Mistaken memories, 0: Why I did not kill myself in January of 2010
Stanislaw Lem writes somewhere about the almost obscene element of death, that this dense skein of memories, understandings, this world of a life, is going to rot into toxic gunk in the skull in a matter of days, as though all the reels of all the movies ever shot were to suddenly deliquesce into a pool of cooling tar. Borges writes somewhere about the old bearded man who dies, the last to have worshipped Odin as part of a continuous thread of belief, and a dimension of human experience moves into text and reconstruction, a matter of philology.
My grandmother died the night before last, an hour or two before midnight, Friday, the second of April 2010. She was my oldest living relative. She had Alzheimer’s, and seemed adrift in a fog of memory much of the time — I remember her shock at realizing this older woman at her side was her daughter, this older man her son-in-law, everything changed so violently — but our eyes lit up in recognition, and the last time I saw her we sang songs from my childhood and she carried the tune.
There’s an experimental idea for a clock that works like the terminator, the line that separates day from night as the Earth rotates, but for a flat surface: the border of darkness advances with its edge furred in grey shadow. Perhaps a line of objects which drop off one by one into the empty space. My grandmother’s memories of running barefoot through the woods of Oklahoma, of Hollywood and raising her children, my grandfather and their marriage — time has taken these things, the darkness advancing like the ratchet of a clock to my parents.
Sometimes you can only come to things obliquely, by indirection. In the depths of my depression earlier this year I could seek giving up life, blessedly ceasing to be conscious and awake, but the forgetting of certain small things was too much to face. It was through these that I could even briefly apprehend the dazzling fact of what I was letting go, and tighten my grip.
When my father and I were camping, a late afternoon, the sky leaden, and I stood on an outcrop of grey granite and could feel the coming rain brushing against me like a cat — something in the air, some change of pressure as though a room had gently shifted from cube to rectangle. The rain came and beat the lake’s surface silver and we huddled in our tent. Trees around us breathed in the evening with their black, patient lungs and the air went from gray to a pale celadon green.
In the Llanganates, camping on the boggy ground, when the velvet fog made the night a deep matte black. Lightning bugs began to flicker and swarm over the paramo grass. I stayed out after we’d all gone to sleep, in the dark, watching them flicker, the clouds began to clear, the hidden stars shining gradually through, first Venus only and then many — clearer and clearer, vast systems of stars, tangles, clouds of stars. All out to the soft depth of the Milky Way. And on the clouds of the eastern horizon I could see reflected flashes of lightning, huge, flickering clouds in negative, the glow of lightning over the Amazon.
In the tiny kitchen on the roof of the hostel in Píllaro, where M stirred big pots on the Durex stove with its propane tank, the smell of turnips, onions, carrots, kale, the gritty clay smell of lentils, and the little pitbull Tomé licked at my leg. The few scattered lights beyond the town and then the deep blue ridge crest. Finishing Moby-Dick there, a cheap bulky paperback covered with flowered Con-Tac shelf paper. “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” Closing the book, talking with M as he stirred, the box of matches: Chispas.
Walking with L, imperishable walks: on the great folds of shattered stone of Shetland, her eyes where sea and sky met. The empty parking lots and frozen moments of drifting Scottish nights. The color of her hair as she came out of the green water in Virginia and a dragonfly, bright as copper, settled on her head. With all that happened these things can never be taken away.
Bicycling as a little boy, and stopping to rest on a summer day: the light edging around the leaves of the vine growing on the telephone pole. The air and the leaves, their luminous green, each with its border of light rubbed a little blurry with diffraction. The paths through the woods white and hot in the summer when the pulse of the cicadas was the rippling of heat and the dust hung in the air forever.
And so on, more and others: silent mornings and the faces cities turn to us before they wake. Broken fevers. Songs and books and rivers. It’s the happiest ellipsis I can write: …
For all the failures, then, all the losses and mistakes and inability to go on, these things took place. Ruskin, at the end of his life, after the work and losses and the madness and utter breakdown, when the world had changed without him to degree that he was like a man marooned in time as another might be on the furthest island, wrote his autobiography, the Praeterita. And it ends like this:
“Fonte Branda I last saw with Charles Norton, under the same arches where Dante saw it. We drank of it together, and walked together that evening in the hills above, where the fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves. How they shone! through the sunset that faded into thunderous night as I entered Siena three days before, the white edges of the thunderous clouds still lighted from the west, and the openly golden sky calm behind the Gate of Siena’s heart, with its still golden words, ‘Cor magis tibi Sena pandit,’ and the fireflies everywhere in sky and cloud rising and falling, mixed with the lightning, and more intense than the stars.”
To live, to be a person, remains a hard and strange thing. I’m not much better at it than I ever was. But the flashes, the moments of alignment into constellations: you can sail by these. The moment has its timeless depths, and you can glimpse eternity there, Being, the recognition, whatever you want to call it. It may not sustain; it is not grand. But it is a partway open door.
Why write this here? Because so many writers sustained me, those I mention above and many more. Perhaps this will be useful to someone, somehow. The gift must move, as the saying goes — staying a step ahead of the advancing dark.