Are We There Yet?

Acting My Age was published in early 2021. As I started to write again, one impulse was to avoid—as Ernest Becker (1924-1974) put it—The Denial of Death.

As for what ensued…

Glimpses, foreshadowings.
Antipathies, ventings.
Qualms.

Praises. Attestations. Appreciations.
Tokes of malice; excarnations.
Exasperations. Remonstrations.

Admirations.
Savorings.

Death at least acknowledged, was death not denied?
Fair question.
I suppose my writing—some of it almost in spite of itself—may be read as life-affirming. 

Of course, re death or life, what’s here makes no claim to be all the world. As Ecclesiastes put it, “to every thing there is a season…”

—T.F.
Berkeley, Honolulu, December 2022

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“Our Nada…”

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In Death in the Afternoon, nonfiction published in 1932 in his early thirties, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) offered more than “a few bright thoughts on death and dissolution.” For instance, “…all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true story-teller who would keep that from you.” 

In his story “A Clean Well-Lighted Place,” published in 1934, one of the two café waiters says of the deaf patron who’d attempted suicide, “I wouldn’t want to be that old. An old man is a nasty thing.”

Several years later, in his novel To Have And To Have Not, Hemingway describes suicides by victims of a grain broker’s financial manipulations. One “who shot himself early one morning before breakfast and which one of his children found him, and what the mess looked like”; the one who took “a step forward onto the third rail in front of the Aurora-Elgin train…” 

And, “Some made the long drop from the apartment or the office window; some took it quietly in two-car garages with the motor running; some used the native tradition of the Colt or Smith and Wesson; those well-constructed implements that end insomnia, terminate remorse, cure cancer, avoid bankruptcy … those admirable American instruments so easily carried, so sure of effect, so well designed to end the American dream when it becomes a nightmare…” 

As Hemingway aged, fame, an increasingly cartoonish persona, and health problems obscured his best writing. At sixty-one, having hooked-to-kill or shot-to-kill many creatures (machine-gunning sharks, for instance), he committed suicide. As had his father, as did sister/brother/son/granddaughter. Hemingway’s Boat, Paul Hendrick-son’s remarkable revisionist biography, salvages for the reader Hemingway as both father capable of compassion and gifted writer struggling to continue his art. 

Several years after Hemingway’s death, I took a college class in which we read his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, published in his late twenties. Our instructor was soon to publish his own first novel, would arrive at class wearing a multi-belted tan Burberry trench coat. One of Hemingway’s ilk, the sartorial message. However, given the bitterness of the novel’s opening sections—the shit Jake, war-eunuched protagonist, dumps on his Jewish “friend”—I felt my Jewish instructor was lucky to have missed Hemingway’s boat. As, I thought at age twenty, I was. 

But… might our teacher instead have been one of Hemingway’s compatriots or go-fers? Not vilified in a novel or sucker-punched while boxing? And/or, would our teacher have avoided suicide, unlike others in Hemingway’s orbit? As Jake said, “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”

Just Like Always

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Back on the small beach. Mid-June. Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn over Diamond Head before dawn. Earth’s very own moon once more full. Low tide, roar of waves breaking out on the reef, slosh of wavelets at my feet, brief surges of blurs and film of white water on sand. 

Yet another early summer’s school—shoal!—of small fish just beyond the shore-break. A mass of Hawaiian sardines and halalu (young akule). Densely packed, moving as a single swarm. Cloud. Confusing both predators and the non-predating seeking-to-make-contact self. 

Many thousands. Millions? Too many to try to count, in any case, and not a single one stepping aside to identify itself.

Who By Fire?

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The list of people I’ll never see again keeps growing. 

Some far away. 

Some surviving but struggling. 

Some dead. 

David, vacation skiing, fell off the chair lift, suffocated in the snow. Possible precipitating heart attack, high alcohol content.

Melissa murdered by boyfriend. Not, repeat not, double suicide.

Mary: pancreatic cancer. 

Jasper’s marijuana deal in Mexico fifty years ago. Never returned. Presumed dead. 

Ned, forty, two young kids, wife. Killed by drunk driver. 

Chester and Leo in their nineties, dead of “old age.” 

Betty: cardiac arrest. 

Lenny, botched back surgery, years of terrible pain, ended, it seems, by (voluntary) dehydration.

78s

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In 1971, Joni Mitchell, already a famous composer, lyricist, and performer, released her fourth album, Blue. Also in 1971, my first book was published. A tyro, in over my head but with stories to tell, I was beginning to learn both how to write and to be in the role of writer. Joni Mitchell and I were then twenty-seven years old.

I savored several of her songs well before Blue—“The Circle Game” and “Both Sides Now.” But after Blue, perhaps because the album was so rich it was enough for a lifetime, without intending to I stopped following her music. And/or because I had so many other teachers—authors, filmmakers, singers—to learn from. Over the years, in any case, with lovers and friends, I’d share Blue. 

Beyond my admiration of the songs in Blue, Mitchell was clearly ahead of me in what she grasped, almost mercilessly, about the vagaries of passion and commitment. Herself both manipulative—often more than the equal of her rock-star lovers—and guileless. Back when Mitchell had written in “Clouds,” “I really don’t know love at all,” I heard that I had much to learn. In 1977, world changing in so many ways, my Who Wrote the Book of Love? contained “fictional variations on an eternal theme,” as the publicist put it. My short pieces were untitled, sometimes almost fables. Unusual back then, contrary to market conventions. But you couldn’t hear Joni Mitchell and not try to find your authentic idiom and form. 

Such a stubborn artist! Defiant! Noncompliant! Interviewed in 2013, she said, “I’m not a herd animal.” Back in the day in “A Case of You,” she sang, “Oh I am a lonely painter/I live in a box of paints.” And in ‘All I Want’, “I am on a lonely road and I am traveling/traveling, traveling, traveling….” And in ‘California’, “Oh will you take me as I am?/Will you take me as I am?/Will you?” Driven to follow her own star, willing to be on her own if need be, partnering and then once again a party of one, perhaps she saw that being solitary gave her access to her art. If at a price, dynamic I had to assess in my life and art.

Talented David Crosby, of CSNY fame, said, at age eighty, “She is, arguably, the best singer-songwriter of our time … as good a poet as Bob [Dylan] and ten times the musician and singer that he is…” And of Blue, Crosby said, it was “much better than my stuff.” Crosby estimable in older age to continue to insist on Mitchell’s genius, whether or not she likes or praises him.

Fifty years-plus since Blue, I recently saw video of Mitchell, so determinedly recovered from a brain aneurysm, performing at the Newport Festival. Like many people, I was in tears for/in awe of…also admiring the musicians empowering her. Also sobered by her voice, several octaves lower than on Blue. Catching up on what had become of her, I read she’d had a ten year creatively fruitful marriage. And why should she not have? I’d now been married for fourteen years.

As she wrote in at twenty-three in “The Circle Game,” “We’re captive on the carousel of time.” Captive? She had that right. But what an extraordinary sustained drive for freedom.

For the moment, Joni Mitchell and I are each seventy-eight, though, truth be told, she’s about six months older. As she wrote, and sang, “But let's not talk about fare-thee-wells now/The night is a starry dome…”

It Can't Happen Here

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It was the era of “America Love It or Leave It” and “My Country Right or Wrong” bumper stickers. President Richard Nixon (1913-1994), having escalated the insane and unwinnable American war in Vietnam, was not forced to resign for criminal acts against political opponents until 1974.

Meanwhile, Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip was published. His haunting, didactic book compiled a late 19th century small-town photographer’s images with a local paper’s stories. What emerged was a montage of community as charnel house. Death, murder, barn-burnings, bank failures, diseases, tramp armies, poverty, jealousy, revenge, bankruptcies, suicide, mental illness, addiction, paranoia, infanticide by parents, shame, sorrow. Not, as Walter Sussman described Lesy’s work, the American dream but the American nightmare.

For instance, Lesy, then a graduate student, wrote, “The old men who went mad with jealousy. The old women who jumped down wells. All those mothers: the ones who carried their children into rivers; and the ones who fed them arsenic and strychnine so that, if they had to die, at least it wouldn’t be of epidemic disease. All those women who purified and punished themselves with kerosene and matches. All the men who cleansed the putrescence of their lives with carbolic acid. All the others who killed themselves with the same insecticide they’d used on potato bugs.

“Do you recall? The hypnotists, The hydrophobes. The somnambulists. The tireless inventors of perpetual motion who tried to conquer time as if it were a disease. The doctors who went to heaven, and the railway men who saw ghosts along the tracks. The farmers who saw monsters pull squealing pigs into lakes, and the others who accused their neighbors of witchcraft. The men and women who received messages from the dead in their dreams, and the sick and injured who believed electricity was the elixir of life… The stories of salvation and religious insanity. The accounts of berserkers who kept their villages at bay. All the women who howled, naked in the winter night… epidemics of smallpox and diphtheria and typhoid and meningitis that no invention of prayer or perpetual motion could prevent.”

And: “There were the hermits who had withdrawn muttering about their enemies, and the wildmen, dressed in skins, howling gibberish. There were the old misers who sat behind boarded windows, keeping their money safe. There were the men and women who left their bedrooms only at night and only then to make certain that nothing, absolutely nothing was out of place. There were the suicides who killed and cleansed themselves with fire or carbolic acid. There were the men who stuffed and collected animals, living creatures transformed into things… Here and there were women who refused to speak and men who had been miraculously cured of their blindness…”

I read Lesy’s book when it was just published in 1973, my own first book recently out. Much admired his, learned from it as human and writer, for good reason envied its author. Lesy had found a way to convey the madness of our country in the moment we were then living by presenting madness past. For sure, in 1973 we too were on a death trip.

I came back to Lesy’s book nearly fifty years older as I was slowly paring down my too-many hundreds of books in the garage library, gifting a few more day after day to the public library. Reread Wisconsin Death Trip in the process, raved about it to friends, couldn’t let it go.

In 1973, our country was—how to put it?—a horror. Now, generations having passed since the American war in Vietnam, Nixon dead/Lyndon Johnson (1908-1973) dead/JFK (1917-1963) dead/Martin Luther King (1929-1968) dead and so on and on, the young have no particular reason to think about that time. But I do. Lesy’s book both reminds me of the world when I was young and of ways in which our country is, still, as it was then. His book also speaks to me about the dizzying unpredictability of life, that things fell apart so mercilessly in Wisconsin at the end of the 19th century. And could—so easily—so mercilessly fall apart once again.

You think not? Call me old enough to know better.

Portents

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The tropics. For years, after checking the crabs on the small beach at first light, I sometimes walk along the park. At a larger beach, on benches facing the ocean, I join the usual four or five older working-class or middle-class local guys. Asian American, in their sixties and seventies, mostly retired—strong unions here. This start of their daily routine, no doubt advised by health plans to avoid social isolation’s risk of dementia, stroke, depression. Or, merely, getting out of the house: male companionship away from solitude or spouses. To talk story: shared memories of how it used to be back in the day. Comparing notes for the next long-weekend package deal to Vegas.

And spectator sport, horizon line out there in front of them. Surf up or down. High tide/low tide. Lifeguard arriving, stopping to chat. Monk seal and pup, dedicated volunteers setting up warning signs. Older woman picking up other people’s beach trash. Early morning swimmers and surfers. Middle-aged guy in superb shape wearing a malo—loincloth—performing his daily theatrical exercise routine in the sand. As if no one’s watching.

In full wetsuit, stopping on his way to resistance exercises in the water, Jack from NYC. Former union mechanic, hyper-haole/hyper-vocal Fox News devotee in this hyper-Blue state. Street-smart but, in his seventies, still channeling his inner NYC wise-ass. He talks and talks, looking to goad, but the local guys don’t bite. Not that they’re happy Democrats in a one-party town. Rather, pretty sure everyone with power, local or not, is corrupt.

Passing the benches, Val’s just back from Vegas. He reports that Ray, someone they know or know of—in these islands, few degrees of separation—died there. At the airport, heart attack. Just like that. There’s a moment of silence. Then Greg, a skeptic who plays the cynic says, “You just never know.” Words which, given the bench-warmers’ age, occasion another moment of silence. Could be any of us. Any time, any place. Then Greg says again, “You just never know.”

Standing there as we process his news, Val adds that lately Ray had been partying “pretty hard.” A compensatory gift from Val, allowing us to put some distance between Ray’s heart attack and our present—and anticipated—conditions.

And then?

Well, we on the benches go on with our living.

And/or, to paraphrase Mark Strand, go on with our dying.

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An excerpt from Penultimates: The Now & the Not-Yet. Copyright © 2024 by Thomas Farber. Published by El Leon Literary Arts/Manoa Books.

Image by Isai Ramos.