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Mortality

Slip slidin’ away –Paul Simon

The usual narrative is that the young think themselves indestructible while the old know better.

Kids can’t imagine death and so they drive drunk or eat crap or crowd into bars even as some disease, Corona say, spreads around them.  But then a friend dies or you survive a heart attack or you just turn fifty, when you can no longer hide from the reality you have more days behind you than ahead of you.  Sooner or later we all die. Knowing it will be sooner sobers the youth out of you. The ignorance of youth and the awareness of age come with drawbacks, of course, as with great hilarity. If you like, you can tie the slow emotional growth of the human race probably to these cliche truths: the young won’t listen, the old fear change. Yet what is funnier than looking back on oneself?  Recalling the goofball you were? Knowing you will do that again ten or twenty years from now too, assuming you make it that long. Death clarifies, but often too late. In the great stories of Flannery O’Connor, it is only in the one moment before death that the irredeemable characters about whom she writes receive a moment of grace, a moment of clarity, the tiny, tiny, redemption her god grants them.  Like Julian in her “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” these characters learn, “you are not who you think you are.” That, I would argue, is the chief lesson all Western Literature preaches, We were not, as a race, who we thought we were. In the days before Corona, governance was a charade, finance a scheme, work a task, religion a lie, spirit a sales pitch and justice a sham.  (If you say I am too harsh here, you cannot say I have zero cause to say it, can muster zero evidence towards making those claims.) And yet that world before was beautiful too, because its illusions were ours, because we had John Stewart and Sylvan Esso and visits to the Tate to see Rothko and chats with Bruno about coffee and funny texts from friends across the globe and because one in a million of the selfies were worth it. We now know just how beautiful was the past life we lived.  In the glow of a warming planet we convinced ourselves we were young. O’Connor’s god knows only death will teach people the lessons they have mouthed all their lives.  And the passing on of our global youth comes hard upon, the price which shall signify this death to be paid disproportionately by the old, the poor, those on what we now call “the front lines” at hospitals and stores.  Far too many of these will be those our previous world treated as fodder and exploited out of routine. But this time it is not only they who pay the price, who feel their world getting stomped on.  Even the titans can see the flicker of a light that may be their last. (As I write this, Boris Johnson goes into intensive care, his advocacy that England is not connected to the rest of the world an image of our mistaken sense of believing we knew who we were.  “Sure, we can pull up the drawbridge and close the gates. That’s how we will survive.” And Corona, like O’Connor’s god returns our thinking back to us with a vengeance. . . . As I read over the above I am cognizant of its intellectualism.  Its remove. Mortality, as a subject. (O’Connor called intellectuals “inner-lectuals”)  Meanwhile, my friend David has in-laws in a nursing home through which the disease spreads.  Sarah fears for her parents. As does Michelle. For each of us the list of friends living in this sort of fear will grow, even as their fear turns to grief, tears wept in absentia soon to become the norm. You might hear O’Connor telling us that as individuals we get one chance to live with the openness, sense of connection, and love for all her god demands. For sure you will learn this lesson in the moment before you die.  As a race–perhaps–we get more than one chance because even if we die, others live on. This is to say, again, that we are all connected and that we must learn from this tragedy. In that vein, and because intellectualism won’t do, I feel sure this will not be the last post on this subject. But yesterday, catching up with Mr. Dash, he tells me about the last faculty meeting he attended in real space before his school moved everything online.  “It was raucous,” he says, “the adults were acting like kids.” “Finally,” I say. Mr Dash continues:  “Outside, Joburg is quiet.  Yet as the streets lose their voice, I think we’re finding ours.” Let us do that. And hold on.  And stay well, –Ted