Home______Remembrance of A Death Foretold
This blog has meandered from breezy humor to philosophical speculation, from political commentary to consciousness questions. A thread runs through all the articles, the thread of persona. Each tone reflects a different color of my personas. From the ancient Greek, persona literally refers to masks actors used when playing tragic or comedic roles. Ergo, personality, which is our composite of masks. We are not only the lover, the husband, the parent, the executive, the employee, the cop, the professor, the doctor, the lawyer. In a sense, we are these roles and also the values, morals, emotions and feelings behind the masks while the speaker conveys this inner condition to the world.
Who is the speaker behind these masks? Dawn rises on our lives and we glory in the fresh sun, the roseate sky. In our childhood we are golden lads and girls without a care for speakers or masks. Life offers itself and we take it. Soon, very soon, we become professor, doctor, lawyer, cop, roles foisted upon us by the world as we find it. By middle age some of us have become duped into believing in our masks or else we consider ourselves imposters.
Which brings me to my story.
Several years ago I received a letter from an old navy buddy. He and I had corresponded for years, and so when I took his letter from the mailbox I looked forward to reading it. I walked back to the house, the sun warm on my back, the breeze rustling tree leaves. The day had been good. The evening promised a pleasant dinner with my wife and a stroll through the neighborhood as streets revealed shadows, lengthening toward night.
When I opened it in my house I had to sit down, for his letter wasn't just about himself. It was about our common destiny, his, yours and mine. It was about the heaviness that each of us carries within. Here is part of the letter. I have changed his name.
You may wonder why you've not heard from me recently. Many of the normal reasons apply--busy, new projects, hectic life, etc. What wasn't normal for Wesley R. Andersen was a period of weakness and illness that wouldn't go away.
By the time it bothered me enough to force me to a doctor, by the time they put me through the requisite tests, by the time a prognosis was reached, it was malignant, untreatable, and terminal.
By the time you read this, my last letter, I'll be gone and my ashes will be scattered in the North Atlantic Ocean.
You may wish we could have talked one last time, but I didn't need the sympathy--I needed time to clean closets, both metaphorically and literally. You may have missed an opportunity to express sadness, but I needed the mind-set to get ready for my final day.
With the letter was a note from his wife. It said that he had died Saturday morning while resting on the couch.
The death of others is like an astronomical datum. The day he died Wes was spinning at 836 miles an hour around the earth's axis, or 64,800 miles an hour around the sun. Wes's pain and departure were there but I didn't notice them any more than I noticed our common velocity through space. Poet W.H. Auden said that the painters of old were never wrong about suffering and death. Breughel painted Icarus falling out of the sky, while a farmer had his field to plow, and so plowed calmly on. Suffering and death take place while someone else is eating or opening a letter.
As I compose this article, I read Wes's letter once again. It invokes not the man whose ashes are scattered on the waters, but the fellow I once knew, young, eager for his life to come.
His years crept into middle age and the life to come went. When I first read his letter, I resisted an impulse to pick up the phone to call him and see if it wasn't all a giant hoax. After it sank in, I was reminded of Hemingway's comment in A Farewell to Arms: against all the high-sounding words, truth, honor, country, patriotism, duty. One fact remains. You die. You die alone.
When Wes died, I thought of all that had remained for him. He looked forward to working on his antique car. As a reunion coordinator, he anticipated the annual gatherings of our old aircraft squadron. That was part of his public persona. I also knew some of his private masks, one of an orphaned child cast upon foster parents who threatened him with Hell and damnation if he didn't become Born Again. He had his own struggles.
From his ashes I raised some questions. His wife lost a husband. I lost an old friend. He lost himself. Himself. What was the self that he lost? What was behind his personas? Who was their speaker?
The questions are not only about Wes. They are about everybody. Whoever, whatever, he was, only Wes knew and now he is gone.
All things are on fire, said Buddha. They burn with desire, hatred, illusion, birth, old age, death, mourning, misery, grief, and despair. The eye is on fire, as are forms, thoughts, sensations. Thus the world consumes itself. Scientists call it entropy.
This is called The Fire Sermon and seems to have little to do with us. After all, where's the fire? We feel no heat, see no fumes. No, not us.
We commute to work, resolved to get the promotion, finish the project, become a better parent, not cheat on the spouse. We look at the buildings we pass, edifices of public authority, proclaiming that this is the world, that it is right and fitting to bend our lives to the edict. Sometimes we stop to ask if the lie doesn't penetrate deeper, but then we shake our heads as if caught dreaming, and we scurry to the elevator to get off at the ninth or tenth or eleventh floor.
At home, the question of the lie returns before we fall asleep. We glimpse the lie of authority; listening to the nightly news, watching the commercials, we ask Is this the Good Life? But we nod off in our easy chairs, dreaming that when we retire things will get better. Better always means when. When wealthy, healthy, happy. Better always allows us to postpone the questions, Who am I? , What is the lie? Am I just John Doe, husband, father, entrepreneur; am I only dedicated, loving, ambitious, methodical, rational, or impulsive? Is it merely the lie of authority, conformity, normality, or sanity?; of capitalism or communism or democracy or autocracy?
Did Wes have answers to these questions? I don't know. He certainly didn't believe in the world as he found it. He retired from the navy and followed his own path. He was unusual in that regard, career military on the one hand and a maverick on the other. Anyhow, he is gone, and his wisdom left with him.
As I said, the questions are not only about him, but also about everybody. For the rest of us, life continued on the day he died. Nobody except his wife and family noticed. That's why the matter is about us. We are all self-referential. Yet Earth spins through the black infinitude of space while we comport our daily affairs as if nothing unusual is happening. We dream on, despite the millions of births and deaths each day. We don't bother to ask important questions because they don't occur to us, or if they do, we think we have more urgent and pressing concerns.
They get considered only if we make them pressing. The world offers distraction enough to postpone them for the rest of our lives. Then we wind up with cancer or pass peacefully in our sleep. Either way, we don't postpone any longer.
Wes was somewhat familiar with W.H. Auden, although I don't know the extent of his knowledge. Perhaps Auden was a solace to him; at least I like to think so. The poet can give us pause. He reminds us of the lie, of the truths we avoid. That's why I will close with him. He provokes thought, even in the casual reader. Auden offers a filter for our modern world, one which helps us see our way to a few of the questions which need asking. Here it is--
The Unknown Citizen
(To JS/07/M/378 this marble monument is erected by the state)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors, Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound),
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink,
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
. . .
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for his generation,
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
And so I leave you with the biting sarcasm, the irony, of that last line.
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