21 David Gessner Published In The Oxford American THE

21 david gessner published in the oxford american the dreamer does not exist 1. the pig sizzles on the spit, its eyes n

21
David Gessner
Published in the Oxford American
THE DREAMER DOES NOT EXIST
1.
The pig sizzles on the spit, its eyes not so much blank as boiled. It
is now the middle of my first term as an academic, a professor, but at
the moment I bear more resemblance to Cro-Magnon man, intent on
tearing apart my prey. I rip skin from the pig’s body and delight in
its taste on my tongue. I am drunk by the way. I especially like the
skin.
My new job is to teach other people how to write, and I am surrounded
by fellow members of my tribe, writers all, who tear along with me at
the porcine carcass. But if what we have in common is wielding words,
at the moment are communication is decidedly non-verbal. Though we say
little there must be a genetically encoded social pleasure in standing
around a kill. It just feels right. We grunt with pleasure at the
food.
2.
Artists, writers, and poets all have pat answers when they are asked
why they do what they do, and I’m no different. Usually my reply is a
soft one peppered with the word “love” (as in “I love my work” or
“labor of love”), and sometimes if I’m feeling fancy and literary I
throw in a Robert Frost quote about “uniting my avocation with my
vocation.” When less inspired I resort to some well-worn variant of “I
write because I have to.” Whatever. These are nice answers, all of
them, but the truth is it isn’t something I have thought too deeply
about, and if I did I suspect the true answers would be significantly
darker and less verbal. A series of angry but self-asserting grunts
maybe. A howl or a pounding on my chest.
In fact, as I turn toward rooting out a truer answer, I can’t help but
suspect that my current obsession with words is entangled with my
first obsession, the one that plagued my late childhood and early
puberty. I was a fairly normal kid, if there is such a thing, good at
sports and not ugly, and though my brain teemed with the usual
childhood insecurities, many adults seemed to be fooled into thinking
that I was a confident and relatively healthy-minded young man. They
were wrong. Below my ready laugh and not unpleasant exterior lurked a
dark obsessive fear of nonexistence.
I think I was around 10 when I had my first crisis of being. This was
not a Sartre-like intellectual consideration of nothingness that
provoked mild nausea, but a visceral sensation that induced something
close to real madness. A sudden and overpowering sense that there was
nothing in the world: that the world and, more importantly, that I
didn't exist. This sensation provoked something wild and strange in
me, a pure panic reaction that the child psychiatrist who later
observed me described as being like "an LSD user on a bad trip." Not
the kind of thing young parents want to hear about their 10-year-old.
It all started when my dear dog Macker died. Macker had been my
lifelong companion, brought home from the pound the same month I was
born. His death was an ugly one: he ate some of the salt that was used
to melt the ice on the roads in Worcester, Massachusetts. My mother
found him frozen stiff in a snowbank in our backyard. As anxious as I
was about my beloved dog's whereabouts, neither my father or mother
told me anything about his death for almost a week. They waited
because they were worried about my reaction, and as it turned out they
had good reason to worry. I flipped out when I finally heard. I
couldn't believe that this thing--this horrible cold ending--had
happened to my best friend. Even more appalling, as the days passed,
was the notion that something similar might one day happen to me. Lots
of kids start to worry about death around this age, I understand, but
not many begin to truly obsess over it. Lying in bed at night a
thought--or more accurately a series of thoughts--would grip hold of
my mind. It was these thoughts that would comprise my first full-blown
obsession.
I called it "the feeling" and though it began with thought it ended in
outright panic. It was a little like walking up a mental staircase
where each step was more frightening. It all began with the fact of
death, but that was just the first step. Next I'd imagine how it felt
not to exist at all, and it felt like nothing, as well as nothing I
could imagine. But with some effort I would manage to put myself in
this state of not-being, and with that I would begin to sweat and grow
nervous. At that point I wasn't quite terrified. Not yet. Terror was
the next step and with it I left logic behind. In my solipsistic
manner I reasoned that if I didn't exist then nothing else did either.
It was about then that "the feeling" usually took over.
It is impossible to exaggerate the sensation of terror that came over
me as I ascended the next step. Suddenly, I was certain at that moment
that I did not exist and, equally if not more terrifying, the world
did not exist. I was nothing--not even something that might have ever
existed. I pounded on my chest to remind myself that I was solid, but
it did no good. I reminded myself that I had to exist because I was
the one thinking these thoughts, but that didn't help either. I felt
like an imaginary wisp, a fleck of nothingness, a passing thought in
someone else's mind. Worse, it was as if I were merely a fleeting
second in someone's dream, but I was even less than that: the dreamer
did not exist.
While my logic might have been faulty, the power of what I felt was
undeniable. I ran through the house like a lunatic. I had a room on
the attic floor and when "the feeling" hit I would sprint down the
stairs screaming. Once I picked up a painting and almost smashed it
over a chair--after all, it was nothing—only holding back at the last
second.
Usually the first person I encountered was my sister, Heidi. Heidi and
I were close but it still surprised her when her lunatic brother came
charging down the hall and hugged her tightly in his arms. I needed to
hold something solid, to prove to myself that something did indeed
exist, and Heidi usually existed. But even squeezing Heidi like a boa
constrictor I couldn't make her feel real to me. I would sprint off to
find my mother, then clamp onto her as tightly as I could, trying to
find something real. But it didn't work, it never worked. Though she
felt substantial enough, I knew the truth, knew she was just another
illusion.
I tried desperately to explain how I felt as if that would somehow
reduce the horror.
"Nothing is nothing!" I yelled at first, getting my words mixed up in
my panic. "Nothing is nothing!"
"Of course nothing is nothing," my mother said with a gentle smile.
Couldn't she see the awful truth? Why was she smiling? Was she crazy?
"But don't you understand: nothing is nothing!"
She smiled again and suddenly I realized my mistake.
"Everything is nothing!" I screamed.
I wanted these words to strike her with the force of revelation, just
as they'd struck me. She, after all, was the person I was closest to,
the person I had come from. But I couldn't make her see, no matter how
I tried. She would pat me on the shoulder and assure me that it would
be all right. But it wouldn't, I knew that, knew that nothing would
ever be all right again.
One time I had the doubly unpleasant experience of having the
"feeling" strike when my father was around. While usually intimidated
by him, that day, overwhelmed by my obsession, his presence hardly
mattered. He was just another whiff of "nothing" (though, granted, a
more substantial whiff.) I charged around, throwing things, screaming,
"EVERYTHING IS NOTHING!" (I'd gotten the words down by then.) At first
he yelled back, angry, until it finally dawned on him that I was, at
that moment, almost completely out of my mind.
He looked at the frothing maniac who was his first born.
"Calm down, David," he said. "Just calm down."
He rapped his knuckles on the coffee table to show me how hard it was.
"This isn't nothing," he said. He touched his own burly chest. "I'm
not nothing."
He had the right idea, I'll give him that. But it didn't help. I
stared for one intense second at his puzzled ape-like face. Then I
sprinted off down the hallway, screaming and yelling.
"David!" he yelled. "David Marshall Gessner you come back here this
instant!"
I didn't come. He found me out cowering in the garage.
"Look, David, just try and calm down--"
"You don't understand!" I yelled.
He'd had enough.
"I understand one thing, my friend. I understand you don't see how
lucky you are. Lucky to live in this house, to have food on the table,
to have two parents. Do you realize there are millions of children
starving and dying of disease?"
I looked up at him as if he were the crazy one.
"I'd like to be starving or dying right now!" I screamed.
And I believed it! Believed that I alone was cursed with this awful
understanding, an understanding that made starvation and disease look
like child's play.
I ran away from him, down the street into the neighborhood. I couldn't
listen to him and his logic. Didn't he understand? Everything was
nothing! I did not exist!
Of course "the feeling" didn't happen every day, but it happened often
enough to cause my parents serious worry. It wasn't particularly
pleasant for them to suddenly be contemplating turning in my Pop
Warner uniform for a straightjacket. Though I tried to convince my
mother it would do no good, she finally dragged me off to see a
psychiatrist. With the first one I got nowhere, but the second was
different. I was twelve or thirteen by then and I folded my arms as I
sat up on the couch, convinced that mere words couldn't change "the
feeling."
"I won't try to 'cure' you," he said. "All I'd like to do is teach you
how to relax yourself. So that when you have your 'feeling' you can
use these techniques."
He was a bearded black man who smoked a pipe and seemed very calm and
wise, but deep down I knew mere "techniques" didn't have a chance in
hell against "the feeling." Still when he asked me to, I stared at the
spot on the wall.
"I'm going to hypnotize you, David, but it's not like in the movies.
Anytime you want you can come out."
I nodded and counted backward. The plan was that, while under
hypnosis, he would teach me self-hypnosis. Then, when the feeling
came, I would simply calm down. I went along with him, knowing full
well that I wasn't about to close my eyes and count backward when the
real thing returned.
And, just as I guessed, it did return. But then, slowly, mysteriously,
it faded. Maybe I was just getting older, growing out of childhood
logic, or simply getting used to the idea that I was "nothing." By the
time I got to high school I was only experiencing it about once a
year, then not at all. I never believed I was cured, (and I still
don't, I suppose) but, on the other hand, I have to admit it stopped.
Whatever the reason, the feeling finally faded away.
3.
The dead pig tastes wonderful and I nod and smile at the other
writers. But then, just as I am becoming fully immersed in this
mindless pleasure, a grad student of mine begins to talk about God.
Which makes me shift uneasily. I’d rather stay focused on pig. One
thing I’ve learned about this new place where I find myself is that
the air is thick not just with humidity but with religion. There is
much talk of the Lord. Just this morning I drove to get my coffee
behind a pickup with a bumper sticker that read “Live hard, pray
hard.” There are signs like this everywhere (as well as countless
flags, both American and Confederate). I am not sure if people are
actually any more religious here, in a deep sense, but they are
quicker to bring up religion, to display it, to drop Jesus’ name. Of
course it’s as easy to be a regionalist as any other kind of bigot so
I need to watch myself.
The boy keeps talking and I find myself backing away. I mumble a
full-mouthed apology and shuffle off to the woods to piss. On the way
back I make a detour by the keg. Then, when I see that the god-talker
has moved on, I sneak back for another go at the pig. Yes, there is
something naturally religious about the sacrifice on the spit, but
maybe with more of a pagan flavor. The hog has given us the greatest
gift. The unworded must die for the word-makers. I take a long pull on
my beer and once again partake of the body.
4.
The word “nothing,” which had so terrorized me as a ten year old, lost
its power in my teens. My family occasionally attended a Unitarian
church, with a minister who was less like a preacher than a good
humanities lecturer in college, a man only slightly this side of an
atheist. Fittingly, for a Unitarian in central Massachusetts, I spent
my high school years worshipping at the church of Thoreau and Emerson.
If I had a religion it was a kind of paganism, and one of its few
rituals was woods walking (sometimes aided by the sacramental smoking
of a joint.) As a child, God had never taken a firm hold on my mind,
and by then had faded entirely. More surprisingly my fear of
annihilation also atrophied, or at least was buried below more
pressing preoccupations, like girls and drinking. And something else
rushed in to fill the void. Not writing, not quite yet, though I
filled my journals with profound thoughts about the color of maple
leaves. No, what had begun to obsess me was less putting words down on
the page than the idea of becoming or, better yet, being a writer. A
great writer, it goes without saying. A writer whose name others would
think about, who would fill their minds. And a writer who—why not
since I was just daydreaming anyway?—would put words on the page that
would live forever. That is, to state it bluntly, a writer who would
be immortal.
5.
It occurs to me now that while I thought of myself as burningly unique
back then, many of my concerns were in fact socio-economic, and,
moreover, regional. My family was well off enough so that I did not
have to concern myself with putting food on my plate, with the
contemporary equivalent of hunting, which freed my mind for other
terrors. The regionalism came out perhaps in my Unitarianism, my
overriding love of the Concord nature writers (though certainly
dreamy-eyed adolescents all over the country shared this one), and my
community’s easy acceptance of my off-handed atheism. When I was
shipped off to prep school in Western Mass I found myself with many
like-minded members of the same tribe. We wore Tye-Dye, listened to
Pink Floyd and the Dead, smoke pot and drank wine. Occasionally we had
moments of ecstasy not unfamiliar to those in their late teens.
It was while I was away at school that the rest of my family moved
South. My mother and three siblings were stunned by the move, which
would later assume a mythic quality in family history. I, already
safely tucked away at school, was the only member of my family who was
spared.
6.
We eat our pig deep in the woods. Earlier my wife, my two year old
daughter, and I drove across the bridge over the Cape Fear River and
then north on a road more like a path. The land here is full of live
oaks and long leaf pines, as well as a few abandoned refrigerators and
washers. The smell is of pine flavored with the smoke from the pig. I
talk for a while with Elton, the old man who is letting us use his
woods, and he gives us a tour of the one room cabin where his
grandmother grew up. When he shows us his stuffed bobcat and raccoon,
my daughter points and makes monkey noises. We take a buggy ride
through the woods in the dark, which seems quaint at first until the
horse balks at some tree roots and then rushes forward, nearly
throwing my daughter and me from the buggy. Suddenly it is not play,
and I clutch her tight during the last few hundred yards as the horse
trots through the dark woods, pulling us bumpily along. We survive,
and settle down around the fire. I help myself to yet another plate of
pork, which is still succulent. We all stare at the fire and drink
while some of the students play guitars.
I note thankfully that the god-talker has left. I sing along with my
fellow writers, my fellow pagans, my fellow pig-eaters.
7.
If I sometimes stereotype the Southerners around me, then they
stereotype right back. Since I come from the North, from Massachusetts
no less, that land of liberals and bloodless intellectuals, I must
know nothing about the traditions of hog-eating. My Southern students
tell me all about pig etiquette. They are like excited
anthropologists. But they are wrong. I know pig. For instance, I have
traveled to the Gessner ancestral home in the former Eastern German
town of Aue where all my father and I ate for a week was some form of
pork or another. And this is not my first pig pickin’, far from it.
Though I am polite and nod, I am willing to bet the cold beer my hand
is wrapped around that I have ingested as much meat straight from a
hog’s side as any of them.
I was eighteen when my family first moved to North Carolina. Though I
stayed at school in the North I often came down to visit. Later on,
family members would speak of the move to the South the way the early
Jews must have spoken of Egypt, a time of massive uprooting and exile.
But the fact is that my family is filled with gregarious sorts, and
that they make friends easily, and so after a few months in the South
we decided to celebrate with those new friends by throwing a party and
barn dance in the country outside of Charlotte. Following the local
tradition, that party would be a pig pickin’.
School was just out and I was visiting my family at the time. My
father and I and some other men got out to the barn early, at the
crack of dawn, to start roasting the pig on a spit. No matter what you
choose to baste the animal with, booze is the true lubricant at any
celebration of pig. The men all drank heavily, and before long we were
savages around the fire, a Southern version of Lord of the Flies. And
if we were acting out that classic book, there was little doubt who
was playing the bullying part of Ralph. My father downed a six pack of
Schlitz before noon and got that glimmer he always got in his eye when
he drank. He took the pig’s head and put a baseball cap on it and
jammed a Lucky Stripe in its mouth and hooked a Schlitz around its ear
using the plastic six pack loop. He then somehow managed to hang the
head over the barn door so that it greeted people when they arrived.
Of course the guests didn’t start to trickle in until late in the
afternoon, giving us long hours to achieve almost complete
inebriation. When my sister Heidi's new Southern friends arrived they
immediately got me stoned. This was a bad combination of intoxicants
for the teenage me: the pot made me paranoid, the alcohol violent. The
next thing I knew I was alone in the back of someone's car and that
someone, a real Southern boy, was in front flirting with Heidi. They
passed me a bowl and I lit it and pulled the smoke deeply into my
lungs. Some time went by, and, apparently, though I’d passed the bowl
back up front, I’d forgotten to pass the lighter. The Southern boy
asked me to pass it, but in doing so he made a grave mistake. He
mispronounced my last name.
"Gezz-ner," he said. "Pass the lighter."
I tightened.
"My name's not Gezz-ner. It's Gess-ner."
It was then that my sister's new friend made another fateful error,
one he would soon regret. He laughed at me. I can’t remember exactly
what he said after laughing, but through the haze of pot and alcohol
this is what I heard:
"Gezz-ner, Gess-ner. Gessner is a nothing."
What the poor kid was probably trying to say is "Hey, it's nothing.
Don’t worry about it." But what I heard was something like this: "YOU
ARE NOTHING."
In a flash I was over the seat and was on him. A second later we were
out of the car rolling on the dirt, fists flying. I punched and
punched, a savage attack that he could in no way have anticipated. My
family's new Southern friends all gathered round to watch the fight.
As was the custom, as is the custom everywhere apparently, a primal
chant began, one word over and over: “Fight! Fight!”
Somehow, later, it was all right. I apologized profusely, the way I
always did back then. Later we shook hands, though the boy was still
understandably confused about what he had done wrong. As it turned out
I’d picked the right kid to attack: Many of my sister's friends came
up to me to say that they’d often wanted to beat the crap out of old
what's-his-name. I was forgiven and the night turned wild. The music
cranked and we all danced like dervishes in the barn. My father spun
my mother across the floor, my little sister Jenny leapt and whirled,
Heidi and I danced in a mad flight of self-forgetfulness.
We were the Gessners. No one could say we were nothing.
8.
Tonight is not quite as wild, though with the guitar strumming, and
the fire flickering, and the good bloated feeling in my belly, it’s
not bad. When my wife says it’s time to bring my daughter home I
decide to stay and get a ride with one of my students. Now I can
really drink and I begin to tilt the beer cans more aggressively
vertical when I lift them above my mouth. By midnight only a small
band of us remains and when we are not singing we stare into the fire
as if looking for the answer to something vexing. Really we just like
the way all that flickering looks, like a great animated painting, the
whips of orange and blue and white, the ash rising as if bobbing in an
anti-gravity chamber. The fire tightens our faces so that we feel like
skiers in the lodge after a day in the cold. We have done nothing more
than eat pork and drink beer, but we feel the healthy glow you get
after a hard workout. The woods are dark around us.
My father was an ambitious man and ambition lured him south. A chance
to run his own company, a larger company, a chance to be king of a
wider realm. Now, like my father before me, I have pulled up stakes
and landed in North Carolina. Like him, I am ambitious, though not for
this teaching job. My ambitions focus more on my continued attempts to
put words on the page, though I certainly no longer believe those
words will live forever. While ambition still grips me, I have come
more and more to recognize it as phantasmagoric, no more substantial
than the flecks of ash rising from the fire. In fact, it is the same
airy stuff that “the feeling” was made of. I think it interesting that
my father’s instinct, in the midst of his ten year old son’s panic
attack, was to rap his knuckles on something solid, like the living
room table. This wood, he seemed to want to say, is the world, not
those insubstantial ideas in your head.
But my father was susceptible to phantoms, too. Gessner is a German
name and sometimes I wonder how much our heritage affected my family’s
melodramatic, not to say operatic, concept of ambition. During the
last years of his life my father indulged himself in what amounted to
a Teutonic version of roots. By that time the Berlin Wall had come
down and he had begun to seriously explore the possibility of
extending his kingdom beyond the borders of North Carolina and buying
his great-great grandfather's textile company back in Aue, in what had
been East Germany. He had made several visits to Aue, had traced the
Gessners back hundreds and hundreds of years to the goatherders in the
surrounding hills, had walked along the town's central square which
was had just recently been returned to its original name, "Gessner
Platz" (after forty years as Karl Marx Platz), and had essentially
been greeted as the great American savior by the nearly bankrupt
company and its employees. At that point many if not most East German
companies were going under and thousands of employees were losing
their jobs. Perhaps the most telling moment of his several trips was
when he was ready to close the deal on his grandfather’s company,
Gessner Textilmachen. He was walking on a balcony above the factory
floor after spending the morning inspecting machines when a strange
thing happened. All of the sudden dozens of machinists and press
rollers stopped working and looked up to where he stood above them.
Then they started chanting his name. "Gessner, Gessner, Gessner," over
and over, louder and louder. My father just stood there above them
waving like Evita and, knowing him, basking in it.
9.
The three students who are left are all in a class I teach called
“creative nonfiction,” whatever that is. One of them pulls out and
lights a cigar, which at this moment seems an inspired act. We pass it
around, sharing saliva and pig juice, all of us growing stupid with
beer. This stupidity manifests itself when one of the students asks me
how I feel about memoir, which many critics have deemed a sure sign
that our civilization is crumbling. At the moment I am only slightly
less interested in this topic than I was in talking about god. “Jesus,
this cigar is good,” I say in response.
Not long ago I read an essay called “Whole Hog” by a fine writer named
Tenaya Darlington. She wrote of the joys of “big meat,” of “something
slow roasted that leads to the unleashing of energies.” A pig pickin’,
according to Darlington, is a celebration of “joyous crudeness” and at
its center are the central facts of fire and smoke: “The whole affair
is testament to the power of fire, our innate attraction to it, the
strong sense of community it awakens.” I want to articulate thoughts
like these to my students but find my tongue and brain will not obey.
Instead I point my beer at the fire as if to say “Look,” and take
another puff on the cigar. Soon I am bogarting it, suckling it,
ignoring all those warnings about not inhaling and pulling in the
sacred smoke.
10.
What is the craze for memoir all about? Doesn’t a lot of it come down
to just this:
Here is my life. I lived. I made my mark. Don’t forget me, please.
But does anyone really believe that that mark, that any literary mark,
is even mildly indelible? There is a reason, of course, that few
people these days talk smirklessly about “immortality.” Science has
extended our perspective so that the time between us and Shakespeare
becomes a mere speck in contrast to geological time, a speck that can
only seem significant, if not large, in comparison with the earth
itself, the tiniest fleck of nothingness in the vastness of millions
of galaxies. Hard to believe anyone is reading King Lear in the Omega
galaxy. Hard to believe the words of Shakespeare would survive a
supernova.
In his brilliant book, The Denial of Death, Ernst Becker argues that
much of our energy, much of our creativity, much of our life, comes
from our attempt to deny the essential fact of our existence: that
that existence will end. Whether we consider ourselves life-affirmers
who claim the fear of death has no hold on us, or “realists,” who
admit to living in death’s shadow, we are all, according to Becker,
both terrified and propelled by our not-so-happy ending. We throw
ourselves into frenzied attempts to fill up the nothingness with
“something,” hurling our objects of work or art--our creations--into
the void. At the same time we try to make a name for ourselves,
knowing that the worst thing we could be is a “nothing.” Speaking not
just of artists but of human beings in general, Becker says that in
our realization that we are nothing, we fight to stand out, to be
something, trying to build a narcissistic shield around ourselves that
keeps death out. We see this need to win, to be fist, most obviously
between children as siblings, but it is also obvious enough in adults.
Becker writes:
But it [narcissism] is too all-absorbing and relentless to be an
aberration, it expresses the heart of the creature: the desire to
stand out, to be the one in creation. When you combine natural
narcissism with the basic need for self-esteem, you create a creature
who has to feel himself an object of primary value: first in the
universe, representing in himself all of life.
The next step is finding obsessions that reflect ourselves and our
shining narcissism. For artists, obsession obviously comes in handy.
It not only gives us the energy and power to create the artistic
object, but it fills up our minds in a way few other things could. But
can obsession fill the death hole? Of course not, though maybe it is
out of nothingness that we all begin to create. If the world doesn't
exist then we will make our own world. Maybe all this fever of
creation, this need to be special, this frenzy--what Thomas Wolfe
called an "enormous task of excavation" of self--this creation comes
at least in part out of the terror of pure emptiness, the terror of
the end. The need to fill the void, to make something out of this vast
sense of nothing. Extreme fear of oblivion creating extreme creation.
We hurl ourselves against the death void.
In the end, Becker acknowledges, death wins. “All paths of glory lead
but to the grave.” The least hard-headed moments in Becker’s book are
when he reasons that, since everything man does is an illusion, why
not pick the best, the highest, illusion. This is Becker’s somewhat
convoluted path back to the spiritual, to god. But there is another
path to take, another choice. What if we acknowledge that all our dear
passions—ambitions for fame or spirituality—are illusions, and then go
trudging ahead without them. Of course illusions will still tug at us,
most of us do not have the discipline of a Zen master emptying his
mind, but even if we sometimes go where they tug, we give up, at
least, on the idea that these obsessions offer us any real protection
against the big D. What then? What are we left with?
Well, nothing really. But on the other hand, everything, all that is
solid--the world. Terrifying as that world is once stripped of
illusion.
11.
My father, that master pig cooker, feared death his whole life. But
when it actually came he responded well.
I was with him during his last days. His death took over the book I
was writing at that time. I typed and scribbled straight through those
final days, taking few breaks except to care for him and write his
obituary. My father was only fifty-six when he died. Two years after
his death I faced another. I hadn’t gotten close, really close, to a
dog since Macker, but as I was falling in love with my wife, I also
fell for her dog Zeke. Zeke was a curmudgeon who bit many and loved
few. Part Saint Bernard, Part Collie, he took his last watery breathes
in the garden behind our house. Zeke’s death has stayed with me, in no
small part because of how startling it resembled the death of his
fellow curmudgeon, my father. Both animals breathed long labored
breathes as they closed in on death, then shallower gasps at wider
intervals as the moment approached. Both, Zeke in the unplanted mud of
the garden and my father in his hospice bed, seemed ready to let go
before hanging on and fighting back, this pattern repeating over and
over. Their eyes looked off behind them and away from us, but they
were clearly aware that we were holding onto them. The sheer
physicality of the moment was like none other, the only thing
comparable for me being the final moments of my daughter’s birth.
Another way that the two deaths were alike: neither took solace in
religion.
My father was a non-believer until the end. Did this soothe him?
Doubtful.
But after knowing him my whole life I would have been shocked if he
made that cowardly retreat in his last hours.
Don’t get my wrong. I am full of admiration for the man of faith who
stays faithful in the face of this sternest test. That is every bit as
admirable as my father’s death. But what is not so admirable is,
having lived one way, trying to suddenly fudge things with the end
near. “I’m sticking to my guns,” my father said in his usual business
man vernacular. And he did stick to his guns.
I, like my father, am a non-believer. So what does that leave me with?
Quite a lot it turns out. For one, this world—its smells, its tastes,
its feel, and of course its other people. And if I have learned one
thing in the years since “the feeling,” it is that the world exists
quite separate from me, thank you very much. But what it doesn’t leave
me with, in the end, is the self. When I die I am gone. Kaput. Poooof.
I can’t imagine that I will turn to prayer. As for ambition, what will
that get me? Perhaps a slightly longer obiturary.
But this is too glib an answer. Even if my work is not remembered, it
gives me much. Not the least of its gifts are that it fills me up
while I am here. But it is more than that. In the end my work is the
something I make out of the nothingness, even if it does not help me
escape oblivion. It is my sacrifice made at an empty altar.
10.
The night is fading, the pig is picked. Our pagan rituals are done and
soon all that will remain will be bones and bellyaches and hangovers.
Only Elton and one other student, my ride home, still sit with me
around the dying fire. Not much stands out from the black except for
two similar sights: the fire’s red embers and the taillights of the
straggler car existing through the woods. I feel beery and deeply
tired. I stand up and thank Elton, then tell my ride I am finally
ready. We stumble off into the dark night.