Je n'ai que des souvenirs

Heath Ledger

... would have been 37 yesterday.

atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale

.

Saturday Night Thoughts

In a few months I'll be sixty-five, which is all sorts of .... interesting.  I was talking to my best friend from when I was sixteen just now, and we were wondering what happened to our lives.  Fifty years, nearly, have gone by from those days when we were filled with hope and our whole lives lay ahead of us.  We believed passionately that we would make the world a better place, that we would make our mark somehow, that we would have happy lives.  Yet here we are, both of us, just a few months away from being able to go on the old age pension.  Him a widower, me arthritic and in pain.  Both of us much poorer than we'd hoped.   And with so little done.  The world has gone on, indifferently.

I can't say I haven't had a good life.  By comparison with some I've in fact had a wonderful life.  The grief which pressed so heavily on me a few years ago has lifted.  I shan't forget my friend Henrik, or my parents or my father-in-law, but the agonising grief of their deaths has hardened into a scar.  You can call that "healing" if you want.

I still miss my little dogs horribly, though.  Their love was so generous and forgiving, so un-judgemental.  Sometimes I think of them and I find myself weeping.  I wonder that God -- or whoever orders these things -- should acquiesce in such suffering.

Really, I shouldn't  complain.  I have enough to eat, shelter, books and music, a loving family.  I live in a safe country, with a decent welfare system, my health is tolerable.

All the same I still can't get my head around the terrible grief and loss we humans must endure, of how you will suddenly be ambushed by a random memory which leaves you weak with sorrow, of how happiness is always tinged with remembrance.  The other night I dreamt of the little dogs, all asleep on the bed, and was overcome with grief to wake and find it wasn't true.

Bizarrely, despite my grief and memories, I am also sometimes intensely happy. Without reason or logic.  Happy, just because.  I know that if I examine the cause it will flutter off, so I don't.  It's a sort of blind happiness, owing nothing, so far as I can see, to circumstance.  A divine pat, perhaps?

Did my parents suffer this angst too?  And theirs before them?  It seems to be something that the  young don't feel, perhaps because they haven't suffered grief like we oldies have.  Or maybe they do too.  I can't remember it, in myself, when I was young and brash.  But then, the young are so self-centred. Or at least, I was.  Perhaps it is precisely this grief that makes you fully human.  I don't know.  The happy certainties of sixteen have vanished.

Even the old aged pension is an oddly mixed blessing.  It means I'm entering that last stretch of life, the slow curve downwards, the decay.  I find myself forgetting things and wonder, is this it?  Only I can't forget the things I would like to.  God has a sense of humour.  A very black one.

It's bedtime, now.

A la prochaine, mes amis.

After Great Pain

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

Emily Dickinson

After noon, is night

Love is a growing, or full constant light,

And his short minute, after noon, is night.

(John Donne)

Monday morning

My little dog, 14 years ago

It's very cold (2 C) and dark and the beginning of the week.  Today I go to get the referral for the colonoscopy and gastroscopy.  That's where they stick a fibre-optic cable up and down you to look at your colon and your stomach, respectively.  It's horrid, the whole process horrible.  Bleagh.  But at least it's me and I know what's happening.  A much worse thing this week is that I'll be taking my dog down for his last visit to the vet.  He's quite senile now, and he's becoming distressed all the time.  He's been my loyal and loving friend for 16 years, more loyal than so many of my human friends.  He's loved me without judging, he's forgiven me when I've been grumpy.  And now it's time.

I can't bear it.

Thou canst not, love

 Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault,
And I will comment upon that offence:
Speak of my lameness, and I straight will halt,
Against thy reasons making no defence.
Thou canst not, love, disgrace me half so ill,
To set a form upon desired change,
As I'll myself disgrace; knowing thy will,
I will acquaintance strangle, and look strange;
Be absent from thy walks; and in my tongue
Thy sweet beloved name no more shall dwell,
Lest I, too much profane, should do it wrong,
And haply of our old acquaintance tell.
For thee, against my self I'll vow debate,
For I must ne'er love him whom thou dost hate.

Depression

Again and again people say (or imply)  that depression is the same as sadness.  It isn't.  It isn't the same as grief, either.  Or loss.  Or unhappiness.  Of course all those things can lead to depression, and you can feel them at the same time as you are depressed, but they are not depression.  Believe me, I know.
 
Depression is the absence of 'colour'.  It is 'greyness'.  Everything seems too much trouble.  There's no point in doing things.  There's no purpose to life, no meaning in life.  There's no joy, no ecstasy, no bliss.  There's just grey.

Sadness and grief and loss and unhappiness are not grey.  They are 'coloured'.  You feel them.  And how!  They hurt, sometimes terribly, and deeply, and for a long time.  There is pain.  Depression is not the same as pain.

What is true though, is that you cannot 'snap out' of any of them.  That offensive exhortation by the happy (and cretinous) is useless and only shows the speaker's ignorance and lack of insight.  With luck and time and relentless hard work they may in the end go away.  In my case, my grief and loss have diminished.  But low grade depression remains.  In effect, the joy has gone out of life.  It's not a lethal thing, I think.  But it makes it hard to care about so many things.  And it leaves you with so little energy!  When I think of how much energy and get-up-and-go I had when I was younger!

So tonight,  to ward off the blahs, I will watch an episode of Poirot and drink a glass or two of wine.

Bugger!  I feel better already!  :-)

Oh, yet we trust

from here

From In Memoriam (Alfred Lord Tennyson)


Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
         Will be the final end of ill,
         To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
         That not one life shall be destroy'd,
         Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;

That not a worm is cloven in vain;
         That not a moth with vain desire
         Is shrivell'd in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.

Behold, we know not anything;
         I can but trust that good shall fall
         At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream: but what am I?
         An infant crying in the night:
         An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

Dark House

Tennyson wrote In Memoriam to his very dear friend Arthur Hallam who died suddenly.  Modern readers might see their deep friendship as 'gay',  but it seems clear enough that it was a 'romantic friendship'  Whatever.  It was love.  This poem below is just one from In Memoriam.


DARK house, by which once more I stand
    Here in the long unlovely street,
    Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,

A hand that can be clasp’d no more—      
    Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
    And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.

He is not here; but far away
    The noise of life begins again,      
    And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

*        *        *        *        *

O days and hours, your work is this,
    To hold me from my proper place,
    A little while from his embrace,      
For fuller gain of after bliss:

That out of distance might ensue
    Desire of nearness doubly sweet;
    And unto meeting when we meet,
Delight a hundredfold accrue,      

For every grain of sand that runs,
    And every span of shade that steals,
    And every kiss of toothèd wheels,
And all the courses of the suns.

Saturday night thoughts

I'm sharing a bottle of Piper-Hiedsieck with my lady.  Normally we imbibe much (much) cheaper champagne.  But tonight we have something special to celebrate.

But (as usual, when I have a glass or two of champagne) I am led to think about the sorrow of life.  We have this friend, Julie.  Her children were at school with ours.  We met at kinder, primary school dos, high school, and after, at the supermarket, shops, going for a walk.  She was always such a happy laughing joyous person.  She wasn't a great beauty, but you didn't notice that, because her inside was filled with light.  And then her husband left her.  He wanted to "find himself".  He "needed space".  For a long time after that she looked physically ill, like someone with cancer or severe heart disease,  She aged 20 years in a year.  From being happy and convivial she became a recluse.  She doesn't want to see ppl or talk to them.

Only young people (or therapists or counsellors) think that life is good and that being a good person will bring its own reward.  She was a good person, and life kicked her in the teeth.  And now she is desperately, unbearably unhappy.

God is so fucking good.

Oppressed ...

... today by the suffering of life, by loneliness of so many people in the world, by grief and loss, by betrayal and illness and death.  I miss Nimbo and Sharpie and ... and people too.

I should be more philosophical I suppose and be glad of the good things too.   Usually I am, but tonight ... it's too hard.  Well.

Onwards and upwards.

Source. Click to see magnificent full size

Forgotten?

Never.  But not forgiven, either.

I said it better here.

Saturday night thoughts

In The Curse of Chalion (which I will review here one of these days), Bujold says at one point, 'a young woman looking forwards and up not backwards and down'.   It is a characteristic of youth, or at least more fortunate youth, to look forward in the expectation of up.  But surely most ppl my age look back.  And down.

Friends who are gone, for whatever reason.  Failing health.  Things you always thought you would do, but didn't: take the number 1 tram in Budapest, for example; or visit the forests of Washington;  or see Venice; or climb Sneeukop one last time with someone you love.  Things you will now never do.  Failure.  Loss.  The realisation that love is transitory and ... not enough.  The awareness of your own arrogance and folly when you were young and the certainty (given your own experience of life) that you will surely be foolish and  make more mistakes before you die.

The greed and short-sightedness which ignore the inexorable logic of global warming, to postpone as long as possible the necessary and inevitable steps needed to fight it.

Yet such are the ironies of life that your horizons contract as you age, and what you need to make you happy is less.  That is not to say that I don't sometimes find myself staring into the distance filled with melancholy.  Of course I do; life is filled with grief and loss.  Sed fugit interea, fugit irreparabile tempus.  Yet as you look back and down there are simple, ineffable, pleasures: a bowl of home-made mushroom soup.  Music.  The deep love which grows between partners in a marriage.  Family.  The first hope-filled creamy green spikes of the daffodils, knowing before we do that spring is on the way.  I am very conscious after recent health scares that I may not have much more time here.  Yet I am happy.  How odd.

Anniversary

Thinking of you, my dear.  It's five years today since you died.   Dligo tson.

Better to have loved and lost ...

... than never to have loved at all.

Rubbish.

I know.  I've been there.

Friend

Mates -- Alex Cunha, Nils Butler and Marlon Teixeira

This word has so many meanings.  Like "love".

We don't have enough words to convey and describe the subtle gradations between someone you barely know on Facebook, who is your "friend", and someone whom you would trust your life with.

For me, a friend is someone I love, and who loves me.  I'm not talking about sex or desire -- too often "intimate" is a euphemism for fucking.  Intimacy is something you have with real friends.  A friend is someone I trust in important things.  But most of all, a friend is someone I can be myself with, someone I don't have to pretend with.  They love me in spite of me.  With them,  I don't have to drag out my Mr Jolly persona.  If I am taciturn, well, I don't have to bother to chat mindlessly.   And so on.

Most people don't see friends in this way.   "How to choose friends for success".  "How to get better friends"  As if they were accessories.  You know, a good handbag or elegant shoes or a super haircut.  Using each other.

We are programmed both to love and to want sex, and sometimes these needs conflict.  But as I get older, it becomes more and more clear to me that love is what matters.  Without it we shrivel.  We can, if we have to, provide ourselves with all the sex we need, if we are truly talking just about sex and not about the bond that sex often builds between people, a bond which justifies the word "love".  But we can't manufacture or buy love.

Meh.  It's late (for me), I'm dead tired and worn, and I'm not thinking too well.  I'm off to bed.

Depression and sadness

I've seen several commentaries and discussions which treat depression and sadness as the same thing.  They are not.

Sadness is an intensity of feeling.  It's akin to grief and sorrow and loss.  It hurts.  It has colour and depth.

Depression is the absence of feeling.  It's greyness.  Indifference.  Akin to exhaustion and tiredness and weariness.  Nothing seems to matter.  Everything is too much trouble.  Life is flat and dreary.

Of course, sadness and its brothers grief and loss can lead to depression, as they did in my case. Over a period of a year  or so, someone I thought loved me as a friend dropped me; my best friend's wife died; my father-in-law died.  I lost some illusions and I grieve for them still.

As time when by, my grief lessened, but my disillusion deepened.  It came to seem to me that people I had trusted had betrayed me, that those who appeared to love me did not in truth, and those who were truly fond of me were dead.  To add to my depression, I had to take a massive pay cut at work (one still not reversed).

Gradually my depression eased too.  But still it is there, lurking just out of sight, and sometimes, it returns though, thankfully, never as bad as it was at the worst.  However, the cynicism and doubt engendered by the behaviour of my "friends" and of the universe have not left me, and I have to work hard to keep going.  When you are depressed, you do what you have to and what you can.  And everything else slips by the wayside.

So, like Lord Peter Wimsey as he worked through his post-war shell-shock, I play patience.  Endlessly, hour after hour.  And I read and reread old familiar books (Dorothy Sayers among them)  and watch old familiar films on DVD (Miss Marple, Star Wars, Poirot).  Drink helped get me through the evening, but I'm not drinking now. Sometimes I have enough energy to write.  To play my clarinet or sax.  But often I don't.

Well, what I suffer is no more than what millions of others have endured, and here I am after all, surviving.

I make a point of being grateful for something every day.  I make little lists of things to be glad about.  This makeshift philosophy works.  Sometimes.

At any rate, tonight is one of the nights when I just don't want to do anything.  I'm reading Lois Bujold with enjoyment, and when I've reread all her books, I will move on to Mary Stewart.  Or Miss Marple.  Or Star Wars.  And glad it is I am that I have even those distractions.

Onwards and upwards.

Melancholy

Tonight I'm thinking of friends and family who've died.  It started with a post from Andrew Sullivan, The Last Lesson We Learn From Our Pets,  and I thought back to my own dear dog, and with tears in my eyes, after that to friends and family who have died.  My mother, my father-in-law, my friend Henrik, my friend Anneliese, my father.

God has so badly organised this business of death.  So much suffering before the end.  And our grief!  It's just not fair that we should suffer so.  But "not fair" is childish.  The world is what it is.  But the way people and animals die, and the grief that survivors endure seems to me to argue very cogently for the absence -- the total absence -- of God.  We are alone, and what we make of our lives and of the lives of those we love is up to us.  Not believing in God and in Heaven and Hell makes it all the more important that we show love and compassion and forgiveness and grace now, while we yet live, and not rely on some mythical ideas about life after death and paradise.  I know these notions comfort some people when someone they love dies.  But for me, the horrible savagery of our ends, of the permanent severing of ties between us, is a compelling argument to loving one another while we still can.

True empathy

Years ago I got to talking with a woman on the train, who recognised me from TV (you didn't know I was on TV, did you?)  We became acquaintances, sharing anecdotes about our lives, our children, our jobs.  Sometimes we gave each other lifts home from the station.

I always rather envied them.  They were well off.  They went every year on weeks-long overseas holidays to France and Italy and Switzerland.  They went to opera and ballet.  They did things.  But then, about a year ago, I saw her and her  husband in the station car park. He looked ill.  They told me that he had lung cancer, not because he'd smoked, but because he'd worked, decades ago, in an office of smokers, in the days before people were forced to go outside to smoke.  Just a few months ago, on another meeting, they remained upbeat.  The treatments were working.  Alan was getting better.

Yesterday I met her in the supermarket.  I knew at once what had happened.  You could see it in the way her body slumped, in the terrible grief in her stance, in her eyes.  I didn't even have to ask what.  I knew.  How long ago, I asked.  A month, was the answer.  Then a burst of courage.  Well, I must keep going.  Nice to meet you, Nick.

I know what grief feels like.  And I don't believe until you have experienced grief yourself that you can fully understand the grief of others.  Perhaps we humans can only really get the suffering of others when we have suffered ourselves.   When you have nursed your sick child through the night you will never again be dismissive of other parents' worries about their own children.  When your marriage has been under strain, you will know and understand what others are going through when theirs is similarly afflicted.  And when someone else suffers intense and incredible grief, you will be able to understand fully only if you have lost loved ones yourself.

As I spoke to her, I felt the lump in my throat and the unshed tears in my eyes.  But I wondered afterwards whether the grief I felt was just a memory of my own, in other words was selfish (even narcissistic) or whether I was truly feeling for her.

Who knows?  It's all too easy to deceive yourself, and to fancy yourself to be a better person than you are. And yet I am unable to shake the memory of that grief-ravaged face and the cringing posture; body and soul bending away from the blows of life and the horror of death.  Perhaps the only mechanism our minds have to have insight into the minds and characters of others and into their feelings and sufferings is our own mind and our own memories of those we loved and lost and what we felt.  Maybe that is the only way humans can see into the soul of other humans.

What's the saying?  Hope for the best, be prepared for the worst?  The best, surely,  is a compassionate and empathetic insight into the hearts and souls of others.  The worst is to say, "well, when I ..."  We humans are surely a mixture of both, neither unalloyed compassion nor unbridled selfishness.  But there are times when I wish it were not so.