Joe's Jetsam

You rarely hear the word anymore, and when you do, it is almost invariably paired with "flotsam," as in "flotsam and jetsam."

The two have independent meanings.  Flotsam is something that has fallen into the sea.  It could be salvageable.  A shipping container may have escaped the deck of a big cargo ship in a storm, broken up and left the surface littered with Nike shoes, basketballs and toilet items.

Jetsam is something that has been pushed or tossed overboard to lighten the ship, usually in extremis.  A 19th century American frigate might be in danger of capture or destruction because smaller enemy vessels are in hot pursuit.  "Everything overboard!"  Even the cannons might go, though they be neither flotsam nor jetsam but something that goes straight to the bottom.

What is on my list now for dispatch?  Practically everything save family and a few friends.  Books, kitchen gadgets, drums and drumsticks, reading glasses, socks and underwear.  A CD on which Mstislav Rostropovich conducts a rousing "Stars and Stripes Forever;" another of Irish folk tunes including "Tir na Nog," the ancient story of a man who makes a bad bargain with the leprechauns and loses everything as a consequence.  And all of the memories of my awkward youth, especially its squandered romantic opportunities.

Finally, my body itself.  You may object -- "Your body is the vessel!  How can the vessel be tossed overboard?!"  But I trust that it is one vessel among many, and the least of them.  I have abused it, and now it is abusing me.  To abandon the controlling metaphor for another, better it be left an empty shell, a translucent snakeskin wedged between this rock and this hard place.

 

A Thinly-Confected Memory

When my mind is idle, as it often is now, rather than count sheep I recapitulate memories, most but not all of which are authentic.  (If the memories don't come from my "lived experience," they certainly come from my unlived experience, which surely is entitled to a voice as well?)

This is an old man's game.  When my father was a child, circa 1926, he might have listened raptly while old men of his day reminisced about their child labors in the Merrimack Valley, working not in textile mills but rather in factories that made shoes for the Army of the Potomac, some of which no doubt still lie buried in the fields outside Petersburg, Virginia and in the accursed Wilderness.

One hundred years later, my memory paints two identical pictures.  They show mounds, small mountains really, of raw sugar.  The mounds sit inside the walls of two manufactories that I would often pass on excursions to see my mother's family in Woburn, Massachusetts.  One, owned and operated by the New England Confectionery Company in East Cambridge, was at the time the largest candy factory in the world.  It spat out millions of multi-colored, multiflavored Necco Wafers per year.  The other, in Everett, bore the proud logo of the Charlston Chew, a popular confection of chocolate-covered vanilla nougat.  These products had national reach; you were as likely to be sucking on Necco Wafers as a child in Des Moines or Bakersfield, California as in Eastern Massachusetts.

But where did all of that sugar come from?  Almost certainly, I surmise, from Cuba, at least in the days before Fidel's revolution.  And how much of the journey from there to here was taken by ship, and how much by railroad car from a place like New Orleans or Miami?

And so we can draw a thin, fading historical line that passes directly through the environs of Boston.  It starts with a bent-low campesino in the interior of Cuba, whacking away at cane with a machete under a broad-brimmed hat.  It ends with a dentist in suburban Des Moines, empowered financially to buy a bass boat because the teeth of his little patients have been corrupted, over and over, by New England-made confections.  In those days we were all, it seems, in this together, even though we hadn't the slightest clue what this was.

 

What Is Missing

I mean from me, at this juncture.

It's the spirit of His Majesty's Navy.  The very real courage of Nelson at Trafalgar.  The fictional courage of Jack Aubrey and of Horatio Hornblower during the Napoleonic Wars.  The courage embedded in the very names of certain storied ships of the line -- "Indomitable!"  "Indefatigable!"

Me, I have to pause to summon the gumption to go down the steps at Park Street Station.

I should mock myself by changing the name, for the second time, of my jaunty little would-be tugboat.  Change the name; change the hailing protocol -- "IBYC launch ... IBYC launch ... this is Indefatigable for a pick-up."

 

A Bold Thought Experiment

Music is precious to most of us.  Stereotypically, it stirs the soul, inspires joy, sorrow, passion, patriotism, dread -- you name it.  And it is mysterious; as far as I know, no evolutionary biologist has been able ever to explain what role it plays in facilitating our individual or collective survival which, supposedly, is all that we care about.

Let us now imagine that mankind will face a new global pandemic, worse than the previous one of the 2020's insofar as literally everyone will suffer its severest symptom -- being struck deaf, totally and permanently.  And also, that this malady will be passed on genetically to our children, ad infinitum.

One consequence of this is that music will be a thing of the past.  For a while it will be preserved in the internal monologue and perhaps also in sheet music that wistful historians will peruse with regret.  But over time, even those vestiges will disappear.  It will be as if music, which played such a big role in our emotional lives, never existed.  But we know that in fact it did exist, and that its loss was due to a mere contingency -- the fact that our senses could no longer perceive it.

What else is there around us that is equally real but equally walled off from our normal perception?  (We know, for example, that we cannot see infrared or ultraviolet light, but that other creatures may perceive these parts of the spectrum.)  Scientists are taking these unseen worlds more seriously of late, whether they posit a literal multiverse, or conclude that drugs like psilocybin and LSD do not distort our perceptual apparatus but rather remove filters so that we can experience, for the first time, raw inputs that are as legitimate as the aural inputs that we prize as "musical" but that have disappeared in my hypothetical.

The veil is being torn in so many places, and via so many modalities, that it seems in danger of being ripped apart entirely.  What modalities?  Ayahuasca and DMT, near death experiences, incubi and succubi, cryptids like "dogman" and "mothman," glowing orbs in the sky and in our bedrooms, apparent "portals," and yes, more conventional close encounters of the third kind.

When psychonauts go "all in" via one of these modalities, they often report that the other realm, masked as it may be, is at base a realm of pure, unified consciousness that feels like the Ultimate Source, the One, the Godhead.  They also often report that while it is a realm beyond spacetime, it strikes us as extending in all directions, without limit.  This perception can be both awe-inspiring and terrifying; we know not how to navigate this space!  (More and more I reject the template of the Tunnel of Light, with Jesus or Mom/Dad there to welcome us, at least as the ultimate answer.  I think that the Tunnel of Light may  merely be Step One on a much deeper journey.)  Here is where I look for guidance from certain among the ancients -- the Tibetan Buddhists, the Gnostics and the Kabbalists in particular.  They are like the Lewis and Clark of the unseen worlds, taken in their full abundance.

 

Once Again at the Hour of the Wolf

I felt in the depths of the night that I was being charged (by whom?) to find a single vignette in my life that would represent and explain the whole, as if my life were holographic in form.  I failed in this.

This would be a cinematic exercise.  Fine actors in finely-directed films can sum up characters in five or ten minutes, powerfully.  Orson Welles in "Citizen Kane."  Marlon Brando in "On the Waterfront."  Charlize Theron in "Monster. " Rod Steiger in "The Pawnbroker."  And yet we must concede that the high points of these portrayals would be nothing without context, supplied by the rest of the films.

And life is not a movie.  Like most people, I roll from quotidien to quotidien, seeking comfort in routine.  The salient points are often sins of omission, failures to act, risks averted, examples of courage not found.  Where I have excelled enough to distinguish myself, it has been mostly because of two things -- a rarely-encountered ability to focus paired with an inability to forget a whole range of things, even at a granular level!

The old Reader's Digest used to feature a column/essay called "The Most Unforgettable Character I've Ever Met."  When I look at the lofty, met or unmet, these might include the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, who was a gifted bongo player and safe cracker, and of course Ludwig Wittgenstein, about whom perhaps I have said too much already in these pages.  Among the low, we have Steve Jobs for his utter transformation of global society in a mostly sorry direction, Ayn Rand for her glorification of selfishness, and [insert politician whom you love to hate here].

In the life review that awaits us all in transition to the hereafter, every single moment is said to count; every single moment is said to have moral consequences; no singular moment that we review will be singularly exemplary in a literal sense, good or bad.  We have to hope, then, that in the event we will meet a singularly merciful God.

 

That Elusive Transcendence

I have now lost three close companions, loved ones to be sure.

This latest loss leaves me feeling as if I have watched him leap from the lip of the Quincy Quarry into its particular abyss, and now that I am being poked with a stick to follow him against my will into the same abyss.  In the absence of signs, it also leaves me with a weakened confidence in the hereafter -- first that it exists at all and, if it does, that I will find it a welcoming place, not one populated by laughing machine leprechauns or rapacious reptilians.  The collective unconscious by all accounts is not the same as heaven as we see it portrayed in film.

And yet I take some level of solace in films, not the great dramas of the late 20th century like "Chinatown" and "Taxi Driver," but films from any era that carry a special purity of heart and purity of execution, viz., "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1928), "La Strada" (1954), "Babette's Feast" (1987), John Huston's "The Dead" (also 1987).  It is as if I could slip the noose to populate the worlds therein depicted without suffering death in the transition, not as an active participant but as a quiet observer, a cat or a mouse, perhaps, watching unseen from the corner of the kitchen as Babette perfects her "real French dinner" of turtle soup and quail en sarcophage!

I know that I will have to forsake all of my personal attachments in the end, perhaps to the point of "ego death," but I would take with me attachments at least to these synthetic worlds, talismans to protect me in the ultimate wilderness.

 

Victory Gardens

The time has come for me to cherish my relative independence, because it has a time limit on it; I just don't know what it is.  I see it all around me in my peers.

The next and presumptively final stop will be a place where living is "assisted," and where the fruits of the victory gardens feature peas, carrots and mashed.

We, the inmates, don't call the place by its proper name.  Having seen how our world has shrunken in the transition, and how things we talk about now are real to us but have already melted into history for those who have come after, we refer to it sardonically as "The Walled-off Historia."  We speak of rabbit ears and curb feelers, book bags, newspaper routes, wax lips and ice cream push-ups.  But also of politics, bitterly.

The chaplain comes to visit once a week, whether we need him or not.