

Planes to catch have the effect of creating anxiety. Going is a complex thing. One not only has to have all sorts of security checks but then there’s the strange business of losing a day, or catching up a day! Let alone leaving a life behind. Can we get younger, or older, if we were just to keep going round and round the world?(?) And then (this heart-breaking news just-in) a dear friend of mine writes he is stuck with Badly Garlickbreath for a 12+ hour sidekick! One meets interesting people on journeys. And some things we do not catch. Like fate. Among my most memorable of moments was the Titanic actor, Frank McLeod, sputtering “Just my luck” as, useless ticket in hand, he watched ‘his ship’ already leaving. Sometimes it pays to miss a connection. Tonight I might have been packing it in. Tomorrow I would’ve been on a plane. Instead, I shall still be at typing and collating and selecting and editing, and the plane will leave without me. That decision was made last week. I’m a good day ahead, yet this journey is not yet done!

Loitering can make one late. Distractions can veer one of course. Being phlegmatic can create tardiness, disrupt punctuality, and frustrate dependability. Enjoying oneself can also interfere with datelines. We are given to dwelling in the past within our presents and so drag our feet as if walking backward with a sack-full of baggage. Not all baggage is an overnighter on handy little wheels; the weight of things might best not be judged by size. Carry-on baggage can be heavier than checked-ins, even though the more obvious stuff be at first removed. Or am I too obtuse?

It is choices that define our lives. Appointments, schedules, commitments, other’s expectations; such are obligations that keep us scurrying, or not. And ant-like we are on the search for something to fulfill time, even if it be just to catch the next episode of our favorite show. It is so; and so it will be. But when one has chance and one does not take it one may well live to regret the decision for a lifetime. Some choices I’ve made certainly have haunted me for decades!

This journey was to complete a Memoir for M’Lady. My personal day begins around 3:30 a.m. and goes until about 6:00 a.m. I use it to read, edit my work on my own computer in my bedroom, answer e-mails, and publish my Blog. Then I shower and dress for breakfast, and almost precisely at 6:30 a.m. M’Lady brings in rooibos tea. By 6:45 we breakfast. A little cereal; yogurt; a fruit; and one toast with her home-made marmalade. By 7:30 a.m. I am in my wheelchair facing her computer on the 12 person dining table. I smile at the ghosts against the walls who each come alert at the 17 stations with their familiar names, and I sublimate myself entirely to the process of transcribing M’Lady’s ongoing handwritten notes. I amend, add photos, and keep developing her family’s past. A present becomes a future; though we dwell so heavily in the present on the past. It is around 9:30pm that I come back to my personal time, and draft the daily essay, until 11:00ish. 

Then sleep. And so the pattern continues, until one's Memoirs are done!

It has been five weeks here. Thank goodness I am afforded another four! Yet one day I too will have to catch a plane. I shall go with the published Memoir done! (Lest there be other plans in the Big Sky?) I share such domestic details for those who care. Yet like all details, they’re filled with double-entendre, esotery, clandestine allusion, and messages between the lines. Such is the yoking of variables. No joke! And yes, at times `tis more-better to bend such a concept as ‘time.’  

DAY 37) Brain Based Belligerence?

“I’m such a silly twit.”

“Sorry, can’t except that. When you call yourself a twit it means you may call others that too.”

“Well, I can’t help it if I’m an idiot. I forget things so easily.”

“Two things occur when we call ourselves idiots; we create a semantic basis of belief that demeans ourselves and worse, we are ready thereby to demean others too. We lack some compassion.”

“‘Semantic’ basis? And what do you mean; I lack compassion?”

 “Semantics is about word choice; we create habits that make words and phrases less-better for ourselves than more-better. And there are multiple levels to compassion; most of us think of it as expressing sympathy, or even with more feeling, empathy. Compassion cares for and with, yet allows as is. You have compassion aplenty!”

“Apparently not enough if I call people idiots! Sympathy, empathy, compassion; the difference?”

“Sympathy is a feeling for; Empathy is a feeling with; Compassion is having understanding.”

“Hm. ‘Understanding’; not ‘feeling’?”

“Feeling for, with, and part of everything is compassion; it allows for forgiveness of the self first, and thereby everything and all else for ‘whatever’; although that does not excuse, condone, or permit terrible things, or even silly things, ha! It just allows for an understanding of how things are as they are.”

“Okay. Why do I forget things I’ve known all my life? Or why do I forget everyday things like right now? I can’t remember a date! Or where I put something. I need my little routines, you know, or I cannot function!”

“You think you cannot function, so you don’t. If you thought you could adapt, you would. We each are what we think we are, even though it takes lots and lots of practice to think oneself into a newly habituated person, ha!”

“Still, I’m just worried I keep forgetting things.”

“M’Lady. You are physically and emotionally exhausted. You are 90 years old, and you keep the pace of people not even half your age. You’re alert and caring and thoughtful and considerate, and you run this house and tend to meals and then insist on doing the washing up too. We work at this Memoir from 6:30 a.m. when you greet me with tea until 8:30 or so every day, and even through our meals or breaks we keep engaging in conversations like this. Today and yesterday you wrote about four pain filled deaths and three weddings. We also did the Fairy Party day! And the Vargo caravans episode! No wonder you are tired! Your brain is like a multi-complex with a kazillion secretaries all scurrying to the distant reaches of time to gather documentation, and then their losing some of the pages on the way back! The short term secretaries have taken a holiday! You don’t focus on them much. But they’ll be back when the distance runners are done! You certainly care enough about them too.”

She smiles at me. “Thank you for that. I feel much better. Now then, let’s get back to work!” 

And as she gets up, gathers up some of the tea things, and leaves some things to me, I look around at the ghosts in the house, and wonder just who is listening?

   

DAY 36) Just Desserts!

“You’ll get your just desserts,” Nancy joked. It seemed directly related to the end of dinner, given my waiting for her to finish her plate, but in fact it was a summation. Life is not fair! One person gets away with murder; yet 24601 Jean Valjean gets hounded for the rest of his life for stealing a loaf of bread? There is no equity. There is no equanimity. There is just ‘what is’. So it is for all when cast in our real life’s Les Miserables. And our lessons are learned, or not. It is the intent with which we live that makes the difference. One person’s practice may be to make each and every thing interesting; another person’s may be not to be bored, which is quite different.

And rewards are not on par with effort. The reward best be in the effort itself. One person will swim an ocean with a letter between his teeth, fight off sharks, the tigers on shore, surmount the steepest cliffs, o’erstep the sharpest of crags, and finally arrive at the abode of his beloved to lay the missive at her feet. “What took you so long,” she may say. “Why didn’t you just mail it?”

Manuscripts are like that. One person will make a kazillion bucks with a fortnight’s plotline as thin as a thread, yet put enough weight on it to provide sufficient suspense, and the public will search out his wares. But another will spend months if not years of research, live the work of a lifetime, self-publish the result, and hardly garner any notice at all. Livingstone needed to have the world aware he was in Africa. Stanley needed to have the world aware he was going after him. The rest is history. But of the journey of M’Lady’s life, with its 90 years worth of arduous and torturous and unfair topsy-turvy advent after advent, what readership does she have? Who responds? The tome most likely will be flipped through by most of her family, “but who on earth nowadays reads 300 pages?” (Even if each unique page is liberally enlivened with pictures?) We look for how a thing, anything, relates to ourselves, our own name, to our own interests, or we devalue its worth. Quite naturally, disinterest springs from the self. Taking is easier than giving.

Yet we have this expectation that one should get one’s just desserts. Positive or negative, we bandy about with karma as though it were a tally sheet, a bank book, or a chequing account. And most of us are easily in debt. We think we can get away with our secrets. We think we can draw the curtains on the passers-by. We think we have skeletons in the closet that no one hears rattle. We think we are inviolate in our own cocoons. But we forget we are in metamorphosis. We are in the process of becoming greater than our immediate paradigm, aware of it or not. Thing is, it seems to take so slow! Am I really a caterpillar; not a worm or a slug? How about a snake? It sheds its skin. Or what about a...? Yet whatever we chose with which to identify, we are affected by change, intrinsically motivated or not. And we each grow old and die. Life in the meantime is not fair. Some of us are lone wolves; many of us, they say, are sheep. Stasis is for rocks, but they break down too. There is no stasis. Yet few wake with intentions to be more-better than afore.

Thing is, one’s just deserts are adjudged by others in terms of their own reference. We hang, or we deal out life sentences. We give accolades, a plaque, and a statue in the town square. Others just walk on by. Joshua Bell played his Stradivarius in the New York subway, and people hardly noticed. Many others paid hundreds of dollars to hear him in a concert hall. Indeed, `tis best to do what one does for the very love of doing it. Therein might just be found one’s “just desserts”!   

DAY 35) Your Days Are Numbered!

The ants have it. They found a way into the frozen dinner and then invaded the Tupperware container en mass. But first it must have been the lone scout. He or she was the one to come across the prize, had followed the scent, had stumbled over it, or had purposefully set out on an adventure, but find it the ant did! And then it was not enough simply to gobble its fill and keep a check for exactly where to find the treasure when it returns, oh no, it had to go brag about it. So the other ants heard about this massive mother load and they followed the trail and, bingo! And just how long they’d been at it, gorging themselves, is anybody’s guess, but an entire town of ants had pretty well relocated from their usual neighbourhood and made themselves at home in the new watering hole by the time M’Lady found them. They each had had their moment.

Industrious critters, aren’t they? They seem to overcome every obstacle, gnaw their way into every container, and populate one’s universe with their creepy-crawly-ness. Rather difficult then to ‘go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise!’ Proverbs 6:6 has an injunction against us dismissing ants. It is very seldom one sees one at rest. They move on!

Doing has its own rewards. Not doing does too. It is awareness that differentiates. As I type I am of two minds. There is a live and frantically buzzing bee caught in the spider’s web over the light in my bathroom. I watched it zoom toward the light. It bashed itself up against the dome of the thing, over and over. I was going to take a glass and rescue it but then it got caught in the thread, and besides, at this late hour, with the doors all locked in the cottage and the screens on the windows, setting the thing free will be quite a chore. Best to let nature take its course? But was it nature that had us washing those ants down the drain, spraying the kitchen, wiping them up? Was it not little Bitty’s first outing? Did his parents not fearfully wave him goodbye when he begged to go with the bigger ants on their wild escapade? And are his folks not now still up, bothered in their warren, checking anxiously every exterior sound for his arrival? Ha! We anthropomorphize easily, we humans. I doubt that ants see us as humans at all. Nor do bees feel for us, either way.

But we humans feel deeply when our loved ones are no longer. There are heart wracking sobs and self-recriminations and deep sighs of discontentment with our lot. “Don’t do this to me,” we say of the dead. Especially if they’ve not yet lived a full life. We are distressed and shocked and stupefied. One minute one’s child, one’s loved one, one’s friend, one’s family member was here, and the next you hear by phone, or by word of mouth, or by mail that, well, they’re never coming back. And never is forever.

M’Lady’s memoir is at a painstaking retrospective of too much loss. The sheer volume and weight of incident after incident would be so very dreary were it not for the intermittent fun of fairy parties, an arrest for taking a late night pee in a public place, a party to go to here or there, the treat of trips and expeditions and ventures that bring one back, safe! But as for the ants, for the bee, or even the midge flying around my desk lamp right now, their moments are numbered.

For which of us does it not remain so?

 

DAY 34) String Theory!

A simple string can stop one in one’s tracks. Dogs, trained to stay in their yard by a thin electric wire, will soon enough not cross over the barrier, even when it is turned off. And in the army, in the jungle or the bush, even the slightest hint of thread near one’s path was enough to stop an entire platoon up; no one wanted to be responsible for tripping a trip-wire. Yet some threads betwixt people are like a silvered connection of psychic awareness. Special. A friend of mine and I often jabber at each other about it; we have a rapport that reaches across time and space. Yet with others we may get strung out, strung up, tied in knots, or frustratingly entangled. String Theory connects us all.

The very complexity of our universe means we are often mistaken about our assumptions, insights, assertions, beliefs, connections, and security. It does not take much to untie a bow, cut a cord, or fray the texture. It also does not take much to have things all tied up. Seemingly secure. String Theory purports to do just that; to be an answer for things. It at times imperially is announced as a Theory of Everything. It is easy to trip up over a word like ‘theory’. (Never mind a big word like ‘Quantum’!)

From bitty-bits through their three basic ingredients of Electrons that gyrate around a nucleus of Neutrons and Protons, we are structured so that a kabillion-billion-kabillion of Atoms makes up each of us. Yet even those three teensy ingredients of an atom are subdivided. The electron is made up of leptons. And the neutrons and protons are made up of quarks. (And to be imbalanced in measure is to be thought of as being quirky, ha!)

Interesting that the subatomic universe is known as The Standard Model; (my ‘sense’ is that it’s automatic!) Physics has it that there are 12 fundamental building blocks making up our atomic soup, and that there are forces of interaction between them. 6 Quarks interact with 6 Leptons. Quark names are so very creative! Up; Down; Charm; Strange, Bottom; and, Top. Leptons have much more exotic names, like Electron; Muon; Tauon; and the triplets, The Three Neutrinos. (Ir-religiously, they’re rather like names for 12 apostles!)

Thing is, ‘The Twelve’ don’t just integrate in accord; they tend to co-habit according to four fundamental forces: Strong or Weak Nuclear force; Electromagnetism; and what sucks most of all, Gravity. But these 4 forces don't gather in spaces just unto themselves; they are moved by Particles of Light, those grand mediators of flow among them all, called Photons. The Four Forces are thus made up of fundamental photon particles that act as integrators of ‘The One Force’. Active interchange of our photons attract, like filings to magnets. Strong Force is invigorated by Eight Particles known as (you guessed it!) Gluons. But Weak Force enervates, no thanks to Three Particles, the W+, the W- , and the Z. (Or a minus and a plus still equals zed! Ha!) The lone particle that sucks? Graviton!

String Theory has it that an atom’s electrons oscillate multi-directionally, in constant flow. There is no sticking place. And so the vibration of the universe is in an accord with each and everything, responding (or reacting) in a state of rapport. Point is, if you’re still reading this, and following along, and finding it interesting (let alone fascinating) then we have a rapport in this moment. Stronger yet, it might even engender a tangential response, if not a like minded one. But if the mind has wandered into a ‘WTF?’ (Why Too Fuddled?), then our rapport, for the moment, is not ready, not right, and awaits...?  

DAY 33) Forwards or Backwards?

Once we go through a door we either take a peek at a new world and keep moving, or we retreat and rearrange, at best, into that which is our old habit. Dorothy said us much, “There’s no place like home!” and she retreated from an intensified-existence back to the ordinariness of the farm, albeit with more appreciation. Yes, she had contributed with her life to the people she met en route, but then left them to their own devices. Her Toto was back on his leash! So too did Alice. She slipped away from her restraining Governess and followed the immediacy of the free rabbit, only eventually to return to the past. Where are Alice and Dorothy at 50; at 60; at 90? Was their insight sustaining enough to last them through the mundane, the domestic, the chores, the obligations, the expectations, and the traditions of their ‘oh so every day’ society? Can one make ordinary time special? A way of life?

Whenever in some unique place, like on a beach or an island or a ship or in the magic of London I've looked at the dissatisfactions of the people who work there and wondered if they perceive the privilege of being where they are at, appreciating what they've got, feeling the magic that I feel since I am usually there on vacation and thereby must needs too soon to return to my ‘normal’ same-oh-same-place. How come ‘they’ get to live there?

Why is it we soon do not appreciate what we have, take for granted the milk in the fridge, the taps that open to give water, the stove that heats, the light bulb that clicks on? Many a person driving a Jaguar or Benz looks grumpy, or worse, haughty. Not everybody. But many. And most people appear to delve into a focus and concentration on the minutiae of our existence; the weather, the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the things we must see. Not that I dismiss these necessities; it is just that I choose not to make them something to serve.

So, upon reflection, what is it that I am indeed ranting about?

“We are pregnant!” was announced today by M’Lady’s granddaughter. They are going to have their second child; Nancy’s fifth great-grandchild. Unto us a child is born. Unto us. And it shall be called... a human being. Unto it will come all the lessons of its ilk, kith, and kin, be they watered down as it may, and be they mixed with the chronology behind each of the parents. And this child shall speak with an accent and fill its head with the needs and wants of its society; how can it be other?  As it is on earth, so do we make our heaven. What chance to stay in the magic possibilities of Alice for this child, even if it does break free from its parenthood, its societal expectations, it emotional inculcations? What chance for this child to see the Kingdom of Oz? Not as a birthright or as a natural state of being, but as something deeply to be experienced, treasured, and contributed toward. Or will it walk with heavy tread and use up the resources, impact others, claim rights and privileges, and seek to control its environs as a statement of its very existence? We seldom are actually harmonious with life; we struggle to make it more-better. It is the struggle that wearies me; I much prefer simply better to flow.

I think it was the existing two-year old that got to me today; the one who is soon to have a sister or brother. The constant self-centricity of the child absorbed all four adults’ energy. And so much control was needed to keep the poor child in check. The wailing and yelling and tantrumming got to me; I wanted peace. I did not want to reason with it. I certainly did not want to have to babysit or control or even spend too much time amusing it. Selfish of me, I know, but it is not my child. I did not choose it, make it, or even want it to visit me. And though it be sweet and adorable and full of potential, I am not the one with the patience for repetitive domineering. I would rather dance with an adult than play with a child. I would rather converse with a soul in rapport than throw the ball back and forth. I would rather flow in accord than wrestle with wants and needs and expectations.

Upon reflection, I would rather be a Thoreau than a Romantic fop. Give me ongoing new vistas to explore; not a perpetually revolving door! But how to say that much to our inner children while caught up in their fundamental infancy? Children want what they want, and they want it now. Give them the key; they still can’t open the door. Not yet. And once they are old enough to do so, do they step beyond their habitual paradigm, keep adventuring, or do they retrench into the diurnal quotidian?