Partial answer to question asked in previous chapter: we’re the only animal that knows it will die.
KAREN SHABETAI, dead at forty-four.
When you were around her, you sometimes felt like a bit of a jerk, because you knew you weren’t as good a person as she was. You weren’t as generous, as kind, as civilized, as communal, as energetic, as fun (Karen riding the elevator seated atop her bike with her helmet still on). She gave the best parties in Seattle, at least the Seattle that I know. She made belonging to part of something larger than yourself—a discipline, a city, a religion—seem like a possibility. She had the most and best tips for what school to send your children to, what summer camps, where to travel (Rome, Rome, and Rome, apparently), what to see, what to read.
Once, masquerading as a scholar, I applied for an NEH fellowship, and I swear Karen spent more time on the application than I did (still no luck!). Having her students in my creative writing classes was a distinctly mixed blessing: they were inevitably among the most well-prepared students in the course, but they expected me to be as dedicated a teacher as Karen was. She believed in the continuity of culture in a way that I pretend to but don’t, and one of my most luminous memories is of her daughter, Sophie, playing the violin at a party at their house (Karen’s concentration matching Sophie’s).
It’s important to remind myself that Karen was sweet but not too sweet. The loving and challenging contentiousness between Karen and Ross was and is to me a model of a successful marriage. One night, Laurie and I and Karen and Ross saw Il Postino, and afterward we went out to dinner at an Italian restaurant. The waiter at the restaurant was so Italian, so obviously an extra who had somehow (Purple Rose of Cairo–like) escaped from Il Postino, that Karen and I virtually—no, not virtually; literally—had to stick napkins in our mouths every time he came by to inquire about us. Laurie and Ross were considerably more composed, but Karen and I were beyond rescue.
RAY KURZWEIL BELIEVES that in twenty years, medical and technical advances will produce a robot small enough to wander throughout your body, doing whatever it’s been programmed to do, e.g., going inside any cell and reversing all the causes of aging by rebuilding the cell to a younger version of itself. If you do that to every cell in your body and keep doing this on a regular basis, you could (theoretically) live forever.
By 2030, Kurzweil believes, most of our fallible internal organs will have been replaced by tiny robots. We will have “eliminated the heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the other hormone-producing organs, kidney, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, and bowel. What we’ll have left at that point will be the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain.”
Kurzweil’s father died of heart disease at fifty-eight. His grandfather died in his early forties. At thirty-five, Kurzweil himself was diagnosed with Type II diabetes, which he “cured” with an extreme regimen involving hundreds of pills and intravenous treatments. He now takes 150 supplements and drinks eight to ten glasses of alkaline water and ten cups of green tea every day. He drinks several glasses of red wine a week (gotta love that resveratrol).
On weekends, he undergoes IV transfusions of chemical cocktails, which he believes will reprogram his biochemistry. He undergoes preemptive medical tests for many diseases and disorders, keeps detailed records of the content of his meals, and routinely measures the chemical composition of his own bodily fluids.
Kurzweil, now sixty-four, has joined Alcor Life Extension, a cryonics company. In the unlikely event of his death, his body will be chemically preserved, frozen in liquid nitrogen, and stored at an Alcor facility in the hope that future medical technology will be able to revive him.
Asked if being a singularitarian (someone who believes that technological progress will become so rapid that the near future will be qualitatively different and impossible to predict) makes him happy, he said, “If you took a poll of primitive man, happiness would have consisted of getting a fire to light more easily, but we’ve expanded our horizon, and that kind of happiness is now the wrong thing to focus on. Extending our knowledge—casting a wider net of consciousness—is the purpose of life.”
He wants not so much to live as never to die.
He seems to me the saddest person on the planet.
I empathize with him completely.
ROYAL AIR FORCE (RAF) MEDICAL CHIEF: “All war pilots will inevitably break down in time if not relieved.”
BEN SHEPHARD: “In the Battle of Britain, a stage was reached when it became clear that pilots would end up ‘Crackers or Coffins.’ Thereafter, their time in the air was rationed.”
DICTIONARY OF RAF SLANG: “ ‘Frozen on the stick’: paralyzed with fear.”
PAUL FUSSELL: “The letterpress correspondents, radio broadcasters, and film people who perceived these horrors kept quiet about them on behalf of the War Effort.”
MICHEL LEIRIS: “If this were a play, one of those dramas I have always loved so much, I think the subject could be summarized like this: how the hero leaves for better or worse (and rather for worse than better) the miraculous chaos of childhood for the fierce order of virility.”
SHEPHARD: “From early on in the war, the RAF felt it necessary to have up its sleeve an ultimate sanction, a moral weapon, some procedure for dealing with cases of ‘flying personnel who will not face operational risks.’ This sanction was known as ‘LMF’ or ‘Lack of Moral Fibre.’ Arthur Smith ‘went LMF’ after his twentieth ‘op.’ The target that night was the well-defended Ruhr, and the weather was awful. Even before the aircraft crossed the English Channel, he had lost control of his fear. His ‘courage snapped and terror took over.’ ‘I couldn’t do anything at all,’ he later recalled. ‘I became almost immobile, hardly able to move a muscle or speak.’ ”
JÖRG FRIEDRICH: “The Allies’ bombing transportation offensive of the 1944 pre-invasion weeks took the lives of twelve thousand French and Belgian citizens, nearly twice as many as Bomber Command killed within the German Reich in 1942. On the night of April 9, 239 Halifaxes, Lancasters, Stirlings, and Mosquitoes destroyed 2,124 freight cars in Lille, as well as the Cité des Cheminots, a railroad workers’ settlement with friendly, lightweight residential homes. Four hundred fifty-six people died, mostly railroaders. The survivors, who thought they were facing their final hours from the force of the attack, wandered among the bomb craters, shouting, ‘Bastards, bastards.’ ”
DOUGLAS BOND (PSYCHIATRIC ADVISER TO THE U.S. ARMY AIR FORCE IN BRITAIN DURING WWII): “Unbridled expression of aggression forms one of the greatest satisfactions in combat and becomes, therefore, one of the strongest motivations. A conspiracy of silence seems to have developed around these gratifications, although they are common knowledge to all those who have taken part in combat. There has been a pretense that battle consists only of tragedy and hardship. Unfortunately, however, such is not the case. Fighter pilots expressing frank pleasure following a heavy killing is shocking to outsiders.”
HEMINGWAY: “Hürtgen Forest was a place where it was extremely difficult for a man to stay alive, even if all he did was be there. And we were attacking all the time and every day.”
FUSSELL: “Second World War technology made it possible to be killed in virtual silence, at least so it appeared.”
Not a Quaker per se but sympathetic to Quaker pacifism, Nicholson Baker wanted to give himself the toughest possible case to make. In Human Smoke, he takes hundreds of passages from innumerable sources and positions them in such a way that an argument clearly emerges. War, even WWII, is never justified. All deaths are human smoke.
When the war was winding down and the draft was over, I registered as a conscientious objector.
WHENEVER U.S. SOLDIERS in Vietnam saw the horror show revealed with particular vividness, they’d often say, flatly and with no emphasis whatsoever, “There it is.” Michael Herr’s Dispatches: “ ‘There it is,’ the grunts said, sitting by a road with some infantry when a deuce-and-a-half rattled past with four dead in the back.” Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers: “Sooner or later the squad will surrender to the black design of the jungle. We live by the law of the jungle, which is that more Marines go in than come out. There it is.”
The movie version of No Country for Old Men, ostensibly a thriller, gets at something profound—namely, in the absence of God the Father, all bets are off. Life makes no sense. How do I function when life has been drained of meaning?
IN STANDARD ERASURE POETRY, the words of the source text get whited out or obscured with a dark color, but the pages in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes have literally gone under the knife, rectangular sections physically excised using a die-cut technique that resembles X-Acto artistry. The result: chinked, rectangular cutouts around which remaining text floats, reminding me of the shape of floor plans (albeit for buildings made of nothing). The cutouts produce windows and doorways to portions of up to ten successive pages of text at a time. Words and phrases get revealed, repeated, then covered up. Language waves at me through these X-Actoed text windows, disrupting the surface texture of the page. The composition not only interrupts normal eye movements but in effect forces me to read the book back to front at the same time I’m reading it front to back.
Lifting the pages up one by one, I discover a lyrical seminarrative delivered by a single narrator, characters (a mother and father), a single plot point (the father’s death), and a shift in setting (the movement from an Eden-like garden to an urban frontier). Futzing with Bruno Schulz’s book The Street of Crocodiles, Foer gets intimate with the Polish writer; Foer is writing a book with, through, and for Schulz by unwriting the original. There’s much debate about the relevance of books to our byte-obsessed culture, but I’ve yet to come across any assemblage of text, hyperlinks, images, and sidebar ads that presents a more chaotic and multidimensional reading experience than this book.
“I felt light,” says the narrator midway through Tree of Codes. At this point I think, too, of the book itself, which, composed of half-empty pages, feels to the touch too light. When I pick up the doctored book-object, it weighs less than the eye says it should. So, too, when I separate the delicate pages one by one and examine not just the words written on each page but also the space through and past these pieces of paper, I have the uncanny experience of looking through empty picture frames.
Turning pages, my hand (accustomed to a physical understanding of the page) literally measures subtracted weight. This tactile emptiness lies at the heart of the book’s attempt to plumb antispaces—landscapes unrecoverable at the levels of text, paper, geography, and memory—which are excruciating to Foer, whose oeuvre is simultaneously an attempt to recover, through art, the dead bodies of the Holocaust (his mother’s parents were survivors) and a demonstration that such an attempt is not only impossible but also wrong (“to write a poem after Auschwitz,” etc.). The book is both hospital and crypt: the thousands of tiny rectangular spaces are both beds and graves.
No one from my immediate or extended family died in the Holocaust, and yet in a way that’s difficult to explain, it was the defining event of my childhood …
BUILT TO SPILL’S “Randy Described Eternity” is a launching pad for the empty space between your body holding your guts (built to spill onto the pavement) and the vast cavern of forever-land eternity. Doug Martsch manipulates the thin, hollow body inside his electric guitar toward both extinction and monument, marking our inability to hold the dual concepts completely in mind. This isn’t thrill-seeking exploration or death taunt. It’s a slow plod toward guitar inexpressible. No benedictions or apologies, just a few shafts (I can always hope) of illumination. Electric guitar solos simultaneously battle against postmodernity and worship it—feedback jamming the alternating currents into sound sculptures of pain and ecstasy. White-boy field hollers: slow it down, add pedal steel guitar, and you have a country song. Keep the guitar/drums setup, add a light show, and you have the rock existential thing. Martsch doesn’t really close in on death, but hey, his guitar’s alive.
PHILLIP, WHOSE MFA thesis I’d just directed, died in a freak accident. He was walking his dog, lightning struck a tree, and a heavy branch hit his head. At the funeral, many of his classmates and teachers told standard stories: funny, sad, vivid, delicately off-color. I praised him fulsomely, thereby casting a warm glow back upon my own head. Another professor, trying to say something original, criticized his fledgling work. I upbraided her for her obtuseness, but I felt bad about badgering her and made it worse by harrumphing, “Words are famously difficult to get right. That’s why being a writer is so interesting.” Worse still by adding, “Who among us doesn’t get the words constantly wrong?” She said she would write Phillip’s widow an explanatory and exculpatory note, but it came out wrong, too, I promise. Because language never fails to fail us, never doesn’t defeat us, is bottomlessly … —But here I am, trying to paper over the gaps with dried-up glue.
WITHOUT RELIGION, no one knows what to say about death—our own or others’—nor does anyone know after someone’s death how to talk about (think about) the rest of our lives, so we invent diversions.
In Bruges is a film about two English hit men who are sent to the medieval Belgian town of Bruges, where they have to while away the days, knowing they’re next. Given death’s imminence, is any particular activity of any greater significance than any other activity? Good question.
Lance Olsen’s novel Calendar of Regrets is concerned with tourists, travelers, cafés, voyeurism, the lure and illusion of art, what happens when we die: “Movement is a mode of writing. Writing is a mode of movement.” Every major character moves from existence to (literal or figurative) nonexistence. “I’ve been dreading the disengagement one experiences upon arriving home. You end up maintaining a fever-distance between where you are and where you’ve been. As if you’re recovering from some sort of illness.”
Vladimir Posner says that when a Russian is asked how he’s feeling, he tends to go on and on about how he’s actually feeling, whereas when an American is asked the same question, he invariably answers, “Fine.” We’re doing fine, making progress, moving ahead, living the dream, it’s all good …
Mesmerized—at times unnerved—by my ninety-four-year-old father’s nearly superhuman vitality, I undertook an investigation of our universal physical condition. The result was The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, which tries to look without blinking at the fact that each of us is just an animal walking the earth for a brief time, a bare body housed in a mortal cage. Some people might find this perspective demoralizing, but I don’t, truly. Honesty is the best policy. The only way out is deeper in. A candid confrontation with existence is dizzying, liberating. I now see life entirely through that book’s Darwinian prism. I keep trying to shake off the aftereffects, and I find I can’t (after finishing the book, I couldn’t do anything for several months).
Sarah Manguso’s The Guardians goes to hell and back, just barely back, and ends with a tiny glimmer of uptick—not too much but not too little, either. It’s the only affirmation that anyone can offer: astonishingly, we’re here. The book majors in exposed nerve endings. Without which, sorry, I can’t read anything. Manguso is mourning both her friend Harris, who on p. 1 commits suicide, and herself (she’s “dead” now, too). “It doesn’t mean shit,” an Italian security guard tells her Israeli friend about his passport, which is crucial, since Manguso is always asking what, if anything, means shit? Nothing does or, rather, everything is shit. How then to put one foot in front of the other? Well, let us investigate that. Life and death are in direct tension (as are Manguso’s vow not to make anything up and her acknowledgment that, of course, she will—constantly). I did something I do when I genuinely love a book: start covering my mouth when I read. This is very pure and elemental; I want nothing coming between me and the page.
In Denis Johnson’s The Name of the World, Michael Reed, whose wife and daughter have recently died in a car accident, wants, as if he were Adam in Eden (or Adam in Leaving the Atocha Station), to name the world in a pre-fallen world, but he realizes that the world isn’t like that, was never like that, so he becomes a war correspondent in order to have running confirmation that the world is as terrible as he thought. Wherever he goes, he’s walking across a graveyard. So are you. So am I.
IN HIS EULOGY for Christina-Taylor Green, one of the victims of the Tucson shooting spree, Obama said, “If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in them today.” However, for many people in the post-transcendent twenty-first century, death is not a passageway to eternity but a brute biological fact. We’re done. It’s over. All the gods have gone to sleep or are simply moribund. We’re a bag of bones. All the myths are empty. The only bravery consists of diving into the wreck, dancing/grieving in the abyss.
As baby boomers enter their/our senescence, we’re all looking for companionship in the dark. Michael Billington, reviewing Simon Gray’s Close of Play in The Guardian, wrote, “To embody death convincingly on the stage is one of the hardest things for a dramatist to do. Mr. Gray has here managed it in a way that, paradoxically, makes life itself that much more bearable.”
Greg Bottoms: “When things go wrong, when Nietzsche’s ‘breath of empty space’ moves over your skin, reminds you that you are but a blip in the existence of the world, destined from birth to vanish with all the things and people you love, to mulch the land with no more magic than the rotting carcass of a bird, it’s nice to imagine—” Imagine what, exactly?
Some people might find it anathema to even consider articulating an answer to this question, but if, as Rembrandt said, “Painting is philosophy,” then certainly writing is philosophy as well. Isn’t everyone’s project, on some level, to offer tentative theses regarding what—if anything—we’re doing here? Against death, in other words, what solace, what consolation, what bulwark? Tolstoy: “The meaning of life is life”—for which much thanks. Ice-T’s answer: “A human being is just another animal in the big jungle. Life is really short and you’re going to die. We’re here to stick our heads above the water for just a minute, look around, and go back under.” Burt Reynolds: “First, it’s ‘Who’s Burt Reynolds?’ Then it’s ‘Get me Burt Reynolds.’ Then ‘Get me a Burt Reynolds type.’ Then ‘Get me a young Burt Reynolds.’ And then it’s ‘Who’s Burt Reynolds?’ ” Beckett’s mantra: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Okay, you’re going to go on, I hope and assume. Congratulations. Why, though? What carries you through the day, not to mention the night? Beckett’s own answer: he liked to read Dante, watch soccer, and fart.
As a nine-year-old, I would awake and spend the entire night sitting cross-legged on the landing of the stairs to my basement bedroom, unable to fathom that one day I’d cease to be. I remember being mesmerized by a neighbor’s tattoo of a death’s-head, underneath which were the words “As I am, you shall someday be.” (Now, do I yearn for this state, the peace that passeth all understanding? What if death is my Santa Claus?) Cormac McCarthy: “Death is the major issue in the world. For you, for me, for all of us. It just is. To not be able to talk about it is very odd.” I’m trying to do a very un-American thing here: talk about it. Why? Pynchon: “When we speak of ‘seriousness,’ ultimately we are talking about an attitude toward death, how we act in its presence, for example, or how we handle it when it isn’t so immediate.” DFW: “You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. I’m not sure I could give you a steeple-fingered theoretical justification, but I strongly suspect a big part of a writer’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.” The only books I truly love do exactly this—
In Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer tries and fails to write a biography of D. H. Lawrence, but the book conveys Lawrence better than any conventional biography does, and more important, it asks the question How and why do we get up in the morning? In many ways, it’s a thinking person’s self-help book: how to live your life with passion when you know every passion is delusional. Dyer is paralyzed by the difficulty of choice, because he can always see the opposite position—a different place to live, woman to love, book to write. His conclusion: “The best we can do is to try to make some progress with our studies of D. H. Lawrence.” By getting up in the morning, we get up in the morning. By not writing our biographies of D. H. Lawrence, we write our biographies of D. H. Lawrence. The crucial line in Dyer’s most recent book, Zona: “We never know when we’re going to die and because of that we are, at any one moment, immortal.” All of his best books are fixed on this idea—searching for such moments, trying to produce such suspensions in the work itself. Extended footnotes divide Zona in two. Digressions give us at least the illusion of breaking away from time, killing it before it kills us. The book kept reminding me of an evening Dyer and I spent together a few years ago. It was terribly important to him to find exactly the right restaurant. I didn’t understand this. I remember thinking, Who cares? We found the right restaurant, where (after mocking me for ordering Prosecco—“another drink for the homosexual gentleman?”) he devoured what he called the best hamburger he’d ever eaten. Empty praise? Full stomach? It was crucial to him to at least try to enter the Zone. Dyer is determined not to waste his time on earth, and he knows the only way not to waste it is to waste it.
Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello eviscerates, chapter by chapter, a commitment (antiapartheid activism, animal rights, friendship, art, love, sex) that Coetzee, in previous books, had once affirmed. The “novel” consists almost entirely of a series of lectures that Coetzee himself gave, but in the book a fictional character named Elizabeth Costello gives the lectures. Coetzee/Costello is trying to find something that he/she can actually believe, and by the end of the book the only thing Coetzee can affirm, the only thing Costello affirms, is the belling of the sound of frogs in mud: the animal life of sheer survival. I love how joyous and despairing that is. It’s on the side of life, but along a very narrow ledge. My favorite books are candid beyond candid, and they proceed from the assumption that we’ll all be dead in a hundred years: here, now, in this book, I’m going to cut to the essence.
David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel is a book built almost entirely out of other writers’ lines—some attributed, most not, many mashed-up (weirdly, he insisted upon verbatim quotation of his “own” work in Reality Hunger). One of the pleasures of reading the book is recognizing so many of the passages. A bibliophile’s wet dream, but it’s no mere collection of quotes. It’s a sustained meditation on a single question: Against death, what consolation, if any, is art? Against the dark night of death, what solace is it that I still read Sophocles? For Sophocles, Markson implies, not a lot, but for me, maybe a little. Markson constantly toggles back and forth between celebrating the timelessness of art and mocking such grandiosity. The book forces me to ask myself: What do I push back with? Maybe art, and if so, barely.
SHORTLY AFTER the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, the editor of Image, a magazine interested in the intersection of art and faith, asked dozens of writers to respond. Annie Dillard’s “This Is the Life,” fewer than 1,500 words, is, to me, by far the best essay yet written about 9/11; she addresses the event extremely obliquely and doesn’t come even close to mentioning it. Instead, she uses 9/11 as the catalyst for an extremely far-ranging contemplation of the inherent relativism of all cultural “truths,” and given the actuality of death, the irreducible ephemerality of all human experience (each of us is, apparently, “as provisional as a bug”). And yet if nothing is meaningful, everything is significant.
Aggressively ambivalent, Dillard contains the contradictions: between ecstasy and despair, herself and the world, life and death. In The Writing Life, Dillard advises, “Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place. Assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?”—which is precisely what she does here: she’s utterly unblinking, unapologetically sober (but still funny) about the fundamental questions of existence.
In case we need reminding, Dillard reminds us at the beginning of the essay, “Somewhere in there you die. Not a funeral. Forget funeral. A big birthday party. Since everyone around you agrees.” This sets the terms for all that follows: everything we do—seek to know Rome’s best restaurants and their staffs, take the next tribe’s pigs in thrilling raids, grill yams, hunt white-plumed birds, burn captives, set fire to a drunk, publish the paper that proves the point, elude capture, educate our children to a feather edge, count coup, perfect our calligraphy, spear the seal—is, in a sense, nothing more or less than a prelude to, distraction from, death. She relentlessly questions her own position as she rigorously investigates the world: “The black rock is holy, or the scroll. Or nothing at all is holy, as everyone intelligent knows.” She establishes the problem, deepens the problem, suggests “solutions,” explores the permutations of these solutions, argues against and finally undermines these solutions, returning us to the problem (pretty much the M.O. of this book as well).
We know only the culture in which we live and we abide by its “truths.” The “illusion, like the visual field, is complete. Each people knows only its own squares in the weave, its wars and instruments and arts, and also the starry sky.” Can we not get beyond our own ethnocentrism? Of course, sort of, but say “you scale your own weft and see time’s breadth and the length of space. What, seeing this spread multiply infinitely in every direction, would you do differently? Whatever you do, it has likely brought delight to fewer people than either contract bridge or the Red Sox.” There is a good-sized rock in the garden, there is no way to remove the rock even if you peer at it from above and at many different angles, and all rocks are equally significant/insignificant: “However hypnotized you and your people are, you will be just as dead in their war, our war. What new wisdom can you take to your grave for worms to untangle?”
There is no wisdom, only many wisdoms—beautiful and delusional.