July 4, 2013

 

The Fear of Death

He was so frugal he would save even a bent paper clip. It was driven at its root by fear, that was of course obvious. You would have expected it was the type of fear one couldn’t articulate. An inchoate fear, slipping the mind like a loved one’s scent lingering just beyond sense in a room they’d long left. But in fact it was a very precise fear: the fear of waste, of coming to some calamity in his life and having been profligate. Profligate, and therefore blameworthy: responsible by his own malfeasance for the disaster’s incarnation. What wasting a bent paper clip had to do with this, what sort of problem it could possibly precipitate, he really couldn’t say, but this was how he felt.

Ultimately, the fear of smaller catastrophes was an imperfectly confronted fear of death, either his or a loved one’s. Fears of lesser disasters were just echoes of this ur-fear, a distant tocsin echoing down the valleys of one’s years, touching everything with an urgent pathos otherwise unknown.

***

Travel by Train

The train’s quick passage in the light of New England afternoon had the odd effect of slowing his thoughts, like the settling of insects in amber: deliberate, unhurried. He looked out the window.

Gravestones tilted, more crooked towards the back of the cemetery. Leaves disenfranchised between them. The elegant fragility of passing time embodied. The sea lay on his right, higher than ever, a pregnant curve ripe with life. Unbidden, “Time passes like corn from the husk” came to his mind. He remembered long drives between the cornfields of upstate New York, visiting his aging grandparents. A four color portrait of place: green cresting to yellow, blue rising to white in the late afternoon light.

The quality of the light was different between Connecticut and New York---hard to say how. Connecticut an old place, long inhabited, weathered and familiar to the touch as the boards of the house where you were born. New York larger somehow, a sense of space and grandeur. A breath of wind only and all the human traces in the landscape would flicker out, forest and hill restored to timeless innocence.

The gravestones now cast their shadows long on the rustic diaspora of leaf. Was the cemetery an intentional accompaniment to the train, a memento mori for those who in this triumph of speed would think to outrace death? We are only just passing through, he thought: headstones are a permanent reminder of impermanence. A reminder of passing: poignant in their way as the train’s motion. But his father was a lawyer, so he remembered, too, the pragmatic. Graveyards are easiest to build in because there is no one to oppose the eminent domain.

He could not see the stone angels, rough-hewn wings effacing death, straining skywards like the body’s last breath. But he remembered them from childhood rubbings, he with his mother in the cemetery. To lose a father at sixteen is to be unafraid in such a place. Her lost father; his namesake. In Judaism the living keep faith with the dead by sharing their names, generations unknown to each other, linked only by name, stretching, a back stretched back under the weight of time.

Wings unyoked from stone, birds in their flight above seemed like ornament. Light coated the interior of the train. Strange to feel such glory in the shadow of the grave. But then, that is the beauty of trains---the beauty of what passes---and so leaves what is past behind.

Even following the train’s passage, though perhaps through mere figurative chance, we go from one image of human finitude to another. Now beyond the window was a sewage plant overflowing. Some piece of modern art, the regular concrete tanks, circles perfect in the light, filled with quiescent gray-green. Algae filigreeing the surface as if to set a gemstone to the ring, the ring to a finger.

*** 

The War Years Remembered

Memory now returned him to Cambridge, flat English countryside, an Elizabethan manor house. He had hidden in the priest hole, imagined what it would be to survive there for four days on only bread and jam, to remain silent even as the Queen’s soldiers lit a fire in the hearth above you, to emerge ash-covered and ashen. What is there that one man will not do to another in the name of idealism? But without ideals what are we?

For dinner there were guests, friends of his host’s father, staying for a funeral. They ate at an ancient oaken table, vast and dark with age. The sun set in red elegy over the fields, row upon row of wheat and barley beyond the paned glass. Over port, the man told how he had once been to America, sent over for safety during the War. The man had been the youngest child on his ship. The liner after it and the liner before it had been destroyed by a U-boat---what is there to survival, but luck?

His own grandfather had come through the war with only a notepad, filled with scribbles. Addresses that no longer existed, passcodes known only now to men bent with age, forgotten years ago even by them, circuit diagrams with components that had been obsolete for a half- century. A one-page calendar for 1943 was at front, Ma, Pa, Sis’s birthdays marked in meticulous cursive.

Like him, his grandfather believed in saving things: as if saving things could somehow save you. Even a bent paper clip, a pad of topgrain cowhide, cut down to fit in a military shirt pocket, bought from the Yale Co-Operative Store during officer training a lifetime ago.

One page was a list of addresses: Maj. G.R. Steinkamp M.C., HQ IX Air Defense Command; T/S Dale Goldman; names of girls in Buffalo, New York, in Seymour, Indiana; Mr. J. Bennett in Dalkeith, Scotland. To how many could you write now?

Another page was a checklist for planes: Mach, Inst, Elect, Prop, Para, Paint, Maint, Sheet Metal, Welding, Armament, . . .

His grandfather had had some adventures during the War. There was a certain girl in Paris; another, it would seem (this he learned only from the pad) in Schaerbeek, another in Bruxelles . . .

To think that we were strangers, a couple of nights ago,

 and though it’s a dream, I never dreamed

you’d fall for my hello . . .

Can you reconstruct what is past from the remnants present? A scribble carelessly cast into old paper’s embrace, a list of addresses for those long gone. Stone wings curling in sweet ecstasy up to heaven, remembered imperfectly in crayon rubbed over cheap, thin paper? And yet what have we but this? The body’s grace fades. The strong leg of youth bends to age; fingers once supple over the strings slow: the mind clouds over and memory fails us.

Without memory, how can we be conscious of the passage of time? To be human is to exist in time; to be divorced from time is condemnation to an eternal present . . .
Yet to exist in time: like a river, it bears all its sons away.

*** 

To Love the Lightning

He would have never have thought to have a girlfriend. It was not that he would not have liked it; indeed, probably his personality was such that there was no thrill to the hunt for him; in this hunt, no allure to being single. But he would not have imagined it would occur, ever. He didn’t really doubt his looks---he doubted his orientation to the world, that if truly known, it could be acceptable to another. He saw with a particular clarity---he did not think anyone else would wish to.

She loved the lightning. He never asked her why, though not doing so was unusual for him. He had never thought to. In truth, he had never thought to, because he loved the lightning too.

In Connecticut, lightning was rare, but savage when it came. He had watched it turn the sky’s darkness to the blue of diffuse ink at night from his parents’ bedroom, safe in the system of their care, in the ignorance of what the world could do . . .

There had been a great oak outside, its branches curling skyward as timelessly as Sweelinck’s setting of the psalms. The lightning cracked whip-like and furious, rain striking in bitter anger, the serpent’s tooth sinking to flesh. What can it mean to love the lightning?

The lightning of the West, endless New Mexico desert stretching out to cerulean infinity, was spare and beautiful, lazy with pre-destiny in its arc across the sky. It did not resemble Connecticut lightning, not in any way.

He had been in the West once, where they built the bombs that ended the war his grandfather had fought. As the sun set, lighting Los Alamos with the last rays of day, he would cycle back to the lab, past the lonely restaurants lit for dinner, past Oppenheimer’s wartime cabin, through the empty checkpoints. Sometimes lightning flashed over the canyon: startling, beautiful, and quickly gone---Maxwell’s equations in motion. At night, he’d watch wave collapse as the non-linear Schrodinger equation focused itself, a pillar in the center of the mesh shivering slightly as if numerical error were a wind.

Is scientific study to love this world too much, or not at all? What is it to love the lightning, to love what is defined by its transience---but what else is it than that to love another person?

***

Beyond the train, a small sailboat rocks gently to its mooring, the music of the water made visible, shadow gently rippling up its hull like caressing hands. He thinks of her. There is an ibis in the reeds beside the sea, white as the lightning, quickening in the rush to flight, a thought too subtle for the pen.

Old stone walls crisscross the New England countryside, remnants of a simpler time. Trees climb the hill of years. Time falls away like corn from the husk. The sun is now setting, as it will every day unto the last: again, again and always, in scarlet elegy for what’s past.