Several weeks now since I heard I had vascular problems; several tests taken and finally the cardiologist reading the “will” to me. Apparently I can live, have lived with one artery closed with plaque, dental or otherwise, a series of mild issues with the heart, the dosage of two baby aspirins to keep my arteries clear, teetering or tottering toward diabetes unless I significantly lose weight and then there are no guarantees and the prediction that I will live a long life. I will remember these weeks, for they are the testing one experiences as one ages, the torero’s red cape before the charging bull. I did not submit or sink into a depressive state, quite reasonable if I had; rather, it was as if I was being stressed, pruned, whittled on by the grim reaper. How many “escapes” does one get in life? I observed myself all the while feeling and experiencing myself. I did not play games with myself; I, in fact, seemed to become stoical, for what else is one to do with one’s mortality at large, and one’s mortality when under sharp and acute attack? It was, I imagine, a kind of acceptance without capitulation. I have been put on notice and that has not been lost on me at all. Never was. And never will be.
Hitting70 made me reflect more, as I usually do, about what intention I wish to give my life; as to meaning, I’ve thrown that out. The question is always: how best to avail myself of the time left, for it all ends? I will struggle with that. Those who do not, who do not reflect on this at all, who slough it off are made of the bread of ignorance is bliss. They are the “lucky” ones. Part of me says that my writing in my later years gives me pleasure and so I will continue until the tips of my fingers grow callused. I want to travel, see Costa Rica, to wit, a fantasy I’ve just chosen of late for all kinds of disparate reasons; it is the fountain of youth of my aging, for it guarantees nothing. Costa Rica is just a place, ah, but a place I project onto, for I like to travel. It will have to be deferred for a while (the years are running out like sand in an hourglass) so I “rush” to weigh carpe diem with tempus fugit. This balancing act, which is a mental chimera of my own making, is the task I set myself.
So you can have an idea of what keeps me canoeing toward the cataract, fear spuming aft and stern, ice on the oars, the roar of the falls ahead is in this snippet sent to me by a book reviewer last week:
Review should be done within a week, again you have mesmerized me with your writing. I sit and read the essays and sometimes I find myself in a place of deep soul searching and discovery, other times I am simply entertained but never disappointed.
Well, now, reader, what moves you? Money, granite countertops and an open floor plan, the next pay raise, politics, Bachmann, Obama, the slurry from the open pits which is American culture at this time. I didn’t need these past weeks to wake me up or to jar my sensibilities; what they have served to do is to simply remove the sand “sleepers” we accrue after a while. I am just more fully awake now, catching my balance, seeing more clearly what I need to do. What greater joy than to hear a reader say that I moved him or her into a place of self-discovery. I’ll match that, as a good competitive American soaked in the conditional lye of America, with what you come up with. Remove the conditioning and one is really shaken by the possibility of being Donald Trump for an hour, the retching that would entail.
In retrospect I feel a mild smugness, for I did not appeal to a non-existent god; I regard that as a man-made folly, a concoction of the human mind that takes up too much space and bends our wills to utter nonsense. I just saw Malicks’ “Tree of Life,” which is his attempt to assay this experience we call life and the whole concept of creation and what god is or is not. At the end it became a soup of religiosity and the light at the end of the tunnel kind of stuff. The platitudes about love, grace and meaning infiltrate the film like basement flooding and I thought to myself and I said to Jane in the theater, “It doesn’t make me feel, it doesn’t make me think.” I face my end alone, having a few close loved ones at my side, but alone in any case. I seek not succor or redemption, heaven or hell, the human projections that nauseate me for they lack courage and hard-thinking about life itself. We come, we suffer, we live, if that, we depart. Why suffuse it with prayer, sin and a call to be saved from sickness? The atheist may be accused of being dogmatic about god’s non-existence but the atheist registers the randomness of it all and bravely goes forth existentially, a kind of Sisyphus. Yes, there are atheists in foxholes.
I have time left, like we all do, moment to moment, regardless of the age. I cannot appeal to anything external for redress — there is only personal redress and I am working on that. I am preparing, if you can for such things, by being aware as my bottom falls away and I experience angst and personal terror of being no more. Nothing can be readily done to assuage aging or illness; all that can be done is in one’s self and in the abiding relationship to another self, for in that is some medicine for the pain. As I slip into nothingness, take it easy with the morphine, and hold my hand ever so firmly. Let me feel or know you are there, as I have been there for you. What more can I ask?
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