Let Me in
Dear Eugene,
"The Truth must dazzle gradually..."
Sumi wasn't eating last night. I gave her the food, normal food, same food for years and for years she loved and loves still. My daughter said Go and then I followed up with a couple of the same syllable and still she looked another way, out the window, as if at something faraway not visible to us, something she lost.
We worried. I panicked. Then theories abounded. Toothache? Maybe the dog-sitters did feed her something different against our instruction after all while we went away for camp this past weekend and now she's sick? My wife said Sumi looked a bit different before dinner, moved a bit slower she said.
I went to her and knelt down to pet her a bit and asked What's up? She again looked away from her food and out the window. So I petted her again and encouraged her to eat. Finally she started to pick pieces of food out of the bowl, spat them on the ground and slowly ate from there the grounded pieces.
Last night a camper shared with everyone pictures she has taken this past weekend, a record of what actually happened in our church camp, indisputable truth frozen in time. I added mine to the same online album. I should have known this a long time ago but strange enough that's the first time I was affronted by what's been happening all along, that my pictures are always of hidden dimensions and with not only the human hiding. I wasn't fully conscious of my own doing until the pictures were starkly juxtaposed with those with human faces and bodies exposed nakedly out in the open and left not much to the imagination, made no demand to the viewers eyes just as naked.
The album puts everything in chronological order; so now I know when I was almost alone and nearly wistful (visiting a hermitage) something bombastic (rock-climbing) was happening not far away from me to people whom I claim to know and maybe even love. It's an eerie synchronicity that really aligns nothing, though it puts everything in its right time and space, a recollection of what "actually" transpired down to the second, while to propose this is how we know ourselves and this sort of knowing is how we are finally loved. The thin thread that seems to make parallel, to link up humanity is all but invisible.
There has been a pipeline explosion near Prince George yesterday and now the gas company is asking everyone in the province to turn down the thermostat. But why should anyone pay for the mistake, misfortune, mismanagement of someone else? I did my part to make things work for me, to achieve a climate that suits my clothes. (And where the heck is Prince George anyway?) The thin thread of a pipeline is all but invisible.
And I recalled what Walker Percy wrote:
"The end of the age came when it dawned on man that he could not understand himself by the spirit of the age, which was informed by the spirit of abstraction, and that accordingly the spirit of the age could not address one single word to him as an individual self but could address him only as he resembled other selves. Man did not lose his self in the modern age but rather became incommunicado, being able neither to speak for himself nor to bespoken to. A man is after all himself and no other, and not merely an example of a class of similar selves. If such a man is deprived of the means of being a self in a world made over by science for his use and enjoyment, he is like a ghost at a feast. He becomes invisible. That is why people in the modern age took photographs by the million: to prove despite their deepest suspicions to the contrary that they were not invisible."
The Truth must dazzle gradually...and, for that, of course, slowly, very slowly.
But, we say, we have no time to slow down (I hate to write in haste but I am doing exactly that now!), which is really to stop time. So we try to capture time--as if--with words, and now more conveniently, with pictures. We try not to live like we didn't.
This morning while trudging slowly up the hill with Sumi I asked her again What's up? Are you still feeling bad? Tummy OK? (I already knew it's not toothache for I brushed her teeth last night and she was totally fine.) Tell me, love...
And she did.
She told me I gave her a new bowl (Remember, Alex?), one that is exactly the same as her old bowl that I purchased together at Zellers heeding some guru's advice to have one bowl for water and another for food and quickly found out the pointlessness of that. I took out the new bowl this weekend when I planned to bring the old one to the dog-sitters and use the new one at home henceforth. To my eyes, any human eye, the two bowls are exactly the same, but to Sumi, though driven as always for food, she won't take the nonsense of feeding not from her home ground.
Let me in on the invisible, my love.
Yours, Alex
Dear Eugene,
ReplyDelete“The thin thread that seems to make parallel, to link up humanity is all but invisible… Let me in on the invisible, my love.”
The invisible line has merged the fate of the interstate pipeline explosion in Prince George, BC earlier this week explicitly with the lives of residents in my home town about 1,000 miles south. The truth dazzled slowly through a series of local news & work emails alerting me to lower thermostats & limit hot water usage. Linen services would be cut back in hospitals. Soiled bedding, towels & gowns to cover human faces & bodies would showcase the “indisputable truth frozen in time” like photographs in a living album: streaks of bloody urine & vomit wedged in cotton fibers, scabs & dandruff coating bare flesh, pain naked in its most base form for all senses “just as naked” to capture. The thin thread of the failing & dying is all but invisible.
Another invisible line quivered in the emergency room over a decade ago in LA, connecting me to the pulseless teen on the gurney. Breaths, chest compressions, drugs & electric shocks were all delivered in a hurricane of resuscitation trials to revive his young heart hidden within his visible frame now sprawled “nakedly out in the open & left not much to the imagination”. Devices & scans monitoring his vital signs in 100% visibility transposed all sorts of truths in dazzling lines on flat screens suspended above him. This was theatre chronicled in something "nearly wistful... something bombastic” about denying death but to let us in he refused. His cardiac rhythms remained as flat lines. More drugs were injected into his ashen body. The curtains behind me split as his parents sped with the nakedness of grief into the room, mother wailing in a prayer for his lifeline restored. No photographs were taken to prove he was not invisible.
This invisible line between the dying & living meshed in “eerie synchronicity that really aligns nothing” would continue to dazzle me with its ghastly truth to this day. "Man did not lose his self in the modern age but rather became incommunicado… he is like a ghost at a feast. He becomes invisible.”
Remember, Kate? Breaths & faces under fluorescent lights in a strange room, explosions reverberating across unknown distances to reshape lives, and cries of visible & invisible losses to regain the grasp of this fragile thread binding us all as one. Let me, let you in on the invisible, my love. We may not know each other but “tell me, love…”
Yours, Kate