The Despair of Animal Mortality

I don’t think anyone under the age of 65 will have the faintest idea what this blog is about. Predictably, every age has its psychological symptoms; when you are 19, you are always the smartest guy in the room and anyone over 25 is a target for your rebellious ire.

In your 20s, you are sorting through career and job and college and he and she stuff. Your 30s are about stabilization and family. All of these phases are superimposed upon a foundation of optimism and possibilities and opportunities and hope. You might be great; around the next corner fortune may favor your portfolio or you will distinguish yourself among your peers in some unanticipatable way.

Yet life tires of itself and plays out its string. Stimulus overload; the novel becomes predictably…well novel. I looked into the Grand Canyon…I saw Harrods at night…luminescent against the London mist. I’ve seen the California coast off Carmel and heard the seals barking commingled with the breaking waves off the rocky Pacific coast. I’ve seen America from Erie, Pennsylvania to Santa Barbara.

I’ve flown into Toronto on a clear night and seen the city – like an arrangement of sparkling jewels – glowing geometrically against the dark earth. I’ve been to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territory...a city of ice and cold isolated and solitary in a land of white and… more white.

I’ve seen the grinding poverty of Nigeria…the cement walls and AK 47s that guard the expats – the compounds…the guards…the gates…the cardboard shacks. I’ve been in Dammam on a day when the temperature was 119° F – in the shade and smoked Shisha amongst the revelry of Muslim camaraderie and boisterous sociability.

I’ve drunk Caipirinhas in cafes on the beach of Ipanema and smoked Marlboro cigarettes and watched the tall and tan and young and lovely people play volleyball and drink coconut water out of green coconuts…smelled the sizzling meats…the fragrant smell of red meat being barbecued at the tables.

I stood at the top of Christo Redemptor overlooking the city of Rio de Janeiro and enjoyed a view of perhaps the world’s most beautiful city. And, after about 2 minutes I was ready to go, to eat lunch, to move on. When you are 65, times winged chariot is tailgating you…almost pushing you toward your end…toward your undoing…the time when you will be undone…when you will be no one.

The question I ask myself as I am immersed in these unique environments…unusual and new to me…is this; what difference does any of this make? You’re going to die anyway…and that right soon – perhaps. All the diversity and beauty and horror and mystery and romance and banality of this reality will evaporate and…then…nothing.

As I write this, I can hear the groaning of others for whom these reflections appear to be cynical and jaded…the ennui unacceptable by the standards of their life perspective. The empirical and hedonistic tone of my comments seem cold and faithless…spiritually disquieting and devoid of the merry optimism of the sacred.

As E.O. Wilson says in his book, Consilience, which I referenced in the preceding blog; “The spirits our ancestors knew intimately first fled the rocks and trees, then the distant mountains. Now they are in the stars, where their final extinction is possible. But we cannot live without them. People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or other, however intellectualized. They will refuse to yield to the despair of animal mortality.”

At a certain age – which differs for each person – the decay is undeniable. The body disintegrates irrespective of any efforts to discourage its accelerating decrepitude. The fresh-fleshed and life-scented buoyancy of the young presides at every gathering and asserts its predominance over those of us who are vanishing.

Look at the old people dragging their disabilities and deteriorating carcasses around the world to get one last glimpse of all that is and all that can be – just before they cease to be. Being a part of that predicable and desperate mob is depressing. What does one hope to gain at this last moment; unique insights into what life could have been had you understood yourself and others more completely in your youth?

Is all this futile wandering in the service of moral development or to develop one’s aesthetic sensibility just in time to sit in a rocker and think about all the things you should have seen and appreciated but were to busy to enjoy? I’m not sure about the objective shared by this caravan of gray hair and arthritis…and I don’t care. Most of us seniors travel because we don’t have anything else to do and it gives us stories to share with others – people who are still immersed in purposeful lives – earning, spending, and supporting their families…advancing their noble career ambitions.

My point is that travel doesn’t mean much to me at this point in my life. I look around the various settings in which I find myself and ask, “Am I once again the oldest person in the room?” As I see the physical beauty of the world, I can’t help thinking how wonderful it would have been to see it when I was in my 30s. When I might have fantasized about actually moving to a location and living in a strange and wonderful other world from the one to which I have habituated.

At my age, I know that won’t happen. I will never live overlooking the beach at Ipanema. I will not work in Dubai or Abu Dhabi or London or Dublin and experience the otherness of cultures and people different from mine. Everything that I could have been and might have become, every possibility and dream and fantasy has cascaded and deflated into the now…the here…and the last end.

Putting It All Together

There are many great books; the great book for you is one that “puts it all together.” E. O. Wilson’s book Consilience is the greatest book I’ve ever read. Firstly, it is written in the most beautiful prose I’ve ever seen. I’ve never read a book that I believe used language in a more elegant and evocative manner.

Secondly, the objective of the book is not to promote any particular idea or perspective, but to integrate all perspectives into a single vision of reality. If you buy it and read it, you will never be the same again because – even if you do not remember everything he says, you will be left with an overwhelming notion that all the things that appeared separate – are one.

This book will unify your conceptual world and allow you to see that “oneness” is not a religious concept as much as it is an intellectual pursuit.

A few quotes from E. O. Wilson collected during a recent interview.

One by one, the great questions of philosophy, including "Who are we?" and "Where did we come from?" are being answered to different degrees of solidity. So gradually, science is simply taking over the big questions created by philosophy. Philosophy consists largely of the history of failed models of the brain.

You are not a real scientist until you make a discovery. And if you make a great discovery, you're a great scientist. You can be a complete jerk and go the rest of your life just saying dumb things and never finding anything again, but you're still a great scientist.

If someone could actually prove scientifically that there is such a thing as a supernatural force, it would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. So the notion that somehow scientists are resisting it is ludicrous.

The intelligent-design folks say, "You haven't explained everything." What they don't appreciate is that that's what biologists do for a living. And, one by one, the things that can't be explained are explained.

Between scientists, you can have high competitiveness and jealousy and petty nit-picking, because we are human. But once something is nailed, the person who did it usually gets the credit, and we move on.

Freud's place in history was to simply point out that a lot goes on in the brain that is not conscious thought. But then he should have gone back to the laboratory. Because what he did then was to dream up a whole series of scenarios about the subconscious, most of which turned out to be wrong.

Anyone who wants to know the history of American philosophical thought for the last half century should go through the pages of The New York Review of Books. See what the fashions were.

What makes humanity is not reason. Our emotions are what make us human.

Religion is a manifestation of deep emotion that will out, one way or the other. Either in an atheistic political ideology or an excessive fierceness in being secular. Or the Red Sox. In other words, we constantly seek a tribe that we feel is innately superior and has the great truths, and we want to identify with them. We shouldn't deny that.

I'm a very patriotic American. Pure reason would say, "Well, America is your tribe, and there are certain things you grew up with, were enculturated with, and that's why you're behaving the way you are." And then I say that's right. I repeat, I'm a very patriotic American. I want America to be the best. I want America to prevail -- not conquer but prevail. I want this country to be foremost in its qualities and its virtues and its accomplishments. And also, to stay together as a closely united country. And I know why I think that way. It's five million years of evolution. My brain is programmed to think that way. But that doesn't lessen my patriotism.

Let's be sensible, guys. We're not gonna tear off on Mars, and we're not gonna send off colonists to the nearest star system. We're gonna live here. This is what our bodies and our minds are adapted to.

I'll catch Wall-E when it goes on cable.

We have to get an entirely new mentality. Getting set for a long haul into the future. In which we grow. Not in numbers -- we'll probably shrink in numbers -- but we grow. In our understanding, in our happiness, in our harmony. Because we realize that there's no other way to survive as a species.

I think we're in the early stages of it now. Don't you?

I think we will make it. Because one quality people have -- certainly Americans have it -- is that they can adapt when they see necessity staring them in the face. What to avoid is what someone once called the definition of hell: truth realized too late.

The Blood and the Heat of the Blood

He rode with the sun coppering his face and the red wind blowing out of the west. He turned south along the old war trail and he rode out to the crest of a low rise and dismounted and dropped the reins and walked out and stood like a man come to the end of something.

There was an old horseskull in the brush and he squatted and picked it up and turned it in his hands. Frail and brittle. Bleached paper white. He squatted in the long light holding it, the comicbook teeth loose in their sockets. The joints in the cranium like a ragged welding of the bone plates. The muted run of sand in the brainbox when he turned it.

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

He rode back in the dark. The horse quickened its step. The last of the day's light fanned slowly upon the plain behind him and withdrew again down the edges of the world in a cooling blue of shadow and dusk and chill and a few last chitterings of birds sequestered in the dark and wiry brush. He crossed the old trace again and he must turn the pony up onto the plain and homeward but the warriors would ride on in that darkness they'd become, rattling past with their stone-age tools of war in default of all substance and singing softly in blood and longing south across the plains to Mexico.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Houses

The Beauty of Words

we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas 2 glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and the pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

James Joyce, Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921

The Self as Sober

Scotch and soda, mud in your eye. Baby, do I feel high, oh, me, oh, my. Do I feel high.
Dry martini, jigger of gin. Oh, what a spell you've got me in, oh, my. Do I feel high.

People won't believe me. They'll think that I'm just braggin'. But I could feel the way I do and still be on the wagon.
All I need is one of your smiles. Sunshine of your eyes, oh, me, oh, my. Do I feel high.

People won't believe me. They'll think that I'm just braggin'. But I could feel the way I do and still be on the wagon.
All I need is one of your smiles. Sunshine of your eyes, oh, me, oh, my. Do I feel higher than a kite can fly.

Give me lovin', baby. I feel high

Scotch and Soda: Lyrics by Kingston Trio

Its quarter to three, there’s no one in the place
Except you and me

So set ‘em up Joe, I got a little story
I think you should know

Were drinking my friend, to the end
Of a brief episode

Make it one for my baby
And one more for the road

One for My Baby One More for the Road: Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer

“Son, he said without preamble, never trust a man who doesn't drink because he's probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time."

James Crumley, The Wrong Case.

I don’t know where you stand on the issue of “altered states,” but I tend to agree with the artsy crowd that the highly examined life tends to create the need for recreational relief. If you have researched global warming, pollution, political corruption and the CIA’s Black Ops activities—any sane human would want a drink.

The farmers who live in my county seem to be pretty sober, but then they spend their lives obsessed with milking schedules and hay. They do not pay any attention to what they eat nor do they watch the evening news—they have to get to bed early to get up at 2:30 AM.

Writers seem to drink a bit. There are numerous examples provided in this article by Joan Acocella in an article in The New Yorker.

Tom Dardis begins his book “The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer” (1989) by noting that of the seven native-born Americans awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature five were alcoholics: Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck. As for problem drinkers who didn’t get the Nobel Prize, Dardis assembles an impressive list, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, Hart Crane, Thomas Wolfe, Dorothy Parker, Ring Lardner, Djuna Barnes, John O’Hara, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, Carson McCullers, James Jones, John Cheever, Jean Stafford, Truman Capote, Raymond Carver, and James Agee.

In an article for “The Washington Post,” Writers and Alcohol, Ann Waldron says,

Nancy J. Andreasen, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa with a PhD in English, did a 15-year study of 30 creative writers on the faculty of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where students and faculty have included well-known writers Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, John Cheever, Robert Lowell and Flannery O'Connor. She found that 30 percent of the writers were alcoholics, compared with 7 percent in the comparison group of nonwriters, she wrote in the October 1987 issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Andreasen had begun her investigation to study the correlation between schizophrenia and creativity. She found none. But she did find that 80 percent of the writers had had an episode of affective disorders, i.e. a major bout of depression including manic-depressive illness, compared with 30 percent in the control group.

My own humble opinion is that emotionally distressed people seek, and find, comfort in the solitary reflection and personal exploration that writing affords. Perhaps the primacy of internal dialogue and the examination of one's personal sentiments and feelings provide a vehicle for catharsis—that’s the way it works for me. I know very little about art, but from my perspective most artists seek emotional expression.

Being “in touch” with ones emotions may be different from emotionalizing life through symbols, images, metaphors, and analogies. Many of the most famous writers seemed to revel in expressing themselves through eccentric emotional behavior, in public and in print. I am not sure they were “in touch” enough to understand the effects of their actions on the feelings of others—which is a very different thing from understanding how to emotionalize the behavior of a fictional character.

Artists may just be neurotics that use their writing to control their symptoms. The practical, well-balanced John Waynes of the world eschew the emotionalism and sentiment that drives my obsessions. I once showed one of my favorite movies, “How Green Was My Valley,” to a friend who was a CPA. He thought it was disgustingly sentimental. I find it to be melodramatic, heart rending, and inspiring.

The business majors of the world, the captains of commerce, the utilitarians, pragmatist, realists, naturalists and other practical people have probably never cried at a movie, or when reading a poem. In which case, to rewrite or an old adage—I think the practical life is not worth living.

Life is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.

Horace Walpole (1717–1797)

Blog from the Dead

The following post was left to be shown 3 months after the writer - Theresa Duncan - committed suicide.


Basil Rathbone was entertaining a friend one night at his home in the Hollywood Hills. Both men were keenly interested in dogs and their breeding. His friend had brought with him two handsome specimens. As it got late, the two friends had a parting drink and called it a night. The friend and the canines got into the car and drove away. But, sadly, not very far.

As Rathbone turned to go back inside, he heard the screech of brakes and the sickening sounds of a ghastly car crash. His friend and the dogs were killed instantly.

In deep shock, and with the thought, “He was just standing here,” pounding in his aching head, Rathbone heard the damned phone begin ringing. Mechanically he picked it up and heard the voice of the MGM studio’s night switchboard operator. “Sorry, Mr. Rathbone but I have a woman on the line who simply must talk to you. She says it’s desperately, desperately important.” Probably some smitten fan, he thought as the operator said, “Sir, I’ve never heard anyone be so urgent. She hopes you’ll know what a certain message means.”

Rathbone, impatient and in a daze, snapped, “For Christ’s sake, put her on and be done with it!” The woman was calling from her home, located way to hell and gone on the far side of Los Angeles. She had a low and cultivated speaking voice and identified herself as a trance medium and clairvoyant. At that time the movie colony was going through one of its periodic infatuations with psychics, astrologers, table-tipping séances, Ouija boards and such. Rathbone scorned all such claptrap, but, he said, “the woman’s voice was so compelling.”

“I have for you, sir, what we term ‘a calling of urgency,’” she said. “It came to me with such impact that, although not knowing its meaning, I simply had to find you. The message is brief. Here it is in its entirety: ‘Traveling very fast. No time to say good-bye.’ And then, ‘There are no dogs here.’ ”

The next time I saw Rathbone (F.Y.I., he lived at 135 Central Park West), more years had gone by, and he was in the act of receiving a summons for letting his dog Ginger off the leash in Central Park. I thought he might have decided, looking back, that it had all been some sort of bizarre coincidence, or maybe a highly original prank. He said, “At the time, of course, I was quite shaken by it.” And now? “I am still shaken by it.”

Dreams

Last night I dreamed a dreary dream,
From beyond the Isle of Skye,
I saw a dead man win a fight,
And I think that man was I.

James Douglas, 2nd Earl of Douglas


I don’t consider dreams to be mystic premonitions or symbolic messages from our psychological underbelly. I have not studied dreams or dream research—I’m sure there are hundreds of fully funded Ph.D. and M.D.s working through grant money as we speak.

I often dream that I am talking with my father or that he and I are engaged in some commonplace undertaking. He has been dead for over 20 years, but he appears in my dreams as if he is 40 years old.

In some dreams, I am aware that he has died, and I wonder why he is still walking about looking normal. Some of these dreams are extremely disquieting. I wake up in an emotional state.

Dreams are provided a special status by some people—keys to unleashing clinical symptoms or clues to the etiology of psychological symptoms. The lengthy psychoanalysis that many people undertake uses dream interpretation as one of its key clinical tools.

Woody Allen was in psychoanalysis for 30 years; sometimes he saw his psychoanalyst 3 times a week. That’s the kind of behavior that gives psychoanalysis a bad name. I think the old adage that “psychoanalysis is just paying for a friend” may have some merit. But, sometimes you need a friend you can talk to about everything that haunts you, and those types of friends are hard to find.

When they depict dream imagery in movies, it can be interesting, although, I think that flashbacks and images of important events or people in the character’s life are more compelling. In the movie, Islands in the Stream, named after Ernest Hemingway’s book of the same name, the main character (played by George C. Scott) has just been shot.

As he lies dying, we are allowed to see the final images flashing through his head. He sees his ex-wife, his children—standing and looking at him in a misty haze. They are smiling and waving to him. As he dies he sees them driving away in an open car looking back at him—waving and smiling—whereupon he says, “I now know that there is not one thing that is true. It is all true.”

Dreams take on a sinister value in the movie, Jacob’s Ladder. This movie is about a soldier dying on a table in Viet Nam who dreams that he is back home in the US. The movie moves back and forth between dream and reality. Click on my link and read about it—the movie is ominously surrealistic.

The people I have known come back to me in my dreams; they seem so real. Some of my close personal friends have died young and I see them in my dreams. We talk. These dreams make me aware of the loss that can be felt years later, when friends depart. I always wish I had done or said something that I did not-- that I had done something for them that I did not because I was so self-absorbed.

"O God, I could be bounded in a nut-shell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams."

Shakespeare, Hamlet