Warmth
Submitted by vacancy on Tue, 09/25/2007 - 4:46pm
Been up all night, cuddling a lame but familiar fascination with the end of it all. It seems there's too much to do in too little time, and I balance life on a tight deadline between the towers of birth and death, growing weaker against the implications of mortality by refusing to soak up the accidental beauty engulfing me. Raised Christian, now a non-practicing atheist, I'm crammed to the brim with a sadness that one day the lights'll go out as an overture to nothing at all. That's some anticlimactic shit. The typically comforting thought that everyone experiences nonexistence before they're born won't comfort me. Nor will the mental gymnastics of heaven or hell. Good parts of my life have played on par with nonexistence, as if acting without me, while I observe the opera through binoculars. When that feeling finally relents, I'm catapulted onto the stage with scarcely an idea of the appropriate thing to do, and make the best of it.
I've learned a lot here. In my life, in America. In the VFW halls and CSX yards. The coffee shops and subway platforms and empty-bottle apartments. Friends and lust and crusty-eyed morning after ontology. Finally discovered something I thought I'd known for years, something so delightfully cliché: The love around you is all you have. Its all you'll ever have, and then you die.
Our bodies are beautiful things when they're healthy and new, and even more beautiful when they're in peril. Tennessee Williams wrote that struggle is the condition for which the human organism was created. I'll add that struggle depletes us, and in suffering defeat or emerging victorious, our minds and bodies still show scars, sickness, and age. A couple of years ago, at a film festival in Detroit, I watched a documentary on the last couple years in the life of Rockets Redglare, a fat old comic and notable East Village character. His life had been such a wretched pile of shit, yet a look in his eye assured you he was wringing all the majesty from the misery. His mammoth, decaying old body looked like a grocery bag filled with rancid guts as he smoked cigarettes triumphantly and talked about blowjobs and booze. He knew he was on a deadline. The thing was, that through all the filth and drugs and fucking and fighting, he remained an endearing and loving human being, something my religious rearing noted as a scientific impossibility.
Most people I know, as much as they front, are walking disasters. Baffled by the shit their minds and bodies throw at them, they build elaborate but ridiculous-looking forts to escape the threat of insanity and the marching drums of age and death. Some minds are obsessed with abandonment. Others, humiliation. Being unneeded. Physical pain. Poverty. Obscurity. Many my age have simultaneously abandoned the comfort of piety enjoyed by their predecessors, for which science is a gloomy substitute. But however we choose to attack or retreat in the war we live, we cannot be shamed for fucking up. Unless we are of the tiny percentile that somehow manages to avoid any considerable difficulty in life, we are not to be cast aside or dismissed. It goes without saying, moreover, that there is no gold medal for misfortune. Physically feeling someone living alongside you, captivated and frightened as they may be by their own warmth, is what makes this all bearable.
We all need living arms to wrap around us - and to remember when we're smeared across the shoulder of a highway - staring down the long, dark tunnel. Anyway, our bodies fail us now, fail us later, but whatever comes in death, comes. There is nothing any of us can do about it. If there is nothing, embrace it. If there is heaven, thank its creator. But thank the creator when you get there. And don't apologize for the burden of proof. Heaven is a stretch of the imagination that rivals nonexistence. I'm grateful for this life. Really. And I haven't yet done my best, but I'll do better.
I've learned a lot here. In my life, in America. In the VFW halls and CSX yards. The coffee shops and subway platforms and empty-bottle apartments. Friends and lust and crusty-eyed morning after ontology. Finally discovered something I thought I'd known for years, something so delightfully cliché: The love around you is all you have. Its all you'll ever have, and then you die.
Our bodies are beautiful things when they're healthy and new, and even more beautiful when they're in peril. Tennessee Williams wrote that struggle is the condition for which the human organism was created. I'll add that struggle depletes us, and in suffering defeat or emerging victorious, our minds and bodies still show scars, sickness, and age. A couple of years ago, at a film festival in Detroit, I watched a documentary on the last couple years in the life of Rockets Redglare, a fat old comic and notable East Village character. His life had been such a wretched pile of shit, yet a look in his eye assured you he was wringing all the majesty from the misery. His mammoth, decaying old body looked like a grocery bag filled with rancid guts as he smoked cigarettes triumphantly and talked about blowjobs and booze. He knew he was on a deadline. The thing was, that through all the filth and drugs and fucking and fighting, he remained an endearing and loving human being, something my religious rearing noted as a scientific impossibility.
Most people I know, as much as they front, are walking disasters. Baffled by the shit their minds and bodies throw at them, they build elaborate but ridiculous-looking forts to escape the threat of insanity and the marching drums of age and death. Some minds are obsessed with abandonment. Others, humiliation. Being unneeded. Physical pain. Poverty. Obscurity. Many my age have simultaneously abandoned the comfort of piety enjoyed by their predecessors, for which science is a gloomy substitute. But however we choose to attack or retreat in the war we live, we cannot be shamed for fucking up. Unless we are of the tiny percentile that somehow manages to avoid any considerable difficulty in life, we are not to be cast aside or dismissed. It goes without saying, moreover, that there is no gold medal for misfortune. Physically feeling someone living alongside you, captivated and frightened as they may be by their own warmth, is what makes this all bearable.
We all need living arms to wrap around us - and to remember when we're smeared across the shoulder of a highway - staring down the long, dark tunnel. Anyway, our bodies fail us now, fail us later, but whatever comes in death, comes. There is nothing any of us can do about it. If there is nothing, embrace it. If there is heaven, thank its creator. But thank the creator when you get there. And don't apologize for the burden of proof. Heaven is a stretch of the imagination that rivals nonexistence. I'm grateful for this life. Really. And I haven't yet done my best, but I'll do better.
