A woman who was a sister to me died on Monday.  Her death was not unexpected but despite this it was still a shock. This is not unusual. Having experienced the death of loved ones before, now matter how well prepared one is, death is never a comfortable experience.

Like all family, my sister and I had our disagreements but as luck would have it we were able to have a comfortable coze and admit missing each other when I came over for her daughter’s wedding. It was a good, if brief, visit and it stands as the last time I got to see her alive.

I had hoped to make it before she died, and last week made plans to come over yesterday, but Monday she was told there was nothing more that the doctors could do except make her comfortable and by mid afternoon she was dead. And so here I am back in Washington State, having left at the planned time, but, unfortunately, not before her death.

I am running up to the Reservation today to attend the first of several good-bye services. The services will last three days because there are many, many people who are, like me, travelling to say good bye to someone who will be deeply missed.

My children and I arrived in town last night, paid for the hotel room, unpacked and then (once email etc had been checked) we went out to pick up some groceries and a little fast food for my daughter. Remember now, this is the US.  We went to a Jack in the Box drive through and I ordered poutine. It was a bit of a comedy. The woman said “what?”  I said “poutine.” She said “what?” In the end I ordered chicken strips and drove up to the window to pay.  She came over to the window and asked “what did you ask for?” And so I had to explain what poutine is and the expression on her face said “what?”  ”Never heard of it,” she said. “Wrong country,” I said.

We laughed; it was a bit of a face-palm moment I fear.  A long drive, never enough sleep, grief, and the shock of it all –  I am hazy, not quite here. Yet I am alive, and so laughter remains. It is a wonderous thing being human.

Yesterday I spent most of the daylight hours walking through the fog, resting for a while with hot tea, Hedgehog and Deleuze, and then walking again.

Not long before twilight I went to see a film called A Single Man. It was a deeply beautiful movie centering on a man (played by Colin Firth) bound by grief and loss. After a day in the fog, a day in which the intimacy of beauty was a constant companion, I came out of the theatre to the fog Peardg has caught in her photo below.  I walked the few blocks to my car, the round towers that are so common here were like fluted pillars in a moonlit cathedral or perhaps more inline with my atheism, walking to my car was like moving through a vast and toplit cavern, one that opens up into a sense of infinity, where the buildings were luminescent stone fingers fluttering against the dark. A thoroughly beautiful day.

Peardg’s photosite

By all rights I shouldn’t be happy. All my joints are aching so every movement hurts. The one philosophy class I wanted to take just got cancelled because the school thinks nine students isn’t enough. I need surgery and every day there is a chance the pain will resurge and I will be back in the hospital and the only thing that seems to be working is a low fibre diet, and on top of that I am supposed to lose weight before the surgery, and of course the standard weight loss diet is high fibre and I have symptoms today and the apartment above me is populated by four 18 year old young men who think the beer bottle toss from the second floor is a high art form and I found out on Tuesday that T (sister to me from the Rez) is dying of cancer (she has 3 kinds!) and probably only has about 9 months to go and there is a chance I (at just that age where childrearing is safely in the past) may be the best person to take over the rearing of my (much loved but very needy and soon to get needier) deaf 11 year old niece.

Yet, I am happy.  The sun is out after a November of 1 day of sun and although it is cold the air is clear. Is it unreasonable to be happy under these circumstances? And if it is, do I care?

I have never been able to like Faulkner. I admire much about the books I have been able to struggle through, but I always finish them feeling raw and dirty.

This time it is The Sound and the Fury. In part I reread him because he is a very important American writer, in part because because not knowing Faulkner is to miss something vital about the growth of the American psyche and intellect, but really I decided to reread The Sound and the Fury because I still can’t figure out what it is about his books that causes me such distress.
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How compassionate are humans compared to other animals?

This is what I mean about needing to be careful when assessing others by virtue of the content of our feeling complexes (see post just before this). Clearly, both humans and macaques have compassion but the content of that feeling complex is also clearly different when comparing the human and macaque versions. Of course, what is also true, is that the causal relations differ between our species when comparing the various complexes (say between the complex known as compassion, and the one known as respect [for authority]) and their place in the overall set of complexes.

This video is also rather strong support for the contention that we need to continually assess our intuitions about our own states and those of others using empirical evidence. If we don’t do this, then all we really do is assess what we believe to be true by virtue of what we believe to be true. And of course, doing this isn’t going to get us anywhere sane.

Originally seen on Pharylngula, but also part of National Geographic’s Visions of Earth 2009, here is Dorothy’s body, and her troop’s witness of her passing.

Although I still have trouble understanding why, it still seems contentious to interpret the stance of this gathering of chimpanzees as some set of feelings related to grief. I suppose it must be the implications of those apparently expressed beliefs that is so disturbing. If they have grief, for example, that means they know something about what death means, which, in its turn, means the gathered chimps have a capacity to understand and express consequences to not just self but the group, which is an ability to abstract, which leads to the idea that they have what we usually think of as morality.
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I watch Rachel Maddow, and recently I saw a clip called “Making Painful Decisions.” The clip below starts at 3 minutes 56 seconds and goes to the end.  Essentially it is a clip of the lawyer for Terry Schiavo’s husband speaking to the fear being drummed up against living wills by some Republicans as a way of trying to impede health care reform. Right near the end George Felos says “the only thing this bill does is say we will pay the doctor for the conversation. That’s it.”

He is, of course, refering to the conversation a dying person should have with their family and health care provider about what they want done for them and to them at the end of their lives. This conversation is what some Republicans are saying is a plot to kill the elderly. Bah. If its a plot at all, it as a plot to get people involved with their families, to talk to them, to open lines of communication, to speak to each other about the hard stuff.

The earlier segment of the clip shows that the principle opponents of the living will provision have a history of supporting exactly what they now oppose. I sure hope Mr. Felos is right when he suggests that the political downfall of some of those who used Mrs. Schiavo’s end to bring themselves political attention is something that will repeat itself with respect to some of these current conspiracy “theorists.”

It takes a mean spirited person to add to the pain and confusion that dying brings with it and that is what they are doing by trying to kill such a simple provision: help people speak to their doctors and families about what they want their death to be like.

It can be exquisite, the idea of spiritual madness, the sensation of spiritual transcendence, but the more I read Simone Weil, the Jewish/Christian mystic the less I am sure about the “facts” of her madness (although I am certain of her experience of it) and the more I think of her life, and her death, as probably the most perfect example of possession by a story that I am ever likely to know.

The fierceness of her life, the tenacity, the arrogant humility of it, her abnegation of the self, all reach deep into the underlying assumptions about human nature coded into the Western god-story. Weil’s truly fine mind and her passionate intensity and spiritual fervor led to her death in 1943 from the long-term effects of “willful starvation,” its attendant malnutrition, bodily break down and loss of the capacity to heal. In a sense, probably without clear consciousness of the implications of her denial of her own corporeal state, Weil committed a slow kind of suicide, dying in her 34th year, dying, as it were, for her absolute absorption into the story of god that shapes the western mind.

She believed, essentially, that we are the space where god is not; that god retreated in order to create the space for its creations. That is, we are a god-void, an essential emptiness, while at the same time full of the things of the causal world. This dual state is felt to be intolerable, the void itself unbearable, yet, to fulfill our purpose—to empty ourselves and wait for god to fill us with grace—we must stop trying to fill the god-void with the human endeavor. We must endure what is unendurable. These things of causality, of the human world, to which we turn to ease the unbearable sensation of the void are what she considered the two greatest idols. These were “the self and the social.”

Born in Paris in 1909 Simone Weil was a young Jewish girl of good family during the years that broke Europe. Her parents were sophisticated, well educated, middle class French citizens. Her brother was three years older than she. He had a fair share of the family’s intellect and cultural curiosity; he favored mathematics and the wonders of the mystical East. Simone seems to have been, to some degree, following his lead. She naturally took to the ideas behind Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, and in her life and writings she seems to have assessed both Judaism and Catholicism by some of the precepts she discovered in her study of the East, but it was perhaps her exposure to the First World War as her family followed her father to his various war-time postings (he was a doctor) that focused her metaphysical interests along the tracks of both society and the individual’s responsibility within and to the world of the human—and to the divine.

She would have been only five when the war began and as a teen would have been exposed to the after-effects of the social and mental devastation that the First World War wrought amongst the people. The fact that the space between the wars could hardly be called kind to the Jews deeply affected Simone and her family both physically as well as mentally. In fact, in the last few years of her life, her parents, increasingly concerned for their joint welfare, decided to leave Europe, having already been driven from Paris to Marseille by the German invasion in June of 1940. Her parents planned to go to the United States. Simone was deeply patriotic but with little sense of how much her body would tolerate: she had organized protest marches for the workers in the Auvergne (1932); she worked in various French metal factories on the line (1932-1933), jobs physically difficult and demanding, ending her stint when she was too weak and ill to continue; she fought with the communists in Spain (1936) where she was scalded with boiling water, ending her time as a freedom fighter; Simone, who had gone to work as a field hand in rural France (1941) where she acquired pleurisy because she would not take comfort when she could.

Simone was reluctant to leave Europe but her parents would not escape without her, and she was really quite physically weak by this time (illness and migraines had been life-long companions), and so she left France with her parents in early 1942. Making their way through Casablanca to New York, the parents settled in the United States. Simone could not. She left for England in late 1942 and here she stopped. She worked for the French cause from its headquarters in London. She wrote reports for them and she wrote what was to be her final book, The Need for Roots there. All of her personal work, including what would become Gravity and Grace, Waiting on God and Oppression and Liberty were published posthumously. She died in the late summer of 1943, in a sanatorium in Kent, of the combined effects of exhaustion, repeated illness, malnutrition and general self neglect.

The concept of self-destruction was what she called decreation. For her, god created humans (and the world presumably) so that we could empty ourselves out and return, selfless, to that perfect emptiness which is god. In his introduction to Gravity and Grace Thibon, interpreting Weil’s thoughts, says that “so long as man does not consent to become nothing in order to be everything he needs idols. ‘Idolatry is a vital necessity in the cave.’ And among these idols the social one of the collective soul is the most powerful and dangerous.” The self and the social: the very things which created the human being that was Weil, allowed language to be born in the social space between her and the world which she fought to save, was for her, in the grips of this story, poison. She felt that as long as she was not a perfect vacuum that she got in the way of god’s grace—and turning to any comfort, whether this was food or the idea of a helpful, friendly god, debased spiritual energy, getting in the way of god.

Simone’s obsession was god, not church, nor really social welfare, not politics, nor the state of society. She sought in everything she did to empty herself to receive grace. She disliked the Jewish religious history, disliked the Roman Catholic Church and certainly disliked what she called the Great Beast of social control. She disliked both of the religious systems because of their behavior, their actions over history, and not because of what they had to say about the nature of god and human. She attended Mass; she sought god vigorously all through her adulthood. In 1938 she had a mystical experience in a church in which “Christ came down and possessed her.” But she was not a Christian; she refused baptism.

She was a mystic, caught in a time of broken and breaking people and her story of what her experiences and life means reflect that social contingency. She was obsessed by god and she was a woman of her time. She believed that “duty is given us in order to kill the self” but she also believed that

It is not surprising then that she did not fear death, or even that she seemed to court it. “To die does not commit one to anything, if one can say such a thing; it does not contain anything in the nature of a lie…at present I have the impression that I am lying, whatever I do, whether it be by remaining outside the Church or by entering it. The question is to know where there is less of a lie.” She could see, I suspect, that the self and the social world were stories but to her that meant that they were lies. This is because her god-story tells her that there is only one perfect truth, and her meticulous and fervent mind realized that this perfect truth was alien to everything it meant to be a living human being. The only way out of this quandary, without giving up the god-story, is to give up what it means to be human. This is why I say that the story possessed her and why I say god obsessed her. She sought truth; she could feel in her mysticism, the resonant emptiness underlying life but her interpretation—her storying—of that emptiness followed the guidelines of the god-story of the Western world. In other words, she felt she had to make a choice between the truth of her living experience and the truth of the story. She could not hold both truths and learn how to walk life inside the contraction, because she could not tolerate the idea that the god-story was in fact a story.

She said: “To love truth means to endure the void, and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death.” So she died at the age of 34. Death is sometimes easier than living. Committing to the idea of life, it is perhaps one of the greatest challenges faced by someone who has grown into the world shaped by this particular brand of god-story.

I have recently been watching a discontinued TV show called Dead Like Me. It posits a world where some people, when they die, become grim reapers whose job it is to take the souls of other people who are themselves imminently dead. The main character, an 18 year old girl, dies in the pilot episode – dies by flying toilet seat – and starts her (eternal?) unpaid job as reaper. The show only went to two seasons. I have watched all of the first and 3 episodes of the last. It’s delightful.

I tend to like shows like this. Ones that create a world where there are things like paranormal insight, bodiless souls and odd creatures (in the case of Dead Like Me that’s gravelings –they’re the ones that set up the deadly accidents). When I am really tired, really stressed, I will watch (or read) something like this and feel soothed, reoriented.

I wonder about this, what this says about the power of atavistic notions for, of course, there is no life after death, no soul to take, no gravelings and accidents are just that. But really, of course, the show isn’t about death at all. It’s about living, about being in the world, and there is nothing to heighten the value of life like the closeness of death. Positing a world where death has a positive presence, where it exists as a thing itself, allows all kinds of life-moment mirrors. For example, the young woman in the TV show finds herself suddenly responsible for herself. She has been a real pain in the ass with regard to her parents: taken what they offer (home, food, clean sheets) for granted but now, as a reaper, there is no one offering. She suddenly has no place to live, no dinner waiting, no one to hurt by her sarcasm. Her death forces her to begin looking at her life. This is what I mean by a life-moment mirror.

I think that anthropomorphizing death in the form of human reapers is an easy way to create these “mirrors.” (Nothing grabs our attention quite like death, except perhaps sex and there are plenty of shows about that as well.) Human social life is something we deeply understand. Giving something completely alien and nonhuman (like meaningless accidents and death) an animal-like existence as well as a human face allows us to think about it, to try to extend ourselves outward into the world a little more from the relatively safe perch of humanity. Doing this is one aspect of learning: emotional learning, becoming more conscious of who and what we are.

I am a creature of the world. That means at least two things. First, I am born of a long line of apes and carry the complete history of primate evolutionary history in my genes, my behaviours, my senses, my reactions, my desires, my fears and my consciousness. So when I am at risk (even mildly) I turn naturally to what has always worked for my ancestral line – I make the world into a place I can understand. Hence the TV. Second, when I feel most myself, when I don’t feel so discombobulated, I still turn to the world of earth for answers. But at this point, I can try for more exacting insight. For the second that often either means science or poetry.

Like this poem by Melissa Kwasney:

Madrone

Animal, this nakedness, the bark
rolled back
as a bear or dog would bare its teeth.

Whose limbs, red and gold as mango,
flare like lanterns
among the darker, creek-side trees.

Glowing above the charred wrist
of root, they light
the wild iris in the muddy bottom.

They glow. They grow acrobatic,
offering their arms
shameless, they coil through the forest.

What is hidden inside us is suddenly
exposed to air.
The trunks gleam like a wound gleams.

Here is a mirror; a much subtler statement than Dead Like Me but still an anthropomorphizing of the world: a madrone-mirror. What ever it is to be a tree, it is not shameless or its unspoken corollary, shameful. This is an emotion we experience and find hard to understand consciously since its power is archaic and limbic and thereby not easily dis- and re-membered by our awareness. Looking at the world through narrative builds backdoors into our psyche and allows us to sneak in, peering around with the lantern that is narrative. So I watch paranormal TV shows and read poetry. I do this for my primate, worldly self, the one that is obsessed by what it means to be human, to be me. If I want to understand madrones themselves, or what death actually is, then for that, I need science.