The Hole


Dear Eugene,

Were you once like me, expecting bad things to happen all the time, especially when getting closer to Christmas, when everything is supposed to be nice?

I think it has to do with the rain and possible snow.  The cold weather, this part of the world.  The shopping, people getting what they want and never keeping any.  People hopping on airplanes, leaving home to find home.  Friends gathering, in hope to present to each other a better past year than the one before.  Things are supposed to be on the up and up, to progress.  Not that we are naive about life, but if we are to go down, we would like to be seen as doing so gracefully.  Nobody cries in a Christmas party, colors too bright for that.  Please leave your even most positive spin on a cancer tale at the door, where the slush is.

But, man, look at the news.  I don't want to look at it.  I don't even know why I am looking at it.  Other people's trouble, insisting to speak of my fragility and imminent downfall.  You do wrong to me, I do wrong to you, I can't tell which is which, and something being done to us like a judgement, something we somehow expected, a storm, a fire, the way we were going, but still we cry foul.  I am a frail being in a frail collection of beings, which points to the very nasty truth that we all at first and finally stand alone; frailty reduces us to solitude, with no one to blame but ourselves.  The last of our journey we walk alone.

I will have my turn one day to be the spectacle, the guy with a neck brace being hauled into an ambulance, red light and siren coming in and out of his consciousness, like he's at peace finally to have done his share of suffering in the name of being human, his tear hidden in the glitters of freshly cut Christmas trees people peek through from their warm kitchen at the window of composite sorrow, one snippet and then another.  I don't want to be that guy, the housewife changed the channel.  And she checked the turkey again.  Not again, she said.

So we can't be too cynical about the frivolity of the season.  It's not that we don't know sorrow, but we want to forget the wound of knowledge, "the hole in God's side," as R. S. Thomas puts it.  We ask the noise to drown things out, the twinkling lights to blind us just a little, and we will do what we've been told to get real again in January. 

The more the merrier in December
The less the hope when it's all over
That's the method to our madness
Well, let's call it a year

Yours, Alex

Comments

  1. KateNovember 21, 2018 at 12:47 AM

    Dear Eugene,

    “The last of our journey we walk alone.”

    It must have arrived within these past 12 hrs, discreetly alone in the coffin of a box labeled "Christmas tree for kiosk” by the old side entrance. I did not see it last night as I left the building.

    From birth, it must have been pulled pressed parceled to reducible specs by mechanical & human hands, hauled past slush ambulance shopping sprees housewives roasting turkeys in homes pierced with cracks of windows pelted by rain & possible snow, to have at last relented its march of progress, whisked its composite sorrow away & now in frailty leaning on industrial vinyl flooring. The solitude of a Christmas tree screams about “The Hole”, the “wound of knowledge”, from its cardboard grave.

    I thought I heard its scream when I saw him in the women’s restroom after lunch today. Well I first heard him wheeling in his cart, a portable mound of bleach sprays wipes towels. The contour of his back sloped down to a quiet stance. I searched for his eyes to perhaps share a smile. He stooped to gather trash & vanished with his load of tales untold, one snippet and then another adrift.

    Then in the same afternoon down the hall, I saw another with a similar cart, her face familiar to me. Not again, I thought: a smile possibly lost. This time she looked at me. We exchanged a few words of civility about the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend, trying to sound more humane in this part of the world in this building where people leave bed to find bed for healing. She smiled, her eyes drooping to tell another tale palpable only by the touch of the wound, The Hole.

    My two friends & I with our carts of stories bad & good should soon see the Christmas tree at the lobby unveiled.

    Yours, Kate

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One World, This

Image
Dear Eugene, I am sure some would object to what I said yesterday .  Based on the kind of education we are getting, maybe we should all object. Well, science can explain a lover's kiss , one says, We must know this by now.   Things that go on in a lover's head, bring to bear a series of trigger working together and crossing paths to conjure up what finally a poet would pick up the slack to call "romance."  It's simply a release of chemical cocktail that heroin and cocaine too can effectively concoct, just as "obsessive compulsive" in its serotonin-ian nature to give us a long good memory, just as culturally conditioned, almost like a basic human instinct. Who are we (to answer yesterday's question again) to say what actually  "shapes" us?  Science can explain ourselves to us, and does a better job every next morning.  The rest are just tassels on the fringe, perfunctory footnotes to scientific facts--the only truthful account of actua
Keep reading

He Walks Our Line

Image
Dear Eugene, The sun is brilliant today, best time of year, not too hot, not too cold, not too anything , a good life hangs finely in the balance of a myriad of capricious elements, mostly hidden, many I won't even come to identify let alone make sense of before my little life ends. Two mornings ago I read in the news that a suicide bomber attacked a voter registration center in Afghanistan, killing 31 people.  Yesterday morning the headline was gone, and I had to search online to see the casualty was then more than doubled. If I didn't quickly scan the headlines Sunday morning I would not even know something like this had happened, like the registering voters knew not a bomb was in their midst, and by the time they knew for sure there would be no point in knowing, let alone trying to make sense of the blast or piecing smithereens back together.  A line was drawn to divide before and after, life and death, hope and despair; a line that gives and takes away the meaning of
Keep reading

A Word for the Caveman

Image
Dear Eugene, We could imagine when a caveman was chased by a T-Rex, the nature man would naturally cry for help. His shriek would have been a plead no less earnest than ours when we lost control of our vehicle to an evil sheet of ice.  If after years of high education we could in our final moment at least wrap our spinning head around the physics of skating in a ball of metal into our death, the caveman wouldn't have the luxury of comparable enlightenment to come to terms with his demise under the chicken-feet of a leviathan. Who was the caveman crying to?  In whose name was his prayer going to be answered, if at all?  And if he could not even utter an intelligible syllable comprehensible to himself, who was going to speak on his behalf when he was most in need to be spoken for? Now these are the questions I would ask a Christian if I am not one. Not too long ago a pastor tried to warn me about N. T. Wright by saying he's cool with the dude and all, but make sure I
Keep reading