Exactly 39 Years Ago . . .
I was frantic today to find someone good to take care of my cats while I go to Florida. Then it hit me: it was Thanksgiving 1971 when a friend who had been looking for a pretext to introduce us anyway thought she had found it in the fact that Jacques Sandulescu was going away for Thanksgiving and needed someone to feed his cats.
Unfortunately, I was also going away for Thanksgiving and needed someone to feed my cats. So that didn’t work out. We wouldn’t meet till the following March. But I did exchange a few words with this exotic character on the phone. Since he was from Transylvania and had a rich accent, I imagined him in a black cloak, looking suave and smoldering like Dracula. (In reality, he looked more like Frankenstein if the operation had been a smashing success.)
Thirty-nine years later, and I’m STILL looking for someone to feed my cats. Different cats. Same problem. Full circle.
First contact to last: exactly 39 years.
P.S.: I found someone to feed the cats.
The Fascination of What’s Digital
I will slowly get around to writing about the cataclysm that’s hit my world. Can’t get words around it, may be able to pick a few paths of a few steps through it here and there before they falter out like the footprints of the settlers of some vanished colony. There will be a lot of false starts.
But meanwhile . . .
I spent all day with friends yesterday (a disorientingly novel experience in itself). In between sitting in an outdoor hot tub and walking in the woods on the path of an old NASCAR raceway, we watched part of David Attenborough’s Planet Earth on hi-def, flat-panel TV. I was duly impressed, but also disturbed.
It is so awesomely, breathtakingly beautiful, this Earth of ours — too beautiful. Mountain peaks are impossibly pristine, airbrushed of blemishes; polar bears are bowdlerized of their fleas; autumn hillsides change color with the orchestrated precision of The Wave in the Superdome, or a flashcard display by Communist Chinese kiddies — all in obedience to the wand of digital totalitarianism.
The implicit message: digital is better than real. Man trumps Nature. Mother Earth needs a facelift and silicone falsies.
There is a connection between this triumph-disguised-as-tribute over nature and 15-year-olds getting nose jobs as quinceañeras presents, boob jobs for Sweet Sixteen.
Our experience of nature is always mediated and manipulated by art — I realized that when, writing the introduction to a book of Thomas McKnight’s paintings, I was struck by the insight that what we remember as our intense, naïve, direct early-childhood perception of the world is in fact already powerfully shaped by art in the form of children’s-book illustrations. All my life, for example, I have appreciated the beauty of the woods through the filter of Walt Disney’s Bambi. Seriously. And as for women’s beauty, is it really such a big step, other than technologically, from plucking your eyebrows to boosting your boobs?
But have our powers to imagine and manipulate become Faustian? Do the digital wonders of Planet Earth enhance, or demean and diminish, the actual experience of living on Planet Earth? To steal a page from W.B. Yeats:
The fascination of what’s digital
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. . . .
A Bittersweet Task
As J lies on what I suppose is his deathbed, or death-and-resurrection bed, slowly getting smaller, more hollow-cheeked and thin-legged, I sit on my futon on the floor beside the hospital bed, reediting a digital file of his story of cheating death as a teenager in Soviet Russia.
Back in the ’90s, our friend Robyn painstakingly retyped the whole book to post on the website that she and her husband Ralph had created for Jacques. (Ralph had become our future friend as a child, when his father, Warren, operated on Jacques in 1975 — three and a half years after he and I met — discovering a massive staph infection behind his left lung and in two of his vertebrae, which had probably been smoldering in his body ever since a sadistic guard in Russia shot him through the chest, missing his heart by maybe a centimeter.) When we then republished Donbas in 2000, adding back material that the first crew of editors had cut out and new passages that Jacques had written since — and an epilogue describing his return to the Donbas — Robyn took all but the first three chapters down from the website at our request.
Jacques’ lifelong dream, which he had hoped from Day One I would help with, was to see his book read in schools and made into a movie. It was all he had salvaged from that experience (well, okay, a Russian soul — no small thing), and in many ways his sense of his own worth balanced on the razor edge of the book’s acceptance. Everybody who loves him is aware that Jacques has a bedrock foundation of natural confidence we can hardly imagine and are drawn to by an unfamiliar but gravitational force; most are less aware (some more than others) that, as with most trauma survivors, it is overlaid by (like one of those black strata in the earth that memorializes a mass extinction) a layer of ash and shame. I am reading his unflinching account of how filth-encrusted and pus-befouled he was when he escaped from the Soviets’ clutches on legs rotting with gangrene. People in British- and American-occupied Germany moved away from him in train stations; one or two even spat on him. Nothing that happened to him as a prisoner in Russia — where he had at least been valued for his strength, and even loved — had wounded him as deeply as his rejection by (barely) respectable people when he washed up like a piece of flotsam on the edge of the West, and especially his rejection from an American military hospital (a simple act of triage; they thought he was irreversibly close to death, a mistake that is still being made more than six decades later). That rejection was so devastating that he lied about it in the first edition of the book, and wrote instead the fantasy that he was taken in and cherished there.
Are you beginning to see why I couldn’t put this guy in a nursing home?
For various reasons too complicated to go into here (the simplest of which is that it’s just so goddamn difficult), I failed to devote myself sufficiently single-mindedly to getting Donbas made into a movie. In 2001, though, I did write an article about J and me for O, the Oprah Magazine (the article will soon be permanently archived on the magazine’s website). Around the same time, he had been contacted by a middle-school student in Oregon who’d loved the book and wanted a new one as a retirement present for his teacher, whose copy was falling apart because he’d taught it for 25 years. It looked as if J’s dream might finally be gathering itself to come true (just as he was beginning to get ill), but then the magazine hit the newsstands, literally, on September 10, 2001.
Decades ago, a gay editor who had a crush on J had published the book in paperback with a rather homoerotic, bare-chested cover illustration and the wince-worthy title A Man Never Dies. (“A man always dies, sooner or later,” I pronounced in my infinite thirtysomething wisdom. Oh, yeah?) Well, be that as it may, a book never dies. Or this one doesn’t. It keeps clawing its way out of the grave. Freeman Hunt, a blogfriend from the Althouse community, ordered it from the link on my blog. She gave it to her husband, David, who is a filmmaker. He fell in love with it, as certain people, over time, inexorably continue to do. And now it’s 2010, and I’m sitting here reediting the digital file that Robyn never trashed because David and his business partner plan to produce a school edition AND a movie. Is J aware of this? Intermittently. Will he live to see it? It would be a mistake to rule anything out with him, obviously, but probably not. Does it matter? The part of him he wanted most to live will live.
I noticed recently that J’s hands, which he described as having been so hardened by mine work and mineralized by coal dust that you could break a razor blade on his palm, are now much softer than mine. I also thought about how his being on hospice for a year is some kind of strange restitution for his rejection from that American Army hospital in postwar Germany so long ago. He’s having his umpteenth rematch with death — he’s won them all till now — but this time, he has a corner.
Way to Go.
I had a peaceful day with J today. Stopped pushing him to drink and eat and swallow medication-laced applesauce. If he was through with all that, okay. He knows what he’s doing.
He slept most of the day but to my surprise wanted a little water — three swallows — in the morning and again in the evening, and three teaspoons of coffee ice cream in the afternoon. The hospice nurse told me dementia patients can sometimes go on like this for months. He seemed much happier and more comfortable not being nagged and force-fed. He basked in his favorite Errol Garner CD with a few blurry but familiar exclamations and sighs of savoring.
Our friend Axel the hospice volunteer, who usually comes on Fridays, offered to come over, but I told him we were okay. I had work to do (yay!), and a workout that was overdue, and I figured he had things to do, too. He was over on J’s good day a week ago, and J hadn’t said much but reached out to touch his face affectionately, which was very . . . touching. I wasn’t sure whether or not he would have responded to Axel’s presence today.
And I was practicing being alone. I might as well get used to it. After all, in a way I’ve craved it. And been frightened of it. And it was easier than I thought. J slept and slept; I made lentil soup and talked to the cats and started the CD over again whenever it ended.
Then our karate friends called and said they’d come over for dinner. I got in my workout before they arrived. J woke up enough to greet them quite sociably, with a sort of drunken bonhomie. Then he sank back into his half-asleep jazz bliss, cheeks sunken and mouth open in that hollow O of the demented and the dying. It was okay: a part of life, the rounding-off. We dragged a couple of little tables into the bedroom and sat there and ate, told stories, and laughed within his sight (if he cared to open his eyes) and hearing.
I thought: Yes! This is how we’re supposed to die: with life going on all around us.
(Right. He’s not dying, yet, tonight or tomorrow or even next week. But he’s started on the way, and very peacefully, so far. Will it stay that way?
Meanwhile, my New York subtenant called: the landlord has sent me a renewal lease! If I wasn’t back, my tenancy was supposed to end this coming February, but the lease-renewal department may be operating on automatic pilot. Or the recently cured case of bedbugs, which the landlord is legally required to disclose, may have cooled their zeal to deregulate the apartment. Whatever — if I sign the lease and they countersign it, that’s two more years. If they question it, I can tell them I’m coming back. My subtenant won’t have to leave, and I won’t have to decide, by February.
This is good.)
Love [UPDATED]
I looked at these beautiful photographs of my niece and her fiancée (yes, two e’s) and the thought that came to me unbidden was, those who would ban or curse or cure this have it exactly backwards. That our love cannot be contained within biological utility is the sign of our humanity.
UPDATE: NOT to say that I don’t think conceiving a baby in love is a mighty and awesome thing. Just that love conceives other things as well.
Bloodsport [Updated]
This entertaining Jean Claude van Damme martial-arts howler was one of our favorite B or C movies. J always reliably enjoyed it, even remembered that he’d seen it before — I actually can’t count how many times we’ve seen it. If I had to work and it happened to be on, I knew I was in luck because I wouldn’t have to worry about him being entertained. I would surreptitiously enjoy it myself in brief space-out breaks from editing. The score is bouncy and the bad guy, played by Bolo Yeung, is deliciously evil, obviously having a wonderful time.
Tonight I’m watching it alone. J is here, but not here. He’s slept all day, and has taken in nothing but a glass and a half of thickened lemonade that I fed him one strawful at a time. Ever since he had that really good day, he’s been weakening and withdrawing again, interacting a little bit, but mostly either sleeping or hallucinating. He feels a little warm, and I’m afraid he might be starting to get aspiration pneumonia. My friends and I were so anxious to get fluids and nourishment into the brief windows of opportunity when he was actively swallowing that some of it inevitably went “down the wrong pipe.” He, too, at the moments when he caught hold and felt how thirsty and hungry he was, drank and ate too fast, and we encouraged that because it encouraged us.
We the healthy lack the patience to slow down our pace to the crawl it would take to keep him with us. We want to rush ahead at life’s clip and if he can’t come along, at some point he’s going to get left behind. It’s ambiguous — ruthless and full of regret and sorrow and frustration.
He and I are largely alone now in this strange space of suspended animation. Even the people from hospice have backed off, because there’s not much they can do. He’s hovering again (the German word is better: schweben), going, as yet, neither way. And I’m trying to neither push nor pull but inevitably ending up both pushing and pulling, sequentially and simultaneously.
I alternate between a kind of rushed, what’s-the-use recklessness and a penitential, painstaking patience. Now I’m thickening all his drinks, pipetting them slowly into him with a straw held in my own mouth, and this morning I suddenly remembered with horror that I’d read somewhere that what causes pneumonia isn’t aspirated fluid or food, but accompanying bacteria from the mouth. I’ve always taken terrible care, like no care, of his teeth (luckily he doesn’t have that many of his own), and I realized that I should have been swabbing his mouth with antibacterial mouthwash, and that not having done so may already be tantamount to negligent homicide. Nor did anyone from hospice mention this to me.
The fact is that someone who has lost both the ability and the urge to drink and eat can’t go on living unless you stick them full of tubes, which I won’t do because it would be torture: mentally he is already some mixture of miserable and elsewhere. We’re all in this awful space where we know he can’t recover to a life worth living (his underlying dementia is progressive, essentially a one-way street with small, cruel reprieves, and it has been deepened a fathom by this illness), and we’re sort of waiting for the decisive turn for the worse and trying to prevent or postpone it at the same time.
He didn’t care or maybe even notice that Bloodsport was on, which made having it on seem helpless and hollow. It’s in this way that our life has become a hollow shell of what it was even before, which, in turn, was a hollow shell of . . . and so on. Like those Russian dolls.
UPDATE: Today he started to quite decisively refuse to drink. He’s not saying anything else clearly, but that “NO!” was loud and clear. I don’t think it’s a mental decision, but a physical decision. So far, he seems comfortable and I feel at peace with it, despite being unable to imagine the world beyond that edge.
A New National Holiday?
Spread the word: Charles G. Hill of the blog Dustbury has dubbed yesterday “Refudiation Day.” I think that ought to catch on.
Countersuggestible.
I just realized that that’s the precise word for my current political mood. It ceased to be “ambivalent” quite some time ago.
It feels so good to put your finger on something.
Twittering was going on about this article on Politico, saying that a lot of Republicans are trying to figure out how to defeat Sarah Palin for the 2012 nomination.
Damned if it didn’t make her look good to me. And I was not a fan. (So why didn’t Democrats’ scorn for her have the same effect? Because I discounted it so completely. In the twisted logic of countersuggestibility, that somehow makes sense.)
I twittered that and got an e-mail from Ron:
I’m still unsure if Palin should be president…(first thought: no) but it’s more interesting to see all this stuff play out, while Obama is going in the opposite direction. If Palin can defeat her own party…she may be getting the training needed to defeat the dems! 2 years is a long way off….
I answered:
I’m not sure she’d be such a disaster. Gut instinct is worth a lot more than book learnin’. She could store the necessary knowledge in her advisers.
And Ron wrote back:
let’s say that happens….and she has a successful presidency. Boy…that will mess with a lot of heads. Though it shouldn’t. Isn’t Palin the kind of figure Dems used to be proud came from America? (a la the screwball comedy?)
Bingo. It feels so good to put your finger on something. Even when it’s somebody else’s finger.
That’s exactly what Palin is. She is the first female president out of a screwball comedy: warmhearted, ditzy and clueless like a fox, a character out of the American folk tradition by way of classic Hollywood.
Ambiance 