Month: April 2019

A close parallel to the distinction between flotsam and jetsam: those relationships lost in the chaos and confusion of a major life transition, and those intentionally discarded to lighten the load. There is a third category as well. Or perhaps it is only flotsam’s prodromal phase: those relationships holding fast through the swells, resolute, clinging to the rails even as the ship is thrown violently against the rocks.

And I’m not talking about people here. Or, not exclusively so. Our relationships with people are not different in their essence from our relationships to the other items on the ship’s manifest, not different in their form from our connections to other valued objects inhabiting our emotional cargo hold. I mourn friends I have lost, those who were swept overboard during storms of crisis, transition, and transformation. But I also mourn those parts of myself that were torn from me, cherished hopes that got caught up in the rigging and were pulled silently overboard into the waves, involuntary amputations of dreams made weak through idleness, partially ruptured plans pushed aside and rendered gangrenous by inattention. 

In the calm of the early evening, as the effects of the wine first settle in, there is a moment or two of nostalgic recollection, almost as if I am standing two decades in the past, almost as if the last twenty-two years were only yesterday, almost as if when I open my eyes I will see the house that harbored so much potential, each corner of each room replete with shadows of a future treasure, a kitchen filled with laughter, a feeling of family, an incipient awareness of true purpose.

And the echoes of laughter become the mournful cry of a lone seagull outside my futureless apartment.

Start from a dark place, the darkest place. Scour the ground of existence down to base granite. Borrow Descartes’ example. Whittle the rational mind down past its inner xylem, into the pith, to the central core. Doubt even the solidity of this. Borrow Descartes example, but not his purpose. The purpose of this mental knife-play is not to establish a foundation for belief; the purpose is to lay bare your intimate fellowship with the void. Prior to birth was nothing. No nouns. No verbs. No past or future tense. No beginnings or endings to serve as a frame. Nothingness itself was nonexistent. No opposing principle by which to form nothingness into an object of contemplation. No contemplative being capable of granting such principles.

There is little about this state of prior nonbeing that seems personally threatening to me now. Why is that? Why am I able to calmly imagine an infinite expanse of time when I wasn’t? There is something about the present moment that renders my prior nonexistence irrelevant. I find myself in the present moment occupying a richly furnished living state of being in a universe populated with nouns and verbs and tenses—most of which I have yet to discover and many of which I will never know. Contemplating the infinity prior to birth is little more than an intellectual exercise, nothing ominous or menacing.

But despite its intimate familiarity—its intimate but ultimately unknowable familiarity—things appear quite different to me when I turn my gaze the other direction. When the universe ends for me, the same eternal absence-of-even-oblivion from which I emerged waits only to wrap me in its disintegrating, obliterating embrace. I die, but I can never be dead. Death is a feature of the living present moment. Death is a verb. There is no after-death in the first-person. In my mind I can project the universe beyond myself, but this is an illusion of objectivity. After this, there is nothing. Death leads us not just to an end of life, but to a complete annihilation of all that ever was, the universe itself, with its unfathomably infinite furnishings, never existed. Life doesn’t come to an end with death. With death, life never happened to begin with. 

Yet here, now, in the present moment, it seems as if there is something worthy of my attention.

This moment now the evening sky is dim and the reflection of my face has become visible in the window, a grizzled gray beard beneath shadow-darkened eye sockets, the dog is using my outstretched foot as a chinrest, and thoughts of Spanish wine are inserting themselves between the words my fingers are slapping out on the keyboard.