More 'Just Thinking' Pieces
Fear
In Search of a Knowable Absence
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John Knowles in A Separate Peace said:
Now here…was the well known fear which had surrounded and filled those days, so much of it that I hadn’t even known it was there. Because, unfamiliar with the absence of fear and what that was like, I had not been able to identity its presence. 1
I have been thinking about that. I am drawn to Knowles’ premise. I want it to be true. But I am not sure it is. I doubt that we identify something only when we know its absence. Do we identify life as life, for example, only when we know death? Obviously not.
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But do we identify love as love only after we know indifference? If so, how do we first know indifference? Wouldn’t it require our having first known love?
(Just for the record, homo sapiens is, as far as we know, the only animal that gets itself tied up in theoretical arguments like this. We are the only creatures, apparently, who know that we know something. So I am glad that in this moment I am the only creature in our garden that is wondering about this. I might do well, though, to shed my homo sapiens drive to know that I know, and just sing or dash for nuts.)
So no, I do not think it is literally true that we cannot identify a feeling for what it is unless we have already known its converse. But I still savour the poetic thrust of Knowles’ observation, the poignance of it.
And I am entirely drawn to his assertion of a “knowable absence.” How can we, I wonder, achieve the knowing of an absence?
If fear is our constant state, for example, how do we know the absence of it? Only when it stops? Only when our hearts no longer pummel our days, our minutes?
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What is that like, I wonder, the cessation of fear? I don’t know. Because I, like Knowles, know fear that “surrounds and fills my days and nights.” Not fear that immobilises, not often anyway. Not fear that precludes confidence, enjoyment, fascination, conviction, loving, savouring, imagining. But a steady drone of something.
Something mystifying.
Or not. Maybe not mystifying at all. Maybe continuous, cryonic fear emerges from, feeds on, an untrue assumption lived as true, an assumption easily identified.
I am afraid all of the time. The assumption?
I am dying.
Stamped in the foetal brain during premature contractions for four months. Imprints of the swim of diethylstilbestrol (DES) in her in bed for those four months, her unmoving preservation of life, these lives. “You can have other babies,” they told her. “I want these babies,” she said.
For me:
It is ending. We are dying. We cannot trust. We can. We can’t. We must.
Probably not, you say (because most people do). A foetus doesn’t absorb the mother’s fear and then learn to manufacture its own expressible version of it as life’s immutable blueprint.
Maybe. Maybe. But maybe it does. Maybe I did.
What I know is that I do not ever know the absence of fear. Not ever. And I search every day/hour, for a way to fool it, then to end it, and for the first time, know its absence. Its absence. Think of that. The absence of fear.
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Must that require a presence of something else?
Maybe you are not afraid all of the time. Maybe you can tell me about the presence that replaces fear. Maybe if I have words for that, I can create it. A new presence, by definition, would eliminate an old, wouldn’t it? You can’t have, vying in a given second, opposite valid presences.
So maybe, if I knew the presence of something else, I would know the absence of fear. And maybe, logically, the new presence would be a true liberating assumption:
Although I am in the process of dying because we all are; and although I will die fully sometime because we all will, I am not dying today. Nor tomorrow.
With positive brevity:
I will live today and tomorrow.
And:
If I knew that I will live today and tomorrow, how would I feel in this moment?
I will absorb that, that titanic question and its somersaulting wondrous replies, again and again, and see if I can materialise a knowable absence of fear, a presence of non-fear.
I want to live that presence, and not die until I have.
That is all I ask.
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1 Knowles, John, A Separate Peace, Macmillan, NYC, 1960, p.10
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What Do You Do?
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I hesitated before starting this. No one wants to hear more about ageism, I thought 1 (Just proving the need for infinite pieces about ageism.) Old people are unsavoury. Best not to get too close too often. Good to help out now and then, but life is not with old people or for old people or by old people. Come in, say hello, bring soup, leave.
Not this old person. I am here to be reckoned with. I vow not to hesitate again. Read this, I will say, right now, and again. Think about it. Hard. Get it. Act. Ageism, not old people, stinks. Learn the difference. Shout about it. Swing it around and lasso averting eyes with your understanding of it, your outrage.
Now, here is what I want you to know. This is my most recent learning about the putrefaction of respect, i.e., ageism.
First, though, how old is old? You decide. When do you divine revulsion? When do you rationalise exclusion? 60? 65? 70? 80? For sure by 80 old is all you see, what you fear, why you wince, smile, hurry away. Or charitably stay.
So let’s say 80. I was at a party. It was a room full of old people celebrating a slightly younger person. Only slightly. I talked (listened) to one guest and another, even to the (seriously) younger magician who would be doing a “set’ later.
There was the occasional question, mostly versions of, “How do you know her?” The room filled. The conjuring of nods and the turning of one’s ear to the other’s mouth established sufficient links to warrant moving on to the next person.
Soon with knee pain I had to sit, but I didn’t mind. Even in my twenties I had not liked the furtive eyes and superficiality that are all that standing seems to produce. There were three chairs arranged in a crescent of weary expectation. So I sat. Christopher sat next to me.
Eventually a person sat next to him and talked (shouted) about the honouree and the building, which he owned, and the entire history of his life and his ancestors’ lives who had featured in the even more entire history of the vast farm on which all of this celebration was perched.
When we got home, exhausted (mostly from the colossal din), I said to Christopher, “I was disappointed because I had spent three days figuring out how to answer succinctly, really succinctly, the question: ‘And what do you do?’ I had it down to 15 words (which is amazing for a whole career): ‘I am a writer and the director of my teaching company called 'Time To Think.’ I figured that would be intriguing and the person would want to know more.
“But no one did. Not one person ever even asked me what I do,” I said.
I looked at him. He smiled.
“No one ever asks an old person what they do, Nancy."
“Oh,” I said. “Oh. Gosh. Really?
“Really?” I asked.
But instantly I knew it was true. I had never ever for a second thought of that.
Of course they don’t, because old people don’t do anything. They just linger. Until they don’t.
I wish Verdi had been a guest. He would have had a thing or two to say to that question, if anyone had asked him. I would have asked him. And maybe, if he had not gotten too carried away talking about Falstaff and how close he was to finishing it, he would have said to me, “And what do you do?”
And I could have said my 15 words. And I’ll bet you anything he would have said, “Wonderful! What do you write and what is Time to Think?” And we would have been off again, waving away the bubbly and nibbles, and revelling in each other’s oldness, each other’s lives, our living lives, maybe the best of each other’s 80 years.
1 See: www.nancykline.com/just-thinking-more-new-v and www.nancykline.com/just-thinking-more-x
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You Go
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Jon Stewart, progressive thinker and comedian, is pretty sure that humans are mostly nice. He would say that although all media make masses by featuring the fiend in humans and the narcissistic rat holes it digs trying to be noticed and “loved,” most humans are kind, not cruel. All of the time.
I agree. I am willing to do without data for this one. I am content just to notice the obvious which is that all of the people I know of do more good things than bad every day. And I doubt that there are vast vats teeming with people who do only bad things each day.
Given that, it seems to me vital, as it does to Jon Stewart, that every minute we honour the dominant goodness in humans in whatever ways we can. It matters that we not be cynical and dismissive and hopeless about our species. It matters that we remember that, according to breakthrough biologist Lynn Margulis, in order for there even to be human beings, the process of moving from one-celled non-life to multi-celled life, and then all the way to the powerhouses of mitochondria that eventually produced us, required collaboration.
Yay.
This is how Jon Stewart, pointing to a Jumbotron screen which showed traffic merging into a tunnel, said it in 2010 in his speech at the, “Rally To Restore Sanity.” He said:
Look on this screen. This is where we are. This is who we are. These cars — that’s a schoolteacher who probably thinks his taxes are too high. He’s going to work. There’s another car — a woman with two small kids who can’t really think about anything else right now. There’s another car, swaying, I don’t even know if you can see it — the lady’s in the NRA and she loves Oprah. There’s another car — an investment banker, gay, also likes Oprah. Another car’s a Latino carpenter. Another car a fundamentalist vacuum salesman. Atheist obstetrician. Mormon Jay-Z fan.
This is us. Every one of the cars that you see is filled with individuals of strong belief and principles they hold dear — often principles and beliefs in direct opposition to their fellow travelers. And yet these millions of cars must somehow find a way to squeeze one by one into a mile-long 30-foot wide tunnel carved underneath a mighty river.
And they do it. Concession by concession. You go. Then I’ll go. You go. Then I’ll go. You go; then I’ll go. Oh my God, is that an NRA sticker on your car? Is that an Obama sticker on your car? Well, that’s okay — you go, and then I’ll go.
And sure, at some point there will be a selfish jerk who zips up the shoulder and cuts in at the last minute, but that individual is rare and he is scorned. Because we know instinctively as a people that if we are to get through the darkness and back into the light, we have to work together.
And the truth is, there will always be darkness. And sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t the promised land. Sometimes it’s just New Jersey. But we do it anyway, together.
We do. We just do. We cooperate. Count the times today you notice this wonderful thing about human beings. Multiply that by a billion, just for starters. Cooperation among us all is, except in the very few wars we fight, how we survive. And, yes, the cliché followup clause: how we thrive.
You go, then I’ll go.
Yay.
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Unnecessary Fear
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“Then say to me again the words I could not hear
When I was tense and troubled by unnecessary fear.”
Nearly forty years ago my beloved friend, Amy, wrote those lines. They were for me to think about after meeting the love of my life. She said I would someday be able to make those lines my own. She was right.
Those lines are about the relief of discovering that we can trust love after all. That sometimes our fear of losing love is actually only fine down, dependent on air for its impact. But we treat the fear as if it were stone.
When we do, we become troubled. Sometimes steadily, chronically. Sometimes that scree of fear becomes our primary reference point. Sometimes it makes us turn, run, never look back, never notice the outstretched faithfulness.
But, I learned, we can just stand for a while. Still. We can then look up and around. We can see the forever-true in front of us, the thing we’ve turned from, terrified of its treachery. We can let collapse the self-built scaffolding of imminent loss. We can, in other words, pick off the fear from our hearts, fluff by fluff, and soon stand free. Strong and vulnerable, we then can hear what actually is. We can know that sometimes love is for real and forever.
And we can ask of our beloved:
“Then say to me again the words I could not hear
When I was tense and troubled by unnecessary fear.”
Thank you, dear Amy, for offering me your young wisdom for my young heart.
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