Prefontaine
I went running on Pre's trail this afternoon. It's a bark trail along the Willamette River, with sections where the trees have grown over the top of the trail to make a tunnel like in a fairy tale, and it suddenly gets really dark and cool and so quiet that you can hear the draft going around your body. I'd love to run in Eugene more often. I ran with my dad, something I've never done before, and it was a strange experience to hear my dad struggling with his breathing next to me, I guess because it's a revelation of infirmity, which I don't want to accept.
I went to a reading in Seattle by a poet/essayist named Lucia Perillo. She has Multiple Sclerosis. In one of her essays she observes that in most of American society there are so few reminders of our mortality around us that we can ignore the fact that we are all bodies that are going to die. She compares this with past societies, e.g. London during the Plague. She compares our burial practices to cultures in which the body is kept visible through decomposition, or discarded with violence. She questions what kind of progress it is, that thanks to modern sanitation, burial techniques, and--I don't know, etiquette?--we're able to distance ourselves so much from death in our daily lives. Is that advancement? I wonder how it changes the way we think, not to be confronted every day with death (in person, I mean. Not on CNN). I mean, when was the last time you saw a dead human body, or saw someone die? In December, I saw a homeless man dead in front of the laundromat across from my apartment in San Francisco.
I'm thinking about those of us that have experienced death up close, death of someone close. Do we become closer to death? I'm thinking about those of us that do confront death often, because of our job or neighborhood. How are we different from the people Lucia Perillo describes? I'm thinking about The Year of Magical Thinking and the essay "Love of My Life" by Cheryl Strayed. Part of what makes them so good is that they locate and illuminate the paradox that we remain unprepared for the one thing that happens to everyone. Why is that?
I went to a reading in Seattle by a poet/essayist named Lucia Perillo. She has Multiple Sclerosis. In one of her essays she observes that in most of American society there are so few reminders of our mortality around us that we can ignore the fact that we are all bodies that are going to die. She compares this with past societies, e.g. London during the Plague. She compares our burial practices to cultures in which the body is kept visible through decomposition, or discarded with violence. She questions what kind of progress it is, that thanks to modern sanitation, burial techniques, and--I don't know, etiquette?--we're able to distance ourselves so much from death in our daily lives. Is that advancement? I wonder how it changes the way we think, not to be confronted every day with death (in person, I mean. Not on CNN). I mean, when was the last time you saw a dead human body, or saw someone die? In December, I saw a homeless man dead in front of the laundromat across from my apartment in San Francisco.
I'm thinking about those of us that have experienced death up close, death of someone close. Do we become closer to death? I'm thinking about those of us that do confront death often, because of our job or neighborhood. How are we different from the people Lucia Perillo describes? I'm thinking about The Year of Magical Thinking and the essay "Love of My Life" by Cheryl Strayed. Part of what makes them so good is that they locate and illuminate the paradox that we remain unprepared for the one thing that happens to everyone. Why is that?
posted by DB at 12:15 AM
2 Comments:
Great posting--except for the second to last word. You fucked it up.
When my best friend Gary died right after high school graduation, it was like someone took out one of my eyeballs. I felt blinded. That fall semester, I went around like a zombie, and cried myself to sleep more times than I can count. Things turned around in the spring, when I took a class on Romanticism. One week when we were reading "Adonais," Shelley's elegy for Keats, I felt beaten by the poem. I thought it was long and stupid, and finally I just decided to go to the professor's office hours to talk to him about it. A little into our talk, I started to cry. The professor sat with me for two hours and talked with me about the poem and its connection to Gary's death. That conversation saved my life. That uncomplicated kindness. Regarding your entry: I almost agree that death has been distanced from us in modern life, but in my opinion death isn't any less present in people's lives. The problem is that we've sanitized grief. Death will always be there, but I think our ability to feel grief has changed. We've given it steps, categories, turned it into a divisible process, the way news gets divided into containable sound-bytes. It's like buying single songs online without knowing the symphonic thought of an artist's whole CD: our emotions are now calibrated by the capitalist impulse to get the one quick fix. We even treat our relationships like that: in a manner that's opportunistic and merely self-gratifying. I'm a 20something guy whose capacity for deep feeling seems very limited. I know this about myself, and I fight it every day by always facing up to every situation and relationship I'm in, and going into each as far as I can. And while I can agree that it's good to be "patient" with what's unresolved in one's heart, another part of me thinks that's just Rilke's bullshit way of saying that life is merely aesthetic capital for art, and thus life should be strung along unresolvedly, the way he did. Being "patient" can also just be a way of justifying weakness of character. It's better to be impatient, to be passionate even if that means to blunder--this is the way I feel most of the time. Who cares if death is missing in our lives, it's living beautifully we need to keep being reminded of.
Dan
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