Monday, March 26, 2007

Street performer at South Street Seaport, NYC

Alas, a cell phone camera doesn't do the performance justice.

  

A better video, especially for those lying sidewise, is here.

zRobot

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Saturday, March 03, 2007

Rites

Peter's e-mail was not unexpected. He had been preparing for the death of his mother, at least insofar as devastation yields to preparation. A Holocaust survivor, hers had been a life of second chances, the more remarkable for its improbability. The odds of her living to 84 could be figured on a photo of her childhood comrades, most of whom never emerged from the camp. She was blessed in marriage. Her husband had escaped a Nazi transport train and made his way to Belgium, where he fought in the resistance. And she was blessed with children, among whom Peter, who brought his parents to Buffalo so that he and Barbara could care for them in their old age.

Growing up against the backdrop of the Holocaust might be thought to prepare a man for every conceivable cruelty. Yet for the exceptional cruelty of Tuesday's second death, there was no preparing.

In an essay on Proust, Walter Benjamin speaks about the undervalued work of forgetting, the necessary complement to remembering, as is Penelope's nightly unraveling to her daily weaving. Perhaps amnesia is a condition of a constructive life -- a forgetting, among others, of that most inconvenient of truths:
For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them. (Ecclesiastes 9:8)

Our friend and colleague Bruce, whom Peter loves like a son, is an applied mathematician from Montreal, leader of computing initiatives on campus, and member of Nickel City Roadrunners ("drinkers with a heavy running problem"). He's conscientious, sardonic and optimistic all at once; has Dilbert on his office door but the Kennedy brothers on his wall; is exasperatingly conflict-averse, and utterly devoted to his sons, Eric (14) and Mark (8), and to his wife, Marcia.

Eric returned from a school trip to Montreal with a high fever and stiff neck, symptoms of bacterial meningitis. Within a day, incomprehensibly, he was gone.

Fourteen years old, a slender high school freshman. Photos at the funeral parlor showed him with teammates -- crew, baseball -- and on the slopes with Bruce a few feet away, beaming, or with Bruce at the science fair. A Boy Scout. His ThinkPad, open on a table next to his orange belt in karate, looped "We Shall Overcome" and a popular Green Day song:
Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road
Time grabs you by the wrist, directs you where to go
So make the best of this test, and don't ask why
It's not a question, but a lesson learned in time

It's something unpredictable, but in the end it's right.
I hope you had the time of your life.

So take the photographs, and still frames in your mind
Hang it on a shelf in good health and good time
Tattoos of memories and dead skin on trial
For what it's worth it was worth all the while

It's something unpredictable, but in the end it's right.
I hope you had the time of your life.
We stood in a line of mourners -- several had attended the service for Peter's mother earlier in the day -- and inched along the perimeter of the room, wondering what strength the bereaved had summoned to prepare the photo displays and tables of memorabilia -- the first-grade Father's Day card, the championship team photo, scenes of a gurgling baby with doting grandparents.

We drew nearer to the family, grasping for appropriate words that would decently mask their own futility. The sudden appearance of Eric's school cohort at the head of the line was a welcome reprieve; inspiration would surely come, and a semblance of composure could be reconstituted.

The encounter with these dozen young boys, each in his tie and blazer, was pitiful and sublime, but not in the way one might have expected. How desperately sad for the family to see the companions of so many good times! Yet in the instant between their arrival and its potential effect, these consummate parents took stock of the boys' confusion and sorrow, and from some divine inner strength, rose above their pain to comfort their son's grieving friends. They received them lovingly, consoling and thanking each one, never allowing a glimpse of the abyss at whose precipice they teeter.

In the odd way that the mind works (odd minds, at least), my recollections of this scene replaced the original sound track with other Green Day songs -- Poprocks and Coke, One for the Razorbacks -- whose lyrics reflected not an acceptance of fate but more meddlesome inclinations: "I'll be there for you," "Open up your worried world and let me in." I conjured up projects to relieve suffering by energetic engagement. By Saturday morning, impulses had coalesced into a plan, and the plan lurched by evening towards a campaign. Resolved: we must not let our friend go into that darkness. We will keep him engaged by showing that we need him. Each of us will commit to meeting some personal goal within a year -- finish the book, swim the channel -- and ask Bruce to check on our progress on some regular frequency, on a set schedule. This will appeal to the athlete in him -- training partners assiduously monitor each other's motivation -- and will guarantee regular conversations which begin with a safe pretext.

An ingenious scheme, but while it might deceive my pain, there is no reason to think it alleviates anyone else's. On the contrary, it is not clear that an increase in responsibility would be therapeutic. I could imagine myself -- and what I would have given for a less active imagination -- handing over the checkbook and the car keys, wishing everyone a good life, then walking south towards the end of the horizon, until I found a quiet place to lie down. Sympathy must require bringing the sorrow home, putting yourself in others' shoes, but the sorrow feels tainted with selfishness.

"Philosopher, c'est apprendre à mourir" (To be a philosopher is to learn to die), says Montaigne, who argues that our forgetfulness is what gives death its power. We overcome it, he says, by making it familiar, by thinking about it all the time:

Parmy les festes et la joye, ayons tousjours ce refrein de la souvenance de nostre condition.[...] Il est incertain où la mort nous attende, attendons la par tout. La premeditation de la mort, est premeditation de la liberté. Qui a apris à mourir, il a desapris à servir. Il n'y a rien de mal en la vie, pour celuy qui a bien comprins, que la privation de la vie n'est pas mal. Le sçavoir mourir nous afranchit de toute subjection et contraincte. (Essais, I:19)Let us evermore, amidst our jollity and feasting, set the remembrance of our frail condition before our eyes. [...] Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere. The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has learned to die has unlearned to serve. There is nothing evil in life for him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to know how to die delivers us from all subjection and constraint. (trans. Charles Cotton)

The memento mori of the funeral home disrupts our forgetfulness of mortality -- surely that is why we hate it. But no one leaves the funeral home resolved to spend more time contemplating death. The more excruciating the rites, the more inevitable the amnesia.

The grandfather of Proust's narrator describes an odd lapse by the newly widowed father of Swann who, coaxed to leave his wife's deathbed as funeral preparations begin, walks through his garden exulting in the glory of nature and the beauty of life.
Brusquement le souvenir de sa femme morte lui revint, et trouvant sans doute trop compliqué de chercher comment il avait pu à un pareil moment se laisser aller à un mouvement de joie, il se contenta, par un geste qui lui était familier chaque fois qu’une question ardue se présentait à son esprit, de passer la main sur son front, d’essuyer ses yeux et les verres de son lorgnon.Abruptly the memory of his dead wife came back to him, and finding it too complicated to explain how at such a time he had given in to a joyous impulse, he resigned himself to the same gesture he used whenever a difficult question arose, of passing his hand over his face, and wiping his eyes and glasses.

Monsieur Swann would later say to the grandfather: «C’est drôle, je pense très souvent à ma pauvre femme, mais je ne peux y penser beaucoup à la fois.» ("It's odd, I very often think of my poor wife, but I cannot think of her much at a time."). His fragmented mourning anticipates the infinitely refracted grief of Proust's narrator, who discovers that he must mourn not one lost Albertine, but many. The losses reveal themselves over time -- Albertine at the piano, Albertine asleep, Albertine by the sea -- and require each a new death of the lover. The narrator emerges from this grief neither through stoicism nor evasion, but embracing his "vocation" as a writer, and viewing his past as both the training and the subject matter of his novel-to-come.

It is a powerful and moving story, Proust's transcendence through writing, and one I can still believe. It proposes an active alternative to philosophies of resignation and submission.

But there is no path out of such terrible grief, neither artistic nor religious, that doesn't go through the darkest and most solitary regions of hell.

I'll be looking for you on the other side. And thinking about you till then.


Sabine Rittner, May 17, 1923 to February 27, 2007
Eric Scott Pitman, May 13, 1992 to February 27, 2007


Friday, March 02, 2007

We're going to Ecuador Morocco.

That's it. Decided.

A trip to Flickr yields lovely results.

Wikipedia aims to instruct and delight.

I'm there. I'm so there.

Is it summer yet?