We live in a universe of our own making. Accept or deny
Some thoughts on the myths of our lives, nature, and the death of my father.
The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on.
― John Nicholas Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
One must say Yes to life and embrace it wherever it is found — and it is found in terrible places. …For nothing is fixed, forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. — James Baldwin
Yet what is life if not a myth we create each day?
I wrote an essay recently that included something like this: …I find myself fascinated with how we live our lives; I am challenging my own outlook on life, or at least trying to make sense of it, as I get older. Everyday that I wake up I sense my body in a bed. I hear sounds, sometimes. I feel my heart beating. I create a narrative for how the day ahead will unfold. I wrestle with the myth of me.
I am almost fifty nine years old. The tattoos on my arms and shoulders still look fresh yet when I raise my hands the skin of them appears striated, rugged veins create empty fjords. A sprinkling of tiny liver spots point to their future and mine; a finger on my right hand sports an arthritic second knuckle, a result of my bass playing style I reckon. It looks like a small barren mountain that a miniature Mars Rover might be sent to explore; at night I am awoken by a dull pain in my right knee, the declamation of a joint that I injured years ago while exercising. My doctor would like me to lose twenty pounds. I do not take any prescription drugs, never have. My face sports perma-stubble.
I have too much hair; although greying, it is not thinning. I have my grandfather’s hair. His was thick, sleek and platinum until the end; I want that. My teeth have been, shall we say, maintained, so unlike Martin Amis, who told of his dental problems in his autobiography, I have no current fear of cancer of the jaw brought on by a half-century of decaying roots. I do have one unbridged gap; although mine is of a far lesser scale than the gap in the life of Karen Green, when she describes in her book, Bough Down, the loss of her husband David Foster Wallace: “The hole is more familiar than the tooth…”
Cancer doesn’t appear to run in my family with but one exception; the one that all men eventually get if they live long enough: prostate cancer. Philip Roth in his novel Exit Ghost has Nathan Zuckerman describe his daily covenant with the disease: “I listen to music, I hike in the woods, when it’s warm I swim in the pond, whose temperature, even in summer, never gets much above seventy degrees. I swim there without a suit, out of sight of everyone, so that if in my wake I leave a thin, billowing cloud of urine that visibly discolors the surrounding pond waters, I’m largely unperturbed and feel nothing like the chagrin that would be sure to crush me should my bladder involuntarily begin emptying itself while I was swimming in a public pool.”
My grandfather died with prostate cancer, not of it, and my father did too as his lung cancer, developed after years of smoking, spread like a rhizome throughout the lymph nodes of his body.
The two baby aspirin I take daily. I hope to ward off inflammation in my arteries; every little pinprick of chest pain leads me to neurotically self-diagnose angina but a short hike on the treadmill at the doctors office, wires and sensors pasted to my chest, sets my mind at ease. I wear one contact lens in my right eye for long distance sight. The left eye remains unadorned; it enables me to stare at a computer screen or read a book without using bifocals. First thing in the morning both eyes look rheumy. After showering, my right eye looks like a map of England’s unimportant B roads with an occasional cul-de-sac. I have my mother’s calves and my father’s nose.
The doses of Milk Thistle I take to cleanse my liver are a subtle admission of mild failure: I like my wine. I eat well; olive oils, fish, salads, chicken, nuts, oatmeal, fruits, only occasional red meat (bacon is the food of the gods of course.) I stopped smoking twenty two years ago but they tell me I’m not out of the woods yet. It has been a long time since I used recreational drugs. (In the context of drug use ‘recreational’ is such a spare term isn’t it?)
I spent my formative years living amongst nature in the Lake District, an area of Northwest England that was also home to William Wordsworth and the hills and dales where he honed his pedzos logos or ‘walking language.’ Herodotus and other Ancient Greeks described pedzos logos as the opposite of ‘the dancing, or even airborne language of poetry’ as Daniel Mendelsohn pointed out in his book Waiting For the Barbarians. Not exactly pedestrian but meant to avoid flights of fancy. Those ancients were smart.
I still live amongst nature in Portland’s Southwest Hills. If ever there was a reminder of John N. Gray’s insight, “Anyone who truly wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to a desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will do better to seek out the company of other animals. A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery,” there is no better place than your own back yard to confirm its truth.
When I sit on my deck at home Blue Jays come for unwitting visits. If I sit motionless they never see me. They take flight and zip by within a foot of my face, it is only when setting on the deck fence do they sense my presence then they clack, clack, clack their tongues in their bills as a warning before sailing across the yard. The fresh young squirrels skitter down the firs, hissing and play-biting each other. In a few months they will begin the unavoidable annual, mundane chore that their kind have done before them for centuries: gather nuts and bury them; if they escape the talons of the raptors that is, or the wheels of vehicles. The crows, those mean, menacing, descendants of the razor-toothed rapacious dinosaur, interrupt all thoughts with their angry cawing.
The poet Ted Hughes captured Crow so well in Crow Tyrannosaurus.
Crow thought “Alas
Alas ought I
To stop eating
And try to become the light?”
But his eye saw a grub. And his head, trapsprung, stabbed.
And he listened
And he heard
Weeping
Grubs grubs He stabbed he stabbed
Thus came the eye’s
roundness
the ear’s
deafness.
Crow. A bird-descendant of Tyrannosaurus Rex, king of the dinosaurs.
I feel certain that the murder of crows that gathers in the pines of my yard hate me. They are intelligent birds but is it possible that they harbor memories of their ancient stature? How they were feared and ruled the world? Most likely not. Sadly, we big-brained humans run things now. Perhaps the crows hate me for that. They can rest assured though that we humans are not in control of our own destinies; in his book ‘The Future of Life,’ Edward O. Wilson writes: The somber archaeology of vanished species has taught us the following lessons:
1. The noble savage never existed
2. Eden occupied was a slaughterhouse
3. Paradise found is paradise lost
Cognitive dissonance is the human condition.
At my feet Rufus suns himself and looks on with that splendid disdain that only dogs own as he cocks his ear toward the machine-buzz of neighbors wrestling with their landscapes. The white noise makes me wonder — who is Player One? Somewhere in the house Dawn Of Midi is the soundtrack to my afternoon; Commons Brewery Urban Farmhouse Ale the kicker…
I note that this year seventy-four has been a bad number; Seamus Heaney and David Frost both died aged seventy-four. Fifteen more years if I’m lucky. Feels short. I should stop reading the obituaries; I read recently that uncertain waits feel longer than known, finite waits. I’ll remain uncertain if that is ok. For the record my father reached eighty two.
As I type I see how my fingers have perfect pink-hued nails and each cuticle looks like a snow-covered, arched mountain in a distant haze. Those ten digits are partly responsible for my improbable career. (Of course luck was part of the equation too.) Nowadays, as I am no longer a full-time, working musician, (although I will always be a musician first,) I have reinforced a single position, one I’ve always had — ensuring that my work is an extension of my hobbies.
Fate and religion are of no interest, in fact they are meaningless to me as a mere observer in an uncaring Universe. After all, entropy is the universal predetermination and even then that is true only if we accept that our Universe is actually a closed system. There are hints that parallel universes exist. So too parallel lives? We may well be living in one of many possible worlds. I am happy to be glued to the current foundation beneath my feet. Yet I wonder.
“Once you’ve grown to accept something and it becomes part of the system you’ve inherited, you don’t even notice it any longer” — Brian Eno.
We live in the universe that we build. Accept or deny.
My universe unfurled on December 23rd 1955 in a maternity home in a small town in Northwest England. I have often thought that my mother never forgave me for ruining her Christmas. I write that without bitterness or sadness — she was always selfish. Is that a crime? No, it is not. I was too young to remember my sister arriving into the family, but old enough to come home one day from school to find my mother, dropped off by an ambulance, sitting on the stoop of our house, locked out. I must have been about eight years old. She was holding my new-born brother in her arms. For her, being locked out was everyone’s fault; me, the ambulance men, the universe. I clambered through the pantry window to let her in then promptly ran off to play soccer with my friends.
Too much tension that could explode in to wrath. My father would be home soon.
It was around this time that I escaped into books and music. I believe the closest we can get to concurrently ‘living’ another life is by reading or listening to music; or catching other people’s anecdotes; their stories add to our other.
Paul Auster put it neatly in an interview with the Paris Review:
“There’s a phrase in The Invention of Solitude I’ve always liked: “The anecdote as a form of knowledge.” This is a very important idea, I think. That knowledge doesn’t have to come in the form of declarations, statements, or explanations. It can come in the form of stories.”
I never knew the story of my dad. Although he was funny and at times avuncular toward me and others, he was reticent to share the history of his adolescence or much at all of his time on the planet. He seemed reluctant to spend much time with me but he would always protect me from my mother when her ‘moods’ struck, pure anger shelling from nowhere. I believe he loved us kids in his unspoken way. I am guessing he never pondered the meaning of life or the myths we create to get through the day. He was proud and stoic. That was enough.
He diligently worked for himself with his hands. He painted houses. He raised wallpaper splashed with a foul-smelling paste onto the walls of the homes of the local bourgeoisie; I could never find the seams in the wallpaper so exact was his technique. I hated how he kowtowed to his clients. He eventually worked hard enough to move up and join those middle classes when he and my mother raised a mortgage and we moved to a ‘nicer’ part of town; such is human desire. After me and my brother and sister left home they started moving and never really stopped until later in life. Then came the onset of his illness.
In 2005 I received a call from my sister and heard the words “dad” and “cancer.” I was in downtown Portland at the time and the usual bustle of the city drifted away. I asked my sister to repeat what she’d said. It was true. “Three months if he does chemo and he’s lucky…” We hung up. What else was there to say? Words would be empty. Travel plans were made.
He did the required; a course of chemotherapy followed by radiation and he was lucky. He survived for nine years. He achieved some kind of record. For people who are diagnosed with small cell lung cancer, a cancer that you only get from smoking, those who get past the first few months rarely ever live longer than three to five years. So, nine years. Then another phone call.
Some time around the end of 2013 the cancer returned, and as is often the case, it was more aggressive. The chemo was less effective and the side effects were worse. Courageously he stopped all treatment. My dad died at home in his own bed on July 2nd 2014.
He is gone now and his story remains untold. He will be remembered in other ways; in anecdotes such as - “He was a good man, a loving husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather.” All of which is true. Yet the hole is more familiar than the tooth.
“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are” — Joseph Campbell
Geoffrey Allen 1932 — 2014.
