Suicide, I remind myself, is immoral in most religions because it usurps God’s prerogative to choose my death himself. It is illegal because it is murder. In both cases, the argument is that I do not have sufficient rights over my own life to be allowed to end it. However, if I were to sacrifice my life to save someone else – that would be moral and legal. I have enough rights over my own life to do that, but not to put myself out of intractable physical pain no one else can feel or to end pedophiliac or violent tendencies (never acted on) that torment but which no one else knows about.
If it is a question of rights, I have the right to kill someone in self defence, or stand there meekly and let them kill me, and the government has the right to kill me if I am convicted (rightly or wrongly) of what it considers a capital offence (blasphemy or murder), and foreign governments have the right to kill me in wartime and I’m just collateral damage. If I faint and fall in front of an oncoming train, no one is under any legal or moral obligation to risk their own life to pick me up; if, however, they manage to film my death they can sell the footage to the news and make money. If I have cancer no one can force me to take treatment.
As far as religions go, a religion, or more admittedly, a cult, recently committed mass suicide because they thought a space ship would take them to Mars if they did. Religious reasons are binding on those of that religion and therefore to prove them you would have to prove the religion itself, which few can do. Suffice it to say everyone has the right to end their own life but not mine. This is not a recommendation. Anyone who feels suicidal should seek help. Talk to a priest. I was suicidal for ten years – I may still be suicidal – but I got help from Guy. Suicide is a tragedy, and given how little we know about death, no guarantee of solving the problem. But it is not immoral if morality is regarded as a matter of rights, what you have the right to do and what you do not. This makes it seem like Freedom.
I watch Jackie walk down the street. I am sitting outside the post office. It is an official government building. Jackie is an artist, with an artist’s studio. That is not all she is, of course. No one can afford to be just an artist. Not even in a small town. Her hope is that we can become a tourist place, a place tourists will come to see us and our quaint ways. So she can sell her weavings and her drawings. She thinks we have potential. We do not have potential. Potential left town long ago. It is an insult to be quaint. It is one step away from being eccentric, and being eccentric means to fight loneliness with something other than people, with habits and thoughts and games and ideas and animals and windmills and causes and routines of excruciating art or beauty.
It is not right; it is not right. I can only save so many. My life raft is only so big. I can only pull so many out of the water. The water: not waving, drowning. Someone has painted, in English, NUKE THE WHALES, on the alley-side of her studio.
Every one knows what Jackie and Gerald are cooking up. Politics.
When I was in the mountains on a walking tour once I stayed in a hut/inn where we had potatoes and bacon for breakfast. There were two other hikers staying there, a couple, male (tall and blond) and female (slim and dark), who billed and cooed the whole time. I even caught a glimpse, well, a look, at the woman showering through a chink in the wooden wall. Her legs were extraordinarily thin for a nature walker, toothpick like, and she did not shave her underarms or bikini area. Her buttocks and breasts were small, but her hair was long and glorious, shiny and sleek and lathered up, rolled and caressed and squeezed out, and she combed it, scratching herself between her legs before towelling off and dressing.
By the time she came out I was putting on my boots on the other side of the yard, with my gear on my back and my head down. I walked for six hours that day and rested by a lakeside and smelled pine and bear dung and dead fish. I relaxed and thought about nature and the world, and my youth, and my father who left when I was twelve but used to take me to the fairs and tractor pulls and Art in the Park and the Tomato Festival and walks for cancer and to see horses at his friend’s place and then said good-bye after something happened – I never found out what. I thought of Emily, the naked hiker, and her body, exposed and absolute, open to me and my eye, my brain, in my memory. I did not wish to make love to her, to enter, to fuck her. I wished only to look at her, think about her, study her, be present, until I understood what it is I do not understand, what no one understands. Until I could put my finger on that truth I can never quite put my finger on. Sometimes – some people – and I think maybe, maybe… but people die, or hide from you inside their houses, or go off into the mountains with their boyfriends. Everything escapes you eventually, even the things you never had, even the people. Females.
I have not been in the mountains for a long time. Times are tougher there now; lumber tariffs, low commodity prices, stronger pollution laws, protestors, all contribute. Plus, I am perhaps more lonely now, less seeking out solitude and stoic, silent, grand nature. Small town life, dogs and gardens and children, people and small shops, the once a week newspaper, the creeks and farms and restaurants (three) that all hang about each other, and about me, or me about them, in the small town life of a small town. And the town is getting smaller. The bank’s head office is closing our branch. It is the only financial institution we have. We will have to go forty minutes east to get to another bank. There is talk of getting a Credit Union, but there’s not much you can do. There’s not much you can do to change the universal laws of personality or fate or the age you are born into, or capitalism, or justice, or desire.
I think about using the telephone and consider that it is probably tapped. Nevertheless I call Carole’s parents.
“There was a strange man watching Carole in the street. He stood there and watched her. Did Carole tell you?”
“No.”
“I think you should ask her. With what’s going on…”
“Yes, yes, I will.”
People say that children are the future; I hear it all the time. It is what you call a ‘cliché’. But really, don’t they mean that adults are what is important and that children are significant, not as children, but as future adults? Children are not important, not as children. They are investments in adulthood, with either positive or negative returns. The Prime Minister will never be a ten-year-old, but a ten-year-old might be Prime Minister one day. We do not get younger as time goes on, closer to our birth, we get farther from it, less childlike. Childhood is not the future: old age, senility, death, war, those are the future. Childhood, if you are a child (I am a child of God, alas) is now.
Nevertheless it is important to treat children well because if you don’t they will punish you in your old age. Life is about punishment. Religion is about life and it is about punishing the innocent. All those martyrs marching gloriously, enthusiastically to their deaths. Jesus arranging his own execution – or God arranging it. Peter crucified – a good man, a fisherman – upside down. All of us sinners because of Adam, because of what some stupid, half-educated, pussy-whipped man did – not me – generations and generations before I was born. And I am guilty. Guilty of being human. Guilty of being me. Guilty of being alive.
And guilt, guilt calls for sacrifice. Either forced – we put you in jail, we fine you, we hang you – or voluntary, alms to the poor, confession, self-flagellation, neurosis, abstinence, suicide, murder.
The people who feel no guilt we call sociopaths and fear. The people who overcome guilt we call saints, convinced God loves them and heals them. The people who feel ‘appropriate’ guilt we call well-adjusted. The people who do not know what to do with their guilt we call artists, and the person, the man, who seeks guilt out and is not guilty we call the messiah. I have no mission in life. I am neither one thing nor the other, neither alive nor dead, neither guilty nor innocent.
Chesterton – do you know Chesterton? – He was an English author – said something like (I paraphrase) that when a regular person is faced with two truths that contradict each other – guilt and innocence, say – he (or she) will take both truths and live with the contradiction. What a charmer he was. To recognize that truths can contradict each other, to point out that it is the living that is important, not the contradiction. To exist and not exist, both – there is hope.
John is telling me that Gerald, who works at the bank, is being transferred. I asked what that means for Jackie.
John shrugs. “He is our most eligible bachelor, ” he says, “Now, if I had his money…”
“She will not go, ” I say. “She will not go. Her life is here. She will find someone else.”
“It might be love.”
“There is more than just love of a person. There is love of self, there is love of place.”
“It is good money.”
“There is no such thing as good money.”
“So you, Pierre, eh? How are you? You have your eye on our Jackie?”
There is a whole world out there, I think.
“The Americans are at war, ” I say.
“The Americans are always at war. They are a proud people. There is not a poverty-stricken third world country anywhere in the world that can stand up to the might of America’s fighting men and women. They have proven that many times.”
What would it be like to be an American, I wonder. It must be neurotic. To believe Israel is always right but that all the Jews in the world are going to burn in hell for eternity for not being Christians. To believe in democracy at home but overthrow democracies abroad. To claim to be the land of opportunity, but seek to keep the poorest immigrants – the illegals – out. But then Americans are the richest, best-looking, sexiest, most powerful people on earth. Everyone in the world wants to sleep with an American.
The fire that burnt Mrs. Bluto’s house spared her garage and when they opened it they found rabbits there, which they let out of their cages and which ran away. Throughout the following weeks we saw them loping about yards and the golf course over town. My thought was of Australia, where rabbits breed without predators and hundreds of them can move across a farmer’s field en masse and eat everything in sight. Perhaps the human hold on the dominant species slot of the earth is not so strong as we’d like to think. Perhaps crowds, hundreds, a thousand, six billion, ravenous, plant destroying, defecating rabbits, instinctively feeding and fucking, moving across the landscape mindlessly is how we look to birds, or coyotes or lynx. It is good to see ourselves as others see us. It is better to have others see us as we see ourselves.
Mrs. Bluto is in the hospital for four weeks with burns. When she comes out, is ‘released’, she is in a wheelchair and cannot live alone, and, of course, her house is unliveable. So I take her in for one month, while her daughter in the city makes arrangements. She is ugly (Mrs. Bluto, not the daughter), scarred, shiny, red, hairless – she wears an orange wig – fleshy and tiny-eyed, and she is bored, so bored, and frustrated and afraid. We sit and listen to the news at six o’clock every night, me at the kitchen table sitting in my chair and she in the middle of the room sitting in her wheelchair. It is a ritual with me, the evening news, and she will just have to adapt to it.
“Je ne sais pas, ” she says.
“Pardon?”
“There is no fool like an old fool.”
We have just heard a story about the Pope praying for the astronauts. “Why do you say that?” I ask.
“It is horrible, ” she says.
Usually when I sit at the table and do nothing I break off small pieces of bread, very small, pick them off, and roll them on the table under my finger, or between finger and thumb, like something I picked out of my nose. It is a habit I have taken over from my mother, who did it while drinking her evening tea all her life, or all of her life that I could remember. It irritates Mrs. Bluto.
“Must you, must you, must you? Eh?” she says. “It is a filthy habit.”
I stop. It is neither a good thing nor a bad thing. It is just a thing, just what I do. Still, for her sake I put an end to it, and just drum my fingers lightly, fingertips, pads only, on the table.
“I cannot stand that noise, ” she says to me. “You know you are an irritating person, Pierre. You know that about yourself, don’t you? What your mother must have gone through, poor woman. And a widow.”
By ‘widow’ Mrs. Bluto meant simply ‘with no man around’ – mother never said anything about father being dead, and she would have told me. She would certainly have been sure to have definitely told me if he had, if she had known. There’s no doubting that.
“I want to go outside, ” Mrs. Bluto says. She is a gardener, or had been, all sorts of flowers and plants, roses and tulips and daffodils and I don’t know, different sizes and shapes, leaves of plants all in her big back garden and all along the front walk to her door – now consumed in ashes forever. Compost, if you think of it that way.
“You’ll need a hat, ” I say.
“I have one. On the sideboard.”
I go and get it. She puts it on her head. “If I cannot live in my garden I can at least look at it, ” she says.
“There is my garden.”
“Ha. Grass and maples and spruce. That’s not a garden. Still, you are a man, it is different for you.” I thank her for that recognition.
“Now, ” she says, “I want to go now, please.”
So I wheel her out, with difficulty down the steps, but she does not seem to mind, to a shady spot that I can see from the window, and go back inside. I cannot spend all my time with her, nor do I think she wants me to. Even she must want to be alone a little, as frightening as that must be in some ways. Guy is inside with me.
“Do not doubt, ” the priest had said, “that there is life.”