12.31.17

Hugh,

First of all, I am so pleased that you and Ber were able to come over for lunch.  As Pauline observed after you had left: “Hugh is a very good father”.

Second, with you, I am much tangled in “this and that”.  Over the past week or so there has been an explosion of dysfunction from our son in San Diego.  For the last three days, it has been clear that I must respond to him in a careful and thorough way.  I would like to have been able to say “definitive way”—but there can be no such thing in a family drama that reaches back 70 years.

Third, with my youngest brother stopping here on his way from Ohio to Tucson and all the rest of our local extended family descending on us for dinner this afternoon, it certainly was silly even for my having suggested that you and I have coffee this morning.  As designated sous-chef, I owe Pauline a hands-on for the entire day.  I surely could not have prepared for coffee any of the writing that I have been struggling with for several weeks.  At present, I feel that the safest way for me to approach the essay will be to treat it as one of my internal investigations that I began to assemble in 2008.  The subjects will be these:  Biological Consciousness, The Development of the Self, and The Individual within its Social Context.

Fourth (actually First in my own mind), I’m pleased that Susan Gubar’s Immortality at Midnight struck a resonant chord with you.  It had a profound effect on me, and a poem actually came bubbling up within me without beckon.  I have begun to let it flow—with revisits to make sure it becomes neither a torrent nor a marsh.  The first two lines will not be changed.  They are these:

I have never held our newest grandchild in my arms,

Nor has he looked into my eyes or heard my voice.

From age eleven or twelve, I have practiced exercises in memory—that is, nurturing the recollection of significant things/events/persons of my past.  Studying with Frankl sharpened and made these exercises more disciplined and focused.  Frankl balanced the “rich granary of the past” with an energetic insistence that we also be focused on the future. However, even in a concentration camp there was some possibility, although remote, of living to see a future.  Terminal illness is qualitatively different.  I have always squirmed inside when I have heard an oncologist (or relative) urge the dying person to hang-in-there and look forward to a possible reprieve from the aggressive cancer.  

What Susan Gruber has done is (to me) truly astonishing.  

There I am, then, my body seeded with cancer that has recurred and may return, whereas now the air is sweet and quiet, with only me conscious, and I can inch forward into futures I weave for the ones I must leave behind.  May they prosper and thrive through a series of tomorrows I will not experience but cherish envisioning.  For they need to find—oh, please let them find!—love elsewhere and abundantly.

Alone but not lonely, I creep down the dim hall to study photos on a shelf: friends, children, cousins, grandchildren.  All of them at various stages of evolution with their unique expressions of expectation or anxiety, curiosity or self-consciousness—standing still for the intrusive camera.  Each requires a long stare.  Where are they going?  Will they be happy?  Each elicits a smile; tears flow, but tears of joy.

What is this inebriated euphoria?  Immortality at midnight!   An intuition of the rightness and beauty and uniqueness of those I know and those I do not know but reverence from afar in my singular ecstasy of simply feeling fine, feeling good staying in what sense that here is the genius of truth and the truth of genius because pleasure and exultation pulse now in this contingent place, inside just this illumined moment of being.

Yes, she passes before photographs of family and friends—but she is projecting the tentacles of mind and spirit not only toward the past but also into the unknown future.  This is a one-eighty-degree spin.  I think of all of those (notably Freud) who insisted that it is impossible for a human being to image his/her non-being, to imagine a world without themselves in it.  I have always been amazed (amazed! I say) that any thinking person would imagine it impossible to project themselves into a world void of their presence.  Piffle.   

But now Gruber opens a new and wonderful door: she turns her gaze toward the unfolding lives of those whom she will leave behind.  She senses them continuing to experience joys and sorrows in the future beyond her own life.  Not only that, she wishes them well; her heart goes out to them—and this includes not only those she has known and loved but also those whom she has never met and never will.  Perhaps it may include also generations yet unborn.  Does she allow herself to imagine a world in the future that is more just? a society more equitable?  And, regardless of her focus in her moments of Self-projection, my guess is that the consequence will be what she calls inebriated euphoria…immortality at midnight…reverence…singular ecstasy…simply feeling good…pleasure and exultation.

Now, the question simply is whether or not such extraordinary sensitivity, such Janus-like vision into the past and future, such heightened awareness of the goodness of the moment, such controlled and focused ecstasy, and such delight in Life (even as life ebbs) is available only to those who, like Susan Gruber, are uniquely attuned to the delicate strands of this Web of Life. Surely the prospect of immanent death is capable of creating a kind of distillation of sensation, a compression of awareness and sensitivity to every aspect of life.

Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.  Samuel Johnson

I don’t know if ordinary persons living lives not immediately threatened by its termination are capable of seeing and feeling those sensations felt by Ms. Gruber, but I am willing to embark on an expedition of exploration and see what I can find.  My first step will be to gather items to accompany me on the way: to begin, I shall set before my eyes a photograph of our most recent grandson…and then pictures of his siblings and cousins.  Surely I will not stop there, but I will be drawn inward, upward, and forward.