The Drawbridge and the Moat
A long-haired hippie girl sits on a patch of summer grass, in uniform -- sandals, tattered jeans, gold bangles and multicolored tunic.
She shakes her mane out of anxiety triggered by the gaze of a boy whom she desires. She does not make eye contact with him. About an hour later, she shakes her mane out of anxiety triggered by the gaze of a boy whom she finds repulsive. She does not make eye contact with him.
Introspection equal to the moment is not to be found in the heart of either boy.
Christopher Hitchens Said
That everyone chooses his own regrets. My mother, for example, regretted on some level that she did not marry another man, a particular man, a very handsome man, a man whose name I knew, because he was more successful than my father. If she had married him, no doubt she would have had other regrets.
"If only I could molt," I said. If I could unzip this rubbery carapace from the inside out, emerging as someone else. Freddie Sayers. James Spader. Rod Laver. Duke Ellington.
Another sort of molting. Some hospice workers say that a puff of smoke or fog rises up from the newly-lifeless corpse. It quickly dissipates, by all accounts that I have counted.
Louise Gluck, Our New Nobel Laureate
She raises the question what is left when the physical scaffolding of a life begins to rot away. Did even the poems of her youth foreshadow this?
"A taking of inventory" might be one answer. And the inventory might not be of anything that is particularly important, but rather of memories and of data points, all of equal weight or weightlessness. Clive James reduced his own such inventory to a poem written in anticipation of death. It included the fact that the oil in Hitler's panzers froze solid before Moscow.
In perhaps the most poetic of all movies, Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire," Bruno Ganz' guardian angel comes upon a middle-aged man who has crashed his motorbike in a collision with a Mercedes. He is bleeding out on the sidewalk. He recites in German an inventory of places -- "Tristan da Cunha ... the Mississippi Delta ..." As if it would be impossible for him to expire until the inventory was complete.
There Are Two Discrete Reasons
Reasons why one may kill oneself. The first is that life has become simply intolerable. That is not a choice, it's a compulsion in the moment.
The second is a co-optation, a wresting from God of the choice of time and place. But a philosopher might say that in this case it was God's plan all along for you to choose, and also to make that particular choice. The arrow of the Lord will find its Maker's mark.
SIMON SAYS
Actually Simon (Paul Simon) said, decades ago:
And maybe you'll find a love
That you discover accidentally,
That falls against you gently
As a pickpocket brushes your thigh...
Further to fly!
Effortless music from the Cameroons,
The spinning darkness of her hair,
Conversations in a crowded room going nowhere.
The Open Palm of Desire wants everything,
It wants everything.
It wants the soil as soft as summer
And the strength to push like spring.
That's what is missing in COVID times, about which no one is talking. That threadbare possibility.
