February is a bleak month for me. I light a candle for Rochelle, now dead for nine years. On February 11 she would have been 71. On February 15, 1970 we were wed. And on February 14 is St. Valentine’s day, consumer mischief day. So February was a combination of events for us and now I light a candle and remember. I think of Our Town and a bit of dialogue in which 50,000 dinners are mentioned in a couple’s life. February 15 would have been our 39th anniversary. Being young and exuberant, I remember at the marriage license bureau asking the clerk if I could have the page of the calendar that read February 13, 1970. I still have it. It was a very lucky Friday for me. We had 29 years together.
I think that the sound of her voice emptied first from my mind, and I hear only faint notes now and then. I remember her slender hands that changed from wear and tear as a spouse and mother over the years. I remember the pride I had in her appearance, quite the beauty. I bathed in her calm and personal serenity. And it is all gone now except memories which come and go and age and fall into disrepair and breakdown; sometimes they even start up like the last nagging growl of a broken down car. I have gone on. The children have gone on. I have made marital mistakes of an almost tragic kind. I stutter and spit my existence. It is an untidy life I lead with the complicated knowledge that I am not in charge, never was, never will be. I don’t like to play pretend –nor should you.
I am more and more convinced that the body and the mind are one entity and if we imagine we are in parts, like that religious and psychotic trinity, we lose the shifting grasp of things; that we are indivisible. We inhabit our minds and bodies; our minds and bodies inhabit us, and we fuss along the supposed seams that separate them. Stay with me as I reflect and consider, if you have a moment, reader. I wade through life having lost my sense in all directions. No matter where I move in the water I am lost. Life makes me move, not so much personal intention. I think I am doing meaningful things — writing, publishing books, thinking, being in a relationship, being with my son but when one comes down to it, we are aimless creatures in the larger span of things, for it all ends.
Trying to find purpose, intention or meaning in life may not be the question to ask, for it all comes to nought. Perhaps just being, and how hard that is to do! Perhaps people scurry about, fret, worry and work because they are inhabited by something other than themselves, perhaps the very dos and don’ts of society, what we call the shoulds. It takes many of us a lifetime, if that, to come to the realization that it all really doesn’t matter. Why should it matter? I am really beginning to simply perceive that meaning is not all it is meant to be; that being aware tops that; that meaning after an observation or learning is just so much dead meat. That awareness of the moment or the one after that is about all this old man wants at this point in his life. I am working — by not working — on being spot on — love that phrase. A pastrami sandwich and a good pickle and Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda is an epiphany for me if I am aware of it. You say it has no real meaning in life. I say to you: Fuck off. I know what I am devouring and you know nothing about anything if you are that much into meaning. In this universe, cosmically speaking, there is no meaning; it simply is, and you brother or sister have no sense of that, for your geocentricism is so far up your ass you are blind.
So what if the arc of my life reveals an untidy life “lived.” Life is profoundly messy. We don’t even have nature’s fractals — or perhaps we do, but I have not seen them. I seek no order, although that might be pleasant like arranging chess pieces on a board. Although I have no choice in the matter, I go on like you do, but I am contemplating about living my life in untidy fashion, to continue with the mess. I look for no meaning in this mess. I look to live in this mess like an infant squirming pleasantly in his cuddling feces. I imagine how it might be to live without meaning. I struggle to savage with a stick that ugly thing when it rears up. Try living without meaning ,and I don’t mean the moron next door who thinks life is a six-pack and a self-made oil change with Castrol. I self-advocate contemplation without a scorecard, without a purpose, but as Krishnamurti said it, the “awakening of intelligence.”
A few days ago a student wrote me after being in my English class in ’94-’95. What you have to understand about me is that I’m no Mr. Chips. I viewed my teaching years with abhorrence; however, I gave my best knowing full well that I did not belong in this unhealthy environment. I went out and got retrained as a shrink because I didn’t want to come to my death being only a teacher, not what it is in this culture. In any case, she writes: “Your class was a bright light in the mind-numbing bleakness of my four years at HHHH East. I always looked forward to English class, and left feeling challenged and hopeful that there was a world beyond the hills of Dix. Your raw honesty, integrity, and willingness to say what was, sans sugarcoating, was exhilarating. This has remained with me, and will continue to inspire me.” Earlier in her e-mail she says: “You changed the way I experienced literature, art, and life. You taught me to pay attention and to always question, question, question — an invaluable gift.”
If she could transcribe this into another language, the one I am speaking now in this essay, it might move me more to know that she has become aware. Awareness for her and for me is so much more. Her letter had its moment, in me. And so I continue to live episodically, asymetrically — as if i can do anything else, except to enter the flow of it all. I am also very convinced that life is, in fact, a dream. As Krishnamurti might say, “think on these things.”
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