My MRI Experience

Yesterday morning I had an MRI, an experience that, were I a Calvinist, would have convinced me of that faith’s two fundamental propositions: that I had, in some way unknown to me but blindingly apparent to omniscient Providence, sinned grievously; and that no affliction is unaccompanied by the catalyzing grace needed to overcome it.

My appointment was scheduled for 6:45 a.m. Now, an MRI before breakfast, before, even, I’ve managed to shake off the burrs of sleep and insert the day’s coffee IV, strikes me as a squalid defilement of all that is human. Why so early? I live in a rural community and the nearest hospital is located in the county seat some 15 miles up the road. The county hospital does not have an MRI scanner, but a truck bearing one comes every other Tuesday, and on this particular Tuesday it was beginning its rounds at my county’s hospital. I arrived at 6:30, knowing that when I reported to the reception desk I’d be spending approximately 15 minutes answering the same questions I’ve answered on previous visits, filling out the same forms I’ve filled out on previous visits, and signing various documents confirming that I’ve been told this or shown that—all of which I’ve done on previous visits. I then took a seat in the waiting room and picked up a stray copy of Midwest Living, just to scan, for I expected to be MRIed at any moment.

At 7:15, the hospital’s lab technician asked me to follow him to the lab so he could draw some blood to test for something or other. “Wait a minute,” I said, “I’ve been to my doctor’s office twice in the past week and both times she drew blood. And one hour after the last visit, I got a phone call from her nurse telling me they hadn’t drawn enough. So, I had more drawn just yesterday at the local clinic. I’m getting a little tired of being poked, penetrated, and tapped. I feel like a toothpicked cocktail frank in a medical buffet.” Truth be told, I’m no High Nooned Gary Cooper when it comes to needles. Perhaps I suffer from aichmophobia, the fear of sharp, pointed objects. No doubt, I am an exuberant sulker; as Voltaire observed, I take “pleasure in complaining” and “delight in viewing only evil.” But, he checked his records and, sure enough, he had the blood the test required. Next, he began reading a series of questions, all of which, I quickly saw, had to do with surgeries that would have implanted some ferric object inside me—screws, stents, pumps, and the like. After the 5th question, I said, “Look, let’s save ourselves some time. Other than a tonsillectomy when I was 3 years old, I have never had surgery of any kind.” He was, however, a man indentured to the fierce banality of a process for which he was merely a carrier, not the creator. He continued asking, dutifully checking the “no” boxes, and had me sign a form saying I’d been asked the questions. Then back to the waiting room and Midwest Living, which I now began to read.

In the middle of an article about a corporate executive who had fled his Manhattan suite for small town Iowa living and designer bird-house building, I was called for my MRI. It was 8:05. “You know,” I told the two attendants who walked me to the truck, “I was told my appointment was at 6:45, and I’m not a little pissed off that I’ve had to wait an hour and twenty minutes. Now, I know these things happen, and it’s probably not your fault, but, damn, an hour and twenty minutes!” “Oh, I’m sorry,” one of the attendants said; “it seems a miscommunication occurred between your doctor’s office and the MRI scheduler.” A “miscommunication occurred.” Such a convenient use of the passive voice; how cleverly it obscures assigning anyone fault, how sly its practiced use in hemming the ragged edge of a patient’s anger. Well, I was having none of it. I’m not an English teacher for nothing. “That may well be the case,” I said, “but, you know, I’m not in the mood to be Strother Martined.” They looked perplexed. “You know, the actor who played the warden in Cool Hand Luke? His tag line is, `What we got he-ah is a failure to communicate.” They hadn’t seen the movie.

The MRI itself, believe it or not, was a warm Pacific slipstream in the thin, cold current of my wintery discontent. Stretched comfortably on the table, covered in two blankets, head padded in place, the on-call bulb firmly grasped in my right hand, I was gingerly slid into the center of the machine—birth in reverse, a return to the womb. Sure, instead of the soothing beat of the maternal heart, I heard only the cacophonous clang of jackhammer staccato and the stiletto chir of dial-tone buzz, but I tried to imagine it as the atonal music of a John Cage or Arnold Shoenberg. Imagination, however, deals with the essence behind reality, and when that ear-assaulting clangor proved impossible to get behind, I resorted to a strategy I have used intermittently in the past in similar situations: a recurrent fantasy involving Salma Hayek and cellophane—a fantasy so potent that, with five minutes to go in the procedure, it got me through being slid out for yet another poking and penetrating, this one with some strange brew to “provide contrast.” Fantasy does not genuflect to the imperial demands of reality. Fantasy is dissociation from reality. I’ve always been good at dissociating.

And then, finally, I am released from the magnetic womb, rebirthed, released into a world where breakfast and a Mr. Coffee machine await. “Good job, Jerry,” one of the attendants said, “we’ve got clear images.” This, of course, was the verbal equivalent of a lollipop, my “good job” being only my capacious talent for lying still. Little did they know the role Salma played in that stillness. I did worry briefly that the images I had conjured might, somehow, leave a residue, a resonance, in those magnetically-generated images of my brain, and that, if they did, they had the potential for being WikiLeaked. That could prove embarrassing. Is the mind in the brain? Detached immaterially from it? Well, that’s a cirque du soleil of debates, best left to the experts. I shrugged it off as a kind of wrestling beneath my weight class.

It is reported that French novelist Honore de Balzac carried a cane upon which was written, “I smash all obstacles.” Upon hearing that, Franz Kafka declared his cane should read, “All obstacles smash me.” Were it not for Salma, the efflorescent Salma, the luminescent Salma, the Salma who redeemed my MRI experience with the magnetic resonance of fantasy, I would have exited that MRI scanner truck, halt and hobbled, leaning heavily on Kafka’s cane.

The Best Gifts

I am shockingly ungifted with the gift of giving gifts. A backward glance at the history of my gift-giving reveals a mosaic of singular ineptitude, a frieze of nincompoopery, arrested moments of unrivalled duncitude. If my gift-giving were a sonnet, it would have 13 lines; were it Romeo and Juliet, it would lack the Capulets; were it a raiding Angle or Saxon, it would have taken the wrong off-ramp to Britain; were it a 100 meter dash, I’d be running it in a spacesuit. The gifts I have given have been ergo sum without the cogito; they have been lime green cargo pants at a faculty tea; they have been bags bursting with botches; they have been premeditated acts with shallowness aforethought. Seeking inspiration, I have lit votive candles to the art of gift-giving, to be rewarded with only a slipstream of silence. I have milked the cow of gift-giving, only to have skim splash into the bucket. When it comes to choosing gifts, my brain shutters its cognitive shop and retires to a back room for a toddy and a nap. Like the demonic sages in Paradise Lost, I have “reason’d high” about gift-giving and found myself “in wandering mazes lost.” The Buddha describes an Eightfold Path to enlightenment, but, when it comes to gift-giving, I cannot find Path #1, and it does not register on my Garmin.

I have committed unpardonable acts of gift-giving. Were the skin of every inhabitant of this planet a manuscript upon which offenses against the art of gift-giving were inscribed, mine would, as Jonathan Edwards said describing his sinfulness, “heap infinite upon infinite.” Over the years, I have given my wife a set of Revere Ware pots and pans—well, it is cookware with a pedigree stretching back to Paul himself; a 30 pound bag of carrots—well, she does like carrots and they are brimming with Vitamin A; a Subway gift card—well, she is an on-the-go woman with a jones for the grilled chicken on asiago bread; and a massive package containing 72 rolls of toilet paper—well, it was a deal too good to pass up and proof positive that I had mastered the art of the deal. I once pilfered my best friend’s golf shoes, polished them, and gave them to him as a birthday present—a gag gift he found as amusing as a computer virus. I have given my grandkids underwear and socks—you simply cannot have too many of these items, don’t you know. I have given my mom calfskin driving gloves, only to learn that she no longer drove. I have given my dad a box of freshly picked, organically grown strawberries, forgetting, somehow, that he suffered from diverticulosis. I have given a colleague a rather nice California merlot, forgetting, somehow, that his religion proscribed “stimulating” beverages. Somehow, for some reason known only to God or Oprah or Joel Osteen, I have managed to turn the act of gift-giving into an incessantly plucked string of self-reproach. St. Francis of Assisi said that “it is in giving that we receive.” I have received a zettabyte of mortification. Emerson says “The only gift is a portion of thyself.” My portion, it would seem, is capaciously meager.

I could, for solace, turn to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of the gift-giving ritual. A self-cancelling paradox, Derrida claims, lies at the heart of gifting. To give a gift is to enter a tangled exchange which incurs an obligation on the receiver’s part, a debt to be repaid, even if that repayment is no more than saying “Thank you.” A gift, to be received as a genuine gift, must disguise itself, must not appear to be a gift, must transcend the fraught cycle of giving and receiving, must locate itself beyond self-interested calculation or strategic deployment. Givers must be anonymous, Derrida concludes, even to themselves, lest they fall prey to the beguiling snare of prideful self-worth. The gift must not be a given thing, and the receivers must have no awareness that they have received a gift. In effect, a genuine gift annuls itself.

Clever, is it not? A swashbuckling concept, philosophically considered, festooned with panache, but, I suspect, of minimal value in chamfering the sharply disappointed looks of my grandkids when they found the raisins and oranges I anonymously placed once in their Christmas stockings. Like so much of postmodern theory, Derrida’s deconstructed gift is all ad hocery, without wider application and as practical as trying to eat a taco with a fondue fork.

The best gifts are really two gifts: that which is given, and, behind it, the unsurpassed gift of attention. The best gifts mean that the receiver has, at some point, been the singular focus of the giver’s concentrated attention and purposeful planning. They mean that the receiver has been placed on the giver’s icon-laden cognitive desktop and singled out, attended to, deliberated on. The best gifts mean that the receiver has been experienced in the consciousness of the giver. They mean someone has watched the receiver wander off to a certain store aisle, linger in front of something. Someone has looked at the receiver looking. The best gifts mean that someone has listened to the receiver talk, wonder, express a frustration, reveal a desire or need or anxiety. Someone has taken in the receiver’s words; someone has made them a part of their awareness and introspection. The best gifts mean that someone has looked and listened and archived that looking and listening away, to be accessed when a gift-giving occasion arrives. The best gifts mean that in an era that scatters reflection, that startles time and chases it into the underbrush of mass distraction, someone has given the receiver the best gift of all: their undivided attention.

The seemingly simple but surprisingly difficult act of paying attention, of observing and listening, of curating the seen, the heard, and placing it in a small mental annex labeled “possible gift items”—this is the gift behind the gift. I’m working on it. One day I will master it. One day. Until then, I channel Bohr and Heisenberg, experiencing my own little uncertainty principle. Until then, I will be saying what I recently said to my wife Kathy: “Have you decided yet what I am getting you for Christmas?”

The Past Is Not Past

With some frequency lately, shards of bygone times and elsewhere places, unbidden and unannounced, have arrived at my mental doorway, edged their way into the foyer, and then, with a cheek kiss and shoulder clap, stride boldly into the living room. They map the coordinates, the longitude and latitude, of a once world through which I passed and in which I left traces, ghostly connections, specters of before, that have now been aroused from their slumber to echo forth from the well of time. I have been beset by nostalgia, that peculiar archeology which reveals the truth of William Faulkner’s observation in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”

I recently remembered that, at the age of six, I removed half a dozen eggs from the refrigerator, cradled them in cupped hands held against my stomach, opened the front door latch with my elbow, walked to the end of the porch, and lobbed them, deliberately, one at a time, against the gray-clapboarded side of our neighbor’s house—simply because I wanted to hear the sound, the pop and crunch, they made when they burst open. Our neighbor, a kindly older woman, was amused; my mother was aghast and embarrassed, and I tried to argue, vainly, as it turned out, and with only the language that a six-year-old can muster, what I now recognize as the aesthetic motivation of my behavior.

And I recently recalled my father, 700 miles from home, living in a company-owned dormitory while training for a new position at the home office, laid up with a broken ankle suffered from a fall on treacherous Wisconsin ice. Each night, promptly at 8 o’clock, he called my mother. Each night they chatted for 20 to 30 minutes, then my brother and I took turns, answering Dad’s always repeated question about how school went with the always repeated “OK.” And each night I wondered why Dad called so much, how in the space of 24 hours enough new events and experiences could have possibly accumulated to justify a long-distance phone call. Finally, I asked Mom. “He’s lonely, Jerry,” Mom said; “he likes hearing us,” and it took me many years to understand that the poetics of love can lie in the caressing meter of a familiar voice.

And I recently remembered that, as a young high school teacher, the physics teacher and I invented an after-school game that involved a roll of toilet paper wrapped in duct tape and a wastebasket set exactly 25 paces away. Students gathered to watch and speculate on the likely winner of this battle of literature and science. We postured and strutted and trash talked, and had an official been present we would surely have drawn a penalty flag for taunting and excessively testosteroned male display. But the delight of it, the incandescent silliness of it, the sheer exuberant kookiness of it, was galvanizing and joyous, a self-contained enclave of play simply for the sake of the ludic pleasure it provided.

Now, I know, as a Sherman Alexie narrator says, “that nostalgia is dangerous,” and can even be “terminal” if allowed to colonize the present and usurp the here-and-nowness of our passing days. I know, as T. S. Eliot warns, that nostalgia can become “fragments I have shored up against my ruins” or, as John Steinbeck asserts, a declensionist “protest against change.” And I am told that nostalgia is most often prompted by a dejected longing, by a morose yearning for some lost, tinselled Ithaca to which we cannot return. But I experience these unfastened moments of my past as cashmered in charm rather than burlaped in sadness, and if their grammar is based on a syntax of longing, it is, as Longfellow says, a “longing/ That is not akin to pain/ And resembles sorrow only/ As the mist resembles the rain.” My nostalgia, it seems to me, is not a wistful homage to an irrecoverable past, not an anguished wave of farewell, but fully in dialogue with the times, a reminder to continually return to, continually embody, now and everywhere and always, the youthful wonder, the small gestures of love, and the unreservoired silliness it reveals.

Undoubtedly, age summons nostalgia. The trick, I think, is to realize that those memories of the child, the adolescent, or the young adult are not necessarily a home from which we are exiled. They do not necessarily speak in an accent of excommunication. If we let it, age can be a close encounter of the too long kind. If we let it, it folds and faults into a tectonics of sameness. If we let it, the familiarity of it all can hoodwink us into seeing an alarming lack of novelty. The world spins on, life unspools, and the up close everydayness of it all can demystify and disenchant, can cabin us in a Prufrockian room where things simply come and go, can hobble enthusiasm, cause it to lose a step, then two, then finally lag far behind. But if we let it, age can call forth a nostalgia that quickens, rather than cuts us to the quick, by showing us what we were, what we still are, or what we can still become. The past is the past, but only if we let it be.

Student Lives

Reading student essays this semester, I was reminded of something I have always known but too often forget: students are not biographically invisible. They are not simply, only, generically, students.

One of my students, a young man from Puerto Rico, described studying, during his freshman year in high school, with his best friend, the only son of a man everyone knew but no one openly acknowledged as a powerful drug lord. Another young man, born in a metropolitan inner city, was abandoned as a child by his mother and lived in a series of foster homes, most of which devalued what the word “home” connotes. Only an unbanishable drive to learn and a talent for football got him to a desk in my Freshman Composition class. A third young man, mugged at gunpoint, still carries the trauma with him, embodied, visceral, inextinguishable, resistant to every therapeutic gesture. His desk is often empty. A female student’s back-home boyfriend was growing increasingly distant; another lost her mother to a brain tumor; still another confessed her addition to Facebook and worried that the medium of the computer screen would displace her desire, or ability, to fully inhabit real-life social relationships; still another, with ADHD, was contemplating discontinuing his medication.

Other students narrate happier stories: loving parents who sacrificed for their well-being; thick networks of caring friends; sports successes and sports failures that catalyzed personal growth; travel to other regions of the country or to other countries, from which they returned chastened by what they had so casually considered themselves entitled to; video game rivalries; books that absorbed them, transported them so completely into a clock-frozen now that they forgot they held the book in their hands; religious belief that guided and inspired, or wavered and was abandoned; sudden moments of transcendence, of insight, of understanding—unmediated moments fully recognized as suffused with meaning.

Students have lives, lives that extend far beyond the classroom we occupy and its cabined agenda of thesis and support, of fluid expression and patterns of organization, of spelling and comma splices, of standard usage and the MLA documentation system. Students have experiences, intense and textured, that echo in the world if I am attentive enough to listen rather than hear. In their writing they struggle to give their lives language, to learn how to make events signify, to make the world intelligible, to enflesh it, give it a pulse, make in breathe in synchronicity with their need to understand it, grasp it, make it reveal itself. “Listen,” I must continually remind myself; “pay attention.” I must remember that I know that they have lives and purposes and intentions with values firmly sutured to them, remember that my classroom world, so engrossing to me, so self-enclosed and self-evidently significant, so islanded in its disciplinary structure, is not their world, nor the much wider world of choice and contingency and contradiction they stand poised to enter.

Such remembering makes teachers both the students’ ally and the bearers of their discipline’s standards. Teachers do well, in other words, when they both affirm and challenge. The two are really the same gesture. We affirm and challenge when we recall that, etymologically, the word “educate” means to lead forth and bend our effort toward eliciting from students that which it is in them to be, drawing them out into the articulation of what had been inchoate, into the recognition of what had been shadowed and barely glimpsed. We affirm and challenge when we create learning environments where ideas can be inhabited rather than paid a cursory visit, where thoughts await deliberative judgment, where analyzing supplants merely witnessing, where students chronicle rather than observe only. We affirm and challenge when we dare students to know, double dare if necessary, when our expectation and assessment is based what constitutes excellence in a particular endeavor. We affirm and challenge when we recall that the simple words “you can do it” are the empowering grace of intellectual courage and perseverance. We affirm and challenge when we enable them to see that the world is made, not given, and because it is made it can be remade, that its conditions, as John Dewey says, can be adjusted, rather than their having to adjust themselves to fit those conditions.

Students have lives, lives they may wish to forsake completely or embrace fully, lives that are anguished or contented, lives that are stammers of doubt or shouts of confidence. They do not, should not, speak the grammar of our lives. Theirs has its own syntax, and we do well when, and only when, as Walt Whitman says, we “teach straying” from us so they can find the richness of its expression.

A Change of Season

The squirrels have been unusually active in recent weeks, scampering down the elm and maple trunks, venturing out across the backyard to scrounge out and secure whatever edible nuggets they can find, then scampering up again and across the skywalk of limbs to stock the larder of their nests. They are hunkering down in anticipation of winter. I, too, have been hunkering, clearing eve troughs, raking the leaves that I am convinced have conspired to deposit themselves in my yard, detaching hoses from spigots, transporting cans of paint from the garage to the basement, winterizing the lawn mower and tiller and chain saw, putting up shrink film on windows whose storms will prove insufficient against the cannonade of frigid air winter will hurl against them. The old earth is tilting. A change of season has sent its calling card, several times, and this past weekend an advance party swept in on waves of cold rain and tumultuous winds. Soon, so soon, it will be arriving, a state visit, in full equipage, trumpets fanfaring and pennants flying, that will last for months on end. I find in myself a deep dismay, visceral and embodied, about this fast-approaching caller. I find myself feeling inhospitable.


It wasn’t always so. In my youth I spoke, loudly and fluently, the deep grammar of winter. No temperature-plummet, no weather-inclemency kept me indoors. Snow storms were to be encountered; they were meant to be in the midst of, embedded in, its exuberant energy confluent with my own. With the neighborhood boys, I built snow forts in preparation for snowball battles, sledded on the seemingly perpendicular hill above the playground at St. Antoninus elementary school, and played a mad-scramble hockey on Schott’s Lake, with sticks retrieved from along the shoreline and someone’s knit cap as the puck. Later, into my adolescence, winter meant flooding a large swath of Goerke Field for a community ice skating rink, complete with warming house and recorded music. Budding romances were nurtured by the rituals of carrying a young lady’s skates, lacing them up for her, and, hand-in-hand, clambering up the wooden ramp and onto the ice. Winter meant tobogganing and ski jumping at Bukholt Park; it meant cross-country skiing and snowmobiling; it meant an aesthetic awakening to the eye-dazzling glitter of branches cathedraled with ice and the masonry of wind-troweled drifts; it meant snow shoveling competitions with my dad which, somehow, always ended in a tie, and my mom’s “secret recipe” chili, its magma-like, chile-peppery heat instantly defrosting numbed fingers and toes.


I wish I had gotten that recipe before it, and mom, disappeared behind the veil of Alzheimer’s Disease. And, these days, the only competition snow shoveling poses is with fatigue. I have, it seems, become, almost without my noticing, a tattered coat upon a stick, and my soul’s clap has become an increasingly diminished thing. My season has changed. Winter still sings, but I am no longer in harmony with its song. I no longer watch with rapt attention the whitewashed air of the storm, but eye the plummeting temperature and begin to dread the stiletto-sharp thrust of cold despite being bundled and layered almost to immobility, dread its “hard, dull bitterness,” its checking “mid-vein, the circling race/ Of life-blood.” I no longer delight in “the frolic architecture of the snow,” but wonder how I can muster the strength to clear it, finding myself doubtful whether it will be in me “to arise with the day/ And save [myself] unaided.” I feel, before I feel it, the invasive wet. Yes, winter still sings, but its lyrics tell me of a treacherous terrain where a fall could fracture a hip, where drivers abandon all caution and common sense, and ice-coated branches crack, with rifle-shot clarity, only to fall on rooftops and awnings. Those lyrics tell me of a world from which time has excommunicated me. It’s all I can do to resist the impulse to pull an afghan up to my chin and hibernate, dreaming, perhaps, of the golden shouts of July, the humid hug of August.


In the quantum mechanics of my change of season, there is no Heisenbergian uncertainty. I know my position and momentum simultaneously. They are entangled, for sure. Yet, it is strange, the disappointment I feel at having met with such punctuality the stages of aging: the graying hair, the gastric reflux, the bifocals, the decreased muscle strength, the constricted range of motion, the fine motor skills that are no longer so fine, the intolerance to cold, the disrupted sleep patterns, the achy joints and limbs and sinews that, like Job’s, “know no rest,” the neurons that seem, in increasing numbers, to be cliff diving into pools of oblivion. Somehow, I had thought I was better than that; somehow, I thought I would blaze unconsumed, but I see that biology gives you a poke you cannot ignore, then defriends you without a backward glance. I don’t like it at all, this declensional narrative, this being a “martyr to a motion not my own,” this being ambered in the gummy secretion of time. But what to do, what to do? Resistance is foolish; there is no emancipation from the imperative of matter, which is older than hope, older than prayer, older than memory. Despair is unacceptable; it is an anguished repudiation of the imperative of spirit, a defilement of the heart’s tabernacle. I think I will adopt an unwilling surrender. I hear winter coming; I feel its rasp of difficult truth, and in the liminal space between its advent and presence, I will be stubbornly disobliging, unresignedly resigned, sharing the mood of the narrator in Robert Frost’s poem “Reluctance”: “When to the heart of man/ Was it ever less than a treason/ To go with the drift of things,/ To yield with a grace to reason,/ And bow and accept the end/ of a love or a season?” There is, I think, a grace, perhaps a benediction, in such ungraceful yielding.

My Friend's Suicide

In Edwin Arlington Robinson’s much-anthologized poem “Richard Cory,” the title character, a man blessed with wealth, a man admired and respected, “ schooled in every grace,” and “always human when he talked,” goes home “one calm summer night” and puts “a bullet in his head.” That poem, and the mystery it contains, became staggeringly real to me when last week, one calm autumn evening, a colleague and a friend, a man blessed with the wealth of imagination and an intellect that pierced to the heart of things, a man graced with a gift for writing poetry, a man respected and admired and, while never on social terms with mediocrity, always human when he talked, walked into the woods and, emulating Richard Cory, took his own life .

Upon hearing of his suicide, I asked the question that I think most people ask on similar occasions: why? A moment’s reflection, however, convinced me that such a question, because it gestures toward the irrationality of the act, is impertinent. The decision to end one’s life, so momentous in its conception, so final in its outcome, must be more than an impulse-imbued act lacking in deliberative judgment, must have a compelling reason, a reason perfectly clear, perfectly sensible, a reason that it is not our business to know. Trish Crap, in “Moon Poem,” writes that “life leans/ and fattens, one part joy/ two parts loss, and our job/ is to make it come out even.” For whatever reason, my friend had decided that he could not strike a balance. For whatever reason, he decided that while life may have a rhythm, it had no melody; that it had a grammar, but no catalyzing words. For whatever reason, he decided to stop inhaling time, for its back-of-the-throat taste had grown acrid and unsavory. For whatever reason, he decided that life had become too small because it had become too large, its possibilities somehow thwarted, his love for it somehow unrequited. For whatever reason he decided it no longer deserved tribute and the silvered notes of heraldic trumpets—and respect demands that we leave off being cognitive voyeurs, looking for the sense of it all to quell our own curiosity, our own fear, and acknowledge that reason, even if it is not given us to know it.

But more than impertinent, the question why is futile, unanswerable. Neuroscientists tell us that we are born with a “Theory of Mind” and with a capacity for empathy. We are innately capable of ascertaining the thoughts, feelings, and intentions of others, of predicting their actions and reactions, of imaginatively locating ourselves in their place. But we do this only on analogy with our own minds; we impute and predict and empathize only from our perspective. What can we ever know, C. S. Lewis asks, “of other people’s souls—of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles?” We simply cannot penetrate, directly and immediately, the minds of others. We cannot access their subjectivity, their felt experience of being, cannot inhabit their anger or fear or joy, cannot feel the assault of their despair or anxiety, cannot feel their islanded remoteness. At best we can know only fragments. It cannot be otherwise unless we know all the places, and events, and people that were and are meaningful to, did and do contribute to, the person we say we know.

How little we know of others. Literature has continually taught us the essential unknowability of others: the masquerade in Fielding’s Tom Jones; the inscrutability of Melville’s Bartleby or the impossibility of trust in his The Confidence Man; the theme of concealment, of hidden pasts and hidden motives in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility; Shakespeare’s Iago, Poe’s “The Cask of Amantillado,” “Ligeia,” and “A Man of the Crowd;” Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert; Conrad’s Verloc in The Secret Agent, Prufrock’s anguished “That’s not it at all, that’s not what I meant at all;” DeLillo’s Richard Elster in Point Omega, the held-at-arm’s reticence of Sethe at unveiling her past in Morrison’s Beloved. All these, and many, many more, teach us that human behavior is more complex, more opaque, more cabined, that we are perhaps prepared to admit. The affective experience and the behavior of each individual is multisourced, overwritten, a palimpsest of traces and annotations. It is at once micro and macro history.

So, where does that leave us? Where does my friend’s suicide leave me? Perhaps it leaves us, me, questioning whether we know even ourselves as intimately as we believe we do. Perhaps it confronts us with our own darkness. As Marlowe, in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, observes “it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence . . . its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream—alone.” Perhaps it tells us that the imposture that all is normal, all is well, can no longer hold. Perhaps it leads us to realize that the Exodus has yet to be completed, that we still wander, still seek the pillar of fire that will light our way to a barely-glimpsed, ever-receding Canaan. Perhaps we will heed the call of the trained mynah birds in Aldous Huxley’s Island to pay attention to the “Here and now!” Perhaps it will make us see, with Matthew, that our treasure lies where our heart is, and we will hoard those we love. Perhaps it will make us take stock, take inventory, liquidate last year’s, last week’s, yesterday’s models of thinking and being. Perhaps it will convince us to lift our heavy eyelids and scan the horizon for some gleam, some bright innuendo, that will draw us away, even if momentarily, from the dark, dark prose of the world. Perhaps. Maybe.

Two weeks before he took his life, my friend sent me an email to tell me he was reading the essays in my blog, that he liked them, and was considering creating a blog himself. He included, “for what it’s worth,” he said, a new poem. It was a searing and satirical indictment of the peculiar dynamics of American pretense, of our propensity to proclaim our virtue, our “Unimpeachable Goodness,” to counter “the weight of our emptiness.” It noted that lately “the real is straining against belief,” and that straining “real” urges us to peer “into the thicket of the human heart.” Since his death, I have combed every word of that email and poem for some hint, some clue, some trace of what lay two weeks ahead. And while the proposed blog appears affirmative, I am haunted by the deprecatory “for what it’s worth” that introduced a poem that now, suddenly, seems troubling, ominous. Did this gifted poet somehow feel his talent ebbing? Was the poem’s satire self-directed? I don’t know, can’t know, can’t even surmise or suppose. We are all, finally, the imperfect curators of a museum we call the self, and its exhibits, while open to the public, tell only a partial story, for much, most, of the inventory remains secured in hidden rooms and basement vaults, stored away in inner recesses, inaccessible and unknowable.



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Stop and Smell the Roses

In a recent conversation with a colleague, I was given a piece of advice in the form of a cliché. Now, as a writing teacher I don’t just warn students to avoid clichés; I scorn them most unmercifully. I execrate them, I inveigh against them: unlovely lumps of language, lexical ossification, verbal riffraff, impoverished expression, jejune junk rusting on the philological landscape, vacuous verbiage, lazy locution, handy pegs upon which to hang shiftless thinking. Confronting a cliché, I have the tolerance of a pillaging Anglo Saxon and the subtlety of barbed wire. And yet, for reasons I cannot account for, my colleague’s cliché mugged my self-righteous scorn and left me silent, my linguistic pockets empty and turned inside out. It resonated, and I have been thinking about it ever since. He told me, “Jerry, you’ve got to stop and smell the roses.”

Previously, I had considered “smell” the pivot upon which this cliché turned. Smell being one of the sense, I took the cliché to be a warning against being too cerebral, against living in the shallows of abstraction, an implicit appeal to the flesh, to breath and pulse, to direct and immediate intimacy with the sensuous surround. After all, who could deny that the beauty of a rose deserves more homage than a passing glance, that it in fact deserves a glance inflamed to a gaze? Who could deny that it deserves being experienced with a fully embodied sensory appreciation that savors its obviousness and its nuance, the delicate fold of each of the 50 cupped petals, their velveted tactility, their gradual unfurling as they whorl outward from a densely packed center, the reddish conical thorn tapering to a white tip, the intense olfactory assault of fragrance. Who could not apply to roses what Wallace Stevens imputed to the whistling blackbird: the beauty of their inflections and the beauty of their innuendos? Who would not agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson that roses “are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.” Who would not understand Robert Burns comparing his love to “a red, red rose” or Robert Herrick’s advice to “gather ye rosebuds” while we can? For me, then, my colleague’s cliché had in the past emphasized the filagreed grace of nature’s aesthetic expression, the importance of its felt texture to our all too often distracted lives, an experience experienced as an experience.

But hearing it this time, now, it struck me that the resonant word was “stop.” Measured by most psychosocial metrics, we are afflicted with busyness, little different from the way Thoreau 160 years ago characterized us as “in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises.” The leaden foot on the accelerator of making a living inches downward, and we neglect living. We see that living has a length and forget, as Diane Ackerman observes, “the width of it as well.” We somehow fail to see that busyness is densely caloric but without nutritional value, that every article that appears touting some scheme for time management to organize our busyness leaves unchallenged and, thus, naturalizes the assumption that we should be engaged in frantic activity. It is telling, I think, that we so often define our self-worth by how busy we are, by how often we confuse being productive with being busy, how often we equate not being busy with a lack of self-management, with how often we consider not being overscheduled, not multitasking, not being stressed and pressed a sign of indolence. We read, or hire, lifestyle consultants to organize our days and little regard the style of our lives. The kiss of the rose is given only to those who stop long enough to receive it.

To stop is to reflect, and perhaps that is why we don’t. It can be, often is, disheartening to be the audience of our own performance. Reflection necessarily involves not instrumental knowledge but what Hans Kung calls “orientating knowledge,” a knowledge that cleanses mental space of debris, a knowledge of the congruence between the persons we are and the persons we most want to be, of the values we accept with unthinking dogmatism and those we most want to commit ourselves to. Tangled in the traces, we canonize our autonomy without understanding that the granite substrate upon which it rests is our capacity for self-reflection, our capacity to disentangle, to step out, to conjure ourselves standing beside ourselves, and regarding, really regarding, the who and what and why and where and how we are and ought to be. It is hard work, harder and busier than any work we do to get a living. It interrogates the fine-structure constant of our individual universe, corrals our scattered thoughts and returns them to the mindful present. But it is the busyness that we should more often make it our business to mind.

I recall coming home late one Saturday afternoon to find my dad sitting on the family room couch, feet up and hands behind his head, staring, it seemed, at the point where the wall met the ceiling. I had seen him in this posture before and it always struck me as strange. This time, however, I inquired:
“Dad, what are you up to? Is something wrong?”
Oh, no; I’m just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Oh, stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Well, you know; things.”
My dad. The systems analyst. He wasn’t mowing the lawn or fixing the toaster or reorganizing the garage, wasn’t writing a report or outlining a presentation, wasn’t pouring over the specs of the latest line of IBM office computers or calculating whether or not they would improve efficiency at the Cincinnati office. No. He was far too busy for all that.