Acting My Age 9780824891831

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critical acclaim for the writings of thomas farber [Curves of Pursuit] Like its themes, its structure is a continual surprise of perspective . . . a beautiful feeling of everything coming together in space and time—and yes even in a kind of love. New York Times [Hazards to the Human Heart] Stunning . . . To be reread and remembered with pleasure. Chicago Tribune [Learning to Love It] A prolonged meditation on love and loss . . . moving and arresting. New York Times [The Beholder] A tempestuous, rapturous, and incendiary love affair . . . Farber limns the perils of Eros with terse, minimalist prose. Booklist [The Face of the Deep] A lithe, spare stylist . . . The chapters read like epigrams—witty, paradoxical riffs. Kirkus Reviews [On Water] The brief chapters often read like prose poems . . . An elegant writer. New Mexican Truth Be Told does more than compact the world into the essence perceived by its idiosyncratic compositor. It also hints at an expansive hidden narrative of sex, death, joy and despair. In short, as the author presumably prefers all things, it may be an epigramasterpiece. Melvin Jules Bukiet, author of A Faker's Dozen Thomas Farber is one of the most gifted American writers of his generation. TGV Magazine, France Compared to What? can be read as a rich collection of anecdotes and quotations, delivered with quick, understated wit; as a shrewd, unsentimental, detached essay on this peculiar occupation; or as the confession of a mania, with its eruptions of manic fearlessness and comedy; or as the autobiography of one who has been saved by himself—though this is never quite said—by his craft; and even as a sidelong meditation on the practical meaning of art, seen unpretentiously in the terms of an American life. Robert Pinsky, U.S. Poet Laureate 1997–2000 [Tales for the Son of My Unborn Child] Brief brilliant portraits. San Francisco Chronicle [Curves of Pursuit] Lifts the spirit with its profound understanding. Thomas Farber probes each idea with a wry illuminating intelligence. Houston Chronicle

[The End of My Wits] As epigrammatist, Tom Farber’s a doctor making house calls: checking on our human condition. In his black bag, stethoscope, tongue depressor, and reflex hammer for listening and testing. But also—for mercilessly amused diagnoses—scalpel, razor wire, and garrote. Each, handled deftly, not pain-free, but curative. Frank Stewart, Editor, M¯ anoa [Who Wrote the Book of Love?] Quietly devastating. Rolling Stone Remarkable perception and insight. The magnitude and beauty is dazzling. Pittsburgh Press I love reading Thomas Farber. It’s like listening to a preternaturally articulate, well-read, and inventive person think aloud. Beautifully crafted, his work seems to have complete spontaneity. It’s always surprising, like jazz. Compared to What? is especially daring, like the great jazz piece of the same name. Phyllis Rose, author of Parallel Lives The bluntness and intelligence with which [Farber] undresses love will remind you of the best fiction of Milan Kundera. Elle Magazine, France A renegade Bostonian, Farber knows that paradise is rarely as it seems from a more earthbound vantage point. There is nothing earthbound about his prose, which spreads a descriptive joie de vivre over everything it touches. Boston Globe Larkin wrote of the moment in life when our “innate assumptions” and daily habits “Suddenly harden into all we’ve got.” A beautifully written memoir, Brief Nudity dwells in that moment, its call to self-judgment, its unexpected openness to possibility. Alan Williamson, author of The Pattern More Complicated Farber is unafraid of feelings, unafraid of life as it is lived in the heart. Newsday [Who Wrote the Book of Love?] To read this book is to re-experience the compromises of love and love’s broken dreams . . . also to be shot headlong and precipitately into dazzling vistas of love’s renewing possibilities. San Francisco Examiner Thomas Farber’s writing has always been characterized by the tension between the concision of its execution and the immensity of its concerns. Here and Gone is brief, elegant, and deeply moving. Intellectually omnivorous and agile … as expansive, funny and full of life as only a book written in the full awareness of mortality can be. James Bradley, author of The Resurrectionist His prose is as spare and specifying as black-and-white photography . . . His gift is real. The Nation

Floating, Makapu‘u, O‘ahu, 1983. Photograph by Wayne Levin

M A N O A

3 2 : 2

U N I V E R S I T Y O F

H A W A I ‘ I

P R E S S

H O N O L U L U

my AG  THOMAS FARBER

E

DEDICATION for 李碧琴, and for Steve & Dee

Also by Thomas Farber fiction The Beholder A Lover’s Question Learning to Love It Curves of Pursuit Hazards to the Human Heart Who Wrote the Book of Love? nonfiction Here and Gone Brief Nudity A Lover’s Quarrel Provocations (with Robert Kuszek) The Face of the Deep On Water Compared to What? Too Soon to Tell Tales for the Son of My Unborn Child on photography Akule (with Wayne Levin) Other Oceans (with Wayne Levin) Through a Liquid Mirror (with Wayne Levin) Portraits: Friends and Strangers (with Michael Mathers) Rag Theater (with Nacio Brown) the epigrammatic The End of My Wits Foregone Conclusions Hesitation Marks The Twoness of Oneness Truth Be Told: New & Collected Premortems Compressions: A Second Helping The Price of the Ride screenplay The Two-Body Problem (with Edward Frenkel)

CONT ENTS



Author’s Note

i

xiii

onshore and in deep The Ocean Downstairs Crabs

Fish Story

1

9

13 17

where we fit in The Long Run, Part One Coral



21

27

Bemoaning and the Future Imperfect Monk Seals

43

Re Snow Leopards

48

the aging self Paradise, 2018

51

Break of Day

53

Time’s Fool #1

59

Aging in Place 63

34

37

Dolphinology

Kudlow

21



24

The Long Run, Part Two

iii

1

7

Sound Systems

ii



5

Almost Unsaid

‘Oama



62







51

Time’s Fool #2

64

Talking to Myself Tantrumming

67

72

Anatomy Lessons

76

Presentation of Self

79

Not Prone to False Optimism Lost at Sea Hirsute

83

88

Family Planning Rants

92

95

Foreseeable Futures Interconnections Aches and Pains

101 104

106

The Interrogative Mikey

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100

Vocational Training M&Ms

108

112

“Lebensweisheitspielerei”



Precedent

iv

113

114

the body politic, embodied





117

the writing life



126

Entrails, Late 2019

v

81

masterpieces Bronk

130

Word Playing Unbecomings #1 Ruins, 1999 Chester

126

136

146

131 132

117

Unbecomings #2

149

About Writing About Water



Swan Songs and Later Words

154

About Rewriting One’s Books

157

Acquiring, Deaccessioning

vi





164

epilogue



173



175

Deliverance Moloka‘i

epilogue

164

166

Last Writes

viii

159

back on shore and into the deep

vii

150

171

173

postscript Postscript: Late March 2020

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About the Author and Photographers 178

Over the falls, Sandy Beach, O‘ahu, 1983. Photograph by Wayne Levin

author’s note

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) yearned to put “a whole book in a page, a whole page in a sentence, and this sentence in a word.” Despite—because of?—this ambition, Joubert never published any book at all. About my own yearnings, author seventy-two to going on seventy-six, these pages seemed, variously, daily craft pursuit; house being constructed; mania; self-directed homeschooling; word music being composed. Also self-sentenced “hard labor.” Also life raft. Also, arguably, spiritual practice. Less ambitious than Joubert, I was tempted—merely—to convey what I could about aging, the fate of the ocean, our political moment, the writing life, family, and words. Meanwhile, there were sections revised but recalcitrant. Mulling if I should wait for laggards, I hoped to stave off a posthumous publication date. What’s here, then, is an interim report. Work in progress for the meantime / meanwhile—like the currently ongoing self. Readers will see I address my concerns repeatedly from different points of entry. Repetition compulsion? Tenacity? You’ll decide. (Poet James Merrill: “It’s madness to think of an audience. It’s madness also not to think of one.”) Meanwhile, something less abridged soon? Years ago, an opinionated fellow—aesthete without an art, is how I came to think of him—told me I’d never stop writing. Never—n(ot)ever. Since he’s “no longer with us”—silenced by his own hand—we’re unable to further discuss whether or not he was correct.



Demos (Latin), “the people.” In early 2020, as I did last revisions, epidemic became pandemic. Epi, “among.” Pan, “all.” Here, then, you’ll find nothing

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about the heroes, victims, benedictions, or maledictions the virus elicited. Survivor-reader you, hopefully disembarked from the infected ship of state on which we were trapped, might even read this in a post–COVID-19 world. Reverted to ordinary life? If so, what new normal? Except for victims and loved ones, wars and plagues seem too soon left behind. Life for the living! After prophylactic hand-washing and wringing of hands, we’re to emerge transformed? Or, as sleepwalking / mind-infected Lady Macbeth put it, “What, will these hands ne’er be clean?” In his very last poem, Jim Harrison wrote, “Man shits his pants and trashed God’s body.” With luck, in the de-quarantined post-pandemic, those of our squabbling, bickering kind who’ve been spared will better care for other members of our species. And/or, will do more to save the rest of Creation from us. Meanwhile, some of my writerly obsessions the five years before epi became pan may shed light on the madness that ensued. Thomas Farber Berkeley and Honolulu March 2020

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Acting My Age

Sooty Terns over Kure Atoll, Papahānaumokuākea, 2009. Photograph by Wayne Levin

i

O nshore

an d

in

Deep

the ocean downstairs

Circling Akule, Kealakekua Bay, Hawai‘i, 2000. Photograph by Wayne Levin

“Not myself, lately,” they say. Or, they say, “Where was I?” Where? Here: N 21.3069 °, not all that far above the waistline of the equator. And W 157.8483°, well to the side of the (hypothetical) meridian running pole to pole through Greenwich, England. Or, trace a path through Calcutta / Mecca / Mexico City, on to the middle of nowhere. Marquesas down below; Japan dead ahead; Anchorage way, way up there. Here, strong trade winds. Venus kissing the horn of the “waning” moon. Seem­ ing to wane: moon’s always just as it is, but here down “below” we have our phases. Stars, meanwhile, more faint but not fainting. Sun deep breathing, ready to heave itself up and over Diamond Head. Strenuous recurrence, surely just for our well-being. Or could it be the sun depends on us? My poet-mother wrote, “For I was there when night had submerged the sun—as though beyond revival. But I was there and held a hand to morning, barely bobbed up . . . gasping for very bleeding life. I reached toward morn ing and it was preserved. It might have drowned, otherwise.” 1

Meanwhile, now, hints of light: twilight. “There is twilight at dawn and dusk,” Jack Gilbert observed. Righto: think twi / twin. Twilight. Twilight years. My twilight years. Running late, as they used to say. Shakespeare’s “black night” falling, “Death’s second self.” But oh, the crepuscular at the break of day. Crack of dawn. Night worn out, ready for a nap. When, for Paul Smyth, things are no longer “Vague, vague as all things were before the mill  / Of language ground the world from Adam’s brain.” And, Smyth wrote, “Morning begins with all the world to say.” All the world. But, only all the world? We’re informed the solar system orbits the center of our galaxy every several million years. That in the observable universe there are all kinds of galaxies (fifty to one hundred billion?), each with as many stars (one hundred thousand million?) as ours. And, lately, that there are many (an infinite number of?) universes. Or just a single plain ol’ multiverse. Keep this in mind, even if your mind boggles. Locally, however, “Nothing new under the sun,” as Ecclesiastes argued? Speakin’ for my Earth-bound self—Earth-bound despite frequent flyer miles & flights of fancy—I try to attend to the more proximate: conditions, real-or-apparent alterations, possible visitations, palpable miracles. Still and yet, about our sun, a question: What’s older than our sun? Take a guess. Answer: H2O! Yes, H2O born out of that interstellar cloud of dust and gas that formed our solar system. Dust? Cosmic dust / extraterrestrial dust / space dust / intergalactic dust / interplanetary dust / circumplanetary dust. All water molecules on Earth, including the water molecules in each of us, were in that cloud billions of years ago. So we’re told. Craving more H2O, I have a daily case of John Masefield’s “Sea Fever”: “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky.” Here it’s not a problem: elevator “down”; glass door; several stairs. Gate. “Twelve gates to the city,” they sang when I was young. That heavenly city. Through this gate, Masefield’s “grey dawn breaking.” Undulations, wrinkles— ocean, far as the eye can see. At sea level, sea not quite level. And, seeing the ocean? Contemplating the ocean? Beholding the ocean. Beholden to it.

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Acting My Age

Meanwhile: “If you see something,” Homeland Security advises, “say something.” I’m seeing. Saying, with ever-more-penultimate words. Joseph Joubert wrote, “Of the last word.—The last word must be the last . . . like a last hand that puts the last nuance on a color, nothing can be added to it.” But for methe-writer? Not there yet. Not quite there yet. “Words fail me” goes the idiom. But here, at one’s feet? A small beach. High tide ebbing, having swept / packed / smoothed the sand. Enviable sand: shrived; absolved. The intertidal. Down to this foreshore not expecting to be alone but, hopefully, to be the only one of my kind. Signs, predictably, of other kinds of lives. Tracks of ghost crabs. (‘Ōhiki in the Hawaiian language; Ocypode ceratopthalmus in taxonomic Latin.) Tunnels, some with tennis-ball-size openings. Carapaced crabs scuttling, excavating / heaving / rolling / scattering clawfuls of sand in front of their burrows. Shaping teepee-like mounds. Survival in the in-between. Fresh / salt; wet / dry; air / water; flood / desiccation. The crabs: their periscope-like eye stalks—ommatophores. Eye at the top for a better field of view. As I come through the gate, the crabs freeze. Hyper-vigilant; battle-ready samurai, skittish eight-legged / two-clawed Rommel tanks on Pacific sands. From those eyes, no blinking. Evoking the old reprimand: staring is rude. But who knows what such eyes see. See in me. Stasis: the crabs’; mine. An immobility contest that could go on forever. Forever, until the tide rises or I start to take a step and the crabs—whoosh! zip!— disappear. Are disappeared? Surely unable to have done this themselves, or to themselves. Vacuum-tubed, sucked or inhaled, grabbed from behind, yanked ass-end down their shafts. Gone. The beach this morning. Like all beaches in Hawai‘i, public to the high-water mark. No means test. Shaped and reshaped by volcanic eruption, ocean currents and eddies, by waterfront buildings, by seawalls. And, now, by the arrival of nearly spent waves. (S)urge as they reach shore, run up the sand. This their one ’n’ only destination, destiny? Tongue-ing, as if craving a taste. And then, licking their lips? Withdrawing. Backwash: flow of receding waves. Renewal forthcoming. Auden’s “pluck and knock” of the tide. Gargles; throbs. Ripplings. No other motion or commotion except the crabs as they resurface, take a peek, scout the wrack line for debris. A tranquil moment. Very tranquil. And then an explicit awareness of tranquil-



Thomas Farber

3

ity, an almost ecstatic awareness, as if in contrast to one’s years / miles / actions / interactions / reactions / transactions. Philip Larkin’s “million-petalled flower / Of being here.” Calm. Latin cauma, “heat of midday sun,” hence when things are still. And Greek kauma, “heat,” from kaiein, “to burn.” Calm. Very calm. Unusually calm. And, comes the thought, an extreme calm. Franz Kafka argued for staying put. Advised, “Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can do no other, it will writhe before you in ecstasy.” So: here, now. N 21.3069 °, W 157.8483°. As for the “not myself, lately” that “they say”? That I say? Well, of that, more anon.



4

Acting My Age

crabs

Interspecies communication. After decades of encountering Ocypode ceratopthalmus at this early hour, I’d prefer a bit of progress. To be regarded as, if not bosom buddy, then not a threat. Man Friday to ghost crab Crusoes? Think how wolf-cub proto-dogs are said to have evolved themselves. Making nice, domesticating Homo sapiens. I watch a large bumblebee come to rest on the sand. Injured or worn out, moving slowly. The crabs surveil, furtively scurry to inspect, dart back in their herky-jerky way. Then attack. The bee resists but cannot fly. Is carried, wings flapping, into a victor’s burrow. So: armored ghost crabs could train me to be of use as they clear away the dead and dying. Scavenger’s apprentice; undertaker first class; assistant gleaner. Lending the multi-clawed a hand. Or, since they live on the shoreline, I could study tides with them. For sure they’re tuned in to the moon, and, though invertebrates, must feel gravitational pull in their bones, so to speak. Fond hope. “Il te faut m’apprivoiser,” Saint-Exupéry’s fox tells the Little Prince. It is necessary for you to tame me. But why should these crustaceans not be standoffish? Even . . . crabby. Oh, my New England childhood’s brutalities: lobsters, pincers rubber-banded, dropped—live—into boiling water. Merde, the Little Prince might have said. Interspecies communication? Chesapeake Bay crab cakes. California’s Dungeness crab. Too late now. And, though I pay attention, why should ghost crabs understand me more than I understand them? Informing myself. Book learnin’: for example, crabs are capable of autotomy, reflexive self-amputation of injured or trapped claws or legs. (Auto, “self ”; -tomy, “excision.” Think lobotomy / appendectomy / anatomy / dichotomy.)

5

Which rings a bell. If we and the crabs are hardly kissin’ cousins, my selfish & self-promoting species can also self-sacrifice—body parts rarely, but memories and facts without effort. As if it’s inadvertent. Un-getting. “Slipped my mind,” we say. Just plain forgetful? Or does to forget entail will or (subconscious) intent—putting something out of one’s mind? Therapists argue this is the kind of thing we can “recover” after “suppression,” perhaps the way ghost crabs regenerate lost limbs. Excision. Thirty years ago—who knows where the time goes?—a dazzlingly fecund reef in Fiji. A five-year-old’s hand in mine. In his other hand, a sea cucumber. Stressed. Eviscerating. Defending: pouring out parts of its gut, though the boy hadn’t intended to be a predator. Such gut-spilling something we too are capable of, though ours, seppuku aside, is to beg for mercy or to show off. The urge to confess: as definably human as the urge to deny. Ghost crabs: their body asymmetry, ours; their incredible acceleration and speed, my envy; their apparent belligerence, mostly ritual confrontations, our countless / endless wars. But what, really, can I know of the ghost crabs’ “immense world of delight,” as William Blake put it?

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Acting My Age

almost unsaid

“Look what the tide washed in,” kids in Boston used to say when a friend showed up late. And, one might ask, as Octavio Paz did, “Who is the tide talking to, all night long?” Here and now, ignore the dying Portuguese man-of-war and the skate egg cases, leave ghost crabs to their own devices (crabs somehow getting by without the virtual). Look out at the empty-seeming horizontal expanse of ocean to the so aptly named horizon. Overhead, catching my eye, pairs of pelagic fairy terns (manu-o-Kū in Hawaiian, Cygis alba rothschildi). Whiter than white, swooping and diving, skimming the waves for squid, flying fish, or other vertebrates driven up through the liquid mirror by predators. Perhaps not just foraging but, hardly unaware of their beauty, hungry for reflections of themselves. Then, in tandem, a pair’s four wings fluttering in midair as if holding steady to embrace or kiss, as if courting or spooning, the terns spiral up and up, finally out of sight. To Saint Peter’s pearly gates? Perhaps, though, seeing them return, maybe not. Such high-flying just to demonstrate that they can, putting on a show for each other? For us? For sure, it pays to look up. Also overhead, skating downwind, a frigate bird, ‘iwa, seven-foot wingspan, forked tail. Occasional “kleptoparasite”—‘iwa means “thief ” in Hawaiian—and, Derek Walcott wrote, “disdainful” as it looks down while the “trade wind tirelessly frets / the water.” But this ocean. Green / blue-green / jade / blue-black. Surface: boundary between water and atmosphere. Undulating, bending. Reflecting, refracting. Trickster. Chameleon.

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Such watching: fishing without tackle. And, nothing caught? Sky not superglued to ocean? Wallace Stevens: “Then the sea / And heaven rolled as one and from the two / Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue.” The seamless sky-ocean interface: a mere ten or twelve miles off, we’re to believe, without swimming out to confirm. Also to believe that from this archipelago south to Antarctica it’s seven thousand miles “clear sailing.” One agrees to stipulate it’s so. Pablo Neruda wrote that, being by the ocean, “no hay que decir nada”— nothing needs saying. Though, as the poet (of course) went on, a wave “perhaps it says its name,” but “Who / can I ask what it said to me?” Similarly, Robert Hass teased, “I won’t say much for the sea,” except that— inevitably—his next word was except. As in, “except that it was, almost, / the color of sour milk.” About the sea, for poets and others, there’s quite a bit to want / need to say. Consider Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar, who struggles to describe a single wave as it “continues to grow and gain strength until the clash with contrary waves gradually dulls it and makes it disappear, or else twists it until it is confused in one of the many dynasties of oblique waves slammed against the shore.” All this transpiring in what Jonathan Raban termed “an unruly brew of shifting planes and collapsing hillocks.” The ocean in Oceania, with, not surprisingly, moments of the oceanic. Moments, that is, of the self merging—merged!—with all the rest of it all.

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Acting My Age

fish story

Other interspecies interactions. Closer to the beach than the horizon, a mere thirty yards or so offshore, I’m a character in an ongoing fish story. The fish of this tale, however, are always the ones that got away. I’m referring to weke ‘ā, as they’re named in the Hawaiian language. Elsewhere, in Histoire naturelle des poissons (1801), they were categorized by Bernard Germain de Lacépède as Mulloidichthys flavolineatus. Latin mullus, “soft”; Greek ichthys, “fish.” Latin flavus, “yellow”; lineatus, “lined.” Yellowstripe goatfish, these weke ‘ā, as I think of them. Or, when I speak of them to others, goatfish. Just plain goatfish: silvery white and, allowing for the fact that water magnifies what goggled eyes perceive, about a foot long. Forked tail fin, small mouth, whiskers like catfish, and the defining eye-to-tail yellow stripe with a black squarish blotch. But about the impulse to categorize (every single one of) the forms of life. Genealogical chants, nomenclature, taxonomy. Though these are deep waters, of possible interest, starting at the top, is the domain Eukarya (one of three), which includes the kingdom Animalia (one of six), which includes the phylum Chordata (one of thirty-five), which includes the class Actinopterygii (one of seven), which includes the order Perciformes, which includes the family Mullidae. Of which Lacépède’s genus Mulloidichthys is a member, and flavolineatus one of Mulloidichthys’s species. What is in a name? Without having to swim or sink in too much info, posit that there are perhaps one or two million species (only a fraction yet identified) of animals, defined as multicellular life forms able to move independently and ingesting other organisms to survive. Animals both invertebrate, without a

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nerve cord or spine (ghost crabs, spiders, octopuses), and vertebrate (these goatfish, birds, and mammals like us). Like goatfish, fellow Chordates have lateral gill slits, if only in embryo, and often a head, tail, and bilaterally symmetrical bodies. Not to overlook a digestive system where it’s food in one end, waste out the other. Sound like anyone you know? Stephen Jay Gould argued we arrived late at the party of evolution, showing up at “the last inch of the cosmic mile,” our presence “quirky, improbable.” Comets had wiped out dinosaurs, making space for something like us. Not that we’re the apex of anything, just in a group of multicellulars that are part of “three little twigs on the bush of just one among three grand domains of life.” That and a “fin anatomy that could transform into legs.” Kissin’ cousins. In Old Ideas (2012), recorded in his seventies, Leonard Cohen referred to “Leonard” as the “brief elaboration of a tube.” Tube??? Tube: aging Chordate poet self-deprecating, de-romanticizing? Or, perhaps, expressing communion as he neared the inevitable.

 But enough about ranking life on Earth! Enough of arguing with the no-doubtblessed faithful who deny humans are (incredibly / merely) advanced fish. On the reef, those thirty yards or so offshore, there’s a cluster of a few dozen goatfish I locate in the same crannies day after day. Goatfish lingering, lying on the sandy bottom or hovering in midwater. I say hovering, but that’s not quite it. Nor is it the hove in hove to, a term that resurfaces from my days of anxiety-prone skippering (or scraping and painting) a wave-surfing, oceangoing trimaran. I could set helm and sails to keep the vessel more or less stationary, though in restless motion—the driving impulse of a “backed” sail counterbalanced by the driving impulse of the sail that was not. The problem is that hovering or hove to may imply waiting, abiding, a boat riding something out (while fishing; during a storm). So what’s the right word? Doing a computer-less Search All, reaching into the reaches of memory to my bohemian and counterculture 1960s, I reel in “hanging out.” Which suggests that though the goatfish are presumably not “stoned,” they do seem “laid back.” In their element. Languid in the liquid, but not languishing. Though they say, re water deaths, we’re food for fishes, we’re not what the goatfish are after. Good thing: they probe the sea floor, root with those two whisker-like, tongue-like “barbels.” Plunge snouts in sand. Touch, taste, dig, sift. Goat-like for sure: omnivores hungry for shrimp, worms, snails, limpets, slugs, sea urchins, and other seabed life of the teeming benthic world. In “Vulture,” Robinson Jeffers’s “I,” resting on a “hillside / Above the ocean,” regrets disappointing the carrion feeder inspecting him from above. Poet not—yet—decaying flesh. “To be eaten by that beak and become part of him,

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Acting My Age

to share those wings and those eyes.” This “enskyment” would be a “sublime” next life. Perhaps, though, seaside in Carmel, Jeffers lived on. Wrote the poem.

 This gaggle of goatfish. The ghost crabs never elicited such an impulse, but I’m tempted to use the possessive. Tempted, though these are not, I remind myself, my goatfish. This though evenings toward sunset the not-my goatfish and I are in close proximity, afloat in what seems—to me, if not to them—the dreamlike wash and draw. Flow and ebb. Lulls: being lulled. Waiting, but not waiting, for the next lift and fall. And the one after that. Idling, going nowhere fast. Where am I? In the goatfish’s company? Keeping them company? Imposing on them? For sure they don’t come ashore to seek me out, or even move toward me here as I approach. Nor am I one of their own kind. But objecting to my presence? Who’s to say? Well, they haven’t said. Meanwhile, who’s doing the staring? An eye on either side of the head, every single goatfish in the cluster keeps an eye on me. Giving me the eye? Eyeballing me? So many eyes on one, would that such attention flattered: for goatfish it’s functional—survival strategy. Consider the benefit of having each group member always on the lookout. But when the seemingly unflustered goatfish do put a few more feet between us, it’s never in a hurry or flurry. Goatfish composure? Letting me down gently? Might this be if not acceptance then tolerance? Such apparently effortless distractions. Mild evasions as, without visible stress or strain, the formation changes shape / depth / direction. Depth and direction I too can change. In shape or out of shape, however, shape I’m pretty much stuck with. So: the goatfish may simply be putting up with me, or worse. Nonetheless, evenings at sunset, at the membrane between two worlds, with them I imagine—want to imagine—I’m not just learning something but being mentored. The goatfish are teaching me the how-to and limits of interacting. To test the degree to which one fits into a group, any group? But, what’s the group? I’m the . . . student, in their. . . school, but of course. (More precisely, their assemblage is at any moment either school or shoal, depending on whether or not the fish move as individuals or, synchronized, match velocities and distances.) Perhaps the goatfish find my persistent presence not threatening but useful. Coming upon too many potential targets, a predator gets confused: visual overload. Eyes bigger than stomach, as they used to say. How pick a single edible individual from a shape-shifting silvery aggregation? How? Focus on



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the one that’s different: the “oddity effect.” And oneself the odd one? Well, for sure I’ve been called worse. Thus: not to make too much of it, but an impulse for connection with something nonhuman and not domesticated. Not capable of domestication? The goal being contact? Understanding? Fellow feeling? I joke that I think of the goatfish as my extended family. If I could share something about myself to them, what might it be? Think of Pioneer 10, first “man-made” (nowadays “human-made”) spacecraft to sail out of the solar system. On board was a plaque with symbols about our species to inform other kinds of life. From me to the goatfish, then, what opening salvo? Convey that we’re animals, that archaeologists say all animal life existed in the sea during the Cambrian explosion? Or, per Jim Harrison, “We’re marine organisms at the bottom of the ocean / of air.”

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Acting My Age

‘oama

Waking up, sound of waves breaking on shore. This almost shipboard life. Aches and pains. Thinking, okay, we humans are not forever. But how ’bout the ocean? Well, they say that some endless twilight becoming a final dead of night, the sun’s gonna die. Thus I might have inferred life in the ocean will have to go as well. But the ocean dying now, because of us? Or, lest I exaggerate, so much life in the ocean dying now because of us? “I’m not myself, lately,” they say. I say. All too true, but neither is the ocean itself, lately. Nor is it what it was when I was young, any more than I am what I was. For Henry David Thoreau, a lake was “Earth’s eye.” Can the ocean, to us impassive, indifferent to our concerns . . . can the ocean behold what we’ve done without a tear in its eye? There’s Dylan’s line about lost love: “Either I’m too sensitive / or else I’m gettin’ soft.” About the ocean these days, maybe I’m just too sensitive. I’ve played in / admired / studied / been in awe of / craved / been saved by / longed for / been at risk in the ocean. Needed and loved the ocean, though it never acknowledged me, nor did I imagine it should. Though I’ve feared for my life in the ocean, it never had anything to fear from the likes of me. But then, people like me—in God’s likeness, some believe—seem hell-bent on killing all life in the ocean. How, then, could the ocean possibly love me back?

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Again at the water’s edge. On the beach. Which brings to mind the 1950s novel set after World War III’s nuclear holocaust. On the Beach. Radiation, end of the world. Here, today, not the end of the world, but, overhead, the roar of two F-22 jets. They’re flanking an enormous B-2 stealth bomber designed to deflect radio beams. Stealth: think steal. Wingspan: one hundred and seventy-eight feet. This bomber one of twenty-one built in the 1980s, two billion dollars per, able to carry both conventional and nuclear weapons. And why airborne here? Post-Eden Hawai‘i is, among other things, a military fortress, home of the United States Indo-Pacific Command. O‘ahu, where, in 2013, “cyberstrategist” Edward Snowden worked in a National Security Agency facility located under a pineapple field. After hours, from Honolulu hotels and libraries, Snowden poached wireless signals to send journalists encrypted messages containing classified material. Re On the Beach. Recently, I’d been up well before sunrise, heard the breaking waves, stepped out on the walkway, located the crescent moon. Went down to the beach as usual. Took my daily slow walk along the shore, mile or so and back. About an hour later, loud knocking on the door. Very distraught neighbor urging us down to the basement, fast: incoming ICBM missile. Shelter in place, they say. Seal windows and doors against chemical or radioactive materials. Lie flat on the ground. Do not look at the flash of light. Stay sheltered for up to fourteen days. But: incoming missile? It didn’t . . . quite . . . compute. No sirens. And the basement? Not where I wanted to be vaporized. Looking out at surfers at the break, I imagined they were grousing about small waves and long lulls, beating up on themselves for not making the drive to the North Shore. Elsewhere in town, Bishop Larry Silva heard the news, quickly offered the congregation the Sacrament of Reconciliation through general absolution, according to canon law only for use in situations of “grave necessity.” Nearby, a father lifted up a manhole cover and shoved his son into a sewer in hopes of saving him. But: false alarm. Human error. Bureaucratic error. How have we humans survived ourselves for so long? Memories: the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962, Kennedy’s advisors urging him to retaliate when our spy plane was shot down; various false missile warnings, ours and the Russians’ (computers; micro-chips). Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, 1964. General Westmoreland wanting nukes for the Battle of Khe Sanh during the American war in Vietnam. Trump’s bigger-than-yours nuclear button.

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But here, on this beach. Up above, more fairy terns going to heaven and right back. As with so much of the living universe—most of it?—the terns were easy to misread. Well, easy for me to misread, not that others would. Decades ago,

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I deemed them another imported species turned loose on these once-remote islands. Too tritely beautiful to human eyes, fairy-tale white. Surely imported, like pigs / fowl / taro / coconuts / rats / flies / lice / cockroaches. Coming ashore with Polynesians more than a thousand years ago—those skilled voyagers themselves an invasive species. Or, more likely, arriving a millennium-plus later, with Europeans’ mosquitos / cats / termites / mongooses, etc. So: myself yet one more member of an imported species, I misread these indigenous pelagic terns, foragers hunting hundreds of miles out to sea. Meanwhile, ignoring my ignorance, the mated-for-life terns seemed a reproach to the human difficulty of finding peace with others. With ourselves. Why so apparently effortless for them? But this beach, on yet another of the thousands of my days here, and, WHOA, what’s that, something unusual in the shallows. A dark mass, maybe fifteen by twenty yards. Odd shadow from passing cloud? Nope. Some strange algae? Oil slick? Knee deep to check it out, and . . . life! My not-my weke ‘ā once again? A wheeling mass of ‘oama, juvenile goatfish? Or so I choose to believe, though they could be āholehole in this once-fecund reef the Hawaiians called Kaluahole, the āhole cavern. A few inches or so each, densely packed, thousands and thousands, though who can tally such a gyrating, shape-changing whirlwind. Shoaling, swarming, moving as if a single entity. Rotating, spiraling. Morphing. Blessedly, the school stays close—survives predators?—for several days, and, blessedly, this is the alternate year no fishing’s allowed here by the state. Otherwise, skilled fishermen would each be throwing ten-by-twenty-foot weighted mesh nets. ‘Oama to be eaten: raw, salted, dried. Over and again in with the ‘oama. Now a brown booby surveys, glides on its five-foot wingspan. Surfing air currents just above the crest of breaking waves. Then right overhead—right over my head—maybe fifty feet above. Abruptly it folds its wings, dives. Arrow; harpoon. Surfacing, only several yards away, ‘oama in its beak. A pause. Then, wings flapping, up to survey / wheel / glide, plunge again. One day, a woman in an i’m from brazil T-shirt joins me in the shallows, her young daughter on shore trying to drag their dachshund toward us. In accented English, the woman asks what kind of bird it is. “In the Hawaiian language the name is ‘ā. Nineteenth-century European sailors thought the birds stupid. They’d land on ships at sea without fear, would be killed, eaten. Similar to European gannets, the sailors called them boobies. Dumb, stupid.” “Boobies?” The woman laughs, cups a breast in each hand. Before I can think of a response about homonyms, she says, “No camera? Have you recorded the bird and the fish?” “Just with my eyes,” I reply, and she laughs again. Meanwhile, two neighborhood boys have returned to the seawall. Having



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noticed the fish an hour ago, they’re carrying butterfly nets and plastic bags with ice. Soon they’re in with the ‘oama, flailing the surface with the nets, howling with laughter though catching nothing. At the far end of the beach, a man unpacks a small drone, dispatches it. Woosh, gone in an instant, already beyond the surfers and out of sight. The man looks down, studying the screen to see what the drone sees. Nearby, basking on the sand like seals, three teenage girls lie prone. Facing away from the ocean and the afternoon sun, they’re intent on the screens of their phones. The B-2 and flanking jets again pass overhead, sustained thunder lingering in the ear well after they’re out of sight. Late in life, Philip Roth said he was experiencing a “constantly recurring newness just on the brink of it all disappearing.” And, he said, “One is always intermittently stunned to be alive. Well, now it’s not so intermittent.” So: here and now, kinda stunned. All that’s transpired on shore—miracles of the natural world; manmade miracles; and / or, where it’s all going. I have intimations, feelings, forebodings, want to draw a conclusion, but can’t, quite. Won’t. What to do? Another swim. Heading for the horizon. Slow and steady. Out.

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Acting My Age

sound systems

Schizophonia: R. Murray Schafer’s term for splitting of a sound from its source. A feat both unremarkable to us and very recent in the 3,000 millennia of Homo sapiens. Until one hundred and fifty years ago, every man-made tone was a one-off. Into the ear and gone, except for echoes. Only with technology to both record and transmit might a vocal sound, for instance, no longer emerge only from a mouth. Sounds, sources. On this small beach, until not long ago you’d often see someone with a ‘ukulele or guitar. Instruments inviting others to approach, listen, join. Now, the music is mostly from phones. Each individual curating an almost infinite playlist. Acoustic instruments, meanwhile, not miniaturized, not fitting in hand or pocket, a hassle to lug around. And, these days, no apparent privileging of the musician, no need to put in the time to learn to be one. Evoking what became of maps: GPS suffices, information from afar. On the sixty-five yards of this beach, few people use headphones. The impulse to display, amplify? Inured to sound made with so little effort? Think of the “sound system” some also bring. Compact, portable, wireless, waterproof, “engineered to spread deep, jaw-dropping sound in every direction . . . immersing you in that same feeling you felt at your favorite concert.” Devices emitting their favorite music, people leave them on when they head into the water. Silence not much on their minds, not part of current hive mind. People messaging, texting, posting. Why so much, so often? What’s sought, avoided? Moments of silence only for observing deaths? Schizophonia: acoustic ecologist Schafer points out that we have eyelids but not earlids. You can’t turn off your hearing by an act of will. But humans have

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come up with microphones / batteries / electronic circuitry / padding to create noise cancelling / noise masking. Sound waves the mirror image of sound you don’t want to hear. Human-made sound waves blocking out human-made noise. (Noise: possibly from Latin, nausea, “seasickness.”) But here by the ocean, what might human sounds obscure? Music of the waves, perhaps? Their concert: breaking, splashing, whispering. The rumble of surf. Water always moving, never dying. Heartbeat of the tides. Ostinatos: repeated phrases or rhythm. If, that is, you have the ears to hear. No surprise: in The Ends of the World, Peter Brannen writes that “save for the wind and the waves, ours was a silent planet” during the “nearly eternal preamble to animal life.” As for unamplified sounds on the beach, not split from their sources . . . Gaston Bachelard: “Water taught birds and men to sing, speak, recount.” Edmond Jabès: “What is sung by the sea / men in turn sing / to the sea.” Hermann Hesse: spiritual seeker Siddhartha is told he’ll learn from the river only when he listens. What might he hear? In our own place and time, think of the eerie silences after power outages. Melville’s Redburn: His First Voyage:

Column of akule, Kealakekua Bay, Hawai‘i, 2000. Photograph by Wayne Levin

The men took hold of the rope, and began pulling upon it; the foremost man of all setting up a song with no words to it, only a strange musical rise and fall of notes. In the dark night, and far out upon the lonely sea, it sounded wild enough . . . I almost looked round for goblins, and felt just a little bit afraid. But I soon got used to this singing; for the sailors never touched a rope without it. Sometimes, when no one happened to strike up, and the pulling, whatever it might be, did not seem to be getting forward very well, the mate would always say, ‘Come, men, can’t any of you sing? Sing now, and raise the dead.’ ”

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Green sea turtle over sand, Kealakekua Bay, Hawai‘i, 2005. Photograph by Wayne Levin

I I

W here

We

F it

In

the long run, part one

In my collaborations with marine photographer Wayne Levin, not quite twenty thousand leagues under the sea, many times we’ve been deep in the deep. Diving with dozens of sharks, scores of dolphins, enormous manta rays. With gyrating, rotating vortexes of thousands of fish. Thunderclouds of fish. Surrounded / deluged / encompassed by streams and rivers of bodies and eyes. Thus this batch of weke ‘ā, evening after evening, might seem too paltry to feed whatever hunger’s driving me. Hovering or hove-to with several dozen goatfish? Only yards from dry land? In a fallen water-world a few feet above whatever benthic life remains on a once-teeming reef? Seeing me, the weke ‘ā, appraising local conditions, are surely entitled to look askance. Pick your poison, as they used to say: pollutants, trash, chemicals; silt, debris, pesticides; sewage, runoff from farming, overfishing. POV of the weke ‘ā: this must seem like madness. Like doomsday. I can almost hear them saying, “If your gods are into punishing you, suggest that they stick to making Floods.” Two centuries ago, Lord Byron wrote that “man marks the earth with ruin, his control / Stops with the shore.” But that was then. A question: are fish in the school in any way individuals, as when shoaling? Or, Wayne has wondered, are they “like cells of a larger entity.” For him, the question is whether or not we humans are “entities unto ourselves” or “just a part of a larger being, humanity.” And, having gone that far, might one also ask, “Is humanity just a part of a larger being, the living earth?” And, should that connection be denied, a further question: how characterize Homo sapiens? Malignant growth? Pestilence? Plague?

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One wants to demur. And Wayne, when out in the open ocean somehow focused beyond fear, is teased by friends for being prone to imagine worst cases on land. Still, he’s spent much of his life through and under the “liquid mirror.” This is where, we’re told, so many organisms of so many species are found. Most of the living world is not human, the eight billion of us now said to be only 0.01 percent of all living things. If only we could see this vast amount of life the way we see, say, dogs and cats. Edward O. Wilson writes that “the most striking fact about the living environment may be how little we know about it.” He estimates there are ten million living species, of which we’ve named and classified only some two million. And though humans, if not suicidal (“which, granted, is a possibility”) are capable of stabilizing climate change, “the worldwide extinction of species and natural ecosystems . . . is not reversible.” By the end of this century, human activity will have “eliminated more than half of all species.” What to do? Wilson proposes keeping half the planet’s land and sea “as wild and protected from human intervention as possible.” Right-o. Calculate the odds? Place a bet? Natalie Angier describes bacteria that when allowed in the lab to “grow at will . . . end up polluting their local environment so quickly and completely that the entire population soon kills itself off.” But this is—just—in a lab. Still, about our sewage or use of carbon, Angier notes “the perpetual struggle found at every stratum of the natural world and its human hyper-projection: between cooperation and selfishness, the tribe and the individual.” And, she writes, new research “suggests that extinction is more easily set in motion than previously thought . . . once it gets started, the responsible parties may be helpless to make it stop.” Or will it be like my IBM Selectric typewriter back in the 1970s—“self-correcting”? Diffenbaugh and Field argue the planet is undergoing one of the largest climate changes in the 65 million years since extinction of the dinosaurs, ten times faster than any previous shift. Such a report documents human disruption even as it manifests our awareness of it. Self-awareness: we have to work now to not know what’s what / what’s up / what we’re doing. As Richard Grusin writes, “Humans must now be understood as climatological or geological forces on the planet that operate just as nonhumans would,” regardless “of human will, belief, or desires.”

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Word choice. “Climate change” versus “climate destabilization” versus “climate disruption.” For Andrew Morton, this marks the end of “Mesopotamian man,” the epoch in which human agriculture and industrialization powerfully utilized and manipulated the environment. In the 1960s, the slogan “You are what you eat”

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was popular. Now, it seems, re chemical poisons, plastics, and so on, we are— you are, I am—what we excrete. So many unsettling interdependencies! And we know it. No pretending. Can’t just flush the toilet, transport refuse to the third world, get on a plane, build one more Mount Trashmore. Or can we? There’s always willed obliviousness. Consider a rock plateau near the Dead Sea: Masada. According to historian Flavius Josephus, in AD 63 Jewish rebels overwhelmed its Roman garrisonfortress. Later, a Roman army commenced a siege, which, in Josephus’s telling, ended in the mass suicide of 960 rebels and their families. Mass suicide. The Jewish rebels knew it was over. Acknowledged it was over. Chose their fate.

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coral

Time traveling. Think about the late 1940s—seventy years ago. Nursery school: infants singing in not-quite unison. “Frère Jacques”; “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Or that farmer’s wife / sightless mice / carving knife. Melody and rhyme swaddling meaning. A few years later, these same children could sing the tunes at prescribed intervals. A lone voice, followed by another starting as the first continued on, these two trailed and joined by a third, the initial voice arriving back at the beginning to recommence. As if all three, one behind the other behind the other, had no end in sight. Finally, however, the first two voices in turn going silent. The third, now solitary, a thin reed, quavering in the dark, leading the listener to silence—and / or to peace. Completing the cycle. Rounds: sequences, patterns. A kind of repetition compulsion. Soothing, haunting, shared. “White coral bells, upon a silver stalk . . .” An almost perpetual canon, this round from Boston way back when, my introduction to the word coral.

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In the tropics, where I’ve spent much ocean time the last five decades, there’s always been coral in abundance. Millions—or more than many millions—of transparent animals several millimeters in diameter and length comprise a colony. Each tiny individual invertebrate, a polyp, secretes a shell, which collectively comprise a skeleton—the reef. Plants inside the polyps capture sunlight and carbon dioxide, make sugars as nutrients, consume waste the corals excrete, and color the polyps’ tissue. 24

If, however, the ocean gets too warm, frenzied micro-algae produce toxic amounts of oxygen. As stressed polyps react, expelling their food symbionts, they starve to death. Plate / cauliflower / antler / finger / lace coral all then reveal the bridal white of their skeletons. Bridal, but only if you think of jilted Miss Havisham’s wedding dress in Dickens’s Great Expectations. Bleached (Middle English blechen; Old English blæcean, derivative of bl¯æc, pale). A word evoking the human-domestic (laundry); human-at-play (bleachers in a ball park); or the beyond-human (animal bones / desert sun). And, now, a kind of euphemism, the human-caused. Bleached: same linguistic root as bleak—exposed, desolate, denuded. Elizabeth Kolbert writes, “We are taking carbon . . . sequestered in the course of hundreds of millions of years and throwing it back into the atmosphere in a matter of centuries, or even decades, as carbon dioxide. This is not just warming the planet; it’s also changing the chemistry of the oceans.” Endangerment findings  /   c oastal dead zones  /   o cean acidification. Hy­poxia / oxygen deficiency / oxygen less soluble in warmer water. Deglaciation / ocean suffocation. Sky falling. Kill life in the ocean. Kill the ocean.

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Bleached coral: starving, dying. Along the Kona coast of the Big Island of Hawai‘i, photographer Levin’s home, fifty percent of the coral recently whitened and died. Caused by rising water temperatures, by man-made rising water temperatures, Wayne would say. Wayne, age seventy-four. Much of his black-and-white work argues for what is miraculous about life in the ocean. Revealing it or “deepening the mystery,” as he’s put it. But now, weighing ambiguities—photographers gotta photograph?—Wayne has pictures of bleached corals. Do images of atrocities produce the intended dismay or shock? Aren’t we overexposed to such representations? Each of Wayne’s photographs of coral only recently alive, in any case, is a necropsy—“autopsy of the formerly living nonhuman.” They say “modern” humans have existed some 3,000 millennia, coral reef ecosystems more than 200 million. These reefs can be hundreds of feet high, hundreds of miles long, support perhaps a quarter of all marine species. The largest biological structures on Earth: rainforests of the sea, they’ve been called. But how save them from us, as we seem unable to save—seem bent on destroying—the far-more-visible rainforests? Robert Socolow describes “a limited set of monumental tasks” but doable. Humans have “wedges” that can solve the climate problem: wind turbines, solar panels, fuel efficiency, nuclear power, stopping deforestation. And it’s true that progress toward cheap wind and solar power has been remarkable. Meanwhile,



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some of the hyper-wealthy are funding searches for breakthrough technologies. None of this, however, addresses worldwide population and economic growth that, so far, seem beyond control. We humans are creatures of hope and action, aren’t built to sit around and do nothing. Since coral scientists do science, they’re breeding super corals, coral hybrids, symbiotic algae, conjuring genetic engineering of algae. “Deploying” interventions. Skeptic Kurt Vonnegut, World War II POW and survivor of the Dresden firebombing, later worked at General Electric, met tech innovators up close. Saw their work as ingenious but—hopelessly—subject to the law of unintended consequences. Such scientists, he wrote in Cat’s Cradle, were “busy, busy.” Think nuclear energy. Fukushima, for example. Chernobyl. But who can tell the future? One hundred million dead in twentieth-century European wars, yet Europe recovered. (Though, tell it to the dead.) Pessimism can be facile, stylish, myopic. On the other hand, Cassandra, princess of Troy, sister of noble Hector, daughter of King Priam . . . you’d concede ol’ Cassandra had a point.

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Acting My Age

the long run, part two

As Pope Francis put it, “Civilization requires energy, but energy use must not destroy civilization.” Destroy: true, but scary. Too much fat-shaming of our ever-more-obese species. To use current therapeutic lingo, let me “deploy” an “intervention” for emotional disorder: 1. Calm yourself. 2. Breathe in, breathe out. 3. Again. 4. Again. Ahhhhhh . . . Now, selves collected, more about Homo sapiens, wise humans: heck of a species! What a long haul preceded us! Supereons, eons, eras, periods, epochs, ages. Formation of the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, if that’s a number that you can wrap your mind around. If not, try 4,500,000,000. (Keep in mind that a million is equal to a thousand thousands, a billion equal to a thousand millions. Or try thinking of 45 million centuries.) But if you’re still at sea, so to speak, needing a point of reference like markers on shore that surfers use to triangulate position, think of something older. Like, say, age of the universe: 13.82 (?) billion years, give or take several million, during which stars and planets had been forming. In the Young Earth Creationists’ view, however, the earth is 6,000 to 10,000 years old, which makes a compelling case for believing in the Christian god: such numbers are human scale. But since I’m not (yet) a Young Earther, let me stipulate that organisms on Earth emerged 3.5 billion years ago, sexual reproduction a billion years ago, cells with nuclei 2,100 millions of years ago, animals 590 millions of years ago, vertebrates 530 millions of years ago, animals with four limbs 400 millions of years ago, mammals 220 millions of years ago, and primates 75 millions of years ago.

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As for us, they say we’re all that remains of the hominin clade, the human genus Homo, from a mere two million years ago, branch of a taxonomical tribe belonging to the family of great apes. And, as noted, our own kin arrived around 300,000 years ago having achieved erect posture, bipedal locomotion, use of fire and tools, loss of some body hair, and larger brains. Hard to remember, as Peter Brannen cautions, that we’re no more than a “provisional moment” in Earth history. Which brings us—Reader, look alert; stay right with me—to Wilbur & Orville, Kitty Hawk,1903, and whoosh! mass air transit. Wings that have carried me to this middle-of-the-ocean so many times. Amazing, though, as is our nature, we never-have-enoughs complain: slow security-check lines; crying baby in the next row; shrinking seats / no leg room. Toilet walls closing in. As Leif Wenar appraises it, ours is “the most peaceful era in recorded human history.” But “Whenever humanity produces and consumes more energy”— think fossil fuels—the species not only is more tolerant but also “grows like crazy.” Think biodiesel: vegetable oil to replace gasoline to slow global warming. Very good for soybean farmers, but increases the demand for palm oil, already used in hundreds of processed foods and cosmetics. Since worldwide farmland is needed for food production, more palm oil means clear-cutting jungles to plant oil-palm trees, which means deforestation, which means greater carbon emissions from the exposed soils. George Monbiot terms such practices “trashing the living world,” that is, “pathological consumption: a world-consuming epidemic of collective madness, rendered so normal by advertising and by the media that we scarcely notice what has happened to us.” Human hungers induced / produced by consumer capitalism. Ever more objects, kinds of food, choices. Limitless desires driven / facilitated / fed / abetted by the political power of oil companies, banks, and related industries. Arrays of products remarkable for any individual, possibly, but for humankind a . . . binge. Species self-mutilation. Here’s a thought: like a wicked fairy godmother, wave a wand. Concentrate wealth and power; deem corporations people; keep war perpetual. Ring a bell? Meanwhile, add comfort animals / p orn  /  g uns  /  r acial hatred  / s martphones / credit cards, not to mention all that non-equine horsepower underfoot. Plus-plus a sprinkling of sugar and salt for mass obesity. Robert Pogue Harrison wrote, “Nature knows how to die, but human beings know mostly how to kill as a way of failing to become their ecology.” Can that be true? Try it again. “Nature knows how to die, but human beings know mostly how to kill as a way of failing to become their ecology.” Harrison notwithstanding, it may not be human beings qua human beings, but our economic system. As Frederic Jameson famously observed, “It has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Question: all kinds of capitalism? Well, here at home ours was founded on, modeled on—c’mon, c’mon, don’t be shy. 28

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What else could it be? New Agers would say karma denied is still karma.

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So: none of this proves good for many—most?—other species. These days, whatever humans say, goes. How goes? Goes . . . extinct. Wiped out. No more living members. Extinction, cousin of the word extinguish, from Latin exstinguere, “quench.” No more deaths in the family. Q: And why not? A: No more family. Recently, R. Alexander Pyron argued that “extinction is the engine of evolution, the mechanism by which natural selection prunes the poorly adapted and allows the hardiest to flourish. Species constantly go extinct, and every species that is alive today will one day follow suit.” He also argued, “There is no such thing as an ‘endangered species,’ except for all species.” Coolly stated, Professor Pyron: Olympian dispassion from one of the (thus far) safe ’n’ sound. Of course, something’s missing in such privileged detachment. More accurate to address stages of our agency. Functional versus numerical extinction; trophic cascades (when a predator is added to or eliminated from a food chain); local extirpations; defaunation; biological annihilations. Increments we can do something about. Pyron might also have mentioned speciation, formation of new species. Humans not only managing a nature that no longer exists apart from the human but affecting evolution of other forms of life. “We are as gods,” Stewart Brand enthused in the first Whole Earth Catalog. But which gods?

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As for extinction, Julian Barnes writes, “We are, as a species, inclined to historical solipsism” (solus / ipse, Latin, “alone / self ”). “The past is what has led to us; the future is what is being created by us . . . And we forget . . . evolution is not just a process which has brought the race to its current admirable condition, but one which logically implies evolution away from us.” Or, as the late Stephen Jay Gould put it, if you’ve achieved space travel, you may face a period in which “technological capacity outstrips social or moral restraint.” Meanwhile, our sun’s not forever either, something like halfway through its lifespan, a mere 5 billion or so years remaining. Hard to imagine, also hard to imagine our kind won’t be there till then. Or after. Author W. G. Sebald, for whom the past could never be past, wrote, “Our spread over the earth was fueled by reducing the higher species of vegetation to charcoal, by incessantly burning whatever would burn . . . Combustion is the

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hidden principle behind every artifact we create . . . From the earliest times, human civilization has been no more than a strange luminescence growing more intense by the hour, of which no one can say when it will begin to wane and when it will fade away.” (Requiescat in pace W. G. Sebald, dead at fifty-seven—brain aneurysm while driving.) Atheist David Benatar, describing what he reads as the “human predicament,” offers that “human life, as is the case with all life, has utterly no meaning from the cosmic perspective . . . There are explanations of how our species arose, but there are no reasons for our existence. Humans evolved, and, in time, the species will become extinct. The universe was indifferent to our coming, and it will be indifferent to our going.” Eschatologists of various faiths will of course disagree, fearing for Benatar or relishing his fate in the world to come. Eschatology, from Greek eskhatos, “remote, last,” and logy, “study”: that aspect of theology dealing with death / destiny of the soul / destiny of us all. End things. Jewish sage Hillel the Elder wrote, “The more flesh, the more worms. The more possessions, the more worry. The more wives, the more witchcraft. The more maidservants, the more uncouthness. The more servants, the more theft.” Sated, satiated, gorged, glutted. Glut: from Latin glutire, “to swallow, gulp down.” In “Disgust,” poet Carl Dennis imagines God “made sick by sanctimonious prayer.” Quitting heaven, He leaves it “to a deity with a stronger stomach.” Here below, He’s drawn to people “who worshipped only the gods of harvest,” their faith “in what He considered his best work, / The first five days of creation.” Eventually, a farmer with a produce stand, He exhorts “Himself not to feel disgust when comparing / The garden he first conceived for the planet” with these gardens here. Distaste. Revulsion. Will only the wicked perish? Good versus evil, the last battle at Armageddon, the righteous saved? Second coming, Resurrection of the dead? These days, everyone can be a prophet threatening or guaranteeing end times, the end of time, the end of days. As Dylan sang, “If the bible is right, the world will explode.” (And, as Dylan also once sang, “It’s all over now, baby blue.”) Or, instead of some divine plan, mere mortals destroying the planet’s resources and lives. Including, perish the thought, Silicon Valley billionaires with below-the-equator anti-nuke safety nets. Save the whales? O Lord have mercy! Save the rich! Back in the mid-1960s, Barry McGuire was on the car radio: “You may leave here for four days in space / But when you return it’s the same old place.” Each verse concluded with this refrain: “And you tell me / Over and over and over again my friend / You don’t believe / we’re on the eve of destruction.” “Eve of Destruction.” Five-plus decades ago, smoking pot, car radio blasting and singing along, I savored the song. Composer P. F. Sloan died in 2015, but

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both his music and destruction live on. The American war in Afghanistan, for instance: year nineteen and counting.

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Apocalypse. The complete and final destruction of the world. From the Greek apokaluptein, “uncover, reveal.” “To imagine apocalypse is to imagine the death of everything,” Sandra Gilbert writes, “and then, perhaps, to imagine a rebirth or birth of the new.” Just to imagine? Or to crave? Performance artist Joseph Keckler sings of “the [12/21/12] apocalypse we wanted but did not get.” As he observes, “I had friends who were into it.” But, then, no “tidy and magical obliteration.” As for rebirth, think teleology, from Greek telos (“end, goal”) and logos (“reason, explanation”). What something wants to be when it grows up; its purpose. A word in the air nowadays because of “intelligent design,” the anti-Darwin term arguing that natural selection cannot explain Earth’s lives. If not God, then surely some kind of creator required. I have no dog in the fight teleology is part of. Try to pay attention to the world close at hand rather than pondering how it got to be close at hand and as it is. I get that people crave explanations. But so much to want to know, so little time. On the Big Questions, Joni Mitchell’s “we are stardust” may have to suffice.

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The before us. And the after us. Critic Frank Kermode wrote about how stories make time human, how plots locate beginnings and endings, empower us to draw conclusions from . . . conclusions. “What’s done is done,” Lady Macbeth tells her husband. And, later, “What’s done cannot be undone.”

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Denialism. There’s a 1970 Vittorio De Sica film set in Italy in the late 1930s. Wealthy young Jews playing tennis in a walled estate. Just outside, fascism and antisemitism under Mussolini are on the rise. I was in my late twenties when I saw the film. Have not seen it since. But now, in my midseventies, thinking of our present moment, more than once the film has come to mind. Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis).

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What else to mention? The global climate strike of September 2019, a kind of children’s crusade. And, rather than referring to a “sixth extinction event,” these words from Australian Jeff Sparrow: “We might less euphemistically discuss a ‘first extermination event.’ Nature is not dying so much as being killed, by people who know perfectly well what they’re doing.”



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above

Gill net pyramid, Keauhou Bay, Hawai‘i, 2009. Photograph by Wayne Levin opposite

Hooked and disemboweled sandbar shark thrown back into the ocean, Miloli‘i, Hawai‘i, 2013. Photograph by Wayne Levin

bemoaning AND the future imperfect

Consider nostalgia: from the Greek nostos and algos, “homecoming” and “pain,” hence homesickness. According to Susan Stewart, nostalgia’s “a sadness which creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because . . . the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative . . . always absent . . . [it] continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack.” In Darwin’s Worms, Adam Phillips argues it’s “as though we can’t stop speaking the language of regret; as though our lives are trailed by disappointment and grief, and this in itself is a mystery. After all, nothing else in nature seems quite so grief-stricken, or impressed by its own dismay.” Phillips’s adroit: the quasi-authoritative “seems”; the as-if-conclusive “after all.” Nonetheless, no one knows what else in nature is less “grief-stricken or impressed by its own dismay.” Simon Barnes writes that while scientists grasp that “all placental mammals are put together in the same way physiologically, [it’s presumed that] one of them is somehow completely different from all the other 4,000-odd.” And, Barnes writes, “The barriers we have erected between ourselves and other animals turn out to be frail and porous: emotion, thought, problem-solving, tool use, culture, an understanding of death.” The pastoral. Concerning literary idealization of Nature, of the human in harmony with Nature, Mark Strand wrote, “Any description of landscape has within it an elusiveness, an unobtainableness [sic] that goes beyond the seasonal cycles and what they mean, and that suggests something like the constant flourishing of a finality in which we are confronted with the limits of our feeling. We end up lamenting the loss of something we never possessed.” Something we never possessed. The constant flourishing of a finality. Making

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literary art elicits the wistful, the dolorous? Donald Hall writes that “Poetry is elegy.” And the word pastoral does intimate coherence and solace: pastor = shepherd with flock. But then there’s nekros, Greek for “corpse.” Joyelle McSweeney argues that, despite its assumption of a lost realm of innocence, “The pastoral, like the occult, has always been a fraud, a counterfeit, an invention, an anachronism.” As for what’s been concealed or expurgated: “Infectiousness, anxiety, and contagion.” What’s absent: Joyce Carol Oates writes that in Ansel Adams’s photograph Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, “We see earth and sky commingled into a timeless and seamless whole, irradiated by moonlight. The myth is that amid the visual splendors of transcendental nature there is no ‘refuse’—no devastation, no collapse, no erosion, no rot; no (seeming) effort, struggle, defeat, death.” And, “Such transcendental visions of nature are not ‘natural’ but ‘artificial’. . . distillations of what the eye sees and the brain chooses to select, to arrange formally as art, and to record. (And sell.)” If so, then what about the elegiac? Reviewing bad boy / shock poet Frederick Seidel’s My Tokyo, Adam Phillips dismissed the “smug purities of the average jeremiad,” and “easy nostalgia for those affluent enough to afford such moral comfort.” So much for Wordsworth’s critique of the urban and Romanticism’s literary sublime! For Phillips, “If prophecy, as Seidel intimates . . . is our most disturbing form of hedonism, then poetry is complicit with all our moral equivocations.” Seidel’s poems thus “always trying to avoid the bad faith of elegy.” The bad faith of elegy. In After Nature, Jedidiah Purdy cautions that “nature, mute and sometimes beautiful, invites the narcissistic projections of nostalgia.” And, “Involvement with nature has been a way to stand apart from the ordinary human situation, with all its compromises, indignities, and petty satisfactions. A disgust at much of humanity shows up again and again, and aligning with nature has often meant disowning ordinary humanity, or at least exempting oneself from it.” And, “Those who love (certain parts of) nature are often making a point of preferring it to (certain kinds of) human beings.” Touché! Guilty as charged. For instance, during my stay in Fiji years ago, I struggled to avoid mosquitos that carried dengue fever. Back in northern California, I was on the lookout for blacklegged deer ticks carrying Lyme disease. And here in the cottage, while doing my best to save crane flies I find inside, there’s no such solicitousness for, say, meal moths / mice / termites. Or for Norwegian roof rats, our perennial home companions, which I admire only from afar. (As Marguerite Holloway writes, rats are “our shadow daemons,” with us “for millennia, doing much as we do—wiping out species, spreading disease, consuming resources, using their fierce intelligence to adapt.”) There’s also my history of being anti-crow. Maybe ten years ago, sunset at the nearby school track, I was startled by the sight of perhaps a hundred corvids on the green field, more roosting in a nearby tree. Meanwhile, down at the bay, I saw a group mobbing a hawk. Identified with the hawk. As if overnight, there



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seemed always to be hyper-black crows atop the telephone pole by the cottage. Cawing and, perhaps because they knew I’d been siding with the hawk, dropping gobs of white shit down on the sidewalk. Or, with intent, onto my wife’s Toyota Corolla. But crows are an older species than we are, and our compatriots: more of us means more of them. And how smart they are! Hopping out of the way of oncoming cars just far enough. So, Purdy’s words ring true, but is there not more to say? David Malouf maintains that “what we are touched by now, with a mixture of pathos and concern, is the planet itself; its wholeness, the interdependency of its creatures down to the smallest and most rare . . . and the fragility of their healthy continuance.” Think of Glenn Albrecht’s neologism solastalgia, profound distress caused by environmental change. Or we might concur with Per Espen Stoknes: “This more-than-personal sadness is what I call the ‘Great Grief ’—a feeling that rises in us as if from the Earth itself. Perhaps bears and dolphins, clear-cut forests, fouled rivers, and the acidifying, plastic-laden oceans bear grief inside them, too, just as we do.” Grief, from Latin gravis. Though people used to exclaim “Good grief,” “good” was a euphemism for God, not an affirmative. As for how long it’s good to grieve, religions provide protocols both for mourning and for rejoining the living. Talking Great Grief, however, we seem beyond being able to process specific, numerable, losses.

 A Leonard Cohen line seems germane: “I have seen the future, brother: / it is murder.”

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Monk Seals

On the beach, the ordinary-extraordinary. Just the other day, a Hawaiian monk seal hauled out. Laboriously hefting—inchworming—its bulk on the sand, evoking Slinky toys on the staircases of my childhood. This seal, around seven feet in length, some four or five hundred pounds, was soon sunbathing as it dozed. In the ocean, able to move at twenty miles an hour and dive hundreds of feet, monk seals feed on fish, lobster, octopus, squid, and eels. Big fish, little fish: seals are food for tiger and Galapagos sharks. Some humans, seeing terrestrial life as no worse than difficult despite genocides and wars, argue aquatic life must be nightmarish. Which to them explains those marine creatures that first made their way onto terra firma. In Shakespeare’s Pericles, however, one fisherman marvels “how fishes live in the sea,” the other pointing out that “as man do a-land, the great ones eat up the little ones.” In these islands, in any case, among the last places on Earth reached by Homo sapiens, seals had no land predators. With the arrival of Polynesians, however, seals in the inhabited main islands were killed off. And then, in the nineteenth century, Europeans hunted them throughout the archipelago. Hunted them to the brink of extinction. Hence “endangered.” In common usage, the word becomes a verbal tic, as if the Hawaiian monk seal’s first name is Endangered. It’s also euphemistic: human agency kept silent like the k in knew, w in wrong. God didn’t endanger the Hawaiian monk seal. Nor did erupting volcanoes, meteorites, or any of the two-by-twos Noah loaded on board. So who in God’s name was responsible for this “near extinction”? Think back to third grade, circa 1952, teacher bale-

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fully surveying the classroom to determine which boy made the fart sound. Giggling kids gone mute, hyper-angelic. Weak criminal soon to confess. Endangered. Of course, agency doesn’t mean there had to be a moral dimension—that is, intent. At least, not till recently. But now, now, now we get it. Dinosaurs long gone, on land we’re the alpha predator: what other species could imagine nuclear war, build nuclear weapons, use them? And though ships still sink and people still drown, at sea too we’re the alpha predator. Whitehead and Rendell write that although “until very recently human impact on the oceans was restricted to waters just off the coasts . . . now we, and our effects, are everywhere.” I know: try conveying that to my surf buddies still out at nightfall, apprehensive about shark attacks, hearing footsteps. Having again caught a wave, carried back to the break on a river mouth’s fresh-water linear escalator. Conservation of energy, less paddling, but every surfer has heard waterman wisdom about sharks feeding at dusk. Nor can surfers miss spotting the garbage or carcasses floating downstream. Which attract bait fish, which attract . . . well, cue the soundtrack from Jaws. On the other hand, marine biologists estimate that, worldwide, one hundred million sharks are killed annually by humans. Or might it be two hundred and fifty million? Tens of millions, for sure, for every human killed by a shark. Perhaps six human deaths a year, worldwide, in some eighty attacks. Do the math, though for the surfer out as night falls, math brings no peace of mind. Nor is the surfer likely to assuage apprehension by admiring a family of creatures that thrived for eons before dinosaurs appeared, that has survived for hundreds of millions of years, or by learning individual sharks can live hundreds of years.

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But about these endangered, not to mention “conservation reliant,” monk seals. For the first time in memory, a monk seal gave birth on a popular beach, just down the shore. Right there, in front of a hotel’s beachside restaurant and a condo’s parking garage. As if oblivious to human proximity. What followed were forty-three days of monk seal and pup. And, daily, media coverage, hundreds of humans coming each day to see the duo, photographing, gaping. Dedicated conservation volunteers doing their best to keep our gods’ chosen species at a distance. There were webcam feeds from an apartment above the beach, “live” (though not alive) video streaming, millions of “hits” online. Wonderful for people to see the seals, the virtual being our increasingly frequent form of beholding living creatures (including our own kind). One becomes not just habituated to but hooked on the virtual, as its purveyors intended. But what we are habituated to is—of course—the simulated, the pseudo, the not real, the . . . unreal. The false? About smartphones. Tourists arriving at this beach lugging folding

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chairs / towels / snorkels / sunscreen glimpse a mound on the sand with signs around it. Sense something unusual—the undomesticated nonhuman?—and reflexively reach for phone in back pocket. Hand in front of face, picture “taken” before eyes have processed what the camera takes. Eyes looking down at screen to see what camera saw. Opposable thumbs thumbing away to “share” the image. Monkey see, monkey do. “A thing is not an image,” Charles Wright wrote. So rare, now, someone without smartphone at the ready. True, true, we already had hip / shoulder / knee replacement; heart and teeth implants; breast “enhancement.” But now it’s as if (First World) people have become cyborgs, those science-fictional creatures with mechanical inserts. Two arms / two legs / one head and one phone? Six appendages. But “Rocky” and “Kaimana,” mother and pup, rolling, lolling in the shore break, fluid in the ocean’s fluid. What Jon Mooallem described as the monk seal’s “wiry whiskers and the deep, round eyes of an apologetic child.” How not anthropomorphize? (Robinson Jeffers cautioned that “to see the human figure in all things is man’s disease.”) For instance, online, Trudy: “Oh my gosh, just popped over to see this cuteness.” And Julia: “I love these girls.” As if that’s how the seals would ever think of themselves, if they do think as we know the word. But, another writer online said, “What a blessing to witness this.” Witnessing, but not eyewitnessing. Still, a blessing. True story and, as Derek Ferrar termed it, a “telenovela.” Which concluded how? Both mother and pup still alive, neither attacked by dogs (belonging to humans), shot at (by humans), or beaten to death (by humans), not uncommon recent local occurrences. This seal duo death defyingly still alive, especially given the so-public and accessible a place where “Rocky” gave birth. Finally, thinner and no doubt very hungry, having weaned her pup, “Rocky” as expected left on her own. We have no idea if she had any last words for her offspring. Nor what she thought of the human circus taking place all around her. And “Kaimana,” in danger of being too used to the presence of Homo sapiens? Carried off by humans for release at an undisclosed location to protect her from . . . us. Vaccinated, tagged, and sporting a satellite tracker to allow our kind to follow her movements. “Kaimana.” Kai, “ocean”; mana, “spiritual energy, power.” Name of the beach on which she was born. Not that we’ll ever know her name seal to seal, if she has one. Or her secret name, if she has one of those, which not even other seals may ever learn. Like the tramp stamp tattoo in the lower back of young women at the beach, just above the thong line, which is for you to ask about, for them to decide if they choose to tell.

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Playful monk seal, Māhukona, Hawai‘i, 2007. Photograph by Wayne Levin

Some months later, on my predawn walk in a torrential rain, I was back at the beach, not a—human—soul in sight. A monk seal had just hauled out. No volunteers, no warning signs. With my trekking pole, I drew a line in the sand, went into the hotel, asked them to call for help. That day, it occurred to me that despite the enormous interest in “Rocky” and “Kaimana,” and the untold tens of thousands of cellphone pictures taken and reconveyed hundreds of thousands of times, and despite the Monk Seal Foundation / Monk Seal Response Network / Hawaiian Monk Seal Hospital and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, I was witnessing a species in the last stages of going extinct. Or, possibly, conserved by its primary predator, an effort veering toward domestication. That morning, blessedly, a volunteer soon arrived. As almost always, an older woman. When we spoke, she reminded me about a man at the adjacent private club who’d refused to move his chair away from “Rocky” and her pup. His beach, what he’d paid his membership fees for. The seals hadn’t paid. Of course, neither had even a single human paid the seals for pictures they took. Not a one! What if every last “shared” image was monetized on behalf of the seals as thoroughly as, say, Facebook and Google and Amazon monetize users’ data! A few days later, the pup “Kaimana” was for a second time found with a fishhook lodged in her mouth. Once again the NOAA response team captured / sedated / treated / gave “reversal medication.” And then back she went into the ocean. More than five hundred endangered animals and plants in Hawai‘i. So many “conservation reliant” species. How save all of them from us or from our actions? How save even some of them? How choose?

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Dolphinology

You remember I resisted using the possessive when referring to a cluster of goatfish. My avoidance was first induced—compelled—by sights seen thirty years ago. Just down the coast, there was a marine mammal “laboratory” “training”—how loaded terms can be!—dolphins. The director, behavioral psychologist who’d studied monkeys and rats, said he was seeking to “establish two-way communication, admittedly on a very elementary level. We’re not going to talk philosophy.” In the service of which, two eight-foot, five-hundred-pound females, captured in the Caribbean, were transported to Hawai‘i. For years enclosed (surely intentional euphemism) in separate concrete tanks fifty feet in diameter, five or six feet deep. Within sight, sound, and smell of open ocean, even closer to an adjacent bar’s music and drunk patrons. Late weekend nights in particular must have offered the cetaceans words to learn. Or, if they became fluent enough, to understand what God said about “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Consider ambitions’ premises—stated, unstated. This director’s might have read: (1) interspecies communication is important; (2) communication between humans and other species is the most important; (3) dolphins have large brains, which might allow verbal interaction between them and us; (4) therefore, take them out of their element to find out. Unstated is why interspecies communication, if vital, would require this strategy. Also unstated, how careers for humans in academia are advanced. Meanwhile, observe the finis in confined.

Surfacing spinner dolphins, Kealakekua Bay, Hawai‘i, 2004. Photograph by Wayne Levin

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As Gavan Daws notes in his brilliant “Men, Dolphins, and Biography,” evolution in the water-world evolved “a distribution and processing of sensory information so unfamiliar to humans that we have no way of bringing it together to make it spell consciousness, at least in our spelling: oceanic change of temperature, light, color, barometric pressure, chemical and nutritive composition, acidity and salinity of water, and—on a cosmic scale—the pull of sun, moon, and stars, the turning of the earth, acting on the massive ocean currents and the running of the tides.”

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About who gets to tell the story: back then, four decades ago, and now. In 1977, former employees of the marine mammal laboratory took these dolphins to the ocean to “liberate” them. Or, as the anguished director put it, “They stole my dolphins.” And, the director said, “You build a life’s work around something to which you’re not only intellectually but emotionally wedded. There is a sense of a death in the family.”

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Bear in mind—I’ll try to bear in mind—that sensibilities change, and that the director of the marine mammal center had done great good for at least one cetacean. In 1995, a forty-foot whale, (human-named) Humphrey, entered San Francisco Bay, headed up the Sacramento River, then into a creek. Nearly seventy miles; a dead end. After a month of rescue efforts, it was the director’s strategy of using recordings of feeding whales that lured Humphrey out to open ocean. No doubt this humpback would sing out on the director’s behalf, if someone could do the notating, especially because the director helped a second time when the whale ran aground in San Francisco Bay. And, later, to his credit the director was one of hundreds of marine scientists urging the Japanese government to stop the slaughter of the Taiji dolphin hunts. Good deeds . . . Who, then, can predict whether or not verbally fluent dolphins drawn from a jury “pool” would find the director guilty? Who can guess what stories dolphins might tell, though Ceridwen Dovey ventriloquizes a U.S.-trained combat dolphin in “A Letter to Sylvia Plath.” And Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, has dolphins “perfectly capable of communicating” in human language but choosing not to. Aware of Earth’s impending destruction, they abandon the water planet with a message: “So long, and thanks for all the fish.” If—thus far!—we can only imagine what dolphins would say, we might infer something from nonverbal behavior of cephalopods. As Amia Srinivasan writes, “Captive octopuses appear to be aware of their captivity; they adapt to it but also resist it. When they try to escape, which is often, they tend to wait for a moment they aren’t being watched.” And, “If only the octopus were more like us, we might be better at leaving it alone.” 44

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More like us. Little more than a decade since the laboratory director’s death, our culture seems increasingly uneasy about what creatures we dominate. Or selectively, sentimentally, more uneasy. We are or are not vegetarian, wear fur or not, and so on. Sensibilities do change. Even the recent past can seem long ago. One wonders if the director, bemoaning loss of the captive dolphins in 1977, had seen Planet of the Apes (1968). In it, Charlton Heston plays a starship commander who, emerging from a time warp, lands on what seems to be a strange planet. Though the terrain is similar to Heston’s home Earth, there’s a confounding inversion: here human beings are naked, wild, and without language, whereas apes have an advanced civilization. Are the articulate dominant species. Captured by ape horsemen, unable to speak due to a blow to his throat, caged with the primitive humans, Heston struggles to manifest “higher” qualities. Managing to escape, he’s tracked down. Lassos of the ape guards around his neck, Heston finally regains his voice: “Take your hands off me, you damn dirty apes!” I suppose you either see the dolphins as Heston or you do not. Back in the late 1970s, the “kidnappers” argued that seizing the dolphins from the ocean had been a crime. As Gavan Daws inquires, “How was capture by humans different in principle from release by humans? And if taking dolphins from tanks was abduction, what was the proper word for keeping dolphins in captivity, in isolation (against their will?) prospectively for life?” As for how the director expressed his anguish about the “kidnapping”—“It’s like your own child was taken from you” he told a reporter—Daws observes that “in the wake of the loss of the dolphins, [the director] and his wife, childless into their middle years, had a baby.”

 About still being disturbed by the sight of captive dolphins thirty years ago. The director had intent / rationale / federal funding. Was demonstrating dolphins were more cognitively advanced than chimpanzees. This, he argued, might help us understand the origins of human language and how children learn it. In that same era, however, after a visit to the director’s marine mammal center and hearing him use the possessive, I stopped in at a beachfront resort describing itself as “the hotel for royalty, heads of state, and legends of the sporting, musical and literary worlds.” The color of money: as if dollars are always hungry for just a little somethin’ more, why not a dollop of dolphins. Hotels guests, many of them prosperously overweight, left little question which species had more than enough to eat. A species whose members could pay extra to get in the hotel’s “natural ocean water lagoon.” Natural ocean water, true; “lagoon” technically correct, if deliberately evoking South Seas romance in lieu of “man-made.” Failing, however, to cop to the lack of access—escape!—to the adjacent Pacific [italics mine]

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ocean for the “family of playful Atlantic [italics mine] bottlenose dolphins.” In their “home,” human customers could spend “quality time with your new dolphin friends,” have “intimate dolphin encounters,” book “a playdate.” At the hotel, the trainers / keepers / handlers working with the dolphins were women, talking to—at?—the dolphins as if to infants. “Hyperarticulation”: shrill singsong, repetitive exhortation. But . . . the dolphins were similar to infants only in that they could not talk back. Were imprisoned. As Phillip Larkin wrote about aging humans in his ferocious “The Old Fools,” words that might apply to these not-yet-verbal cetaceans: “Why aren’t they screaming?”

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I’ll scream for them. When does it end? Science writer James Gorman appeared in a recent New York Times video. “Dolphins Mug for Camera in Awareness Test,” runs the initial screen text. And then, “Mirror Mirror on the Wall . . .” Snow White, get it? Wicked stepmother. Cute. A human wrote that text. Not a dolphin. Don’t believe me? Check the credits. Gorman’s describing a three-year study by researcher Diana Reiss, Ph.D. [italics mine], which found that, like humans, chimpanzees, and elephants, dolphins can recognize themselves in a mirror. And, mirabile dictu, can do so at an earlier age than human children! But there’s a prudent qualifier: “Mirror self-recognition is often taken as a measure of a kind of intelligence and self-awareness, although not all scientists agree.” Tell that to the dolphins, lest they get swelled heads. Meanwhile, what questions are not asked by Gorman in the Times video? Among others (and feel free to add your own) . . . why not instead a three-year study of the humans on their side of the mirror, writing up “scientific” “data” about human “self-directed behavior”? About self-regard, or the human self, regarded. Think of the self-awareness—or self-love—sustained “mirror meditation” might facilitate! Mugging for the camera to be duly documented. (One might ask self-aware humans watching Gorman’s video to explain why mirrors appear to reverse the left and right side of things, but not the up and down. Perhaps dolphins can clarify. Or perhaps the dolphins perceive that their reflection is who they used to be. Mirror a time machine, though not powerful enough to teleport them out of captivity.) To her credit, researcher Reiss has been an opponent of the annual slaughter of dolphins in Japan, now opposes capturing dolphins in the wild. And she’s “begun [italics mine] working on ways” to apply her dolphin studies “to autism assessment and intervention.” Good for humans, maybe. Still, narrator Gorman did not point out that Lori Marino, Reiss’s former collaborator on the mirror experiments, suffered a kind of non-sea change.

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Marino now argues, “You cannot support dolphin captivity and be an advocate for them.” Reiss, however, declines to make the case against continuing to breed captive dolphins. Eons ago—actually, a mere forty years ago—John Berger pointed out that zoo animals “constitute living monuments to their own disappearance.” Living monuments to their own disappearance. Stay with that thought for a moment. And with this one: “The animals, isolated from each other and without interaction between species, have become utterly dependent upon their keepers.”

 Novelist John Fowles argued “There is a deeper wickedness still in Voltaire’s unregenerate animal. It won’t be owned, or more precisely, it will not be disanimated, unsouled, by the manner in which we try to own it. When it is owned, it disappears.”

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Re Snow Leopards

Owned and disappeared. Not just dolphins. M. R. O’Connor writes that “since 2008, researchers in the southern Gobi region of Mongolia . . . have outfitted more than twenty snow leopards with GPS.” The snow leopards’ locations are then transmitted to a satellite so researchers can track numbers, terrain, migrations, and predation patterns. Outfitted. Which entails who doing what to what? Or collared. To put a collar on a snow leopard means trap with baited leg snare; “immobilize” with sedative-tipped jab stick; release with radio-tracking collar around neck. In Darla Hillard’s Vanishing Tracks, there’s a photo of a sedated snow leopard remaining “calm” while the collar is being attached. Researchers know that capturing wild animals can stress or kill them. They believe, however, that data gathered will help conserve the species. Conservation: a desideratum. But humans are the problem for snow leopards, radio tracking with collars a human solution. No consent from the ensnared / immobilized snow leopard sought or given. Might there be other strategies? More “camera trapping”—i.e., taking pictures? Drones? Or, how many snow leopards do conservationists need to collar until they have enough data? Perhaps researchers should also / instead capture / sedate / collar / track Homo sapiens. As Chris Wilmers put it, “We already know that humans are incredibly lethal predators. We kill other predators at a much higher rate than any other predator kills predators.”

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Elizabeth Kolbert notes that our eight billion humans “outweigh wild mammals by a ratio of more than eight to one,” that if you add in domesticated animals the “ratio climbs to twenty-three to one.” Toward the other end of the scale, it’s estimated there are four to ten thousand snow leopards in the Himalayas, six hundred snow leopards in zoos. Peter Matthiessen, author of The Snow Leopard (1978), tried but failed to see one in the Himalayas. O’Connor writes that Matthiessen would have known that “visiting one in a zoo [is] not the same thing.” True, no doubt, but impossible that Matthiessen, gifted writer and environmentalist, would have used the word visiting. That is, how can you “visit” a captive?



As for elephants “saved” in zoos, Charles Siebert writes, “It might still be characterized as a Noah’s Ark story, except that we ourselves have become the all-consuming flood that floats and justifies the vessel in which animals are confined.”

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Thomas Farber

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I I I

T he

A g in g

S elf

Paradise, 2018

Senior moments: thread of conversation lost, unable to remember what one was about to do or say. Lapses experienced by—attributed to—the old(er). Connection severed; wires crossed; mind letting something slip? Not distracted or absentminded, you are, briefly, confused. “Not all there.” On your daily walk, for instance, sharp, sudden leg pain. Phrases or words to describe it somewhere up in the cerebral computer, but surfacing only belatedly, unbidden, a few minutes later. “Trick knee” “buckled,” “hyperextended.” Ah: day at the beach thirty years ago, throwing a football in the sand. Subsequent appointments with physical therapist. Other kinds of senior moments. Just after waking up, thirsty. Potable water, right out of the tap! In the shower, humming—singing!—Mitty Collier’s “I Had a Talk with My Man Last Night.” Uplifting! Same day. One more northern California conflagration, worst ever. Less and later rain, hotter summers, low humidity, tinder-dry desiccated plants. Longer fire season. The usual autumn strong winds, undermaintained power lines “run to failure” to save money. Utility company lobbyists with the normal massive donations to state politicians. The quotidian: infernos. Days later, fire only partially contained. Thousands of homes burned, people evacuated. The dead, the “missing,” the “unaccounted for.” Search-and-rescue teams; cadaver dogs. Paradise (pop. 26,682) not lost but immolated. Hellscape. Here, a hundred miles away, schools closed because of the fire’s toxic smoke, a senior citizen sits against the garage door. Weak morning sun; foul air. World

Green sea turtle and cornet fish, Keauhou, Hawai‘i, 2003. Photograph by Wayne Levin

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ongoing. Neighborhood cat alert: two coyotes on the street last night. Crows, proliferating; squirrels; jay. Bicyclist, dog walker, jogger, skateboarder. Electric skateboarder, motorized bicycle. Pickup trucks, of course. Another Tesla. Most passersby wearing a respirator mask. Father on battery-powered hoverboard pushing a stroller. Woman, puppy in sling on chest like a newborn. A tiny old(er)—elderly— woman, no mask, hauling a cart of recyclables, foraging in trash barrels. Neighbor, now a widow, coming down her front steps a week after the coroner’s wagon parked in the driveway. A young couple, mother carrying the baby, young daughter on her bike, father running alongside about to release his hand. Daughter shrieking: joy, apprehension. This Golden State, American dream of freedom and bounty, as utopia. As . . . dystopia: Donner party; Jim Jones’s Jonestown; Charlie Manson; and lately, reappraisal of high-tech libertarian innovation / neoliberalism / social media. About the old(ers). Our Conspicuous-Consumer-in-Chief, age seventy-two, has flown west for a disaster scene photo-op. Notes that seeing it in situ differs from watching it on TV. Visiting the town of Paradise—Pleasure, he calls it, more than once—he says, “I want to have a great climate.” Senior moments. Paradise, incinerated. In Boston, in “the old days” my grammar school had an incinerator in the basement. Latin cinis, “ashes.” No wind today. Very, very still. The birch trees across the street: not just alive, comes the thought, but growing. As usual, of course, as they were yesterday and the day before. But just now I feel them growing, can almost see it. Sitting in the haze watching the world go by. Thinking I might be mistaken for an old guy sitting in the haze watching the world go by. Acknowledging that I might be an old(er) guy sitting in the haze watching the world go by.

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Acting My Age

Break of Day

You recall Lewis Carroll’s Alice, the White Queen’s “six impossible things” before breakfast. So: hold the eggs ’n’ toast, that bowl of granola! Before even a sip of coffee, try just one impossible thing: no words from or about Donald Trump. “I hear America singing,” Whitman wrote, Trump’s runnings of the mouth not having entered his ears. Here, before breakfast it’s between darkness and sunrise. Earth having turned “its other cheek to the luminary,” as Joseph Brodsky put it. Neither day nor night: twilight comin’ round. Twilight—astronomical / nautical / civil. Sun inchworming its way up toward the horizon. Again, finally, less than eighteen degrees below. Waning gibbous moon. Jupiter and Mars clinging to each other in the southeast. On the beach, tide rising. Barely perceptible, a large form in the shore break. Clarifying as not pinniped but octopod: two lovers superglued, at least as well “clung” as Jupiter and Mars. Under the influence, however, of Venus. Legs / arms round waists / shoulders. In the sea of love: drowning, or not. In this half-light, their dyad generic. Archetypal, at least as far back as Zeus-the-bull carrying off Europa. On the nearby seawall, having to make do without what’s keeping the couple warm, a fisherman squirms into full wetsuit. Sex over there, speargun & camouflage here. Love ’n’ death. Death. Too early for the occasional individual carrying a canister: ashes to strew, lei to place on the face of the deep.

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Life ongoing, nearly time for dawn-patrol surfers. Too soon, however, for thong-bikinied preteens with smartphones. Posing, sharing, laughing, (re) posing. Again. And again. “Uncle,” the local girls sometimes say to me, “uncle, can you take our picture?” People rise early in the northern tropics. Just mauka—inland—of these shoreline buildings, it’s not quite the moment for caregivers changing shifts; for walkers and joggers; for ear-splitting two-stroke leaf blowers in Sisyphean battle with trade winds; for tourist helicopters. Still too soon for swarms of “self-balancing personal transporters” carrying “visitors” eager to see everything. Everything, that is, unless it means having to be on foot. Early. Police siren, garbage truck, moped. Van backup beeper. Roosters crowing. Dogs barking. Dogs: from my childhood, legendary St. Bernards rescuing humans in the Alps. Lassie, the television collie. Buck, in Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. Our hapless family boxer. In my twenties, I cared for a friend’s marvelous, intelligent German shepherd for a year while she was traveling. And, spending time on sheep ranches, came to greatly admire border collies herding sheep. That was then. But here, this morning? Homeowners seemingly pleased their proxies yap as they themselves surely would, if only. . . “If dogs run free, why can’t we?” Dylan sang. These particular dogs suffering from SDS, Small Dog Syndrome. Or, worse, VSDS, Very Small Dog Syndrome. But right here, no member of “we” tethered to beloved family member. No human standing—idle; entranced?—in pre-defecation holding pattern. Thence to stoop & scoop, plastic-bagging “solid waste.” Which may resolve hoary arguments about what’s distinctively human. Language? Chins? Bipedalism? Duping oneself? Plastic-bagging another species’ shit? Here in Honolulu, forty years of having to clean up after your dog. Humaninvented plastic for the task, and what can replace it? Plastic bags in its stomach, a pilot whale is unable to eat and, finally, unable to breathe. Plastic bags for whales, micro- or nanoplastics in food for us. “Single-use” plastic bags soon to be banned? Dog owners stockpiling. But what about human-canine symbiosis? Interspecies bonding. Actual living-and-breathing Nature, albeit tethered. At hand. In hand. Twenty-first-century urban life: dog on leash locates a familiar spot; deems fragrances and textures underfoot benign; or, some say, aligns itself with the north / south axis of the magnetic poles like migrating birds. (Your dog circles before sleep, round and round. Why? To get its back to the wind, though . . . in your living room, there’s no wind.) But at ground zero—the tree lawn—Fido-faithful squats back on rear legs, butt down. Looks off to the side as if distracted. Abashed? Tail between its legs, as they say. Performance anxiety? Or, dog reproachful, craving privacy, eyes pleading

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no mo’ FB pics please. Not unreasonably: who likes being watched as they “relieve themselves”? (Rhetorical question: some humans do.) Or, who likes watching? (Rhetorical question: some humans do.) Coming soon to the US of A, Japanese “manner water” to wash where your dog just pissed. Plus regulations requiring you take the crap home with you, dispose of it where you live. Also, no doubt in the planning stage, canine toilet seats, payment by credit card, and/or public “canine restrooms,” a la French pissoirs for males. Already here, “five-star” dog hotels with “lavish accommodations.” Human & nonhuman. Tyranny of comfort animals, or, tyranny of comfort animal possessors. Ever-longer list of what we cannot do without. Post-industrial capitalism: empty-nesters, parental instincts nowhere to go, or kid-less solitaries, social fabric in tatters. Adults yearning for no-strings-attached affection. “No baggage.” Dogs gifted at aiming large eyes to elicit feel-good oxytocin. Puppy love. Man’s best friend? Only friend? Is this violence we inflict on carnivores evolved to live and hunt in packs? Well, not only does evolution—theirs; ours—not stop, but, like border collies herding sheep, seemingly unskilled urban canines are in fact work dogs. How so? Think mobile four-legged bait for needy humans fishing for human contact. Gambit, ploy, signal to kindred spirits. Oh-so-adorable toy / purse / lap / teacup dogs. Eliciting, spoken to the dog: “So beautiful! What’s your name?” Love my dog, love me. Think also how such diminutive—diminished—creatures were bred down. In our own realm, given in vitro fertilization, any day now there’ll be tiny humans for easy toting (though, until modifications, still incapable of unconditional love). But what will ever replace pseudo-dialogue with speechless dogs, allowing humans to impute thoughts and feelings to them, to conduct—okay, control—conversation? Dogs requiring no more than “treats” to keep them begging, wagging. And what other “family member” can you be the owner of? Possess as legal property. Until tiny humans become available, other species take note: approach us as leash-or-cage amenable, comfort us because God knows we need comforting, allow us to impute fidelity to you, and you may thrive. But be careful lest, like half of American dogs, you come to resemble your masters and mistresses. Fat, that is. And, you other species, watch not yo’ back but yo’ front. Your gonads. No more ovaries, no more testicles! Neutered, altered, spayed (French espeer, cut with a sword). Fixed! Helluva fix. And done why? To eliminate an animal’s “animal” instincts? To make animals more closely resemble their undersexed / unsexed / desexed / postsexed owners?



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A modest proposal re human “overpopulation”: dog owners, spay & neuter yourselves! (Other species: like cats, you may be able to win our hearts while appearing to keep your distance. If, that is, humans don’t abandon you: on this island alone, there could be 300,000 feral felines killing off indigenous birds.)

 But here and now. Not a soul in Kapi‘olani Park. No couples from Japan in bridal display—on, well before, or long after their wedding day. What’s the difference? This early, however, no bridal-white duos, no white stretch limos to transport them. But wait! Limo at the curb? No: white Maserati. Brand of choice for a local power couple (husband, former police chief; wife, former Honolulu deputy prosecutor). Charged with bank fraud, conspiracy, and other crimes, found guilty in their initial trial. Her defense attorney had felt free to say that federal “mainland prosecutors,” not being “local,” were “not necessarily familiar with everything in Hawai‘i.” Think of the movie script by Robert Towne, its memorable closer: “Forget it, Jake, this is Chinatown.” So, a Maserati Blanco, new $70k plus-plus model instead of the usual $100k plus model. Eight-speed automatic transmission; twelve-way power seats with memory function. So much touted “elegance” for a 3,600-pound “personal haven.” But why should a Maserati in this archipelago raise an eyebrow? Fifty-something years ago, when I first reached the tropics, why did I imagine cars as status objects would be found no further west than Los Angeles? Was it the size of this island? A mistaken sense of what’s appropriately impure in an archipelago with so many impurities? Of which I was surely one. Yet another Bostonian in these islands since New England missionaries confronted Queen Ka‘ahumanu’s naked splendor in 1820. A friend’s three-year-old, denied something, informs his father, “I need it.” Grownups, former children grown older if not up, also need things. Would be deprived / diminished if unable to display something more “exclusive” and “charismatic” than a—forgive me—paltry BMW or Mercedes. Jesus of Nazareth is said to have said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” Here in the northern tropics, these geographically remote islands are still very much of the (corporate / capitalist / consumerist) world. Think of interminable “rush-hour” gridlocks on H-1. Sheesh, as they say in pidgin, that is, Hawaiian Creole English. Twenty years ago, just back from Fiji and stuck in traffic, it dawned on me that our evolutionary function has been to pave the way, so to speak, for cars. Eons of carrying the car parasite, humans finally impelled—driven!—to create freeways until the last patch of ground is graded and sealed. Car horns around the planet honking a four-wheel “Ode to Joy.” En route to which the car para-

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site busily isolating us from each other, obscuring any sense of our physical limits. Individual drivers ever more amplified / enlarged / engorged / distended. Think mass vehicular manslaughter, vehicular homicide, vehicular murder.

 But enough car talk! Walking on. Just past the Blanco, a homeless man gathering his gear, then another. So many, many homeless in Hawai‘i. Paradise, if ever, long lost. Then, catching my eye—both eyes—a young woman. Black tight short shorts. Across her buffed (how would she say it, think it) rear end / bottom / booty / buns / butt, in large white letters, all caps, namaste. namaste! Cheek to shining cheek! And, while we’re at it, hallelujah! Talk about body language! This young woman or her bifurcated segments bowing to the divine in me? And to reciprocate, how might one bow to all that’s divine in her? Kiss her namaste? But, might she be in on the joke? Or is this just commercial smoke, blown not up my ass but off hers? Oh, yoga biz in America! Om bras / Salute to the Sun bottoms / Goddess leggings! Still, as Shakespeare wrote, “Let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.” So many people here in Hawai‘i wearing next to nothing, mortal coils over-exposed. Re namaste. Hers is far cheaper than a tattoo, though she may have one under those short shorts. But perhaps she’s claiming a connection to the realm of the sacred; of being in a particular cohort; or merely manifesting an awareness about being seen by male and female gazes. So many see-ers! I should run after her, ask where she got the shorts, explain I want a pair. Yes? Well, no. As they say in pidgin, “No can.” They tell us everything ends. For sure Buddha wanted folks to keep that in mind. The young woman’s namaste posterior is disappearing into the haze: without my glasses, this end is no longer in sight. Ever further behind her behind, I recall who I am. Short of breath, dizzy, having to pause. Cardiac issues. My own end ever more in sight.



“Decline adds truth,” poet Vincente Alexandre wrote, “but it doesn’t flatter.” A jogger approaches, middle-aged and overweight woman struggling to keep up with her companions. A T-shirt that reads, everything hurts and i’m dying. I can relate. As a surf buddy, a doctor, helpfully noted, “You’re not gonna die from getting hit by a truck.” No. But “With a song in my heart” a la Rodgers and Hart? Probably not, though yet another of their show tunes comes to mind, lyric we sang in school in the late 1950s. “Some things that happen for the first time / Seem to be happening again.” Perhaps thirty male and female voices, melody and words eliciting unarticulated but hot ’n’ heavy teen eros.



Thomas Farber

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Here and now, six decades later, stopping to catch my breath, after “happening again” comes the song’s refrain: “But who knows where or when.” Where or when. Mind wandering off on its own, toddler toddling toward balcony railing, parent running after. I hear myself thinking, or is it saying to myself, “Who’s next.” And, “What’s next.” As for where or when, well, Death can play a waiting game, may savor playing a waiting game. Christian Wiman argues, “It is the beauty of the world that makes us more conscious of death, not the consciousness of death that makes the world more beautiful.” My thoughts, you ask? Oh, well, I can see it either way. A neighbor who does yoga tells me gratitude is the appropriate response to medical jeopardies, but she’s in her early thirties, may not have reached this conclusion the way Wiman did. The hard way. Still, thinking of where or when, I remember another Rodgers and Hart song that moved me so many years ago: “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.” And then: “Blue Moon.” And then: “My Funny Valentine.” Okay, okay, gratitude.



But about namaste. I don’t seem able to put it . . . behind me. A few months later, an older woman sitting at the café table next to mine is reading Sri Aurobindo’s The Synthesis of Yoga. Making conversation, I mention the young woman with namaste on the back of her shorts, said I took the woman to be conveying that she bowed to the divinity in me. The woman nodded warmly. Smiled. Replied, “That must have felt like a godsend.”

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Acting My Age

Time’s Fool #1

W. S. Graham, declining to write an “auto-elegy” about turning sixty-five, asks, “Where am I going now? / And where are you going.” Fair questions. And, not just where, but how? And when? Artificial intelligence & life. Mobile apps can modify photographs to create versions of your not-yet-older face. But before such transformations, artist Phillip Toledano, photographing his demented father, anxious about his own possible “sad fates,” decided to enact them. A makeup artist and prostheses created versions of Toledano as a drunk; as obese; as homeless. Also slumped over in wheelchair, caretaker checking her phone. And, inevitably, as bathtub suicide. Sic Toledano. But how have I imagined it will end? “Mortality salience,” they call it in the flourishing field of terror management theory: awareness that death—your death—is inevitable. And, even, that most of what we do is impelled by fear of death. By The Denial of Death, title of Ernest Becker’s book. (Becker himself died at forty-nine.) A bit reductionist, terror management theory, but surely containing more than a grain of truth. Recently, the bathroom in my cottage was second-childhood childproofed: grab-bars to prevent falls; raised toilet seat for aching knees; two-sided shaving mirror, one side with unforgiving magnification. The beholder’s predictable shock at sight of Hamlet’s “thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to.” Call me Mr. Natural: jaws shrink; gums recede. Veins bulge. Skin slackens, sags. Lines, wrinkles, age spots. Furrows, folds. Creases. Striations (from Latin for groove, channel). And that bump or whatever it is. A when? Oh, no h? Okay: say wen.

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Overall, I’m dusted with old age, the way we were in grammar school theatricals to play George Washington and his ilk. Surely this is part of the makeup. Long-gone poet Francois Villon’s belle has a question. “This is all that human beauty comes to?” She for whom “once there wasn’t a man alive / who wouldn’t give me everything.” Now “dried up, paltry, thin and scrawny, / I’m nearly driven mad with rage.” Superannuated. Outmoded. Obsolete. Over the hill. Out of it. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” members of my cohort said when I was in my early twenties. In Robert Frost’s vision, the “withered hag” who came to clean “with pail and rag” was once a Hollywood star. “Die early and avoid the fate,” Frost counsels; do what you can to keep “the end from being hard.” Frost-the-baleful. Mischievous, cruel. Frank. But, just how do you adequately “provide, provide”? William Butler Yeats admired actors playing tragic parts who didn’t weep. For me, weeping’s no problem. Re the idiomatic “Not a dry eye in the house,” I’m dry eyed. Lubricate with Visine Tears® or Thera Tears®. Youth versus older age. From anything goes to everything goes. As on the radio in the 1950s when a baseball player hit a homer: “Going, going, gone!” Or, as the official U.S. Air Force song has it, “Off we go into the wild blue yonder.” Think of Samuel Johnson’s “Unnumber’d Maladies” as “Decay pursues Decay.” Or his “life protracted is protracted woe.” Amazing recovery from illness or surgery? Fresh start, “new lease on life.” But, terms of the lease? Durations. Disintegrations. The extent of things.



For the time being. For the time being we timed beings be . . . Time spans. Our “days are numbered.” Job 14:5–7. Duly noted. But what’s the (magic) number? “I’ve got nothing but time,” we’d say when I was a kid, in no hurry at all. “All the time in the world.” “Time’s wasting,” my mother would admonish: “Hurry up,” though I liked “dragging my feet.” Or, bored, had more time “on my hands” than I knew what to do with. Or, impatient with others, might say, “I don’t have time for this.” Now that it’s getting late for me, I can barely believe I was once always the youngest. Yeats’s time, “that has transfigured me.” Time passing, I make a point of being on time. On time? More like under time, as in under time’s thumb. For sure, time’s in charge. Nobody’s ever been able to two-time Time. And while time may pass, it gives none of us a pass. Malicious Time? Or, as Frost wrote, lacking “joy or grief,” merely “grave, contemplative and grave.” “Time stood still”? No: time’s a runaway train. Every one of us aboard.

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Time, when it chooses, moving at double-time. Or taking its own sweet time. Time running late? Not to worry, it’s only a matter of time. Time will tell? Only if it wants to. Time limits? Limits: not noun but verb. Time and death, partners in crime: time handling the long run, death cutting it short. Think dead / lines. Think borrowed time, time we borrowed. Or Marx’s economy of time—how we (get to) spend it. Timely warnings: crime advisories from the local police. The nick of time. Just in time.



I must have thought-without-thinking that life had leeway, space to maneuver. Not assumed, without intent felt there was more of the more-or-less-the-same ahead. Not quite playing for keeps. Like a dress rehearsal, room to remember dropped lines, improve the lighting. Chances for edits, deletions, erasures, additions. For the writer-self, years of revising on the page may have been misleading. May still mislead. Or was the assumption it could be like filing for an extension on your tax return—a hassle, but doable. I have a friend who got such IRS extensions for years, somehow without penalty. Or was it like renewing a prescription, assuming your physician amenable and within reach. Patient asks doctor, “How much time do I have left?” Or, patient asks doctor how long the heart repair will last. “Long as you live,” the doctor cheerfully replies.



Pioneer rocker Buddy Holly died in a plane crash at age twenty-two. His songs were all over the ra-di-o when I was in high school. Unprovoked, words from his lyrics come to mind, making me hear them as if for the first time. “Not fade away.” And, “That’ll be the day-ay-ay when I die.”

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Thomas Farber

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Aging in Place

As defined by our government, it’s being able to live in your own home “safely, independently, and comfortably, regardless of age, income, or ability level.” Amen to that, and, in theory, no one’s left behind, but only if you have the means and get to it early enough. And how early might that be? For sure, do your Swedish “death cleaning” well before death. Whenever death’s scheduled to occur. Retrofit: walk-in bathtubs, ramps, stair-lifts, home elevators. Better lighting. Be virtuous: declutter (clutter: think clots / clatter / cluster). At seventy-seven, singer Joan Baez was proud to say she had only three shirts in her closet. Admirable, but perhaps not a complete inventory of her possessions. (Declutter your mind, they might also advise.) Meanwhile, in the richest country on the planet the old are afraid of going broke. Simon Critchley says people “ultimately don’t trust their children or their loved ones to care for them. Fear of death is a fear of feebleness in an infirm state, stuck in a degrading nursing home, ignored by embarrassed friends and busy, distant family members.” “Scared shitless”? “Get out while the gettin’s good”? Or reconsider “aging in place.” “We age in installments,” as a character in Sándor Márai’s Embers puts it. Or think of it this way: you’re aging each and every moment. As you have been since birth. Sitting down, standing still, partying, meditating, alone or together— aging / aging no matter what. And living as if you’ll be yourself in the morning. Consider the subjunctive verb mood in Spanish. Realm, my friend Pedro explains, of “the uncertain, conjecture, desire, where we often find ourselves these days.” Living as if. Clive James wrote that the life “that cast you, when this all began, / As a small boy, still needs a dying man.” Until then, obey the military drill command: “As you were.” 62

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Kudlow

“Life expectancy”: estimates of the average age members of a population group will be when they die. The average age. Not to be confused with what we expect, plan on, hope for. In a 2019 interview with The Hill, Larry Kudlow, Trump’s chief economic advisor, said, “I don’t think [interest] rates will rise in the foreseeable future, maybe never again in my lifetime.” Born in 1947, Kudlow was seventy-one, had a period of cocaine and alcohol addiction, has held high-stress jobs, and suffered a recent heart attack. When Larry Kudlow said “in my lifetime,” what “foreseeable future” was he anticipating? Did he imagine / hope / assume / believe his life would not end anytime soon? Not that night? Not the next morning? Not right then and there?

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Time’s Fool #2

About your very own impending personal extinction event. Hearing, sight, sense of smell, balance: diminished. Fingers less dexterous. I can’t thread a needle. Dropping things. But not this subject. Goethe wrote, “Ein alter Mann ist stets ein Konig Lear”: “An old man is always a King Lear.” True? Lear’s capricious, cruel. Stupid. All old men are like that? Still, even the lives of not-kings end, and usually with a loss of power, almost always with declining health. Or worse. It’s not just Caliban in The Tempest, whose body with age “uglier grows” and whose mind “cankers.” Jonathan Swift: “Every Man desires to live long, but no Man would be old.” Think of “stranded assets,” things devalued, converted to liabilities. Impaired / nonrecoverable / decommissioned. Depleted, nonperforming. Consider the corpus of the self a one-person corporation. Value diminishing. But, but, I have so much invested in being me! So much net worth! Talk about sunk costs! Nonrecoverable. “You can’t take it with you.” In 1900, about a decade after Herman Melville’s death at age seventy-two, the New York Times printed a letter from a man who’d known him in his later years. Melville “seemed to me to hold his works in small esteem, and discouraged my attempts to discuss them. ‘You know,’ he would say, ‘more about them than I do. I have forgotten them.’ ” James Salter wrote, in All That Is, “He was certain of only one thing, whatever was to come was the same for everyone who had ever lived . . . and—it was difficult to believe—all he had known would go with him.” Oy vey ist mir, they say in Yiddish. Woe is me. And, of course, “Why me?”

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About my one-and-only self. “Not gettin’ any younger,” as they say. No longer who I was, actually. Economist Richard A. Posner writes, “Aging brings about such large changes in the individual that there may well come a point at which it is more illuminating to think of two or more persons ‘time-sharing’ the same identity than of one person having different preferences, let alone one person having the same preferences, over the entire life cycle.” Time-sharing! Other selves elbowin’ “me” out of the way? Not surprisingly, I’ve played an assortment of parts in an already longish life. My poet-mother, gifted performer, termed these her “characterizations” or “leading roles.” Still, psychiatrist Martin Epstein describes “that place inside yourself that hasn’t really changed subjectively. . . that invisible space where you are who you’ve always been.” Yes, Dr. E.! But, I’m not myself, lately. I get that humans are born to die. All creatures that reproduce sexually die, and I’ve been a (determinedly, helplessly) sexual creature. Still, I may have been presuming an exemption from joining those who have “gone to a higher and finer place.” Poet Paul Smyth: “A minute hooks your lip. Resist? But feel / Death’s line yanked taut, and hear the ticking reel.” But one does resist. Oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee writes of “the inevitabilities of inertia and decay.” That is, “The standing body will fall down, fall ill. Yet we keep saying, Look, it’s nothing, until we become nothing. It’s as if nature were built to defy the most natural of all laws: that all of us, in the end, will cool, die, diffuse, dissipate.” All of us dissipating, even the dissipated! Or, as Villon wrote, “And we were so delightful once! / But this is how it ends for all.” All of them, all of us. Library to which even long overdue books are returned. We die because, because . . . because we have lived. “Wait for me,” we kids used to shout. And, when one of us disagreed with something, “It’s your funeral.” And, when not getting all one hoped for, “I can live with it.” Bone weary. Waking in the middle of the night to pee, I remember singing along with The Animals’ Eric Burdon. “We gotta get outta this place / If it’s the last thing we ever do.” It was 1965, I was twenty, the song soon an anti–Vietnam War anthem. (Eric Burdon, now seventy-seven, still “with us,” as they like to say.) As Smokey Robinson and the Miracles sang in the 1960s, “What’s so good about goodbye.” Or the 1960s phrase outtasight, meaning “very good,” becomes out of sight. Premonition. From Latin: “warned before.” Tireless death. Deathless death. Terminal respiratory secretions—death rattles. Death’s got us rattled. As poet Charles Wright put it, “No one arrives without leaving soon.” Or, as R&B singer Lee Dorsey sang, “How long can this go on?”



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About that 1970 De Sica film I mentioned earlier, Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis). It’s possible I was just mistaking the world’s health and future for my own.

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Talking to Myself

Life spans lengthening. Stages within a stage—senior, elder, dotard. Now, in old(er) age, no other human in earshot, I hear myself speaking out loud. More frequently, though who’s counting? I assure myself—in an internal monologue— that I’m not disturbed by this, but I notice. Weigh whether or not I’m in the same cohort as street crazies winning loud arguments with unseen others. Noticing. There seem to be different categories of what my voice makes audible. For example, spiders in the house. I inform visitors the spiders are under my protection. I’ll scoop one up on a short-handled mop, head for the front door. En route, however, the spider may lower a thread to the floor. I admonish it—hear myself admonish it—“Come on, make it easy for me.” Reproaching the spider: I’m a do-gooder. A lifesaver, given that my wife’s not enamored of them. So, vocalizing to something present and living but incapable of replying in kind. Just the way not-senile humans talk to dogs, horses, dolphins, babies. Or, for the second time ever, catching a pocket of my baggy pants on the doorknob as I enter my study, I hear my “What are the odds?” Commenting on the improbable as if sharing the thought with someone who also finds it remarkable. Since no one else is around, however, am I both parties? Two or more separate selves? Me, myself, and I? Similarly, surprised to find a book up in the attic I was sure I’d left downstairs. Spotting it, words emerge from my lips: “Who knows what’s going on. I surely don’t.” As if the someone to whom I am speaking will perhaps laugh at my use of the word surely.

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Or, about to drop something, I say, “Oh, don’t do that,” not clear if I’m addressing what’s about to fall or myself. Or, failing to gather up several things at once in the order intended, I address myself by name: “That’s not the solution, Tom.” Similarly, about to trip on a shoelace: “I’d be careful if I were you, Tommy.” Tommy? Yes, because twenty years ago, when I was in my fifties, my new friend Andrea began calling me Tommy. Not how I’d been addressed since grammar school. It amused me twenty years ago. Still amuses, apparently. Or, brushing my teeth, but interrupting to get my slippers in the living room. Slippers on feet, suddenly at a loss, I hear myself ask, “What am I doing?” “Brushing my teeth,” I reply. Sometimes it’s about cheerleading. “Well done”: I remembered what I’d gone to the garage to find. Or exhorting. “Presumably you know what you are doing.” Or, into the bathroom, staring at the cabinet. Waiting. “Oh, scissors,” finally accessing the object-of-desire’s name. Psychologists believe such “self-talk” is good for recall and focus. And for warnings to oneself, the way toddlers speak out loud for self-control. About swearing. I drop the pen, bend to pick it up as if stiffness had somehow disappeared. Groan. “Piece of shit” enters my ears. As if the pen has a life of its own. Lost fluidity. Ever more intent required. Actions one used to carry off without thought now impeded / hindered / thwarted. Consider something as simple as apple core and wastebasket. Tossing, missing. Retrieving: having to bend down to do so. More unwelcome effort. Hypermetria, hypometria? Overshooting, undershooting: ataxia, an inability to appraise distance? Or merely recalcitrance and hostility of the inanimate? Self or other the cause. Whichever: sounding off; railing at. “Fucking piece of shit.” And, up a notch for a longer cadence of articulation: “Goddamn fuck it to shit.” Not surprisingly, what’s uttered can be self-reproach. Loading the dispenser with the wrong pills, for instance. “Amazing, you’re a real piece of work.” Or, “How have you managed to live so long?” Giving myself an earful, as the idiom has it. Literally outspoken. Sometimes, apparently having come to a conclusion about something, I’m surprised to hear myself say, “That’s that.” Matter settled, closure confirmed. As writer, appraising text I’m working on, I occasionally savor not what I came up with but what, as if on its own, emerged. Still, recently I was taking credit. “Nice work, Tom, beautiful.” What was verbalized evoked by a paragraph in this book about actor Sam Shepard, so you can decide for yourself.

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From time to time vocalizing is occasioned by the ordinary. By the ordinary-incredible. On my daily walk, heart not what it used to be, I again have to pause to catch my breath. Collecting myself, I remember to take a good look around, inventory the silvery green foliage of a pride of Madeira “subshrub.” Flower clusters, blossoms, hundreds of bees at work. More than the eye can see. And then, still winded, I conclude an inner hectoring in which I’ve enjoined myself to be fully present. Time to look up! Which brings into view cotton-ball cumulus clouds, wide cerulean sky. So familiar and yet . . . astounding. How had I lost sight of it all? Brim of my baseball cap too long? Astonishing. So astonishing I seem at a loss for words. Speechless? Tonguetied? “Wow,” I finally manage to (m)utter! Just a single word, the ineffable apparently beyond further saying. As the ineffable, I suppose, should be (Latin ineffabilis, from in, “not,” and effabilis, “speakable”). Back in college, reading Shakespeare’s plays, I savored the asides. When, for instance, Macbeth says he plans more mayhem but is understood not to be heard by anyone else on stage. Or Hamlet’s “a little more than kin, and less than kind,” his first words in the play. But maybe such soliloquies call for more than an audience of one. Groundlings in the pit, pressing close to the stage, perhaps; notables in the gallery.

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above

Large dead algae-covered cauliflower coral, Keauhou, Hawai‘i, 2016. Photograph by Wayne Levin opposite

Large bleached cauliflower coral, Keauhou, Hawai‘i, 2015. Photograph by Wayne Levin

Tantrumming

Tantrum: a word of unknown origin. I’ve spoken ill of the dolphin facility director. Having died at age eighty-six, he’s not around anymore. Not, at least, around in the way he used to be. As for where he might be now, and with which not-us folk / beings / spirits if any, people of faith differ, as do people of little-or-no faith. When I was a child, old(er) folks sometimes asked, “Did I forget myself?” Meaning, were they inadvertently rude, briefly out of character. I myself, despite seasons of prudence and caution, have had episodes—eras!—of being reckless, volatile. Hence, “Did I forget myself?”—the rhetorical question as self-defense—may not, lamentably, be something I can invoke. Think of the qualities ascribed to the non-demented old(er). Kindliness / patience / equanimity / acceptance / appreciativeness / tolerance / tranquility. Also thoughtfulness, able to draw on hindsight. Not to mention frankness / candor / outspokenness, even a cheerful belligerence. Someone, that is, free to speak his mind. Archetypes: wise old man, wizard, guru, teacher, sage. Native Hawaiian kūpuna—elders embodying love / caring / righteousness. Would that the list of qualities stopped there! But also intransigence / scolding / obstinacy / inflexibility. Slovenliness. Avarice. The senex iratus, all rages and threats, impeding the passion of the young. The senex amans, jealous husband married to a young woman. As T. S. Eliot wrote, “Do not let me hear / Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly.” Consider—if you of a “certain age” can stand to—Juvenal’s AD second-century catalogue of longevity’s ills, old men “so loathsome a sight that even legacy-hunters turn queasy.” Longevity for Juvenal is “the least among nature’s gifts.” Or

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think of Aristotle’s AD third-century view of the old as cynical, suspicious, small-minded, stingy, cowardly, fearful, calculating, and malicious. The old. Though sometimes sullenly silent and withdrawn, they’re often said to be garrulous (Latin garrire, “to prattle on”). As for yours truly, as you may have noticed, such chatter can incarnate in the form of tirades, fulminations, and diatribes. Being willful: too much will, not enough won’t. Being intemperate. And, often, aware of being intemperate. Refusing to acknowledge being intemperate. Conscious, sometimes, of being unable not to be intemperate. “Once an adult, twice a child,” they used to say, but what a relief to no longer be a child, the familiar reproach back then, “You’re out of control.” Or, “Get yourself under control.” Or, “Act your age.” The old—stubborn, recalcitrant— are, like children, out there on the margins of the adult world. Entitlements. Now one can be irascible (Latin ira, “anger”). Irritable, testy, dyspeptic. “I say what I choose— / having nothing to lose / by being a demon, taking a chance. / No punishment. / I can afford / to be mean, cranky and mean, ranting and raving.” Or so argues the (also) vulnerable and sentimental grandmother in my poet-mother’s How Does It Feel to Be Old. Meantime, don’t overlook the asperity in exasperated. Acerbic, caustic. A sense, not always pleasurable, that there’s no bridge one might not burn. Temper. And distemper, mixing things in wrong proportions. About what might make one more temperate, think of author-killer Edgar Smith. According to the New York Times, during a parole hearing when Smith was seventy-five, he “was asked what would stop him from committing more violent crimes if he were freed. ‘Old age,’ he replied.” So Smith argued, though unable to prove the point, still incarcerated when he died at eighty-three. But about the dolphin facility director. They say, “De mortuis nihil nisi bonum” (Don’t speak ill of the dead). That this enjoinder, traced back to Diogenes Laërtius in AD third century, still has legs suggests the living continue to be uneasy about abusing the departed, who surely outnumber us. Who (which? or, what’s left of them, their. . . remains?) are nonetheless deemed disadvantaged by not being around to protest. Death-muted, they may hear us all too well. One can imagine—actually, one can only imagine—their reproaches: “You’ve got it wrong, settling scores, hindsight is 20/20, things were different then, you’re mean spirited, blind to your own motives! You think you’re better than we are. Oops, than we were.” The dead may have a point, though some benefit more from the halo effect, George H. W. Bush most recently. Trump attending number 41’s funeral in anticipation of someday—surely unimaginably far off—being the object of such pomp. More “winning.” As for reverse halo effects, the absent dead are handy. Gone but kinda here, available both for being idealized or idolized and unable to sue for slander. As necessary to, say, revisionist historians as dolphins were to the director. Think of biographers, sometimes not so much hagiographers (Greek, “holy” and



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“writing”)—see paeans to Ronald Reagan—but debunkers / undertakers / vandals / parasites. Roger Lewis writes, “Few biographers have had the ability or wit to perceive and describe the Cubist jaggedness of a life. Accident, chance, reversals of fortune, betrayals, sudden eruptions, dreams and areas of darkness; the shifting layers of identity, the friction between public and private selves.” Roger Lewis himself, one mildly observes, qualifies as an articulately vituperative biographer. The dead, then: food for thought and food for. . . cannibals. But, still, what have the dead done for us lately? How make themselves useful? ’Nother Egyptian tomb unearthed? Helpful for tour guides purveying to gray-haired but not-yet-deceased seers of sights. But what about fair play for the dead? During the period the no-longer-with-us is still sorta around, relatives and friends grieving, Laërtius’s admonition seems not unreasonable. At least to me, as I free-fall further into my eighth decade. Even so, some of the dead leave one craving correctives. Think of the J. Edgar Hoover FBI building, Brutalist raw-concrete shit-heap currently falling apart. Let it rot to memorialize its namesake. But no erasing his name. “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” as we kids said years ago, phrase that had been emanating from English-speaking mouths for centuries. (Put another way: when will there be Medals of Honor celebrating the valor of those who opposed the American wars in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan? And how ’bout a Medal of Freedom for Crosby, Stills, and Nash: “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming, four dead in Ohio.”) “Why beat a dead horse?” they used to ask. How much can a little magnanimity cost? Let bygones be bygones. Or, let the long gone be long gone. Forget the mostly forgotten dead. Okay? Okay. But then, what about the living? Surely restraint concerning the recently “laid to rest” doesn’t mean we can’t speak ill of those still up and around. Like who? Thank you for asking! How ’bout war criminal Doctor Henry Kissinger, age ninety-six as of this writing. Pregunta, they say in Spanish: a question. Why the nonmedical honorific in a world teeming with graduate degrees? Why not plain ol’ Henry K / former prof Henry K. Or, if “Doctor” be required for him to auto-inflate or auto-fellate, or if the body politic needed a Doctor to, say, destroy Cambodia or subvert Chile, well then, all right: Doctor Mayhem / Doctor Deceit / Doctor Death. Like Mengele, Doctor even posthumously. But did I overlook any still-breathing body? Ah, wily, remorse-less, remorsefree Dick Cheney, age seventy-eight. Still loves his Iraq War, still big on torture. Daughter Liz carrying on the family tradition. Until these souls depart the material plane, there should be a demand for

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their silence. And for justice: not restorative, but re-trib-u-tive. “Get-back’s a motherfucker,” they used to say. A. R. Ammons’s “Squall Lines” contains the phrase “the vigil till enemies die.” An all-too-human sentiment, though not my own. Paragon of well-wishing, I say L’chaim: long life. How long, you ask? Very long, like Jonathan Swift’s Struldbruggs. As everearnest Gulliver learned, they “had not only all the Follies and Infirmities of other old men, but many more which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying.” Not to mention being “opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative; but incapable of Friendship, and dead to all natural Affection.” And, in the end, not just senile but eternally senile. Fifty-nine in 1726 when Gulliver’s Travels was published, Swift had long feared decay of body and mind. Mortal except on the page, Swift ended life in pain, unable to talk, and demented. “A driveler,” said Swift’s adversary Samuel Johnson, who had no problem speaking ill of the dead. (The Struldbruggs. Role models for immortalists? Longevity, our American summum bonum.) But more about my wishing others incredibly long life. And about being intemperate. Appraising former New Yorker editor Tina Brown’s memoir, Craig Brown writes, “Revulsion brings out the best in her.” And of himself, Swift— unapologetically—wrote that he had the “sin of wit” and “After venting all my Spite, / Tell me, what have I to write?” So: spleen vented and re-vented? Such a small organ, the spleen, just a few inches long, hardly all there is to us. But whatever we conclude about being splenetic, the spleen does function as an essential part of the auto-immune system. Therefore: God save the spleen!!! With, perhaps, this caution. As Richard Seltzer wrote in Mortal Lessons, “A man does not know whose hands will stroke from him the last bubbles of his life. That alone should make him kinder to strangers.”

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anatomy lessons

Words. Shape-shifting, evolving. Or, one’s self suddenly awakened to, inquisitive about, a word. For instance, in my early thirties I came into possession of a home-built oceangoing trimaran. Very, very funky—no ship’s head, for one thing. Given endless scraping and painting—sun and salt water corrode / rust / rot / decompose—ownership of the trimaran made me both captain and slave. When I registered it with the Department of Motor Vehicles, the appropriate category was “sailing vessel.” Vessel. I was acquainted with the word: high school biology class; wall charts of the circulatory system. I also had several years of Latin, but don’t remember bumping into vasculum, a small container, diminutive of vas, “ship.” Things containing things. I was in my late twenties when my physician-father died. In the aftermath, my mother gave me a copy of the autopsy report. Professor of pathology, having spent much time in the dead-house, the morgue, and the autopsy room to understand disease in the hope of curing it, my father had authored many such documents. As for the “680 grams” of my father’s heart, “Post-mortem examination revealed severe, multi-vessel atherosclerotic coronary artery disease, with old occlusions partly recanalized, and two major old infarctions fibrotically healed. The left ventricle was markedly hypertrophic with a large, thinned portion posteriorly. . . [His] terminal episode was probably an arrhythmia, or a very recent extension of his infarctions.” Thus my father’s heart vessels. Heavyhearted, heartbroken, heartsick, sick at heart, I soon forgot the terms of the report. Writing about my father fifteen years later, I quoted from his book The Postmortem Examination (1937): “The heart is grasped by the left hand and 76

drawn upward and forward. The great vessels are then severed by horizontal knife strokes.” Vessels. In my early fifties, surfing all the time, I felt not just strong but powerful. But then one day I had to lean against a building for. . . dear life. Angina, as it turns out, from the Greek ankhonē, “strangling.” A hurry-up coronary procedure averted a heart attack. As I recovered, one doctor believed the stress of being a writer was my problem. “You’re writing your heart out,” he argued. Another doctor noticed me inspecting a life-size model of the heart on his desk. “From a pharmaceutical company. You want it?” I did. Kept it on a shelf in my study, but soon seldom remembered the ankhonē that had brought it there. Now, twenty years later, I’m more attentive. Blood vessels are part of one’s vascular system—there’s the Latin vas again. Among the five types are arteries and veins, channels carrying blood away from or toward the heart. Occlusion of a blood vessel means insufficient blood supply. Blockages create eddies— circular movements counter to flow—which form deposits on the artery wall. More impediments. My recurrent occlusions: throttlings; suffocations. Angiograms: invasive look-sees. Angioplasty: brilliant technique to repair. Angi-, from Greek angeion, diminutive of angos—“jar, vat, vase.” Vessels once again. And heart bypass surgery, blocked arteries replaced with the body’s other blood vessels. Lately, I remember the Messiah from childhood, Handel’s oratorio a Boston Christmas season perennial. In Part II, after the bass sings “Why do the nations rage so furiously together?” and before the “Hallelujah” chorus, there’s a brief aria. The libretto is from Psalms 2:9: “Thou shall break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” Just one sentence for two minutes, the tenor over and again running up and down the scale while singing the “po” of potter’s. Landing, finally, on the word vessel. In D. H. Lawrence’s “The Ship of Death,” composed not long before he died, the poet wrote, “We are dying, we are dying, so all we can do / is now to be willing to die, and to build the ship / of death to carry the soul on the longest journey.” Self-exiled from Britain, traveler heading for Sardinia from Sicily, Lawrence described “that long, slow, waveringly rhythmic rise and fall of the ship, with waters snorting as it were from her nostrils, oh God what a joy it is to the wild innermost soul.” In Acts 9:15, the Lord tells Ananias that Saul-become-Paul “is a chosen vessel unto me.” Of Lawrence’s commitment to his art, one might say he was the vessel of his muse. Tubercular, the poet died in 1930 at age forty-four. As a sailor familiar with warnings to mariners, I read “The Ship of Death” as a small craft advisory. When Lawrence describes a “little ark” on the sea of death carrying his soul into oblivion, I picture a sailing vessel.



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Thomas Farber, 2020. Photograph by Andrea Young

presentation of self

La bella figura, Italian for “looking your best, making a good impression on others.” The best possible impression, actually. Display of taste and grace. Performance art. Suddenly it dawns on me: it’s been years since I wore one of my many, many black dress shirts. Or my black leather half boots. Or the black leather coat I had made in Paris decades ago. Playing the writer, a writer’s uniform no longer worn. As in childhood, when one outgrew clothes. Still, you don’t get to go naked in this vale of tears. These days, it’s down vest, down jacket, fleece or cotton pants. T-shirts. All black. Black running shoes for slow walking. “Live a little,” they used to say. Meaning, “Relax, have a good time.” At seventy-five, I have lived more than a little. They also used to say, “Let yourself go,” which back then meant “take it easy.” But now “letting yourself go” is cautionary: you should pay more attention to how you look. Not just for others, but for the sake of your health. This past winter, heavy rains, late rains. The end of more than seven years of California drought. In the front yard, this year the magnolia tree blooming in early January, plum tree in February. Calla lilies in early March, more of them in the front yard than I remember seeing ever before. The “inflorescence” of Zantedeschia aethiopica, a dazzlingly white funnel-shaped spathe, which is—merely!—a kind of leaf. And inside this funnel, a yellow spadix, thin shaft carrying the flowers. The pure-white spathe, not surprisingly, functions to attract pollinators. And non-pollinators, like yours truly. I tell myself the lilies have never looked better. But it’s not just the lilies. It’s my awareness of them. These particular lilies are big at Easter, all resurrection

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and rebirth. But, also, showboats, enticing. Georgia O’Keeffe showed how they evoke female genitalia. But, no unprotected sex: lilies can irritate on contact, may be toxic when eaten. As the weeks of March wear on, the glossy spathes wilt, droop, shrink. Wither, shrivel. Become brittle and brown, spadix turning dark. And this would make me feel blue, except that lilies are both deciduous and perennials. Odds are they’ll be back in the yard next year, as they have nearly five decades. Perennials. Will I be there to see them? Today, for instance, I’m worn out. Is this how things come to an end? End? Back in the cottage, I take another look at three photos of, how to put it, former selves: 1. There’s one from age twenty, pinned to the bookcase in my study. Eyebrows, mustache, hair so thick, face thin, eyes intent. Intense. Looking, an uncle told me—abjuring immigrant parents—as if I’d just gotten off the boat. Well, I’m not that college bohemian anymore. So why this photo? Maybe to remember where my writerly self got started. When I was in my early thirties, a lover, seeing this photo of an earlier me, said, “I don’t know that person.” At the time, I was incredulous, and miffed, but no longer. Things change. 2. On the wall upstairs there’s a color photo—framed, clips and glass. I’m on the beach, carrying a surfboard. Shaved head, mustache, wet-suit vest, muscular arms. Maybe forty-five, in the ocean every day. Confident, strong. The shaved head, like the mustache, would be me for the duration, I was sure. And why this photo? Though I had it framed to celebrate that self, I’m no longer that fellow. As if to prove the point, the photo’s faded from decades of afternoon sunlight. 3. The third one? Taken by my wife, at my request. In the intensive care unit at age seventy after open-heart surgery. Face very thin, eyes dull, hospital gown open at the chest, line of dried blood along the incision. Just out of sight, various tubes still connected. I asked for the picture because I wanted a record of what—it seemed—I’d just survived. Now I keep the image on my computer’s desktop. Memento mori, to remind myself that we die. Which, when things are good, I don’t find it hard to forget.

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Not Prone to False Optimism

In Fragments of a Journal, playwright Eugène Ionesco wrote, “People die of hunger. They die of thirst. They die of boredom. They die of laughing. They die of curiosity. They die of terror. They die in battle, of course. They die of sickness. They die of old age. They die every day.” Ionesco added, “Old men long to kill. Old men are vile. The young are second-rate and stupid.” And, he wrote, “The young are aggressive, the old cling. It takes as much energy to be aggressive as to cling; or perhaps the clinging takes more.”

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The Hour of the Star was Brazilian author Clarice Lispector’s last book. In this novella, the narrator describes the brief life of a slum girl. “I’ll miss myself so bad when I die,” the narrator quotes her as saying. And, he concludes, “But do not mourn the dead: they know what they are doing.”

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Humpback whale trailing bubbles, Kona Coast, Hawai‘i, 2001. Photograph by Wayne Levin

Lost at Sea







Most Holy Spirit! Who didst brood Upon the chaos dark and rude, And bid its angry tumult cease, And give, for wild confusion, peace; Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, For those in peril on the sea! William Whiting, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save”

Four ocean songs from my childhood: “There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea,” each verse adding something in the hole—log / branch on the log / bump on the branch on the log / frog on the bump on the branch on the log in the hole in the bottom of the sea. Ad infinitum—what’s called a cumulative song, very popular with kids. “The Skye Boat Song.” “Loud the winds howl, loud the waves roar / Thunderclaps rend the air,” but Bonnie Prince Charlie escapes “like a bird on the wing.” A willful child, often disciplined, perhaps I too was “the lad who’s born to be king.” “A Capital Ship,” lyrics from a poem by Charles A. Carryl. “The man at the wheel was made to feel / contempt for the wildest blo-o-ow, / Tho’ it often appeared when the gale had cleared, / That he’d been in his bunk below.” And, “Oh it was sad (very sad), oh it was sad. It was sad when the great ship went down, to the bottom.” A folk song, they say, which made its appearance after the Titanic sank in 1912. In my days as a child at summer camp in the 1950s, it was sung and shouted with boisterous good cheer. Same gusto as “I’ve been working on the railroad,” or “Build me a bungalow,” or “I’ve got sixpence.” 83

Raucous. But what about those “husbands and wives, little children lost their lives.” None of us pausing to imagine what it was like to perish that way. No pity, just the wealthy on board? Harry Elkins Widener and his parents, it turns out, were there. Only his mother survived, funding the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library at Harvard. During college in the early 1960s, I was often in Widener library, loved going down and down in the stacks, browsing books long unread. Bumping into the shelf of books by sailor-writer Joseph Conrad, most not checked out for many years. Writing my thesis on Lord Jim. Jim, who abandoned ship.

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Every sea is sea. Why do we foolishly blame the Cyclades, or the Hellespont, and the Sharp Isles? They merit not their evil fame; for why, when I had escaped them, did the harbour of Scarphaea drown me? Let who will pray for fair weather to bring him home; Aristagoras, who is buried here, knows that the sea is the sea. Antipater of Thessalonica “But the sea is a picky eater. It chooses its sacrifice.” Anna Badkhen, Fisherman’s Blues

Shipwrecks. In his twenties, my friend’s father Henry was crew on an American ship that sank off Newfoundland during World War II. Not German sub; navigational error. Somehow making it to shore in the freezing and oil-slicked waves, trapped at the foot of an icy cliff, Henry was one of the survivors rescued by heroic Canadian villagers. Saved from what T. S. Eliot termed “the sea’s lips.” Henry lived to be nearly one hundred, loved the ocean, for most of his life continued to sail the seven seas. Witty, compassionate, humane, and curious till the very end. Well loved, well cared for. Maybe you get just one shipwreck per life, and Henry was not exactly lucky but maybe lucky to have his shipwreck early on. Got it over and done with.

 After still another surgery, an elderly friend, long in the tooth, told me he’d “dodged another bullet.” Flintlock pistol at ten yards? Protocols, etiquette. Fair play. As if figures of speech can mitigate facts. The aging self as body shop. Not the dating-bar kind: the ones for cars. More than a fender-bender taking place. Auto-self nearly totaled. A wreck, actually. About aging, it’s no surprise that ocean—inviting, powerful, variable, menacing—is a source of metaphor. Freya Stark, early twentieth-century traveler, wrote in her midfifties that “the joy of youth is the setting out on its voyage, but the happiness of age has achievement behind it and a landfall in sight; it is no small thing to come without shipwreck within hail of one’s anchorage.” Despite a tough childhood, being unlucky in love, illnesses, and memory

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loss, Stark died at age one hundred. “Without shipwreck,” in a safe harbor, one hopes. As Greek poet Hesiod observed nearly three thousand years ago, “For I say again it’s a terrible thing to perish at sea.” And, “It is a fearful thing to die among the waves.” In his Memoires, Charles de Gaulle wrote “La vieillesse est un naufrage” (Old age is a shipwreck). So concise, final, unsettling! In his early sixties, however, de Gaulle wasn’t speaking of himself—for ten of the next fifteen years he was president of France. Rather, he was referring to Marshal Pétain. During World War II, already in his eighties, the former war hero was head of the Vichy government. “La vieillesse est un naufrage. Pour que rien ne nous fût épargné, la vieillesse du maréchal Pétain allait s’identifier avec le naufrage de la France.” Old age a shipwreck for France because Pétain, who, “the years having eaten away at his character,” betrayed himself and his country. Far better had Pétain missed the boat.

 As for real ships at real sea, between wind and water they must be ship / shape. Water / tight. Water / proof. Impermeable, impregnable. Built for “smooth sailing,” albeit prone to “structural discontinuity.” When “tempest-tost,” like Jonah’s ship on the way to Tarshish, rigid bodies move up and down / side to side / front to back. Heave / sway / surge / yaw / pitch /  roll. May become ships in distress (Latin distringere, “stretch apart”). Such wear and tear, however, is not the simulation of fashion’s “distressed” jeans. (O latestage capitalism!) Since the 1920s, there’s the call “Mayday, mayday, mayday” (French, m’aider, “help me”). Ships run aground, they list, labor, founder. Are dismasted, upended. Are swamped. Waterlogged. They pitchpole, stern over bow. Are engulfed, submerged. During both World War I and World War II there were hundreds of torpedoed ships. No doubt de Gaulle saw photographs and newsreels. Perhaps in the Louvre, de Gaulle had also seen Gericault’s 1819 canvas, Le Radeau de la Méduse (The Raft of the Medusa). A warship, the Méduse carried more than forty cannons and a hapless captain. In 1816, it was beached—got stuck, was stranded—off the coast of Africa. More than two hundred on board were evacuated into launches, the remaining nearly hundred fifty placed on an improvised raft. Soon left behind, those on the raft endured chaos, mutiny, murder, starvation, and cannibalism. Think of the impact of this nineteenth-century catastrophe in an era of many shipwrecks, often right on shore and visible to beach-goers. Pathos, vicarious terror. Schadenfreude. Relief at being spared such a nightmare. Tropes of marine disasters included desperation, heroism, panic, cowardice, despair. Crew bailing; captain going down with the ship; captain not going down with the ship; rats abandoning.



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Drowning, death from submersion in water. Swallowing the sea, being swallowed by the sea. A sinking sensation, people say, or my heart sank. And it’s not just the drowning. In Aridjis’s Sea Monsters, “Shipwrecks fall prey to all kinds of appetites . . . the appetite of salt water, the appetite of sea creatures, the appetite of time.” And, “How to ignore the tragedy of the wreck, like that of a carcass in a wildlife program, no longer breathing yet under continued assault—once the mortal blow is dealt, a host of scavengers moves in.” As we learn, “In the Mediterranean there are three main saltwater macro-organisms that share a fondness for ancient timber: the shipworm, the wood piddock, and the marine gribble.” As for other post-shipwreck sea-changes, in Deep James Nestor writes: It takes a long time to become ooze. First you need to die and be eaten, then excreted, then have another organism eat that excrement, then have yet another animal eat that organism that just ate that excrement, and so on. This cycle will repeat until all that’s left of you are a few million molecules spread out like a constellation of stars across the world’s ocean. And you’ve still got a few thousand years to go before you become ooze.

Farther into the depths, Nestor continues, phytoplankton “will degrade you into even smaller bits,” and then when these die “the last little bit of whatever is left of you—some cluster of molecules—will drift off inside the tiny microscopic skeletons . . . in a never-ending snowstorm of detritus that floats down,” perhaps even to “a depth so dark and foreboding that scientists have named it the hadal zone, from the Greek word Hades, or hell.” Thus watery fates. If, however, old age is likened to shipwreck, does the figure of speech really hold water? Is everyone’s old age a shipwreck? Even capsized boats can be “righted.” Further, because there are survivor stories, we know fifteen souls on the Méduse-doomed raft did not go down to Davy Jones’s locker. Think of the finale of Moby Dick: “Concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.” That done, “the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” Ishmael, who’d found himself lost on land before shipping out, afloat on the life buoy of the coffin his friend Queequeg made, lives to narrate the tale. More recently, in Martel’s The Life of Pi, “The ship sank. It made a sound like a monstrous metallic burp. Things bubbled at the surface and then vanished. Everything was screaming: the sea, the wind, my heart.” But Pi survives, whether or not there really was a tiger with him in the lifeboat. Shipwrecks: ship + wrecks. Wrecks originally referring not to vessel but cargo. Think “wrack and ruin.” Both flotsam (French flotter, “floating”) and

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jetsam (thrown overboard, jettisoned) are sometimes retrieved, recovered. Are salvageable. Saved, recovered, restored. If old age is a shipwreck, might there be human flotsam? Or is old age better compared to a ship that’s derelict—left behind? You’d think, however, that old age is not lagan—cargo intentionally placed underwater to be retrieved. Not, that is, unless you’re into cryogenics. During World War II, the government cautioned that loose lips sink ships. About shipwrecks and old age, one might say, “Woe betide” landlubbers who risk carrying too much rhetorical sail, failing to stand clear of a verbal lee shore. Or, wind of purpling prose at their backs, they should beat to windward, closehauled. If so, they might warrant the kind of comparison Raymond Tallis achieves in The Black Mirror. Imagining his own death, he writes, “RT goes down with the organism to which his life is fastened and which, failing, changes from a craft which enabled him to voyage across the world to the sea water in which he drowns, changes to a darkness in which the captain, the ship, and the ocean are all one.”

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Poet Yehuda Amichai put it somewhat differently: “To live is to build a ship and a harbor / at the same time.” The harbor, however, is completed only long after the ship has been lost at sea.

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Hirsute

My mustache, still. Shaved head, still. But, unlike some in my cohort, no beard. Which makes me wonder who has ’em, who does not. There’s bushy-bearded Ram Dass, until recently playing his part in the theater of dharma transmission. In the secular realm, post–Late Night David Letterman, tired of shaving, marked life change with mega-beard. As for non-beards, think back to A Hard Day’s Night, Beatle Paul’s troublemaking grandfather (played by Wilfrid Brambell, only fifty at the time). “A nice old man,” and “very clean,” the other Beatles say. Among my friends, there’s Robert, in his sixties working as a carpenter and still into pickup basketball when he grew a goatee. Teased by friends about newly visible white hair, he said it was liberating—helped keep him from imagining he was still a player in the game of sexual competition. Walking across campus, he’d become depressed: undergraduate women just couldn’t see him. Adding, as if it followed, “I have no more secrets.” Secrets only for the beardless sexual self? Another friend, Jerome, was the first graybeard in our circle. Then in his forties, he’d begun studying with Hasidic Jews, soon not shaving either because Torah forbids it or because of beard proximity or beard contagion. Re my own facial hair. Since trying out a version of myself as college bohemian, I’ve had a mustache more than fifty-five years. Faithful to this look, like my father with his mustache, except for a few months in my twenties wandering in North Africa. Came home gaunt and bearded. Was in no rush to revert to my previous status quo until a first date with a compelling young woman.

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Hacked the beard off late that night until again there was just my mustache. “This is who I really am,” I told her. Believed. Though that first date seems a lifetime ago, it’s merely five decades. Now the mustache is no longer dark brown or black. A mix of gray and white, apparently still part of my sense of who I really am. This though shaving to clear the white stubble—spiny sea urchin gristle—is ever more a chore.

 Thus far, then, no beard for me. Who else doesn’t grow one? And / or, why are most Washington politicians and players clean shaven? Nothing to hide? This though bewattled / dewlapped Mitch McConnell might consider facial hair. (Should lying-straight-faced public officials be exempt from body shaming? If so, shame on me.) In the realm of the entrepreneurial, consider Mark Zuckerberg, boy-billionaire all grow’d up. Though this millennial butchers his own goats, for him no artisan-woodsman’s facial hair. At thirty-five, still a “beardless youth.” Idle question: what percentage of FB employees have beards? Z’s signature T-shirt: no tricks up such short sleeves! Think of 1960s Playboy centerfolds—impossible for airbrushed girls-next-door to be hookers. Not that Z’s a hooker. A tech utopian, he’s “bringing the world closer together.” Question: such technology liberates whom from what? And, Z’s job description? He’s “in sales,” or—nouns can be so blunt—a salesman. Selling predictive data points for targeted ads tailored to each user, based on information collected, recorded, captured from each user. Aggregated to manipulate the behavior of “friends” to . . . make money. “A surveillance system disguised as a high school reunion,” John Oliver argued. Designed to cultivate addiction, former FB president Sean Parker said. So, Facebook or, as some have it, Fakebook: a predatory con. Meanwhile, who else is Z selling? Salesman-in-chief saying, maybe believing, his deceptions have the goal of making you happy? Or is it just about lust for power or the reluctance to admit colossal error. “We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility—that was a mistake and I’m sorry for it,” Z said. More PR. As George Soros put it, “Facebook and the others [Google, etc.] are on the side of their own profits.” FB: cesspool of conspiracy theories; live-streamed murder; accessory to ethnic cleansing; algorithms calculated to feed and feed off of divisiveness. Mary Anne Franks argues FB always understood it was no mere mirror of society, that it had the potential to “encourage and amplify the worst of humanity.” As for Z’s “move fast and break things.” Other folks have said, “If you break it, you own it.” Might Z offer reparations? Trump and Z having a meeting: flip sides of the same coin.



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Meanwhile, unlike some millennials, Z’s into home ownership: Kaua‘i ($100 mil?); SF ($10 mil?); Tahoe ($59 mil?); Palo Alto ($51 mil?). About safety challenges for multibillionaires. Z’s “armed executive protection officers” cost millions of dollars a year, and, rumor has it, there’s an escape “panic chute” in his conference room. As they say in French, “La gloire, mais a quel prix?” In the name of community, some no-charge advice: if and when Z’s ever on the run, a false beard will be the best disguise.

 In Satire X, Juvenal observed that “old men all look alike. Their voices are as shaky as their limbs, their heads without hair, their noses driveling as in childhood.” But things have changed in the two thousand years since Juvenal. Middle-class graybeards now seem to aspire to “look alike.” They are not kidnapped or overwhelmed by aging, so their beards, like the inevitable tattoos of the young, are matters of choice. One sees these graybeards pedaling around town on old, much-used bikes. Prudently safety-helmeted, blinking red light on top. Retirement’s maraschino cherry. Done with car-commuting, back to two-wheeling (no training wheels this time round). Genially gliding by stop signs: remembrance of things past. Generic—how can any one of them tell himself from the others? Though these olders put me in mind of unicycled Bongo the Bear in the Disney cartoon, are they merely doing what’s age appropriate? Arriving at this look in the natural course of things? Despite coming of age in the turbulent late 1960s and early 1970s, they ended up with career; first, or second, or. . . spouse; children; grandchildren; Medicare; Social Security; stocks riding high under Trump though they. . . deplore him. Not to mention house exchanges with Parisians or folks in Tuscany. Notwithstanding family deaths / dementias / bankruptcies / infidelities / divorces / colon-cancer scares, possessed of enough patience / forbearance / perseverance or just plain dumb luck to finally manifest the self as graybeard on bicycle. The on-their-own olders, however, are the amateurs. Consider weekend members of two-wheel flotillas. Collectives of mounted sadhus, renouncing material things? Spiritual mendicants? Nope: biking as knee saving / environmentally correct / viable for the pudgy-paunchy. And, since this is the US of A, Europhiles displaying gear. Italian bike, $10k; shoes, $300; helmet, $150; bib shorts / jersey / arm warmers / wind jacket, $500; sunglasses, $200. Throw in a heart-rate monitor for $300 to $400. Figure $15k, Luis Buñuel’s discreet charms of the bourgeoisie one more time. (Brands and model numbers available on request.)

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Still, are such graybeards simply in proper pre-departure mode? Or are the beards their wives / grown kids / grandkids really, really hate a gesture back toward freedom? A just-me-ism lost when the early 1970s faded in their rearview mirrors? As the Rolling Stones sang in 1969, Mick Jagger then in his midtwenties, “Well, what can a poor boy do.”

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Family Planning

So much to (try to) attend to. The future, for example. Question: Your next line of work? Answer: Being posthumous. Advanced health-care directive. Living will. POLST: Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment. “Do not attempt resuscitation.” Relieve pain and suffering by medication, but no intubation (into the windpipe) / advanced airway interventions / mechanical ventilation / cardioversion (electric shocks to restore normal heart rhythm). No place on the form to direct—plead with—friends and family to put a pillow on your face and sit on it. That directive goes elsewhere. Also, trying to be helpful to survivors, the Trident Society sends an unsolicited “Dear Tom” note about cremation. How be disposed of? Cremation now understood as bad for the environment. How the ground, as they say, keeps changing! Think “recomposition burial.” Not quite dust to dust: remains into soil. Two millennia ago, in his Meditations Emperor Marcus Aurelius recommended living each day as if it’s your last. Poet Carl Dennis, however, in “A Maxim” cautions against taking this too literally. Lest, for example, your house “slide into disrepair.” Good to make time to say thanks or repay debts, but “no shame in leaving behind some evidence / You were hoping to live beyond the moment.” From my Shakespeare class in college, I remember Polonius’s advice to Laertes. When I first saw Hamlet staged, Polonius was played as an old windbag, though nothing he commended to his son sounded like bad advice. The last few years, giving skeptical graduate students my opinion of something, I’ve

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sometimes felt like that version of Polonius. Nonetheless, perhaps I can provide guidance for those in my stage of living: 1. Old(er) folks, stick with your own kind. They alone understand what you’re going through. 2. But then again: old(er) folks, hang out with the young and younger, who aren’t beset by the problems of you and your ilk. 3. Or, quoting wisdom an elderly rancher was determined to pass on to me when I was in my twenties, “Don’t get old.”

 Well, slow start as a neo-Polonius. But I also remember what my friend Neil advised thirty-five years ago. My mother was dying, my three siblings and I alternately caring for her. “I don’t know how you do it,” Neil said, meaning living alone as I was then, flying cross-country so many times to do my part. Neil was a worrywart, saw all the dangers of life and then some. How could I not be raising a family? “I mean, come on, stop bullshitting yourself,” Neil told me. “Think about it. Look who’s taking care of your mother.” Good counsel, well meant. Not long after, heading out to the local minimart, Neil was hit by a drunk driver. Killed. Left two very young sons who wouldn’t be caring for their father in his old age.

 Nothing more a neo-Polonius can suggest? Sure: don’t forget that the happiest day of your stay on Earth may be the day you’re discharged from the hospital. And? Though the idea of mortality keeps some folks up at night, good to consider what likely precedes the end of the end of it all. Forget life versus death: as with so many things, binaries deceive. Think decrepitude, helplessness. Apart from massive stroke / heart attack / dying in your sleep, nowadays the usual is an as-if-interminable “death trajectory” before “active dying.” For obituary writers, euphemism a default setting, the “deceased” is forever “battling” disease. But such fights are seldom fair, often last far more than twelve or fifteen rounds. In “Proverbs and Songs,” Antonio Machado wrote, “I give advice, an old man’s vice: / never follow my advice.” Nonetheless, I suggest you check out that “completed life” pill they’re talking about in Europe. When I was a teenager, it was “frenchies” / Trojans / hope for the best. The Pill changed all that. So: if there can be birth control without the government interfering, why not death control? Why have to jump through hoops even where there is “physician-assisted suicide” or “aid in dying.” Why have to certify suffering, pay thousands of dollars for a pill that should be generic and cheap? Your veterinarian can “put down” your dogs and cats. Can you not put yourself down?



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About a stash for the if and when. Barbiturates, perhaps? Nembutal still available in Mexico—maybe. But how get it from there to here? Or, perhaps, sodium nitrite, a common food preservative. Or? Well, not that I’d want it for myself, a friend has a pistol in a table drawer by his bed. Also has caretakers who know better—respect him better—than to take it away. Very pro-choice, some of my cohort, in matters of life and death. Life and death.

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About pulling the trigger. In her poem “Resumé,” noting the downside risks of razors, rivers, acids, drugs, guns, nooses, and gas, more-than-once-failed suicide Dorothy Parker wrote, “You might as well live.”

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RANTS

“He’s doing as well as can be expected,” they say. But, expecting what? Good to have a hapless verbal nostrum handy, something like, “Hope you feel better soon.” Which can go without saying. Should go without being said.

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Older, in deep shit. Putting my affairs in ordure. Surprised that the situation I’m in is my situation. Though, whose should it be? Just back from the hospital after a nuclear imaging scan—any lung clots to be seen?—I remember something ol’ Confucius once told me. About, as he put it, being up shit’s creek without a paddle. I recall him saying that though the shit hits the fan, the current can change direction.

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Beneficiary of another operation, test, procedure. One more recovery, pick up where you left off. Status quo antebellum. But, before which war? Back to where you were when you were just getting back to where you were when you were just . . . Regression, but to the mean? How mean? A regression, but not infinite. Gifted coronary surgeon explaining that heart-valve replacements are currently lasting fifteen years. Thoughtfully not mentioning that for me it’s already been five. 95

Recuperate. Latin recuperare, “to take back.” Gettin’ back on your feet, they put it. After this latest recovery, chills / fever / muscle ache / bone ache. To invoke King Pyrrhus of Epirus, “Another such victory and I am undone.”

 Showing your age. Old before his time. Diminished capacity. Old(er) age as rearguard action: delay, defend, retreat. To evacuate—empty, drain, void. Void, verb. But, also, void, noun. Don’t fall in. “Perishables”: what’s gonna spoil, decay, become unsafe. And not just foodstuffs, Honey.

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Phillip Lopate: “Old age is a great leveler: the frailer elderly all come to resemble turtles trapped in curved shells—shrinking, wrinkled, and immobile—so that in a roomful, a terrarium, of the old, it is hard to disentangle one solitary individual’s karma from the mass fate of aging.” Try it again: “Old age is a great leveler: the frailer elderly all come to resemble turtles trapped in curved shells—shrinking, wrinkled, and immobile—so that in a roomful, a terrarium, of the old, it is hard to disentangle one solitary individual’s karma from the mass fate of aging.” Or, as Judge Richard Posner expresses it: “The utility of living, net of disutility due to suffering, bereavement, and other losses, declines with age. A falling present value of remaining life intersects a rising curve of suffering.” A falling present value of remaining life intersects a rising curve of suffering? Si, claro. You got that right, Jack.

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“Taking a leak,” kids used to say, toilet training and diapers erased from memory. Leakages for adults, however, make you feel . . . permeable. Second childhood, in which you might get to change your own diaper. In 1910, a month before he died, Jules Renard wrote, “Last night I wanted to get up . . . Then a trickle runs down my leg. I allow it to reach my heel before I make up my mind.” Since, gods be praised, I’ve not experienced incontinence, a word about nocturia—nocturnal polyuria. Poly, “many”; uria, “urine.” Three a.m., waking up to pee. Having to pee. More awake in the dead of night than one wants to be. Hanging out with the dead of night.

 At such an hour and under such an imperative, the adjective precarious surfaces. Words, and where they’re coming from. The older I get, I can’t get enough of etymologies, as if I’ve spent life not adequately understanding my mother

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tongue. Greek etymologia: logia, “study of ”; etymon, “true sense.” Precarious, then, from Latin prex, “entreaty or prayer,” which gets you to being dependent on others, hence at risk. Which could put you in mind of vulnerable (Latin vulnus, “wound”). In the middle of another night—there are two equal parts?—I wake to the word jeopardy. French jeu parti, a “divided game,” hence uncertain. Yet another night it’s the word overwhelmed. Middle English whelmen, “turned upside down, submerged,” like a boat in . . . jeopardy. And then, not surprisingly, exposure comes to mind, “to leave without shelter or defense.” Latin exponere, “exhibit, reveal, publish” (see expound), altered by confusion with poser, “to place, lay down.” Heading right toward “overexposure.” Re nocturia: all this was made worse by finally realizing my wound was self-inflicted. Too much coffee. But about being not merely hassled but suffering. Latin sufferer: sub, “from below” + ferre, “to bear.” Acting as both my own grievance committee and its complainant, petitioner, plaintiff (Latin planctus, “a beating of the breast”). More grief, albeit not for the world.

 Taking umbrage—the Fates throwing shade. Affronted: old French—getting slapped in the face.

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Foreseeable Futures

Though she doesn’t say so, doesn’t have to say so, my musician-wife savors life. Wakes up ready to make coffee, thinking, “What’s for breakfast?” Later, “What’s for lunch?” and then, “What’s for dinner?” Among the many things that please her, there’s playing piano for hours at a time (Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Debussy, a jazz version of Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird”); Afro-Cuban dance classes; Tahitian dance classes; cooking; hiking with her friend Kathy. Also shopping for clothes or gear at very low, bargain prices. One recent dawn, as I paused in front of the Berkeley cottage about to start my slow morning walk, my wife jogged down the street wearing her new backpack. Off to San Francisco on BART for a hike and a run at Land’s End— training for a half-marathon. Then a stop at the Museum of Modern Art. Planning to bring back lunch for us from the Ferry Building before getting ready to go teach. One’s wife jogging down the street. Standing still, noting how fast the distance between us grew, I watched as she disappeared from view. Reflected for a moment or two on disappearings. The process of my wife going down the street and out of sight transpired at a pace far faster than I can currently move, a pace at which I used to be able to run without effort. I was both happy for my wife’s happiness and . . . not melancholic, but . . . pensive. Contemplating the difference between my now and my how-it-used-to-be; contemplating what might be ahead. That my wife has—gods willing—far more life ahead of her than I do. That I’ve been able to care for her in difficult times, probably won’t be able to do so if and when. Just a moment of watching my wife disappear. Seeing her one instant, not seeing her the next.

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Another day. Heading out for one of my daily walks. “I’ll be right back,” I call to my wife. “See you soon.” A few years ago, a tenth wedding anniversary: observed quietly, just the two of us. And now? A second ten years possible, a second ten like those? Even after this time together, my wife still wonders how it happened to happen. Again asks, “Why us?” Fair question. Some 7.7 billion humans on Earth? Born in cities 8,000 air miles apart? Born into different languages, different language “families”? Not to mention intricacies of male / female dating & mating, cohabitation, householding. Differing sleep cycles. Age differences. Perhaps the odds were against us. But, somehow, we’ve been—not proven to be, but have seemed—compatible, well suited. A good match. So far. As I wrote in Here and Gone, one of my wife’s wicked “solutions” to the question of “Why us?” has been to describe our past life. We’re together because we were together before. Of course manifested as different selves then, in different roles. Stipulate that way back when she was (far) more in charge. Not that we’re talking only former lives. There’s also the next life, even what my wife terms “the next-next” life. How long it may take, you see, for me to regain, say, my musician’s chops so we can perform together. Do you wonder if I believe in previous lives or ones to come. Do I imagine a moment my wife and I encounter each other, hug, as in an old movie, say, “Darling, it’s been ages.” And does she? Well, frankly, as the politicians in Washington can’t not say when they’re about to misrepresent or deceive, frankly I remind myself to keep an open mind. And not just for domestic tranquility. Two thoughts: 1. My wife is very good at teasing, masterful at keeping a straight face. 2. How disprove, for instance, reincarnation? Though “Why us?” has yet to cost either of us any sleep, I have my own take on the issue. No doubt it’s professional bias, but I’ve suggested to my wife that what’s important is what we’ve made of our decade-plus together. That is, the story we’ve been telling ourselves. Are telling ourselves. Story we’ve become, though I remind her that even in just this one life it’s not final. Story we’re still becoming? Making my point, I’m careful not to mention, say, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.



So: heading out the front door. “See you soon,” I call. And, I’ve said to my wife more than once, when we’ve encountered yet another health problem of mine, having to discuss eventualities: “After I’m gone . . .” And, something she’s said, but only a few times. “After you’re gone . . .”



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Thomas Farber

99

Interconnections

Approaching age eighty, essayist Edward Hoagland wrote, “Drabber in air, water, and biodiversity, we may be sliding toward a planetary Lou Gehrig’s Disease.” And, “Our push to lock in an extraordinary human longevity at the same time as countless other life spans are collapsing has produced a dicey situation.”

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100

aches and pains

Dr. Lawrence Levin’s Poems and Essays from an Ordinary Room was published shortly after his death at age sixty-four. In it, he described surgery for a pinched nerve and ensuing hopelessness: years of “rage, rage, resentment, fear and sorrow.” From far too much experience, Levin wrote, “With luck, acute pain is a positive adaptation for our benefit,” danger signals eliciting care. Healing, hopefully, to follow. But, he noted, “Not so with chronic pain.” Doctors often use the visual analogue scale (VAS) to rate “subjective characteristics,” that is, the immeasurable—what the patient says he feels. Zero to ten, no pain to worst pain ever. As rheumatologist, Levin found patients resented having to respond to the VAS. And / or that as physician he saw no correlation between numbers chosen and visible signs of arthritis. One day, himself now experiencing chronic pain, “feeling alone, raw with misery and disappointment, and desperately helpless,” Levin composed his own rating scale. By four, he’s at “I don’t like this”; by six, “The intrusion is unrelenting”; by nine, “Dear God. Deliver me from this suffering.” And Dr. Levin’s ten? “I am overcome.” Virginia Woolf would have understood. In On Being Ill, she wrote, “But let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. . . He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.”

 101

“I’m sick and tired,” something else kids used to say. Sick and tired of homework / someone else complaining / having to walk to school in the snow and slush. But not actually sick, not actually tired. Words that came to mind all these years later when an elderly friend said he was “tired of life.” He didn’t mean any problem in particular, just didn’t want yet another surgery, another hospitalization, no more chronic . . . not even pain, but discomfort. “Enough already!” from the Yiddish genug shoyn. Think of Leonard Cohen’s “I ache in the places where I used to play.” Wry, self-deprecating. (Cohen died at eighty-two.) Versus kvetching: “complaining, whining.” Petulant grousing . . . “Quit it!” we also said when I was young. And, “Quit your bellyaching!” After my knee-replacement surgery—amazing, almost superhuman, that a knee could be replaced!—a nurse told me, “You have to learn to live with your aches and pains.” She meant well, but I heard the imperative. The nurse’s admonition came when I asked for more painkillers. Timing is all: HMOs had discovered opioid abuse with as much authentic surprise as Hollywood discovered sexual harassment. To allay the nurse’s concerns, I explained, “For more than a decade now I don’t drink liquor at all, never drank much anyway; haven’t smoked tobacco in more than four decades; no marijuana since early 1974, no cocaine since the early 1980s (and back then only if free).” I might at a better moment, or as my better self, have remembered what great care the staff was providing. And that more medical resources were being spent on this one body than on the entire population of some countries. Also, I might have remembered the nurse had her own problems: tough commute, compassion fatigue, marching orders from above. Other patients too much like me. But when she repeated that I had to learn to live with my aches and pains, I started to reply, “Actually, you should learn to live with my aches and pains.” Luckily, the nurse was already speaking over what I was saying, telling me to ask the surgeon.



I was left thinking about the words aches and pains. To begin with, the nouns are not married to each other. Should be divorced. Or separated forever, like Siamese twins at birth. As for the three-word phrase—aches and pains—two nouns and conjunction, use of it should be prohibited by law. Further, each noun, even employed separately, should ever / only be invoked one ache or one pain at a time. If multiple aches or multiple pains are involved, each should be given a number, sums then totaled. Doing this, you might get, in the course of one transit of the sun, thirty-two aches and twenty-seven pains. Not to mention that by being legally required to not only calibrate duration but to also factor in the VAS number—that is, the subjectively perceived intensity—one might achieve some idea of what was never conveyed by the formerly legal aches and pains.

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Acting My Age

This for starters, though of course you have sensations not taken into account by either word. Twinges, for instance (Old English twengan, “pinch, wring”), such a crunchy monosyllable catching a bit of the hurting. And then there’s grimace. Think grim, the grim reaper. (Grimace: the fear-aggression smile, tightening of lower face muscles women passing you on the sidewalk offer to simultaneously avoid / acknowledge / dismiss. Not that one blames them . . . ) Happy endings? Hydrocodone. My orthopedic surgeon assumed risk of addiction had to be weighed against misery of chronic pain. I was also blessed with a doctor friend who said he’d give assistance if needed. When I told him he was a lifesaver, he replied he couldn’t save anyone, but could try to help. A thought. There’s that line of Nietzsche’s: “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” People in our positivity-plus nation of victimized complainers say this. May even believe it, unless they offer it wryly, ironically.

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Thomas Farber

103

vocational training

Not strolling. Two slow walks a day. Two miles a day. Four half miles, that is, a break after each. Many pauses en route. Often having to lean against parking meter or bike rack, or stopping several times each block for the minute—or two or three—it will take to catch my breath. Accident waiting to happen. One day, collecting myself, I have a now-you-know moment. “Was there always a line in my palm that could have been read?” And, “Is this how it all turned out?” And, “I didn’t see this coming.” “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.” Hiking pole in right hand, no divine rod or staff. Trudging up the slight grade to café / market / bank. Later, grateful for the downhill slope. Daily foot traffic. Rhonda the crossing guard, bright spirit dismayed by drivers sailing through warning lights. Rick, talented trainer at the corner fitness gym. Women sporting mat slings heading to the yoga studio. Little kids in the magnet school yard, burbling, shouting, screaming. And another Tom, who walks briskly, with odd, stiff motions, elbows high and to the side. Who to me seems—is—remarkably full of life, but who’s ready, he tells me, to “kick the bucket.” On these walks, I happen not to be in a hurry. Am unable to be, which has the upside of leaving me available to see what I was often moving too fast to take in. No longer jogging, on my bike, in my car—going somewhere, getting somewhere—I have more time to take in people coming my way. Having lived this long, I imagine I can read facial expressions, body language: hopes and fears; stories told to the self. God’s plenty: one has only to be attentive.

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About possible late-life métiers if I stop writing, this thought. A school for teenagers and young adults. Cis- or trans-gendered, queer / hetero / bi / gay / LGBTQ / pansexual / straight / what-have-you. My America! Curriculum? Martial arts as self-mastery; and dancing—Cuban salsa—to help understand partnering. No leaders, no followers. Classes I could have benefitted from when young and hyper-testosteroned. (A chess mentor would also have helped, since I suffered—still suffer—from impetuousness, sometimes misread as decisiveness.) My school would of course offer counseling about choice of mate. Why him or her or them? Potential partners to be interviewed, asked to explain their game plan, what they’re offering, what they’re after. Who they think they are. No need for more Romeo-and-Juliets or bitter separations. Short-of-breath writer on daily walk, a flaneur perforce, drifting toward age eighty. All too aware of what he should have been asked by someone, anyone, when he was a potential partner at such an age. Elder offering priceless public service? No fool like . . . ?

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105

M&Ms

About what ages, what does not. For humans, there’s morbidity and mortality (Latin morbus, “disease”; mort, “death”). Morbidity and mortality conferences in hospitals address patient “outcomes.” Morbidity means amenable to care. Hence “compression of morbidity,” for example, increasing life expectancy by delaying onset of chronic illnesses, or by preventing them. Mortality. In high school in the late 1950s, my classmates and I read Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias.” A shattered statue, “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair” inscribed on its pedestal. “Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair”: something we teenagers throwing a football would shout to friends when we made an incredible catch. Exultant, adding a mock “sneer of cold command,” we weren’t daunted by what happened to the statue of a “king of kings.” Felt, though we wouldn’t have thought to use the word, immortal. Even so, it would have been hard in Boston’s 1950s for young males to know nothing of death. Dying was in the air, and not just during bitter, interminable winters. People then still “passed away” at home, and alcoholics / the blind / hunchbacks / cripples / the maimed were unremarked on in subway stations or on streetcars. In Puritan graveyards, headstones of the long-dead tilted, toppled. The city itself was dying, eclipsed by New York, notwithstanding the “New Boston’s” disastrous “urban renewal.” There was also “The Golden Greek,” Harry Agganis, great local athlete, who died of a pulmonary embolism at age twenty-six. Ten thousand mourners attended his funeral. The young: you could feel sorry someone died and still have no idea that one day it could be you. 106

Also in the late 1950s, Frank Sinatra, king of his world, was performing “I’m Gonna Live Till I Die.” I’d see him on television, struck by the way he’d conclude the final “live / live / live / live / live”—one / two / three / four / five, each a half tone higher—before the triumphant “UNTIL I DIE.” Time passed. A decade later, middle-aged Frank Sinatra recorded “My Way.” “And now, the end is clear,” it opens, singer facing “the final curtain.” Though there were bad times, and “my share of losing,” the singer “stood tall / And did it my way.” More triumph, albeit with intimations and a muted conclusion. His way. Late in life, frequently hospitalized, Sinatra suffered lung and heart problems / high blood pressure / bladder cancer / dementia. In 1998, age eightytwo, he died. Lights on the Empire State Building were turned blue in honor of Ol’ Blue Eyes, and casinos in Las Vegas stopped for one full minute. After Sinatra’s funeral, thousands of fans outside the church, he was interred with mementos, including a bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey, a pack of Camel cigarettes, and a Zippo lighter. Surely Death took note. As for Percy Bysshe Shelley, it was only some four decades after high school that I learned the reckless poet died at twenty-nine. Captain of the yacht he’d had built, he refused to reef sails in a storm, had never learned to swim. It also took me decades to learn that Ozymandias was the Greek name for Pharaoh Ramesses II, who lived more than three thousand years ago. For sure a king of kings, Ramesses II died at around age ninety. Had dental problems, arthritis, and hardening of the arteries. This we know because forensic scientists have examined his remains. Not the posthumous existence Ramesses II had in mind? Sic immortality.

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Thomas Farber

107

the Interrogative

Hobbling, but out in the world. Up to the café at dawn. One of the regulars is leaving, someone I know just by sight. Asks, “How are you?” A routine, perfunctory inquiry as he heads to his car, requiring only something short and rote. “Fine, thanks, and you?” Which, though also a question, necessitates no reply. Call and response. Amenities. “How are you?” Social gesture. Familiar script. On autopilot, one says it oneself. At the post office: Rico the clerk, behind plexiglass. I hear the words as they’re out of my mouth. “How are you, Rico?” To which he replies, “Can’t complain!” This I admire: middle-aged African American man in Trump’s America, on his feet all day, inevitably a difficult customer in the line. “Can’t complain,” though of course he could. Less often than I should, I emulate Rico. “Can’t complain.” Makes me laugh to say it. How are you? Variants: in English, the colloquial. “How you be?” friends ask, or “Wassup?” or “What’s shakin?” When we were kids, boys used the wiseass “How they hangin’?” In Spanish, there’s “cómo estás” and the response “cómo me ves” (as you see me). Or, “Aqui no más” (just here, nothing). And in French, “ça va?” Literally, “it goes.” With the reply “Pas mal” (not bad). Terse, but not curt. In his native tongue, my Rotuman friend Vili tells me, the standard response is “Lelei” (fine). Young males, however, sometimes reply “raksa’ia,” a play on “raksa,” which means “bad.” “Raksa’ia,” however, is what Rotuman males sometimes utter when they’ve had an orgasm. Variants: in American English, the “How do you do?” of my New England

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childhood has passed out of usage, but “How are you doing,” or “How are you feeling?”—one added word—may convey more serious inquiry. “Things are good,” you might reply, half-true or untrue, staving off further questions. Or you might respond, getting yourself in deeper, “Doing as good as can be.” Digging your own grave, as they used to say. For instance, should you make the mistake of adding “My knee is still killing me since knee-replacement surgery,” a not uncommon response is “One knee or two?” Followed by an anecdote about a friend whose surgery went well. In the know: almost the same as having had the surgery themselves. You in turn may be tempted to tell them about the woman—trim, hiker, only sixty—who died the day after hers. Blood clot. Best to be upbeat. I bump into a fellow who’s a motivational speaker. “It’s all good, Tom,” he replies when I ask. His wife has had three arduous operations; she’s disgusted by his obesity, red-meat eating, and cigarettes; his career is tanking. But he’s a Dale Carnegie acolyte, has your first name handy. “It’s all good.” I like the phrase, use it as a litmus test to see what the questioner’s question might have been asking. Which is, usually, not all that much. My friend Paul, housebound in his mideighties, replies briskly when I ask. “Tom, I am as you see me.” Thwarting any impulse on my part to tell him, “You look great.” Smart of Paul: I have a doctor friend who says this even when advising me on treatment for one medical problem or another. How convey you can look the same but are not the same? Or one might reply, “What you see is what you get,” with the implied, “What you can’t see is how it is and how I am.” “How are you?” A neighbor responds with “And how are you?” Right back at ya. Question for question, a rhetorical strategy henceforth known as the deflecto. This in contrast to the words of my friend Troy, at seventy-six still savoring the nuances of being stoned-thoughtful. “How to describe it?” Troy begins, preparing to deliver meticulously textured detail. More than you’d intended to ask for. When queried, a streetwise New York transplant replies, “I’ve been better,” a nice turn on “Never been better.” He then asks, “How you be?” Catching a whiff of his vibe, I respond, “Who wants to know?” Which could have been “Who’s asking?” “What’s it to you?” “How much time you got?” Or, “Do you really want to know (and what would you do with it)?” Occasionally, I interview myself. “Thank you for asking,” I respond. “I’m completely fucked.” Or, “I feel like shit.” Or, “I feel like ground round. Grinding to a halt.” Sometimes one feels a special concern or understanding is being conveyed. “You’re in my prayers,” says an acquaintance whose husband is dying. But, often, trying to be helpful—or not to feel helpless—people are well-wishing you to be as you once were with them. That and hoping to hear a recovery story to fortify themselves against the ever-more-obvious—their own impending disasters.



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Idle questions: a friend is in his nineties, has fulltime caretakers, his wife in a facility. “How are you?” I ask. “Cheryl doesn’t recognize me anymore,” he replies. Silence follows, as we both deal with it. A café regular, late eighties, tells me about a Holocaust survivor he knows. Very old woman with dementia. When he asks how she is, she replies, in Yiddish, “Lucky I am, but happy I’m not.”

 In Italian, there’s “Come stai?” This “How are you?” sometimes eliciting not the all’s well of “Bene, benissimo, grazie,” but the wry “Si tira avanti” (One pulls oneself forward).

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Not that there’s never any banter. When I hear one old friend’s “How are you?” I ask if he knows the joke about the two surgeons in the woods. Drunk, arguing about who’s better, they grab a nearby owl. One surgeon, whoosh, takes out a vocal cord. The other, whoosh, takes out a testicle. They then ask the owl to say who’s better. “Don’t know about that,” the owl replies, “but I can’t hoot worth a fuck or fuck worth a hoot.”

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Old(er) age: may offer common ground. A maladroit former actor I know is his own worst enemy. Stuck for years in a Don Rickles verbal aggression mode, he thinks he’s funny, is aggrieved when you’re put off. But . . . he has health problems, is also dismayed he’s having more and more trouble coming up with the names of things. My “How are you?” on a day I’m more sympathetic to others than usual brings us to an exchange about how much misery either of us would put up with. Would choose to put up with. “My uncle killed himself at sixty,” he tells me. “Public bathroom. Third try.” Trusts I’ll understand—me looking him in the eye, him looking me in the eye—how one could want to do such a thing.

 As for my friend Bruce, age eighty-six. Remarkable man: self-made, highly skilled, compassionate. Former home builder, he sees the body as something that of course needs maintenance, has over the years undergone repairs without complaint or self-pity. Hip replacement, knee replacement, ankle replacement. Pending cataract surgery. Skin cancers.

110

Acting My Age

“You’re my oldest friend,” he says, meaning the oldest friend who’s still alive. I’ve known Bruce fifty years, but he was past thirty when we met. Had friends from college, like Milt, who died twenty years ago. Now Bruce says again, “You’re my oldest friend.” Tells me this in a voice I can hardly hear: he’s in the hospital, we’re on the phone. He’s had a stroke. Ruptured artery in the brain. Doing exhausting rehab. Not sure when or if he can go home. His wife, who has early dementia, is lost without him. “How are you?” I ask. “Declining,” Bruce replies. And, after a long pause. “This is very humbling. Truly ‘a long day’s journey into night.’ ”

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Thomas Farber

111

mikey

Mikey, boy I helped raise, comes by. Time passing, passing: now he’s a grownup, a very good man, father of two sons. “How old are you today?” I ask his younger one, who, grinning, holds up four fingers. At the nearby children’s playground, toddlers running wild, Jacob playing in the sand pit, Mikey and I talk story. Remember days—years—of being out on the waves in Hawai‘i. Remember Fiji when he was eight (and a half) years old. Remote, tiny island off the south coast of Kandavu. Barrier reefs, southeast trade winds. Fern, taro, banana, cassava, palm. Earth oven, kerosene lanterns, outhouse. Mikey, eight (and a half) on the beach. Humming to himself, digging for crabs, drinking from a coconut. Terns diving, catching. Kleptoparasitic frigate birds monitoring from above, ready to hound, steal. Mikey in the shallows, stalking. Another cataract of small fish, hundreds of them, surging up through the surface, then gone. The two of us snorkeling over the reef, surprised to reach a precipitous drop-off, bottom suddenly, vertiginously, far below. Mikey treading water, snorkel out of his mouth, looking toward shore to see how far we’d come. “Tom,” Mikey then said, both of us, decades later—Jacob running toward us—laughing to recall that dazzling place and time. “Tom,” Mikey said, so many years ago, “I think it’s a little deep for me here.”

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“Lebensweisheitspielerei”

Back in my early sixties, I wrote, “Old age, indolent contemporary insinuating that, because you share a mutual inevitability, your lives were more or less the same.” That “indolent contemporary” really pissed me off. Differences mattered, made all the difference. Several years ago, however—that is, a decade later—I was leafing through my poet-mother’s copy of Wallace Stevens’s verse, browsing for what might shed light on my present moment. On page 504, I reached “Lebensweisheitspielerei.” In its fifteen lines, eighty-five words, and five verses, “The proud and the strong” are long gone, leaving “the unaccomplished, / The finally human.” In the “poverty of autumnal space,” there’s ever less to say, to pretend, to lay claim to. Which leads Stevens to conclude: “Each person completely touches us / With what he is and as he is, / In the stale grandeur of annihilation.” The first few times I read this, I bridled: surely no one can know “what” and “as” someone else is. I also balked at grandeur and annihilation. Nonetheless, over the ensuing weeks and months I found myself returning to the poem. Eventually memorized its conclusion. Came to concur:

Each person completely touches us With what he is and as he is, In the stale grandeur of annihilation.

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precedent

Recordar: To remember; from the Latin re-cordis, to pass back through the heart. Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces My mother died more than thirty years ago. Among her possessions was a box of negatives none of her four children seemed curious about, but not long ago my sister-in-law decided to have them digitalized. These images: my mother is in the master bedroom in the house we four children grew up in. Double bed “covered with white chenille,” as I once wrote, “chaise lounge in the corner, writing desk by the windows, elm tree just outside large and leafy, willows and pond on the far side of the park below.” Married since age eighteen, in these photos my mother looks to be in her early thirties. This would make it around 1940. Her first child, my older sister, is a year or two old. My parents had their four children late for that era—my mother thirty to forty, my father thirty-six to forty-six. Their third child, I was born four or five years after these pictures were taken. Any early image I conjure of my mother is from when I was nine or ten, my mother in her midforties. Celebrated singer and actress, much-published poet, mother of four. Very active, a fencing champion. Walking briskly, miles at a time, dog in tow. Formidable; middle-aged. The woman in the negatives my sister-in-law unearthed is much younger. She’s posing for a painter preparing to do a sketch or portrait. Shoulders and chest exposed. Mouth slightly open, as if surprised by having so exposed herself. Right hand, palm down, at the throat, thumb on one side, fingers on the other. Left hand, as if making sure that her blouse will not drop further, over her left breast.

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Seductive; sultry. The poses are in no way accidental: teenager in the early 1920s, prepared for stardom by her stage-door mother—ballet, piano, voice lessons—my mother studied both elocution and dramatic gestures. Learned, among other things, that “the hand defines or it indicates. It affirms or it denies. It accepts or it rejects. It molds or it detects.” Seeing these images, for the first time I read my mother not as parent / writer / actress / singer, but, belatedly—peace be with you, Dr. Freud—as not completely unlike the sometimes marvelously seductive and sultry women I’ve loved. Similarly enhanced the last few years, but not prompted by a photo, my understanding of my mother’s merciless hospitalization. This despite a novella I wrote after her death more than three decades ago, describing a fate much like hers. What’s altered now is my own terminal hospitalization repeatedly foreshadowed. Its imminence sending me back to what I wrote but had for many years avoided rereading. In my novella, I come across an exchange between “the writer” and his mother. Recently widowed after forty-five years of marriage, his mother is in Boston. Roaming the northwest with his lover, he’s in a phone booth overlooking the Pacific. During the conversation, she tells him a woman friend of hers committed suicide. Three thousand miles away, the writer observes, “I’ve never really thought about suicide.” “No?” she replies. “That’s interesting.” In my novella, after his mother’s death the writer comes across a meditation on the loss of her husband that the mother—my mother—wrote around the time of that phone call:

Twenty thousand waves of days Have come over me Still not enough for drowning.

Life and Art. In both my novella and the all-too-real hospital where my mother died, a mother said to a writer-son:

Am I improving? Do I look any stronger? I want to maintain my independence. I’m afraid you’ll stop taking me seriously.

Also said, words I cannot not remember: “My poems aren’t helping me here.” And, my mother wrote, “Unless you have to begin / a sentence with it, death / is only a lower case noun, / five-letter word at that, / longer than life, love, / or terser call of need.



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Thomas Farber

115

Names of deported U.S. veterans on border wall, Playas de Tijuana, 2020. Photograph by Wayne Levin

V

T he

body

politic

em b o d ie d

entrails, late 2019

Back in the dope-inflected late 1960s, “bad trips” abounded. Richard Nixon, for instance, was a “downer” and “on a bummer.” During the soul-sickening American war in Vietnam, home from wandering in India and Nepal, my friend Bob pondered the qualities of dharma. Smoking yet another joint, he contemplated principles of cosmic order, saw we were in a time of corrupt rulers, fools, and “negative manifestations.” Which meant a dark age—the yuga (stage) of Kali (the demon). Kali Yuga. “America Love It or Leave It.” “My Country Right or Wrong.” Of course there have been more recent Dark Ages in our land of the free / home of the brave. Start with Vietnam War–avoiders Bush ’n’ Cheney’s squalid Iraq invasion. But the latest yuga’s incarnation of the demon Kali came in a period when I was more than once grinding toward and then, blessedly, recovering from brilliant—preternatural—surgeries and “procedures.” My body felt like a kind of exploratorium. I was taking the measure of my health, of aging in general, and of what I (perhaps understating) termed the death of the ocean. A trifecta. Then, Trump campaigning and elected: a quadrifecta. Trump incessant. Hyperbolically impure member of a species that has its share of imperfections. I was already at work on this book. To write about him was an option. Responsibility? Every record might be of value. Or, if not a public service, cathartic? Getting into the muck and the mire, I read hundreds of articles and editorials, also countless books about Trump—pro and con. Several “by” Trump, a few by those around him. The subtitle of daughter Ivanka’s Women Who Work seemed apt: Rewriting the Rules for Success. 117

From this deluge of information and opinion, here’s a smidgen of what caught my eye and ear: ■■

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In a 1990 interview about Fred Jr., his older brother, dead at forty-two, Trump said Fred “totally gave of himself and he gave himself to other people.” Adding, via self-diagnosing and getting back to his favorite— only—subject, “I tend to be just the opposite.” Trump strategist Steve Bannon described Trump as not billionaire but crooked millionaire: “just another scumbag.” To the mayor of San Juan Puerto Rico, Trump had a “tweet incontinence problem.” “A nativist who can’t really speak his native tongue,” Frank Bruni wrote. Garbled syntax, verbal mishmash, and blather, Bruni might have added. As described by George Will, Trump had a gift for “self-refuting boasts”: “I have the best words”; “There’s nobody that respects women more than I do”; “My IQ is one of the highest”; “Marla says with me it’s the best sex she’s ever had.” James Fallows noted Trump’s sense of illusory superiority, “the Dunning-Kruger effect: the more limited someone is in reality, the more talented the person imagines himself to be.” Or, as Bret Stephens viewed Trump, “ignorant and vile, but not stupid.” Anthony Scaramucci, briefly White House communications director, described Trump as “an insecure orange turd.” And, “I mean the poor guy has the self-esteem of a small pigeon.” Psychologist John Gartner termed Trump “the most documented liar in human history.” Nixon biographer John A. Farrell, quoted by Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, said Trump has used “the vile Nixonian strategy that making Americans hate each other is a potent way to seize and secure power.” Tucker Carlson: “At times, he’s a full-blown BS artist.”

Stipulate as fact, though Trump professes to disagree. “I like the truth. I’m actually a very honest guy.”

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Trump-ubiquitous, saturating senses. Think of deafening music played at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, our all-American “no-touch” torture site. No wonder people yearned to ignore Trump, though to do so might be a form of submission. Meanwhile, as I worked on this book, news was too easy to access. In better health, I could have headed to a remote spot to study the night sky we’re busy obliterating. Or set out on a farewell / apology tour to family, friends, former 118

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lovers. Photographer Wayne Levin, sickened by daily Trump monitoring, urged on me Natalia Lafourcade’s Denver performance of the folksong “La Llorona.” For my part, there were times when, over and again, I’d play Nanci Griffith and Eric Taylor doing his “Two Fires”: “Used to burn like the lonesome / In a young girl’s eyes,” and “Got two fires burning, baby, one at a time.”

 Trump’s (more than?) Seven Deadly Sins. For instance, Trump suffered the anguish of envy. Knew people saw Obama as—that Obama was—not perfect but admirably self-made / articulate / capable of grace. Tasting the gall of relative deprivation, Trump unjustly forced—by Obama!—to shame and despair he could admit to no one. Trump: wealthy but impoverished. Forlorn. A lost soul’s self-pity. Trump’s perdition. How relieve unappeasable, unenviable envy? Tarnish, belittle. Defile (Middle English defoul). What else could a man who had polluted so much in his own life do but try to destroy Obamacare, the Iran nuclear agreement, the Paris climate accord. Cain / Abel. Iago / Othello. Claggert / Billy Budd. Queen / Snow White. Trump / Obama.

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Perceiving this, one was still paying attention to an attention whore. It might have been smarter, as retired economist Arthur C. Brooks counseled, to move on from grihasthat—stage of career / sex / money / power—toward sannyasa, “totally dedicated to the fruits of enlightenment.” A “compassionate conservative,” Brooks believes in the earned happiness of working hard toward success in the “free enterprise system.” Now on his pilgrimage trail, however, Brooks has perhaps forgotten that, the USA ever less egalitarian, as economist he provided cover for the hyper-affluent. Laundering—heaven and sannyasa forfend—socialism for the rich.

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Stuck in the world of maya—illusion—I was, as Dale Jamieson wrote, “in a world that increasingly fails to resemble the one in which we came to consciousness . . . the result of a pattern of human action.” And, “For some this will mean grief, guilt, and nostalgia. For others it will mean suffering. For others, it will be just another day at the office.” Re Trump’s “Office of the President of the United States of America”: tweeting, golfing, championing coal and oil while the world burned. Couldn’t do enough for corporate war on the environment. We were in a period of pillaging / looting / despoiling, what Camus called a time of pestilence. One hoped, as Camus argued, that there were more things in men to admire than to despise. But this is not to say that despising the despicable is without its place. As Ecclesiastes put it, “To every thing there is a

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season.” Think redress, rectify. Years ago, kids used to say, “That guy had it coming” or we “hated his guts.” Thus you might imagine getting the chance, like the diviners of ancient Rome, to read entrails. Check out Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, seventeenth-century medical worthies inspecting a cadaver. All for edification.

 In Purgatorio, fourteenth-century Dante Alighieri had the eyelids of the envious threaded together with wire. Were the poet around these days, he might write about lips sewn, Twitter fingers tied and bound. Not, however, what I was envisioning. Perhaps because no-veggie / no-exercise porcine Trump—apologies to pigs / hogs / boars / swine / sows / peccaries—looked like a poster boy for prediabetes / stroke / heart attack / colon cancer, what came to mind was a pre-mortem. Nothing personal, but no one lives forever.

 How it happened to happen. They say there’s now no place on the planet unaltered by the human. In year three of Trump’s (first? only?) term, again back in the tropics communing with goatfish, I concluded he was so insatiably into the human-made that he’d become truly denatured. Then I read that this venal specimen of the urban and simulated had, between bankruptcies, owned a “super-yacht.” Crew of forty-something. Ocean something to diminish to human scale, a stage set to impress humans. Suddenly, I pictured Trump on the shore in Hawai‘i. No entourage / Secret Service / camera crew. No phone. No Brioni suit, hyper-long tie draping down to hide his gut, as if stretching to kiss his male member. (Described by porn star Stormy Daniels as “smaller than average” but “not freakishly small.”) In 1965, Dylan sang that “even the president of the United States / Sometimes must have to stand naked.” Was I foreseeing an emperor’s new clothes kinda moment? Trump au naturel? Mercifully no, not even Trump in a Speedo. Which, given photos of fatso-on-the-links, would make you avert your eyes. But then, Trump at the shore, wearing a flannel nineteenth-century bathing costume, outing his relentlessly denied Jungian femina? A burqa, to show he’d repented Islam baiting? Nope. No nouvelle Ophelia here, garments pulling such a wretch “to muddy death.” Instead, Trump in black xxxl full wetsuit and diver’s boots. Neoprene hood concealing his sprayed and dyed “vaudeville hair” (Emily Nussbaum’s phrase). No American flag lapel pin. Alone, all by his lonesome at the water’s edge. Swimming goggles on forehead, squinting—light off the ocean’s surface blinding, disorienting. Creature of so many screens / images / imaging, looking out at the truly large

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screen, “the inhuman vast,” as Daniel Duane termed it. What Trump, exemplar of our clever species, had seemed determined to miniaturize. Not just to ignore but to replace / erase / eliminate. Virtual: similar to being something; almost the same as; as if the same. Painter Ad Reinhardt writes “art begins with the getting-rid of nature.” If so, Trump was not just con artist and bullshit artist but Artist with a capital A.

 Celebrities! VIPs! Notables! His third wedding: Melania’s $100,000 Christian Dior dress, $1.5 million ring. Three hundred and fifty guests. Barbara Walters / Billy Joel / Shaquille O’Neal / Bill ’n’ Hillary / Elton John / Chris Christie. Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt? Where are they now? Not here on the beach, just one solitary driven-to-be-noticed male. On his own, Trump suffers lack-of-phone withdrawal. No TV for a guy with a four-to-eight-hour-a-day addiction? “Who’s rigged the game against Trump?” the conspiracy salesman rages. Referring to himself in the third person—as always, branding must go on. “I hereby order it to stop,” he says, throwing in the legalish adverb. More gibberish. Motormouth Trump, confounded by silence. No one to impress, to buy what he’s selling. But then, down the shore, he sees several surfers stretching, bantering. “Locals” in their early twenties, Asian American or Native Hawaiian, each with full-sleeve (shoulder-to-wrist) tattooing. “Sad,” needle-avoider Trump mutters. The surfers, meanwhile, fail to acknowledge Trump. Which makes him feel: (1) ignored; (2) they’re acting superior; (3) he’s been insulted. More of envy’s anger. For the surfers, Trump figures, he’s just an old white guy. Infuriated, Trump moves into his bluster / boast / dominate / humiliate mode. What he knows after a lifetime of falsehoods: people can be worn down by repetitions, suckered. Possess their own corruptions, on which the shrewd or cynical can play. So? Inform these local losers he’s a surf champion. Famous before their time. Something they’re too dumb to know about. Repeat till they buy in. Boots scuffing sand—bone spurs?—Trump shuffles over to the surfers, as usual ready to lie. Not just former surf champion, he tells them, savoring his self-congratulation. “Out one day in the biggest waves ever—some people say nobody had ever seen such big waves—I saved Obama from drowning.” Of course Obama didn’t thank him. “No aloha spirit, not even born in America.” Appraising the bronzer-induced orange pigment of Trump’s face and odd white circles around his eyes, the surfers are expressionless, silent. Which impels Trump to taunt. “The whole world is laughing at us,” he’s told campaign audiences. But the surfers aren’t laughing, are moving away, ready to paddle out to the breaks. Thwarted, Trump has epithets on the tip of his tongue. “Vermin.” And “dog” (echoing Mao’s “running dogs”?). Luckily, since non-Native haole (white) nationalists are low on the local



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totem pole, the surfers are beyond earshot, “Human scum,” Trump mutters (channeling Hitler? Stalin?). So much mastery implied by the surfers’ ease as they paddle toward the lineup. More Trump envy. And fear. Anger at his fear, anger the surfers seem not to have any. He remembers watching Shark Week on TV with Stormy Daniels. “[Trump] was like, ‘I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.’ ”

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Trump, alone. At his inauguration: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” Crime waves Trump was both inventing and claiming only he could eliminate. Carnage, from Latin carnaticum, the slaughter of animals. On this shore Trump’s on now, however, the ocean is full of death, though, unlike fish, humans are enjoined not to feed on their own kind. So it is that a born-rich survivor of countless failures—gifted at fucking up upward—thinks of making a deal. Both he and the ocean are deceivers, concealers, though the ocean, implacable accumulator, signs no nondisclosure agreements. Still, time to make a move. Charm and gull the ocean, play Borschtbelt insult-comic? Trump stares out toward the horizon, shudders. Ocean inscrutable. Deadpan. T. S. Eliot wrote that “the sea has many voices / Many gods and many voices.” Wavelets lap the shore, softly calling, inveigling, “Donald, come on in. Get back in touch with your inner fish.” Trump shakes his hooded and goggled head, brushing away their blandishments.

 The body politic. Trump told Howard Stern he’d never seen then-fiancée Melania defecate: “Maybe they save that for after marriage.” Or, his response to Hillary’s debate bathroom break: “I know where she went—it’s disgusting, I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “No, it’s too disgusting. Don’t say it, it’s disgusting.” Or how he described the word impeach: “dirty, filthy, disgusting.” Shit on his mind. Not just shithole countries, either. What happens to a shitheel / bad-boy / rich-boy suppository shoving himself up America’s ass? President Ducolax! Shit flying, shit hitting the fan, country up shit’s creek. Shit-outta-luck. And now? Now? Trump smelling not only his sweat but, OMG, don’t tell the kids . . . Number 45, Leader of the Free World, shitting himself! Trump beshat. Sniveling, whining. Whimpering.

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Shallow man in the shallows. Four-flusher in Chief. Bluff called? In the silence he abhors, starved for audience, dying for some response, Trump’s life begins to pass before his eyes. So many people he’s used, dispensed with. Surely nobody’s ever had so many! Think of recent kindred spirits, go-fers, the amoral ambitious. Lickspittles. Flunkies, enablers. Trump’s White House, home to grifters, toadies, brown-nosers. Reporter David Cay Johnston argued, “Donald doesn’t love anyone. He doesn’t even really love himself.” If so, how does he calculate who will pity him? Profess to pity? Ivanka, who’s asserted she inherited her father’s “strong ethical compass,” which must have made Trump smirk. Or Melania: immigrant with iffy visa. Self-mythologizer. Not just marriage to a wealthy American—made her bed, slept in it—but . . . First Lady? What’s Slovenian for “Totally fuckin’ unbelievable”?

 Eighteenth-century poet William Cowper wrote, “God is His own interpreter, / And He will make it plain.” But some Christians, without fear of false prophets or antichrists, can put words in God’s mouth. And how flattering to oneself to speak in His name! Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said He “wanted Donald Trump to become President.” Overcoming “every strategy from hell and every strategy from the enemy,” as prosperity gospeller Paula White predicted. Trump: “Nobody reads the Bible more than me.” “The Bible means a lot to me but I don’t want to get into specifics.” “Nothing beats the Bible. Not even The Art of the Deal.” Author Eric Mataxas, self-professed ecumenical Christian, points out that Trump has “evinced [my italics] a startling lack of familiarity [my italics] with the Bible and has even admitted being unable to recall ever asking for God’s forgiveness.” But how could Trump? It’s just not in him. The Chosen One coming clean before an alleged Heavenly Maker, on his knees apologizing—like a dog!—to something / someone nobody’s ever seen? Pathetic! Penance? Reconciliation? Redemption? No? “I have a great relationship with God,” Trump said. This particular divinity an insurance policy with low premiums. Just the interminable—God damn it!—laying on of un-Purelled hands.

 As for yours truly, Dear Reader, I claim no knowledge of celestial realms or Supreme Beings. Still, by this point in my vision I might have mistaken myself for a recording angel, or, if not, for one of their scribes. But hold on! Check this out! Wetsuit, boots, hood, goggles, and . . . Wow! Trump’s sprouted wings! Wings?



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A Nearer-My-God-to-Thee moment? Demonic Donald now one of the seraphim? Well, no. Water wings. Plastic.

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Trump-beshat on his ass at the water’s edge. Gluttonous overgrown child in need of diaper change. Humming. Chattering: “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man.” Graydon Carter’s “short-fingered vulgarian” doing something with his hands. And laughing. Grabbing pussy? No: building a sand castle. As he’s said, “Nobody builds walls better than me, believe me.” About “Nobody.” “Nobody knows more [about construction / drones / techno­ logy / money / trade / polls / renewables / ISIS / the horror of nuclear war / banks / golf] than I do. Believe me.” But if you do believe him, will he share what he’s learning here? “I know a lot,” he’s said. “I know more than I’m ever going to tell you.”

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Trump’s calling—his destiny, as unctuous pastor Paula White put it. Think of Amnon of Mainz’s eleventh-century prayer. On this shore, Trump seems in no danger of perishing by fire / sword / wild beast / stoning / strangulation / earthquake / plague / famine. But since we all must die, do die, what’s left? Super-yacht owner Trump making the rookie mistake of turning his back to the ocean? Swept away? Businessman Warren Buffett said, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.” Out: Matthew Arnold’s “unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.” Hopkins’s “widow-making, unchilding, unfathering / deeps.” Yeats’s “murderous innocence of the sea.” Trump waiting, waiting. But for what? State funeral in the Capitol Rotunda, like George W. Bush’s? For Charon to ferry him to the Pacific Trash Gyre, obsequies commemorating the Donald J. Trump Shit-heap Vortex?

 Ah, ah . . . Dear Reader, my regrets. It’s at just this moment my vision began to blur. Allergic reaction, perhaps. But could that have been hundreds of busloads of evangelicals spontaneously generated? Crowds, the biggest ever, chanting, “Lock her up”? A band of heavenly angels coming in low over the face of the deep. Arriving to raise Trump on high? Or maybe it was, as Philip Larkin wrote, “Only one ship . . . seeking us, a

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black- / Sailed unfamiliar, towing …  / A huge and birdless silence.” Or what Pablo Neruda conjured: “Coffins under sail, embarking with the pale dead . . . caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead . . . [sails] filled by the sound of death which is silence.” Or perhaps Death was telling Trump, as Thomas Hardy put it, “’I did not will a grave / Should end thy pilgrimage today, / But I, too, am a slave!’” Or just maybe, as Trump so often insisted, it was “no crime . . . no obstruction . . . no collusion. There was no nothing.” Erased. Eradicated. Extirpated. Extinguished. Expunged. Effaced. Nil. Annihilated. Null. “Nobody.” No body. “No nothing.”

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V

T he

W ritin g

L ife

Masterpieces

Back in the 1970s, I knew a Proust aficionado. Snuggling in bed with a lover, he’d read to her from In Search of Lost Time. “A masterpiece,” was how he described it, explaining, ruefully, that it was far richer in the French. Such funereal regret suggested literary time apogeed with Proust. Had—lamentably—ground to a halt. Unspoken: the flame had a keeper. I sometimes wondered how he imagined Proust would have described him. I was then in my late twenties. First book out, second in the works. The Proustian might have argued resistance to the word masterpiece suggested I suffered Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence.” As novelist Cynthia Ozick wrote, to critic Bloom “all of us are disconsolate latecomers . . . envious and frustrated inheritors.” For Bloom-the-Freudian, writing was about Oedipal winners and losers, a zero-sum game. Some readers, however, found know-it-all Bloom “hoist with his own petard,” as Hamlet, Bloom’s favorite, put it. Struggles with tradition? Risks of being derivative? William Deresiewicz suggests Bloom’s theory “seems all too transparent a projection of the academic’s own predicament . . . It is the professor, above all, who labors under the existential need to be ‘original.’ ” Though Bloom was perhaps projecting, writers can of course be competitive. Of the commitment to art, poet Donald Justice deemed it “rather like the self-satisfaction of the elect in certain Protestant sects.” And, “Experience teaches one to believe that there is a dimension to the self that all those who are not artists lack.” Not an attractive sentiment, I’d say, but Justice doubled down: “Some dim notion of all this must underlie the critic’s familiar envy.” In this same vein, poet Derek Walcott was “taking on Shakespeare, he was

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taking on Chaucer,” according to Kei Miller. “He was taking on Dante . . . This is what great writing was and this is what he wanted to produce . . . he wanted to stand alongside them.” Sheesh, as they put it in Hawaiian pidgin. Think of the wolf in “Three Little Pigs,” huffing and puffing. Or remember Norman Mailer’s boxing. Playing the writer—self-promoting, writers so terribly self-made. Self-employed: gig economy workers. Having to, as the idiom went, pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. The literary past: like stenography and filing, part of a writer’s skill set is how best to make use of it. That, and—apologies to Professor Bloom—deciding what voices in the present not to listen to. Coming of age in the turbulent 1960s, an avid reader, I knew our particular stories had not been told. Stumbled, exuberantly, into trying for myself. Obviously I was instructed by countless works of fiction and nonfiction. Each precursor, without my knowing it, opening another door. I’d read, say, Homer / S ophocles / O vid / Chaucer / Shakespeare / George Eliot / the Brontes / Dickens / Woolf / Conrad / Flaubert. The writers I wanted to be in the company of, however, were not-much-older elders. Authors a generation or two senior, all kinds: Camus / Roth / Hunter Thompson / Janet Malcom / George V. Higgins / John Hersey / Marguerite Duras / Italo Calvino / Mary McCarthy / Elizabeth Hardwick / Robert Caro / Kurt Vonnegut, to name a few. Meanwhile, though books were at the heart of my life, they were only among arts formal and informal shaping me. Films, from Children of Paradise to Little Big Man; music—classical, folk, rock, soul, rhythm and blues; stoned rapping of friends, their interminable oral sagas; and idiomatic English in its many varieties. About Narrow Road to the Interior, Haruo Shirane writes that for Bashō “the ancients were, paradoxically, to be a source of inspiration but not of models to be emulated.” The search for the new would exist “in relationship to established associations and worlds, which were reconstructed and transmitted by Bashō and other haikai masters.” When I was in my twenties, spending time in ranch country or in or on the ocean, my poet-mother recommended Narrow Road. Bashō one of the “ancients” she read as part of her process of—as for Bashō himself—revisioning tradition. And though my mother’s great gifts for words—spoken, written—were my mother tongue, I felt free to disagree with, more than once had to disregard, her opinions about books, including my own.

 Having recounted this, I’m still tempted to call Grace Paley’s 1972 story, “A Conversation with My Father,” a masterpiece. Let me go instead with an adjective: masterful. Were Grace Paley still around, she’d no doubt prefer it. Initially



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a poet, she never wrote a novel, which meant that some (male) critics and editors of her era mistakenly—stupidly—felt she’d failed to progress to more important work. In Paley’s “Conversation,” a father and daughter argue about versions of a story the daughter’s writing and so about what writing should be. The father is described as an eighty-six-year-old former doctor, also “artist for a couple of decades.” His heart, “that bloody motor, is equally old, and will not do certain jobs any more. It still floods his head with brainy light. But it won’t let his legs carry the weight of his body around the house.” For decades, and until recently, it was the daughter / writer-narrator to whom I paid closer attention, seeing the father as any writer’s foil. Disagreeing with him about what story should be, offering yet another amended version, the daughter argues against constraints of traditional plot and, perhaps, narratives about lives as they’d been lived in her father’s youth. In her world, she rejects “the absolute line between two points” in favor of “the open destiny of life,” its impossible-to-predict surprises. Rereading “Conversation” again now, after my own stretches of “health issues” I’m more attentive to that eighty-six-year-old father. About a character in his daughter’s story, he says, “Poor woman. Poor girl, to be born in a time of fools, to live among fools. The end. The end. You were right to put that down. The end.” Paley’s opening description of the father—“bloody motor”; “brainy light”— calls more attention to her prose than his condition, does not make the reader despair for him. For instance, she writes that he is “in bed.” Since my own stints recovering from surgeries, I feel sure a writer deft as Paley chose to avoid “bedridden.” Too final a word, precluding that “open destiny of life.” I see with new eyes the prosaic detail she offers only as the story closes: “He took a couple of nitroglycerin. ‘Turn to five,’ he said, pointing to the dial on the oxygen tank. He inserted the tubes into his nostrils and breathed deep.” No possible escape from such specifics. When, not yet thirty, I first read this story, what could “nitroglycerin” have meant to me? A word evoking Albert Nobel: dynamite / gunpowder / nitroglycerin. But now that I’ve “sublingually” consumed lifesaving “vasodilators” for “angina pectoris” made from nitrates, I feel Paley had no choice but to give the father the story’s last word—about both the daughter’s protagonist and himself. This though no one makes a stronger case for believing in the unpredictability of living than the narrator. Thus Paley’s masterful story closes: “ ‘How long will it be?’ he asked. ‘Tragedy! You too. When will you look it in the face?’ ”

 As Paley’s narrator argued, life goes on. More than forty years since I first read it, “Conversation” still pleases and teaches, though I’ve never been impelled to

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read much more of her fiction. This story turned out to be enough, perhaps because it so richly resists any one reading. Invites, requires, rereading. Perhaps also because I wasn’t reading only “for pleasure,” was encountering Paley’s work as writer, took what I needed to learn from her. Was able to learn. (Similarly for me, little post-1971 Bob Dylan, no Joni Mitchell after Blue. Enough of each marvelous artist for a lifetime, one might say.) Not long ago, however, I sought out Paley’s late poetry, part of my quest— this quest you’re reading—to appraise my current condition. Harkening back to her “Conversation,” “My Father at Eighty-Nine” opens, “His brain simplified itself / saddening everyone.” And from two other poems: “I had thought the tumors / on my spine would kill me but / the tumors on my head seem to be / extraordinarily competitive this week.” And, “I have experienced the amputation / of my left breast.” Finally, in “Walking in the Woods,” there’s an old maple, one branch “half-rotted” but “the tree not really dying living / less widely [requiring] a terrible stretch to sun / just to stay alive but if you’ve / liked life you do it.” grace paley, 1922–2007

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Bronk

Reading for this book, toward this book. Rereading for this book, toward this book. Yet again out the front door to the garage-library to scan bookcases, see what catches the eye. The poetry shelves. Death Is the Place. My right hand reaches for it, brings it down. William Bronk’s very short poems, many just a few lines. On page four, more than forty years ago I’d underlined “dawn’s confidence astonishes.” And, on page forty-two, poet referring to the world, I’d underlined “The much / I may have loved in it wasn’t mine.” I encountered Death Is the Place because, way back when, North Point Press was near my cottage. What a list editor-in-chief Jack Shoemaker and publisher William Turnbull were creating! Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime and Joubert’s Notebooks among the titles I savored, learned from. I was in my midthirties, eagerly reading as much and as widely as I could. Finally beginning to define myself as a writer, as opposed to being the fellow who’d published several books. So many different paths still possible, so much to love—and to fear missing, or losing—in the world Bronk illuminated when he wrote that it “wasn’t mine.”

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Word Playing

Childhood in a polylingual family, hyper-polylingual mother and brother. Polylingual punning never quite outgrown. Proust’s temps perdu, for instance. Memories of Tom Perdu: title of a section in my first book, incorrigible author in his twenties. Or, much later­—recently, that is, writing this book—coming across Renaissance musical laments evoking the soul’s ordeals, grief, and that knock-knockknocking on Death’s door. Consider John Dowland’s Lachrimae (1604):

Come heavy sleepe the image of true death; And close up these my weary weeping eyes: Whose spring of tears doth stop my vitall breath, And tears my hart with sorrows sigh-swoln cries.

Such compositions are tombeaux. Tomb, French for tomb or tombstone; plural tombeaux. Tom beau? Tom no longer beau? Tom’s beau tomb? Tombeau, in any case, (mis)led me to threnody, a memorial poem or song, from the Greek threnoidia (threnos, “wailing” + oide, “ode”). Think dirge. Or coronach (Gaelic comh, “together” + rànach, “outcry”). Which delivered me to banshee, a female ghost wailing—keening!—that a death is imminent. Thence to the notion of the older self, this older self, as male banshee . . .

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Unbecomings #1

So much evanescing, I think of a phrase from bygone days. Nineteen seventy, New York City sidewalks, the dealer’s rap in three-card monte games: “Now you see ’em, now you don’t.” Back then, experiencing a pre-internet need to know—craving a story to be told—you might ask a friend, “Whatever became of . . .” Lately, however, in my circle the phrase arises about how people are doing when they’re no longer who they’ve been. How things worked out for them in “later years.” In old age. Imminent deaths. Data about the lives / destinies of writers increasingly catch the eye as one . . . matures. Age forty-one, Jules Renard wrote, “I am no longer capable of dying young.” Five years later, noting a fellow author’s death, Renard wrote, “Is it my turn?” and died a month later. About Saul Bellow, who lived until age eighty-nine, James Wolcott writes, “After Ravelstein, it was a rocky, inevitable descent into fading faculties, physical enfeeblement (the housekeeper carries him upstairs like a baby), dementia and rounds of recrimination . . . Bellow’s memory flutters in and out like a radio with poor reception, he asks about people no longer alive and is crestfallen when informed they’re dead.” As for Philip Roth, in his midseventies he concluded, “I’d done my best work and anything more would be inferior. I was by this time no longer in possession of the mental vitality or the verbal energy or the physical fitness needed.” Actor-playwright Sam Shepard’s conclusion was of a different sort. Afflicted with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—the merciless ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease— until days before his death using a tape recorder or dictating, Shepard wrote and edited Spy of the First Person. His family assisted and empowered, singer Patti Smith, his longtime friend, helping with final revisions. 132

Sam Shepard re time in a wheelchair in New York City: “The thing I remember most is being more or less helpless and the strength of my sons.” And, “One year ago exactly more or less, he could walk with his head up. He could see through the air. He could wipe his own ass.” Self-interest caused me to pay particular attention to Shepard’s commitment to the art he’d lived by. When he died in 2017, he and I were the same age, and I was well into this book. One hoped his Spy of the First Person would be all the publisher’s jacket copy claimed for it: “searing beautiful prose”; “unflinching expression of the vulnerabilities that make us human”; “vivid, haunting, and deeply moving.” One hoped Spy of the First Person would redeem Sam Shepard’s suffering and demise. Transcend his suffering and demise. Hoped a book could be capable of that. Hoped the story of Sam Shepard’s last book would have a happy ending.

 In Robert Lowell’s Day by Day, published the year he died, in “Unwanted” he asks if art is ever “a way to get well.”

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above

East Maui irrigation system, 1996. Photograph by Geoffrey Fricker opposite

East Maui irrigation. Photograph by Geoffrey Fricker

Ruins, 1999

Time travel. “Here today, gone tomorrow.” Or, here today, gone to maui, as the bumper sticker read. Māui, actually, trickster demigod who fished up various Polynesian islands. Who was en route to conquering Death by heading up Her vagina until She crossed Her legs: the end of the end of Death. In the 1970s, hanging out in a friend’s shack on Māui’s north coast, I’d go to the sleepy sugar mill town of Pā‘ia for groceries and coffee. Pā‘ia had by then been discovered by hippies, for them an incarnation of, say, a vegan colonic therapy epicenter. When I returned in the late 1990s, Pā‘ia was a soon-to-be former mill town, locus of several time warps and anachronisms. Mill as before just up Baldwin Avenue, plume of vapor like cotton candy. Diffuser / crusher / escalator / scrubber / mud bath / catwalk / shredder / centrifuge / clarifier. Trucks with payloads of fifty tons. But also Pā‘ia’s weathered wooden storefronts; flocks of helmeted tourists on bikes; old Horiuchi market empty; windsurfers from France / Germany / Brazil. Also, as well, dazzlingly ahistorical seekers still abounding in the ozone of nearby Ha‘ikū or Makawao town, barefoot with sun-bleached hair, eyes open very wide, swimming in the sea of the soul. Shopping at Mana Health Foods. Bulletin boards offering Sufi music, Taoist yoga, Reiki training, rebirthing, channeling, holistic facials, avatars . . . To return to Pā‘ia in 1999, I joined the flow of interisland travel, starting toward Honolulu International Airport in rush hour. Gridlock on Interstate H-1, despite the then ever-more-depressed economy, “visitor” count way down

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in a two-industry state (U.S. military the other big spender). It was dawn, full moon setting, surf on O‘ahu’s north shore wrapping around to the east and west. At the airline terminal, there were cetaceans on the walls. Alas poor Ahab: everyone Saved by Whales. Waiting for the flight, women from “the mainland” were sporting white pants / white sneakers, their consorts wearing large stomachs without apology, as if tolerating another inevitable of the spousal-paternal role. Talk about carry-ons! Their teenage boys, baseball-cap brim reversed, were generic, as recognizable to each other as long-lost twins. And, for the whole family, fanny packs / cameras / tethered sunglasses. naked co-ed golf read one man’s T-shirt. Tourism a stage play requiring an agreed-on diminution of the Unknown. Analogue of, say, the roller coaster. There were also racks of tourist literature. Free post-modern smorgasbords of opportunities. Coming soon to Hawai‘i: The Rolling Stones, Yale Wiffenpoofs, Dave Brubeck, Koko the signing gorilla. Jeep safaris, available anytime. Snorkel Bob in a woman’s bathing suit. Atlantis Adventures’ submarine visiting a “brave new world.” (“’Tis new to thee,” Prospero responds when daughter Miranda utters these words in The Tempest.) But why my flight? Like Pā‘ia’s New Agers, I was a seeker. My quest? To re­spond in written words to Geoffrey Fricker’s photographs of a ruin just outside of town. I already knew his other photographic concerns: wild and “tamed” rivers and watersheds of California; dinosaur fossil assemblages —“death beds.” Had spent time with him on the upper Sacramento River. So: off to a ruin. Where a métier can lead you.

 I’d done some homework. Industrial capital came to Hawai‘i in the form of sugar. With, that is, descendants of the nineteenth-century missionaries who, by 1893, sixty-something years after the missionaries’ landfall, had overthrown the Hawaiian kingdom. Annexation, private property, and sugar in Pā‘ia meant the end of traditional Hawaiian farming of taro, breadfruit, banana, arrowroot, yams, kava, and sweet potato. Meant the building of miles of siphons, tunnels, and flumes to transport water from the windward slopes of Haleakalā, this area too low to draw rain out of the northeast trade winds. Meant the arrival of thousands of immigrants to work the plantations. Meant stoop labor. Meant a local industrial hero, the legendary Henry Perrine Baldwin, adjusting a mill’s cane-crusher and getting fingers caught in the turning rolls, right hand and arm mangled.

 Nineteen ninety-nine. From Pā‘ia, out past the high flames and black smoke of burning cane, the sugar company’s oversized tractors and steam shovels



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cartoon-like, as if out of a children’s book. Driving along the sea cliffs to Ho‘okipa Beach park, bumper sticker on an old VW Bug reads, it’s never too late to have a happy childhood. And sticker on a pickup, the hawaiian kingdom restored june 7, 1992. Restoration still pending, however. Low tide at Ho‘okipa. The papa, shelf of reef along the narrow sand beach, exposed. No wind, water “glassy,” and, farther outside, north swell “closing out” the bay, forming enormous unrideable waves. Not a soul at the breaks—Pavilions / Middles / The Lane / The Point. Hāmākuapoko: from H-Poko Point, back toward Pā‘ia, then up Holomua Road a mile and a half through cane fields. Mongoose hot-footing it across the pavement. Parking just below old Maui High School, much of it abandoned, overgrown by vegetation. Looking way down to the ocean, green / bluegreen / jade / blue-black, white of breaking waves. Vast slopes of cane, cloudcovered ‘Īao Valley. Police car pulling up by a rental car’s smashed window. Hoofing it on red-dirt roads, traffic-less intersections with stop signs in the apparent middle of nowhere, not a sound of humans or the man-made. Headhigh sugarcane. Walled in. Cane stalks rustling, sun burning, rooster crowing. Two resolutely straight, fastidiously branched Cook Island pines. Ironwood, monkeypod, guava, papaya, passion fruit. Jacaranda, kiawe. Trying to find an abandoned nineteenth-century sugar mill, taking one fork, another, backtracking, spotting this stone wall or gulch a second time, a third. Hot, irritated, confused. And then, no doubt only several hundred yards from where I began, a canopy of foliage, what seems a stand of trees, and, through its branches, a structure.

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Slipping down an orderly row of cane, I reach the wreckage of a building perhaps 200 by 100 by 50 feet. Blackened cement-and-stone walls, upper floors fallen, roof girders above, sections of rippled corrugated iron on the ground, window and door frames empty. This was once an agricultural factory: towering smokestack, ox-drawn carts, workers / foremen / bosses from around the world. A babble of languages creating pidgin English above the din of the crushers. For laborers, a lifetime of hand-cutting cane, crouching. Ruins. Latin ruina, “a collapse,” “a rushing down,” “to fall.” The End? No: here, time failed to stop. Empty beer bottles (Steinlager from New Zealand); spray-painted Chinese ideograms. And, why the surprise, photosynthesis. What’s growing? Banyan trunks, roots, branches. Countless banyan trunks, roots, branches. Branches like sections of a pipe-fitter’s mania, superglued—no give when I yank on them—to the walls. Plastered, layering / over-laying. Minimalism this is not. Over-the-top growing. Overkill? Over-living. Or just … life. All nature has a pattern, they say. What’s the plan here, the composition? Trees, but where do these branches begin, end? Going which way? Backtracked

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from a branch, the regression keeps regressing. No obvious single point of origin; no clear end in sight. Banyan(s)? Plural? So many trunks in and around the building, how many trees are there? What if your life depends on a tally? And you, your one and only self, in this . . . labyrinth of branches and trunks, these . . . tentacles? This . . . lava flow of growing. Such life force from sunlight / air / water / soil. Are they, is it, one thing? A graft? Married? At odds? At war? Meanwhile, POV the building, its walls are . . . drowned / smothered / strangled. Cannibalized, digested. Windows and doors spared, branches framing them, dropping (?) down (?) beside them or angling past the rectangles. Spared, or avoided: branches superstitious about windows and doors? Branches seeing something in them that should be left alone? Or, is the building crumbling, branches holding it up, holding it together? And? Melded / matted tendrils hang from branches, as if determined to reach the ground. All this in heavy shade, sunlight blocked by the leaf canopy. Visual escape eliminated, a feeling of the inevitable, and, mill so undone, collapse. Dazed, you think, say, Angkor Wat, expect macaques or other simians.

 Such silence, as if the banyan(s) has / have been waiting for you. Waiting a long time. Capable of waiting some more. Waiting us out. Waiting for all of us to be gone. Disorientation, claustrophobia, hint of suffocation. Out, out of the mill, down a consolingly orderly row of cane, onto a red-dirt road. Into the light, sky now above. Of course. Larger world, ongoing, visible. Of course. Helicopter, jet, Pacific down below, the long upslope of Haleakalā’s volcanic bulk. Looking back, I see the canopy as a bump in the sweep of the fields. Upended umbrella floating on the surface of the cane; Mont-Saint-Michel in a high-tide’s sea of green. The banyan, the mill. Did the mill walls have a choice? The banyan? Fossilized bones of the dinosaur, they say, become one with the rock.

 More homework: banyans are indigenous to the Himalayan foothills, widespread throughout India and Indonesia, planted for shade. They’re a kind of fig, related to breadfruit / mulberries / elms / hemp. An ornamental, and evergreen, the banyan is hardy, fast growing. A central trunk sends out horizontal branches in all directions. From buds under the bark aerial roots emerge, hang hair-like, and eventually reach the ground, themselves evolving into substantial buttresses, pillars. Thus the tree, seldom more than seventy feet high, spreads laterally, coming to resemble a thicket, a tangle as it produces a dome of dense shade foliage with a diameter of one hundred yards. Its bark is smooth. Leaves compact, elliptical, dark, often covered with a



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black mold that grows on the excretion of a bug that feeds on the leaves and twigs. Fruits small, fig-like, seeds dispersed by birds—airborne, the fleshy fruit passing through the bird’s alimentary canal. Or perhaps the banyan evolved to get humans to help it disperse. Banyans came to Hawai‘i in the nineteenth century with Westerners, tree and Westerners non-indigenous / non-native / exotic and exfoliating successfully. Invasive? Alien species, both of them.

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Twenty years ago, when I went back to Pā‘ia to see the mill, Hawai‘i was immersed in simultaneous nostalgias. Most markedly, the irredentist dreams of many Native Hawaiians, ongoing mourning of the lost Kingdom, and frequently invoked love of the ‘āina, land possessed by usurpers since 1893. Every new hotel a visible displacement, violence. As for Hawai‘i-born citizens of Asian or European ancestry, there was rue for the gradual passing of the allegedly simpler plantation world. Still, plantation labor could be close to slavery, hiring strategies were often racist by intent, workers did owe their lives to the company store. There were labor wars, strikes, and sabotage; there was legal power viciously misused. Yet there was also nostalgia for the routine of plantation life, comforts of a small and ordered community in which you knew your place. In 1999, much in Hawai‘i was thus lost, reverberating, or, if deliberately unacknowledged, impending but already deeply felt. Simultaneities, alterations. Transformations. Ironies, terrors, the quotidian, the moment, the merging of destinies. Despite Hawai‘i’s beauty, the word paradise was overused, oversold. Hawai‘i prelapsarian? No. The theme of loss of paradise was not just sentimentality or pastoralism, but also response to daunting human-induced change. As Robert Pogue Harrison argues, “For reasons that remain altogether obscure, Western civilization has decided to promote institutions of dislocation in every dimension of social and cultural existence . . . an aggravated confusion about what it means to dwell on the earth.”

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Earth. Wandering away from the ruin on red-dirt roads, I encountered a sugar company foreman. That odor in the air? “The smell of money,” he explained. Big money, though he said it was good to be nearing retirement: the operation might soon close—consolidation. Soon we were bouncing down cane roads in his company pickup as he recounted tales about the plantation. Much more here than decay. At one site we stopped, foreman teasing field workers about waiting for a wind-shift before igniting the stalks. “Just burn the fucker!” he yelled.

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“What about the EPA?” a worker replied. “You know, Clean Air, that poor old lady’s house over there.” The workers waited. I waited. “Fuck the old lady and her fucking house too!” the foreman shouted. “And fuck the EPA. Tell them, we suck, but we do not swallow.”

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The foreman. And Buddha, who, some say, sat all night under a bodhi tree (cousin to the banyan, a kind of ficus). Wouldn’t budge till he achieved Enlightenment. At dawn, they tell us, beholding the morning star Buddha cried out in joy: “Wonderful, wonderful, all beings are perfect just the way they are.” Unqualified affirmation may only rarely be what Art is about, only for instants of insight or song. Art may, however, help set the terms of both mystery and loss—what one confronts, will live with. Where the artist, through his craft, may discover what Robert Adams termed “his proper silence.”

 Reverb. Persistence of sound after a sound is made. What I’ve recounted took place twenty years ago. What to make of it? Of, for instance, Geoffrey Fricker’s photographs of the ruin, his many repeated stays, repetition compulsion which then sent me there to find words. In his images there’s composition and control, thus reconciliation, but the camera also selects detail to the point of disorder, presents ambiguities the eye (for good reason?) suppresses. Brings forward what we might otherwise choose not to see. May function as the visual equivalent of the id, undermining coherence. On the other hand, beholding the paired architectures of mill and tree, one might come to accept the banyan. Or, even, identify with it. Twenty years since going back to Pā‘ia, twenty years older, now in my midseventies, I read the banyan’s life and death and my own life and death as intertwined, inevitable, a form of embrace.

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above

Sugar water-cooling system, Pu‘unēnē, Maui, 1997. Photograph by Geoffrey Fricker opposite

Pā‘ia Mill and toxic pond, Maui, 1998. Photograph by Geoffrey Fricker

above

Abandoned church and mill gear. Photograph by Geoffrey Fricker opposite

Pā‘ia, Maui, 1997. Photograph by Geoffrey Fricker

Chester

The no-longer-new normal. Friend with a stroke. Friend with colon cancer. Friend with dementia. A few weeks ago, ninety-six-year-old Chester Aaron died. Child of immigrants, he grew up in a coal-mining town in the 1930s, saw combat in World War II, worked for years as an X-ray technician. Became, after his first book was published, a college professor. Became also one-man cultivator of nearly a hundred kinds of garlic. Was, at the end, over-living. In hospice care, “ready to go.” “Tom, let me go,” he’d say when, abruptly fading, he couldn’t continue our conversation. Living alone in the country, again falling down, he’d say he regretted giving away his guns. Buoyant graphomaniac, manuscripts of several works in progress always on the long table by the kitchen, he’d tell friends he would’ve jumped off a bridge if he couldn’t write. But then, toward the end, failed to keep a bridge handy. In Chester’s hospice period, I’d been wishing him . . . dead. But today, for the first time since he died, I missed him. I’d just come across some one-page paragraphs by a poet. Lots of white space. Chester was no poet, and for sure not a poet in the academy. Not into talking critical theory, structuralism, post-structuralism, new historicism, or semiotics. Nor had he begun with free verse and then, liberated from suffocating visual constructs, moved on to “prose poems.” Couldn’t tell you the difference between a sentence and the typographical certainty of a line of poetry.

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To Chester, “prose poems,” sometimes rich and strange, often read like snippets declining to go the distance. Created, he liked to tease, by poets writing prose who were unable to utter just one syllable more. Chester: country boy; cantankerous novelist. On the cliques and networks of poets playing the poet, he’d banter that they found defining poetry easier than writing it. Poetry as song; as breath; as Auden’s “memorable speech.” Poems “you see rather than read.” But, Chester would ask, what of Pound’s enjoinder that “poetry should be at least as well written as prose”? And why, marketing aside, call a paragraph of prose a poem? Or posit that a prose poem is “poetry that disguises its true nature”? Why argue such paragraphs were subversive, offering escape from the prison of form? But that they still were not, God forbid, narrative. Quarter-serious tirades from a senior citizen working on his garlic beds— damn gophers, cussed wild turkeys—or harvesting apples from trees he’d planted decades before. Hummingbirds—scores of hummingbirds—at the feeders. Chester-the-indefatigable taste-tasting: homegrown grape, garlic clove, Asian pear. He did, however, doff his straw Stetson to the versifier who termed her own paragraphs “prosettes.” Incessantly writing, Chester didn’t theorize about literature. No post-modern bones in his body, as professor he merely taught what he admired. Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with a Dog.” Nothing meta about such forebears. Chester’s novels, stories, memoirs: more than twenty books. So much to champion, commemorate, refuse to forget. Recall to recreate. He sought to portray things as they’d been: small-town families in the Great Depression; routines of hospital work; farming; mishaps of mating; war. An estranged stepson; sheep ranching; liberating a death camp. A lifetime of certain moments of being a Jew, whether one wanted to be one or not. Realism: Chester’s kind of fable-making. Expressing praise and grief, celebration and grievance. Though in some ways he was a perennial innocent, again shocked or surprised, Chester’s default setting was an extraordinary vitality and love of life. Life, of course, including sorrows. Learning of the death of the wife he’d divorced forty years before, looking at photos from the good days, he trashed the novel he’d been writing about her. “Three years of work. It was mean. True, but mean.” Published in his mideighties, Chester’s 25 Loves is a chapbook of short nonfictions, one per page, which some might term “prose poems.” Stories that, late in his life, begged or demanded to be told. “Olly—1994” is about a combat buddy from World War II: “A week after we entered Dachau, Olly came to my bedroll and crawled inside . . . ‘I need to hold you and kiss you. Please let me do this.’ I held him and kissed him.” In another brief piece, a young vegan helps him with the garlic. Intending



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to save the world, she “talked every minute of every hour of every day” for three months. Who, on her last day, abruptly very quiet, wanted to give an eighty-two-year-old a farewell gift because he was “a good human being.” As Chester wrote, “She picked me up and threw me on the grass. She opened my fly.” Said, “Just lay still.” Of course a graphomaniac was going to recount such a moment. The vegan’s real name, you ask? Lily / Jasmine / Rose / Daisy / Flora? Here, she’s Tulip. Tulip! Naming day in a California Eden, Chester an octogenarian Adam. This brief tale moving toward its . . . climax, with Chester on the grass Tulip “worked and worked. Finally said, ‘Well, I can give you a kiss at least.’ ” As Chester wrote, “Which she did.” One might ask if Chester’s nonfiction account is factual. Like us all, octogenarians can embellish, if not for themselves then for the sake of the story. On reflection, I believe what passed between Chester and Tulip that day did take place. The universe is at least this miraculous. But even if such an event never transpired, or not quite this way, for Chester Norman Aaron (1923–2019) it surely should have.

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Unbecomings #2

Poet Paul Smyth: “Death asks us nothing, nothing at all, and yet / We ache to answer death with something true, / A voice will force its little rivulet / Of syllables over silence.” The timeless. The temporal. Both self and ever more of the past ongoing, old(er) writers take note. Storytellers, John Berger argued, are “Death’s Secretaries.” What they create is, if not more permanent than experience, possessing a bit more longevity. Whatever a writer might have in mind, however, in “Dark Song” A. R. Ammons cautioned that “the / old, departing, / can confer / nothing.” The struggle against artistic extinction. But in the end? At the end? André Gide, author of more than fifty books, died at age eighty-one. A few days before, he wrote, No, I cannot assert that with the end of this notebook all will be finished; that all will be over. Perhaps I shall have a desire to add something. To add something or other. To make an addition. Perhaps. At the last moment, to add something still . . . Do I still have something to say? Still something or other to say?

And what might that be? My mother wrote, “Apology will be my death / The poet said beneath her breath, / Unless death one day prove to be / My only true apology.”

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About Writing About Water

A. R. Ammons also gave much thought to the liquid. He described sorrow, for instance, as so “wide that it / Comes on as up a strand / multiple and relentless.” And, “If anything will level with you water will.” And, “Old men drain and dread and dream and dress / and dribble and . . . drone and drool . . . and . . .” As epigraph for his essay “A Poem Is a Walk,” Ammons chose Lao-tse: “Nothing that can be said / in words is worth saying.” Not that Ammons meant to go silent. Verbally prolific, he wrestled with what he saw as the division between even masterfully notated language and the observed world. Words can resemble the “what is,” but “The word is / not the thing.” Words are only “the net to / cast on what / is: the finger / to point with: the / method of distinguishing, defining, limiting.” For Ammons, Helen Elam suggests, “poetic language . . . displaces the very thing it attempts to name.” Is “not revelation but appropriation.” Ammons’s poem “Plunder,” for instance, celebrating all that the world has inspired him to write—and despite scrutiny and scientific data brought to bear—concludes, “My mind’s indicted by all I’ve taken.” In “A Poem Is a Walk,” Ammons argues, “Poseidon is the ocean, the total view, every structure in the ocean as well as the unstructured ocean itself.” On the other hand, “Proteus, the god of knowledge . . . is a minor god. Definite knowledge, knowledge specific and clear enough to be recognizable as knowledge is . . . already limited into a minor view.” In “Expressions of Sea Level,” as a walker on the beach, loner hungering for transcendence, Ammons argues that “it is hard to name / the changeless,” and that the sea’s own dream, “a self-deep dark and private anguish,” will be shown only “in small, by hints, / to / keen watchers on the shore.” However, what Ammons does feel words are able to do well is to make 150

comparisons. In “Surfaces” (1974), Ammons proposed that “writing poetry is like surfing.” As he elaborated, The surfboard is the technique, the mastered means by which one is enabled to participate in the energy, greater than one’s own energy, of the waves. The ecstasy of coordination between the mind, body, the surfboard, and the surf . . . the finding of near immobility in motion . . . the groove where with the least surfboard action one ‘dwells’ in the ongoing, onbreaking wave . . . this momentary symmetry of actions allows one to participate in an apparently easy, effortless harmony of things.

Writing poetry is like surfing. Savoring analogies, respecting surfing as craft, Ammons was pleased to link apparent dissimilars. Surfers, however, might not see the point. Surfing is . . . surfing. Surfing the Internet, for instance, is nothing like surfing. Though 1980s Hawai‘i comic Rap Reiplinger did sing “Loving you is surfing you,” surfers seldom compare surfing to other things. Are surfers, then, inarticulate? Or fulfilled (surfeited!) by direct engagement with ocean? If so, they might concur with Galway Kinnell’s description of a naked lover: “What can I say? / Simile is useless.” Unlike Ammons, some authors perceive ocean as not indecipherable but amorphous. In Mann’s Death in Venice, Helen Small writes, “the sea may appear to represent death,” but the more accurate term is “indefinition—the freedom from art’s formal constraint.” Mann’s protagonist Aschenbach is a writer who yearns “for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?” High blown, florid, grandiloquent: Mann’s words express a yearning for reprieve from words. Think of W. H. Auden, who wrote, “Lord, teach me to write so well, that I shall no longer want to.” But ocean as nothingness? Not when you’re in it. Tadzio, the boy on whom Aschenbach is fixated, is described swimming. Aschenbach, however—aboard a steamer, in a gondola, on shore—is not, it seems, a water guy, which might have done something to ground, so to speak, his idea of ocean. In Apolcalypse Now, Robert Duvall’s character says, about the Viet Cong, “Charlie don’t surf.” Though Thomas Mann lived in southern California the last decade of his life, it may have been too late for him to find his way out to the breaks.

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As for yours truly, why make Art of water? Leaving behind the cold Atlantic and icy June lakes of childhood, I arrived in the tropics as a young writer, first book just out. Immersed in warm-water sea changes, as was my habit I wanted to understand, name. Also, nonverbal ocean can demand verbal response. Too much washed away, too seductive a regression. Weeks of water time would send

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me to the public library to learn more, or to a sushi bar as some kind of equalizer. Perhaps also I was unable to leave well enough alone. Occupational hazard? Sharks, they say, have to keep moving to breathe (but, actually, not all sharks). For my writerly self, the ocean was in one aspect liquid material to transmute into story. Ocean qua ocean ever more necessary, but not quite sufficient. I did not commit to writing—in depth!—about water until several years after the death of a second parent. In my midforties, completing a novella about my mother’s terrible last months, I exhausted my narrative and emotional resources. Had, perhaps, written my heart out. Was in no hurry to think about more fiction. I’d also overdosed on the urban, was spending chunks of time surfing in Hawai‘i or wandering in the South Pacific. Time passing, rising and falling on the swell at dawn, waiting for the next set, watching Diamond Head appear to rise and fall, I began to consider writing about water, though without any idea of what I had in mind. As always, I could only find out by trying. Might start by describing Diamond Head at dawn, rising and falling.

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At my usual beach, the regulars—surfers, fishermen, sunbathers, sunset watchers—occasionally remark on being apt to see me whatever the time of day. Shorter or longer stays, off ’n’ on, first light to—as they used to call it—eventide. Responding to the unstated question, I’ve told people this small beach is my office and church. Church? No one’s ever balked at this. Perhaps they too have experienced something like poet Derek Walcott’s “amen of calm waters.” Still, I’ve asked myself just what I’m saying. Worship, homage, reverence? Back in the 1980s, I found that much talk about the spiritual diminished the ineffable. Not for nothing have Jews avoided saying the personal or secret name of G_d, Moses settling for the evasive / elusive “I am that I am.” Mysterioso Almighty into verbal hide ’n’ seek. Still, for me the ocean has been a source of great pleasure. And more. So it was, finally, that I let myself go with the rhetorical currents. The beach is my church. However: saying this also spoke to something more true. Poet Philip Larkin wrote that if called in to “construct” a religion, “I should make use of water.” And for sure, this particular beach is where “any-angled light” can “congregate endlessly,” though no man-made house of adoration can hold a (votive) candle to the ocean. Church? Not even a cathedral. Ocean too vast, and alive, to be compared to the man-made. A category error, but, like skeptic A. R. Ammons, one reaches for analogies. Metaphors and similes: argumentative, playful, a stretch, but how we humans crave them. Create them. As for the beach being my office . . . no desk / cubicle / timecard. Nor, though I consider myself one of the beach’s unpaid keepers, is any authority / trust / service / tenure implied. But, over the decades, text has ensued from water time— in / on / immersed—and from absorption in the art, literature, and science of

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water. One reads Moby Dick, for instance. Admires, learns from, may even hunger to emulate. Or one reads Pablo Neruda, and despite his fame insists the poet should see the whale before beholding the “Leviathan.” From all of which eventually emerged my On Water, The Face of the Deep, and collaborations with marine photographer Wayne Levin. Over the years, a few beach regulars have gathered I’ve made something of the ocean besides surfing / swimming / watching, though they seldom ask to know more. What’s happening on shore in the moment itself seems more than enough to discuss, appraise. What plays on the beach stays on the beach? Or, ocean qua ocean, and what we share right there, more than suffices. Not that there’s no art on this strand. There’s evolution’s human body depicted by endless selfies. God bless. Also, ever more tattoo art, as if people would be naked without it. But who told them they were naked? Post-Fall indeed! I have a tattoo artist friend with nary a visible inch not inked. To me he looks like the convict Magwich in David Lean’s Great Expectations. A monster. But when my friend arrives at the beach, women with tattoos immediately gravitate toward him. To inspect his body art, show him theirs, ask his guidance about what, tattoo-wise, they should do next. As for my kind of art, these days I can foresee not writing further about the ocean. To document human mayhem inflicted on marine life induces despair. But it’s also true all writers one day stop. Must and do stop, no matter how habituated to their craft, despite their desire to continue. Greed and books: I think of my friend Peter, brilliant antiquarian bookman, before he died trying to liquidate his vast stock of first editions. Liquidate! Drowning in books, but still tempted to acquire more of them. Robinson Jeffers wrote that his poems were no longer “guarding the house, well-made watchdogs / ready to bite.” And that “time sucks out the juice / A man grows old and indolent.” And, “Poor hand, a little longer / Write, and see what comes forth from a dead hand.” Here, no body parts dead, yet, but increasingly I’m aware of the effort required. If I tell people that writing a book is like building a house one lives in during construction, then there are roles to fill: architect, carpenter, plumber, painter, roofer, tile setter, electrician. Not to mention all the permits and inspections one has to get. Such—taxing—tasks. When I was a child on a beach north of Boston, I didn’t try to make anything more of being there than a sandcastle. Took home an occasional horseshoe crab shell left by the falling tide, a kind of possessing, but that’s all. Thus may come a moment on a tropic shore when, again like the child I once was, I won’t try to make something of water. I’ll have memories, that kind of souvenir. That kind of transmuting. But otherwise I’ll just be there. By the ocean, in it.

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Thomas Farber

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swan songs and later words

Longevities. Reading recently that Edna O’Brien (age eighty-eight) and Margaret Atwood (age seventy-nine) each had a new novel out, I wondered if these books would differ from earlier work. Artists in winter. A last rich blossoming, freedom, spiritual understanding. Innovative, uncompromising liberation of spirit and art in the face of death? Or, rather, physical decline, bitterness, failing skill. Nostalgia, repetition. Self-parody. I’d been thinking about what critics have called “late style” or “lateness.” In the fine arts, historian Kenneth Clark read in Michelangelo, Titian, and Rembrandt “a sense of isolation, a feeling of holy rage, developing into . . . transcendental pessimism.” Rudolf Arnheim quotes octogenarian artist Hans Richter on qualities of the late paintings of Lyonel Feininger: “A ringing voice without sound, on the border between being and non-being, a man capable of giving utterance in this sphere of the almost divine.” For philosopher Theodor Adorno, old-age style meant repudiation of accepted forms, of bourgeois order. Intransigence and bleak humor rather than reconciliation / acceptance / resignation. Not as much negotiating with the reader’s expectations about how art should function. Literary theorist Barbara Herrnstein Smith coined the term “senile sublime,” that is, less concern with “coherent sense.” Having, Edward Said argued, “the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them,” the artist’s “mature subjectivity, stripped of hubris and

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pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and exile.” Or perhaps, as James Wood wrote, simply “the kind of cussed freedom that one associates with longevity, and with long confidence in artistic practice.”

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“Dying declarations”: legalese for statements made by someone who’s dying or believes he’s dying. Hearsay sometimes admissible in court, though the declarant does not have to die. Presumed to have some reliability because . . . why would someone near death have incentive to lie? In Latin, the principle is Nemo moriturus praesumitur mentire (No one dying should be presumed to be lying). But then again, why would someone in extremis not lie? Still all too human, a declarant might be prone to shifting the blame, self-vindication, faulty memory, or malice.

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My own late(r) style may be what you’re reading here, perhaps foreshadowed by my fifteen-year writerly obsession with the epigrammatic. As Arthur Polgar wrote, “The striking aphorism requires a stricken aphorist.” Having stumbled into the epigrammatic in my early sixties, I was “on a trip,” as the hippies used to say, though I seem, finally, to be over it. Epigrams. Getting rid of narrative. Emphasis on the partial / hyperbole / overstatement / concision. An urge to conclusion, to the irreversible. No explaining. The wicked pleasure of crafting verbal prime numbers. Informing the self and others, “This is how it is!” “Read it and weep,” as they say in poker. “Sleepers, awake!” Art & Life. “The only things men fight over are sex and money.” One sunny day years ago, a neighbor told me this as if it was self-evident. Not too long after, when my first collection of epigrams was published, one of them read, “ ‘The only things men fight over are sex and money,’ said the rich womanizer.” My neighbor read the book, was indignant. “I’m not rich and I’m not a womanizer,” he said. How respond? I’d quoted him accurately. Also, we both knew he’d never worked in the four-plus decades since turning twenty-five, however one characterized having the means to do that. And we both knew his efforts spent trying to meet women were just about a full-time job, though he complained that not having a conventional one was a kind of social disability. Thinking it over for a moment or two, I replied that I’d created something new from what he’d said. And that, as far as I was concerned, what the reader made of it was an if-the-shoe-fits kind of deal. As for some of my other epigrams . . .



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Approaching the end: when a friend thinks of making you both executor and beneficiary of his estate. And, moved to tears, tells you. A kind of trading on the futures exchange.

*

“He deserved to die,” she said. “He got off light.”

*

Old man, difficult, complaining, dying. Unbecoming.

*

Old age. Farewells in progress, some unarticulated.

*

Oneself in the mirror: person to whom you should be sure to say goodbye.

*

Older folk: explore’s become deplore. Implore.

*

Old age, when yet another friend is former.

*

Seventy-five. Though he deems himself a Stoic, his perspective is merely age-inevitable.

*

Living: death deferred. Not that Death defers.

*

Hospital waiting room, the old. Waiting for. . . ?

*

Old age: when you know the game is up.

*

Conclusion of one’s life? Foregone.

*

The old have two questions for the young: 1. “Do you think I always looked like this?” 2. “Do you think you’ll never look like this?”

*

Old age: short pier, long walk.

*

Old age: when no one can save you. Old age: when no one can save you from yourself.

*

Q: Have I wasted my whole life? A: No, not yet.

*

And, as a kind of verbal amuse-bouche, this small bite: Breast: proffer of a nipple. Child’s play at nearly any age.

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About Rewriting One’s Books

Approaching age forty, appraising his previously published work, poet W. H. Auden saw rubbish; good ideas poorly realized; poems he had “nothing against except their lack of importance” (most of his work, he thought); and the few “for which he [was] honestly grateful.” Subsequently, in his fifties, Auden rejected some published poems “because they were dishonest, or bad-mannered, or boring.” He also revised other published poems, not “former thoughts or feelings” but “the language in which they were first expressed when, on further consideration, it seemed to me inaccurate, lifeless, prolix, or painful to the ear.” And, he wrote, “On revisions as a matter of principle, I agree with Valery: ‘A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned.’ ” Like Auden or Robert Lowell, W. B. Yeats was an editor and reviser of his own published work: “Whenever I remake a song,” Yeats famously wrote, “it is myself that I remake.” Of contemporary troubadours, Bob Dylan, still touring as he approaches eighty, has for years continued to revise / deconstruct / alter his songs in performance. “He not busy being born is busy dying,” Dylan wrote when young. Prose authors seldom return to published work with the intention of improving it. However, John Fowles, author of The Magus (1965), felt that, despite the fame the book brought him, it “remained essentially where a tyro taught himself to write novels.” This despite the “endless flux” of the many drafts from which it first emerged. Thirteen years later, Fowles published a revised version. In 1977, Fowles said, “It was the first book I wrote and technically it never satisfied me. I’ve learned more about the tricks of the trade since then.

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I wanted to put in one or two new scenes and I wanted to clarify one or two things a little bit.” What Fowles did. What would it compare to? Remarrying a former wife? Exhuming a body? Not my thing, though in terms of line editing alone I might be merciless. Still, after the years achieving a book, it no longer engaged me except to see it into print. Other projects might then compel; sometimes to my surprise, did. But much as I reappraised the past as writer, I had no impulse to rework published work. Now, at seventy-five, something else strikes me. Many of the people I knew when young are either gone or much changed, in jeopardy if not diminished. But my books? They have not aged. Not, “Did they age well?” one way or the other, but they have not aged. Stuck in time, yet also—oddly, amazingly— immune from aging. Unless, that is, I choose to—how to say it—bring my books down to Earth. To, by revising, make them . . . mortal.

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acquiring, deaccessioning

Seventy-five years old, again online to order another used book. Bringing to mind Marvell’s “Had we but world enough and time.” Nonetheless: W. V. Quine, Quiddities; Japanese Death Poems; An Ocean Garden: The Secret Life of Seaweed, by Josie Iselin; Somewhere Becoming Rain (Clive James on Larkin); Critchley, Notes on Suicide; Anna Badkhen, Walking with Abel; Brody and Lamb, The Faith of Donald J. Trump: A Spiritual Biography; Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks; Joe Gould’s Teeth, by Jill Lepore; Martin Rees, Our Final Hour; Wrongful Death, by Sandra M. Gilbert; Houellebecq, Submission; Mark Cocker, Crow Country; Air Guitar, by Dave Hickey; Flaubert, Three Tales; Advice for Future Corpses, by Sallie Tisdale; Bernard Knox, Oedipus at Thebes; Brodsky / Heaney / Walcott, Homage to Robert Frost. Meanwhile, long overdue, I’m reshelving the countless—two thousand?— books in the garage bookcases. More than fifty years of books read for pleasure, read to learn from. Read toward what I wrote, was thinking of writing. Though a few of the books are now rare—R. Crumb’s comix from the 1960s, for example—to the dismay of the late / great bookman Peter Howard, I never sought first editions. Just what my friend Peter impatiently termed “reading copies.” An appropriate term, I always thought: reading was what I was after. In the garage, reorganizing. Putting books where they should be. But also, I often pull a book off the shelf, leaf through its pages. Remember it, remember when I read it. Set it by the garage door. Walk five or six books at a time up the street to the front porch of a couple who’ll store them for the library benefit sale. Five or six books at a time, three or four times a day, now and then a boxful: four hundred books this month alone.

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Dispossessing. Are these tracks of my life as reader, as writer, no longer essential to keep? Too much to keep? What’s the impulse? Clearing? Purging? Preparing for the end? For the end of the self as writer? Surely not a dismembering. But, perhaps, a clean slate? Tabula rasa, written words erased? Walking every last one of the books up the street? “Can’t take it with you,” they used to say. As I cull, however, there are rediscoveries not to part with, at least not yet. Books asking to be reread, for example: William Davies King, Collections of Nothing. Karl Shapiro, The Bourgeois Poet. The Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram. Alfred Hayes, My Face for the World to See. Embers, by Sándor Márai. There’s also the cacophony of breast-beating authors reproaching from the shelves: Coetzee / Melville / Eliot / Tolstoy / Shakespeare. Disgrace / Moby Dick / Middlemarch / Anna Karenina / King Lear. Also waiting impatiently, my mother’s Year of Reversible Loss. And my own back pages, starting, perhaps, with On Water, then The Beholder. Divesting or not, and to what extent, I again remember that someone once asked me—thoughtfully, sincerely, and, the more I think about it, not unreasonably—“What do you see in books?”

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Mr. and Mrs. Endo at McGerrow Camp home, Pu‘unēnē, Maui, 1974. Photograph by Geoffrey Fricker

above

Hāmākuapoko Mill, 1979. Photograph by Geoffrey Fricker opposite

Plantation home of Pinaro family, Pu‘unēnē, Maui. Photograph by Geoffrey Fricker

Vi

b ac k

on

shore

an d

into

the

d eep

deliverance

Back in 1995, Roger Payne, pioneer researcher of cetacean songs, made a dazzling argument in Among Whales: that the author of Moby Dick surely knew just how and by what steps whales would enter our minds, and how once inside they would metastasize and diffuse throughout the whole engine of human ingenuity, mastering and predisposing it to their purpose . . . that whales would reconstitute themselves, reintegrate at the point of origin of all the meridians of the imagination, its very pole, and there tie themselves forever into human consciousness by a kind of zenith knot . . . that when this process had completed itself the whale as symbol would have become the whale as puppeteer—would start orchestrating, manipulating, and directing the connections that people perceive between themselves and the beating heart of nature . . . that whales can help humanity save itself—help us make the transition from Save the Whales to Saved by the Whales.

Humans saved by what humans had avidly destroyed! Wouldn’t that be something! But now, two decades-plus later, the ocean is ever more human modified, teeming with the human-made. Shipping, factory fishing, undersea pipelines, undersea cables, military operations. Acoustics: possibly maddening for animals using sound to communicate and navigate. As for the lethal? Pollution, “ship strikes”—such a decorous euphemism—and entrapment in fishing gear. Also, from humans to whales, darts attaching electronic tags or “retrieving” tissue, drones sampling exhalations. As Rebecca Giggs writes, what darts feel like to whales, or what they make of the whirring of a drone—“how whales 164

experience and cogitate about their surroundings”—is unknown to us. All for a good cause? For whales, arguably. But also for us. And not just because we’re curious. Like elephants, whales seem to have a form of natural selection that suppresses cancer. One more reason not to drive them to extinction anytime soon.

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Benefits: you might say Roger Payne was dreaming that the disease whales could help humans stave off was inhumanity. Humans saved by whales from being human. About cetaceans and salvation, however, poet Eleanor Wilner had a quite different vision. In “Reading the Bible Backwards,” the polar caps melting, a flood undoes every last bit of human history, “swallowing the old / landmarks, swelling the / seas that pulled / the flowers and the great steel cities down.” Thus the day whales had prayed for, until, “their will accomplished,” once again “the earth / was without form and void, and darkness / was upon the face of the deep. And / the Spirit moved upon the face of the waters.” So much for Genesis, for human-centric creation stories! “When the waves closed over, completing the green / sweep of ocean . . . how soundlessly / it all went under.”

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Payne’s dream, Wilner’s retributive vision. Pick one? I’m left mulling Robert Frost’s “Once by the Pacific,” storm waves thinking “of doing something to the shore / That water never did to land before.” In this night—or age—“of dark intent,” the poem concludes, “there would be more than ocean-water broken / Before God’s last Put out the Light was spoken.”

 “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.” Not to disparage Revelations’ vision of God’s glory, but will creatures here below help this old heaven, old earth, and old sea to abide? Abide: to endure. And for how long? Well, perhaps “for ever,” as it’s put in Daniel 7:18, “even for ever and ever.”

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Thomas Farber

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Moloka‘i

Honolulu. Break of day. Again on this small beach. Ghost crabs, low tide, nearly spent waves. Ocean: living and breathing membrane shore to horizon. My church and office. Writer, alchemizing water into words. So many years here. Time keeps passing. More heart trouble. My surf buddy, a doctor, asks, “Do you want to live until you’re eighty-five?” Arguing, “If you don’t get a second opinion, you might die anytime.” But to live another decade? If things get worse? When things get worse? More than thirty years ago, morning twilight at my church and office, I’d nod hello to a woman. She was “getting on in years,” “showing her age,” as people put it in my Boston childhood. Or, they’d say, “She lived to a ripe old age.” Ripe, but as with fruit, suggesting a trend toward overripe. Or, back in the day, someone “dropped dead.” “Keeled over.” Keeled! I was in my twenties on an oceangoing sailing vessel before I saw the noun inside the verb. Visualized a hull, capsized ship. But about that frail elder before sunrise: “wrinkled as sea-sand and old as the sea,” as poet Edith Sitwell wrote. Very short, stooped, recently widowed. Given her struggles with the slippery stairs, down from the seawall and back up after each brief swim, her several daily visits to this small beach seemed strongly motivated. Admirable; compulsive. As, two times a day / day after day / every single day I’d head out to surf—admirably; compulsively?—I wondered how often this woman had to enter the ocean. How often? Just often enough to stay afloat, I concluded. Afloat. Now, more than thirty years later, for me today it’s not riding waves. Knees aching, no popping up off the board as I take the drop. Instead, a very

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slow swim out the channel to the reefs. Then past surfers lifting and falling during the lulls, carving waves when the next set arrives. Into open ocean. First swim of the day, second with the goatfish at sunset. Black bathing suit. Black neoprene cap for shaved head, black two-millimeter-thick, long-sleeved wetsuit jacket: wind chill, blood gettin’ thinner. Goggles. No fins. No “Australian crawl” as we called it on frigid New England lakes when I was a skinny, shivering, blue-lipped child. No crawl, just a calm and steady breaststroke. Pull, glide, kick; breath in, breath out. Breath autopilot set to, setting itself to ON. Hypnotic. Beyond intent. Might this be what positive spirits term “aquatic mindfulness meditation”? Concentration / serenity / bliss? Nope. No dry-land therapies, please. No counting of breaths, no training of the mind. In the ocean, one mostly gives in—consents to surrender. Is the deep blue not indifferent, unsentimental, without memory? On land, one mostly moves on the stable horizontal, not seeing even worms just underneath. Terra firma. On this mirrored surface, however, it’s inescapable that there’s much going on right below—the mostly unseen, often imminent. Water can also break up anything structured, anything not in the moment. Regressing you back to what Mircea Eliade called “the undifferentiated mode of pre-existence.” Sometimes, when I’ve returned to shore, shedding cap and goggles in the shallows, wetsuit jacket intimating commitment to strenuous immersion, someone asks how far I went. I could say, “A half hour or so outbound,” though I’ve never timed it. Wearing a watch in the water? No. Machine time versus dream time. It’s not that time doesn’t pass either way, but humans have lived most of the species’ existence without timepieces. Without time measured in pieces. Nonetheless, it’s out toward the interface of sea and sky far enough to, but only so far as to—reflexively / inadvertently / prudently—remember (?) to turn around. Though who’s doing the remembering, or, what part of who, is unclear. At last, approaching the beach, taking a rest. On my back. Afloat. Looking up: moon; frigate bird; two fairy terns; planet. Occasional rainbow sign. Double rainbow. “Between the earth and sky, thought I heard my Savior cry,” goes the spiritual. But how or why convey any of this to someone who asked only, “How far did you go?” As novelist Bernard Malamud responded to an interviewer’s interrogative, “What is the question asking?” “How far did you go?” I’m tempted to reply, sometimes do reply, “Moloka‘i.” This archipelago. Eight islands; atolls, islets, seamounts. Fifteen hundred miles SE to NW across the Tropic of Cancer, from 154°40' to 178°25' W longitude and 18°54' to 28°15' N latitude. If the askers don’t know much about where they are, they soberly nod assent, like mariners receiving their bearings. But if a fisherman, surfer, sailor, or waterman does the asking, and I say Moloka‘i? We laugh. From this coast to the island of Moloka‘i is more than thirty miles. “Going to Moloka‘i was tough,” I like to add, “but coming back was a nightmare.”



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Channels: growing up, I imbibed something about bounded bodies of water. Nantucket Sound, and, Over There, the English Channel, Strait of Gibraltar. But not, back then, the Moloka‘i Channel. Or, its Hawaiian name, the Kaiwi Channel. A brutal swim, Moloka‘i to O‘ahu, though not impossible. For great water athletes with escort vessels carrying food, lubricants, and safety gear, it’s twelve, fifteen, or seventeen hours at the shortest crossing’s twenty-six miles. With, predictably, ferocious winds and currents, high surf, stinging jellyfish, tiger sharks, and, as sweetener, volcanic ash—vog—to impair breathing. As for swimming from O‘ahu to Moloka‘i? Seems no one’s ever carried it off. Not, even, yours truly. Just a running joke. Like telling basketball–junkie friends who know better that, regrettably, I can no longer dunk. As if I ever could. Thus my own private Moloka‘i until not long ago, after open heart-surgery at age seventy. I pause to acknowledge my surprise at yet again writing this number. Seventy; 70. But I’d survived the operation, heart-lung bypass machine allowing my heart and lungs to be still for. . . a few hours. Truly extracorporeal. Gifted surgeon splitting my sternum. Professing himself not miniaturist but minimalist: small-as-possible incision facilitating recovery. But then, several years later, total knee replacement. Brilliant techniques and technology. Rehab strenuous, but then setbacks. Chronic pain, that euphemism. I was in bed, bedridden, rider of my bed. “Haggard rider,” I’d tell myself, remembering Sir Henry Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon’s Mines, a childhood favorite. Some play on words! I was majoring in self-pity, minoring in misery. If you live long enough, you learn there are lines you once read that stayed right with you. Set in a prison in Stalin’s gulag, Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle was first published in English in 1968. In the novel, mathematician Nerzhin remembers a proverb: “You don’t drown in the sea, you drown in a puddle.” Post-surgery, that was me all over. Drowning in a puddle. Back in my forties, thinking of Queequeg’s canoe-coffin in Moby Dick, and reading about a retired seventy-two-year-old who died surfing, I thought it wouldn’t be a bad way to go. Out on the waves one day during a surfer’s funeral as ashes were strewn and leis placed, I imagined being cycled and recycled in the tropics. One day to return as warm rain. But now, bedridden, a rider of my bed? Poet Marianne Moore came to mind. “The sea is a collector,” she wrote. And, “the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.” I thought also of Tennyson’s Ulysses, ship at the dock, setting out “to Sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars, until I die.” And I recalled Ahab’s melodramatic exchange with his first mate in Moby Dick: “Some men die at the ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood;—and I feel now like a billow that’s all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am old—shake hands with me, man.”

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Bedridden. When my wife, checking on me, would read my grim mood, she’d inquire, “What are you grinding on?” Not that I was up for being interrogated. Too much to say, too much that couldn’t be said. One day, however, channeling Ahab, I came up with, “I’m going out with the tide.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” my wife asked, reasonably enough. I took some time. “Moloka‘i,” I finally responded. Though my wife has spent much of the last decade in Hawai‘i with me, her time is not in the moana, ocean, but hiking in the Ko‘olau Range. Or at her halau—Tahitian dance school with its kumu, teacher. This dancing: on dry land but waves! cascades! torrents! of relentless drumming. Layered frenzied pitch chattering, impelling the dancers’ shaking / rotating / gyrating hips and pelvises. She’s determined to improve her fa’arapu, ami, and ruru. And oh, the regret of not having started as a child! My musician-wife also studying the percussion, sometimes herself one of the halau’s drummers. “So what about Moloka‘i?” this Tahitian dance zealot asks her querulous husband. For her, Moloka‘i is an island we’ve yet to visit. Another long pause. Choosing my words. “I’m going to swim to Moloka‘i.” Another pause. “And?” my wife said, trying to move this exchange along. Though I wasn’t myself, lately—not hardly—she’s assumed I know what I’m doing in the ocean. It’s my thing. Always has been, she gathers. Also, given how curt and ill-tempered I’d been, if I said I was going to swim to Moloka‘i, then, very well, I was going . . . to swim to Moloka‘i. Think about your own marriage or mate. How much does one want to share? How much do they really want or need you to share? I was tired of withholding. Dead tired, as they say. “I’m going to swim to Moloka‘i,” I told my wife, “but there’s no way I’m going to make it.”

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Thomas Farber

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Last Writes

Christmas season, the small beach, end of the day. “Fast away the old year passes.” All too true. Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la la la.

Diving into ocean, Kūki‘o, Hawai‘i, 2000. Photograph by Wayne Levin

Just a few sunset watchers, hushed, hoping for the green flash. Our own falling star: sun / down. Below the horizon. Day’s second twilight. Last surfers making their way in. Stage of the beach empties. Curtain falls. Evensong, Anglican or Episcopal musical worship. “Even,” old English, time between sunset and darkness. Approach of evening. Sylvia Plath described the sea’s “great abeyance.” For sure, something’s in suspension. About to happen. Night / fall, blue becoming black. Stars coming out, as Derek Walcott put it, “to watch the evening die.” Here, now, one can be alone.

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Starlings at twilight, Somerset, England, 2012. Photograph by Wayne Levin

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Here taketh the makere of this book his leve. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales Start of a new year. Death and taxes. Nothing more certain than. Time to pay federal & state pipers. Can do: “recovering” after open-heart surgery. A repeat of how writing this book began five years ago: “ ‘recovering’ after open-heart surgery.” Same remarkably gifted surgeon both times, though I’ve told him I’d prefer not to go on meeting like this. In the Author’s Note, I described working on these pages as “daily craft pursuit; house being constructed; mania; self-directed home-schooling; and word music being composed. Also self-sentenced ‘hard labor.’ Also life raft. Also, arguably, spiritual practice.” Well, whatever it took. The book is what is. Very glad—relieved—to see it come to an end: once begun, there was no other way out. But, oh, I’ll miss it. During my five-plus (!) decades as author, it occasionally occurred to me to take stock of more than the time—years—a project demanded. Never doubting I was the man for the job, I’d remark on the physical energy needed to build the house of a book. Now, however, I’m tempted to tally kilowatts, calories, volts, watts, joules & therms invested—and spent—to get me to being the reader I’d had in mind. And, always one more book? Not so long ago, there was Brief Nudity (writer sixty-something), then Here and Gone (writer seventy). And now, whew, Acting My Age. A doctor who’s repeatedly helped me said, “You’ll never stop writing.” Blessed or blasted recurrence! That never / n(ot)ever yet once again.

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So, finito? Although, no surprise to friends and family, there’s more I’d like to say. Have to say. Have (?) to say. As for these “sins of my old age,” as Giaochino Rossini described his late compositions, unlike maître Chaucer I feel no need to (profess to) revoke / ab­ jure / eschew / recant. No . . . misgivings. Rather, what comes to mind is A. R. Ammons’s phrase “When you consider the radiance.” And, as so many times before, J. A. Baker’s conclusion in The Peregrine: that he’d described “a dying world, like Mars, but glowing still.”

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Acting My Age

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postscript: late march 2020

William Wordsworth, two centuries ago: “Little we see in Nature that is ours; / We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

 Just after sunset, pulsing fist of Venus in the west. Close to the waxing crescent moon. Seemingly close: Venus, 84 million miles away; our reliable “natural” satellite a within-reach 240,000 miles. Earthshine, sunlight reflected from this blue planet, illuminating what appears—to us—the otherwise unlit portion of the moon.

 Bob Dylan: “Things have changed.” “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” “A hard rain’s gonna fall.”

 Northern California spring, pandemic hyper-bloom. Hyper-busy no-nonsense bees making their own kind of hay while the sun’s high. Zero to twenty mph in a millisecond. Stunt pilots swooping toward you as they head to the hive, veering away at the last possible instant.

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Thomas Farber, 1998. Photograph by B.D.W. Images

A butterfly alights. Basks: solar recharge. Wings lifting and falling very slowly, as if catching their breath. Placard in neighbor’s window: in our america love wins.

 More than forty years ago, Three Wanderers from Wapping was published, my mother’s adaptation of an episode from Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. Illustrations by Charles Mikolaycak, corpses and rats vividly rendered. For the young of all ages, as my mother thought of such projects. For “ages: 10 & up,” as the publisher marketed it. “It was the summer of 1665, and the plague was raging in London,” my mother’s tale begins. Gatherings banned, the only open business “that of tending the dead and the dying.” And, my mother wrote: It is hardly surprising that in the midst of all this disease and dying, many folk turned to the scores of mountebanks and wizards who promised protection or cure—or at least knowledge of the future—by a thousand outrageous methods. Fortune-tellers read cards and tea leaves. Astrologers interpreted the stars. Conjurors and quacks sold multitudes of pills, potions, and preservatives, as they were called. The pitiable folk wore all sorts of charms and amulets to fortify their bodies against the plague.

 That was there and then. Here in the cottage, it’s five a.m. Venus and cre­ scent moon absenting themselves till evening. Town stiller than still. Deathly quiet. And those who have a home? Sheltered in place. Home / bound. Waiting to learn who the virus took, spared.

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Thomas Farber

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THOMAS FARBER has been a Fulbright Scholar, awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and three times National Endowment fellowships for fiction and creative nonfiction, recipient of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, and Rockefeller Foundation scholar at Bellagio. His recent books include Here and Gone, The End of My Wits, Brief Nudity, and The Beholder. Former visiting writer at Swarthmore College and the University of Hawai‘i, he teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. www.thomasfarber.org WAYNE LEVIN received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from Pratt Institute in New York. His books and monographs include Kalaupapa: A Portrait (1989), Through a Liquid Mirror (1998), Other Oceans (2001), Akule (2010), Ili Nā Ho‘omana‘o o Kalaupapa (2012), and Flowing (2014). Levin’s photographs were also included in Kaho‘olawe: Nā Leo o Kanaloa (1996) and in such publications as Aperture, American Photographer, Camera Arts, and LensWork. He has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad. GEOFFREY FRICKER received an MFA in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. His book Sacrament: Homage to a River (2014) documents the many faces of California’s Sacramento River, and his work is included in The Altered Landscape: Photographs of a Changing Environment (2011). He has partnered with groups that include the Nature Conservancy, River Partners, and Sacramento River Preservation Trust. His work is in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Crocker Art Museum, and other institutions.

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