Mood Indigo

I’m in one of those moods again (remember that song?). Which maybe has to do with being locked in and trapped coronavirus-wise. Or maybe it doesn’t, and has more to do with the time of year, or regular bio-rhythms, or astrology, or simply the rise and fall of psychic energy, I don’t know. But I’m in one. Where life seems stupid and futile and everything I do or read seems the same. Not worth the time it takes to think of it. All our attempts at saving the moment or the day or the year, at getting ourselves out of the messes we’re all in (and god knows we’re in a lot of them), don’t seem to matter in the least. What is the good? We’re all heading to the same place anyway, sooner or later, and nothing we can ever do can change that in the least. What is the good of even writing these words? Few will read them and even fewer will care or think about them and so it’s just another jumble of ‘words, words, words,’ as Hamlet I think it was, said in a similar mood. 

            And yet, here I am writing again, pressing rather clumsily on my keyboard and making more mistakes than usual since my stroke took out much of the functioning of my right side, and hoping not only that my right fingers will get more skilled each day, but that something useful or at least proportional or balanced or coherent will come out of this pressing of keys that I hope results in something. And what supports that hope? What can possibly convince me that even if I do manage to come up with something—that is, if my brain, now acclimating to the rhythmic motions of my fingers on a keyboard, can generate something out of the nothing I’m feeling, the nothing that I’m doing, the nothing that is—it will mean something? I don’t know, obviously. Which is one of the magical things about this whole endeavor. Writing, I mean. That sometimes, even when one has no idea what to write, something gets written. It’s the going-through-the-motions ploy. Just start to do it, go through the motions, fake it till you make it, and something will come. And though often it doesn’t, mirabile, it often enough does. Just look. I’ve already got a couple of paragraphs. True, I haven’t said a fucking thing yet, but there are two whole paragraphs of nothing in the completed column already. That means something, no?

            No. It means nothing. Nothing means nothing. And we are all, whether we like it or not or know it or not, meaning junkies. We demand that things mean something, especially ourselves (some would say that finding meaning is not only what we do, but what we are as conscious beings).  And even though I’m already weary of this piece and this line of thought, I keep going on with it in the hope that something, anything, will come out of it. Something meaningful. And I don’t know where it even comes from, this foolish optimism that lulls, that gulls us into hoping for meaning, into going on when we can’t go on. Pace, Beckett. 

            Alright. Enough of this au-ful digressing on this hopeless state. What was I going to say? I was going to say, I think, that some of us, many of us, are getting tired of this hiatus. Imposed from without by this little shit virus. Or rather from our fear that this little shit virus could end us. Could sneak up on us unannounced and unnoticed and slip into our cells and start hijacking them until we can’t breathe, and die. That’s really what we’re afraid of, why we’re all hunkering down in our little cells. Dying meaninglessly and ignominiously beneath an array of mechanical hospital equipment, attended to by people in masks and face helmets as if we had been captured by aliens, only to gasp our last away from anything meaningful or anyone meaningful in our lives the way people now do. Meaningless death via this little shit virus. 

            Trouble is, we’re leading meaningless lives precisely because of trying to escape from this meaningless death. All corona has done is dramatized for us how meaningless our lives are, even normally. And that’s something. Maybe even something meaningful (and look how it creeps in no matter what!) Even writing about meaninglessness provides an opportunity for the little shit to slip in meaning. It does. I haven’t even listed my meaningless activities yet, and already I’m back to finding meaning, or at least desperately seeking one: ‘Sure; that’s what we can do, that’s a direction to head in, a discourse about how even meaningless activity can throw a life vest to /for meaning. So don’t despair, little ones’; and we don’t. Anything, goes the old nostrum, can give us meaning; even meaninglessness. Ah yes. Never give up because at some point the meaningless itself turns into meaning, and we can, we will, we must salvage this piece of nothing and turn it into something. 

            So there it is. You see? The mystery. We start with nothing, and we end with something. This is the way the world goes, after all. Something comes from nothing. Even though the song says, ‘nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could,’ in reality, nothing—the vacuum—actually produces something. Produces everything. That’s the current view, it seems. That from the great void, the great vacuum of space, with a little quantum fluctuation or quantum foam, came everything we now see, and touch, though it may be only with our instruments. Yes, the quantum void (is that even a term?) produces the vast multiplicity of everything there is in the universe. And it all started from nothing; or what appears to be nothing. From emptiness. Which means the Buddhists are right. All is empty, you and I are empty if we plumb deeply enough, and from that amazingly potent emptiness springs all of us and everything else we can see or think of or imagine.  

            So don’t despair. You see in this very piece how it works. From nothing came something. And it seems that it always and regularly does. Even from this shit, not-even-properly-alive coronavirus will eventually emerge something, is already emerging something. And we can look back on it and write about it and marvel once again at the great and impossible empty fecundity of which we are a part. Which we are. And which we will dissolve back into as soon as the shining, which we also are—like flowers, like the petals of flowers that are all descending now at the end of Spring, petals littering the ground and seeds futilely dropping onto concrete but no matter, they don’t seem to mind being wasted, they are living fecundity after all—will likewise drop seemingly wasted, seemingly useless. 

But are they? Are we? Perhaps not. 

Lawrence DiStasi

Truth and Consequences

We are told, from the time we can understand language, that we should always tell the truth. Often the telling is reinforced by varying degrees of punishment for failing to tell the truth. And we are given historical examples—one of the favorites being George Washington admitting to his father that he cut down the cherry tree. ‘The father of our country became great because he told the truth from a young age,’ we are told; and so can you, is the implication. But early on, we also run into experiences that indicate that telling the truth, and being rewarded for it, is not always followed, even by the adults we respect. We see our parents shading the truth, either to get themselves off the hook, or to make a score in business, or to spare a relative’s feelings. And we ourselves see, as I did in about the third grade, that telling the truth doesn’t always work as planned. That third-grade episode stuck with me for a long time. Three of us on our way to school one morning decided to raid a watermelon field we regularly passed. My brother and I and a neighbor all spent half an hour eating watermelon, and then got to school after the bell had rung. Terrified, we all decided to lie and say we had stomach aches, and that was why we got to school late. I dutifully did this, honoring our pact. My teacher didn’t believe me, and assigned me detention. When school let out, I immediately checked with my co-conspirators, who then informed me that, contrary to our pact, they had admitted what we had done, and were let off. I was the only one who had to endure a week’s detention. Truth can thus be confusing. Telling a lie, but being true to our pact, I got punished. For the others, telling the truth, but lying with respect to our pact, got them leniency. 

            “What is truth?” Pontius Pilate replied to Jesus, after the latter had averred “For this reason I was born and have come into the world, to testify to the truth.” (John: 18:38). So here, the Son of God asserts that proclaiming the truth is the very reason He came into this world. A powerful endorsement, about as powerful as it gets. Even so, the truth teller is rare, as Hamlet tells Polonius: “To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.” (II, 2). Why? Because almost everything militates against it, as I found out in third grade. We all want to protect ourselves. We’re all always looking for a way out of whatever dilemma we’ve gotten ourselves into. Julian Jaynes, in his classic 1976 work, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, actually makes the case that lying and deception are at the heart of human cognitive development. This is because, he maintains, humans are the one species that can carry on long-term deception (many animals can deceive short-term, feigning injury or using camouflage to aid in hunting or hiding). Only we humans can do it because we have consciousness and language to aid memory, to remember what we’re really after and what deceptions (we have to keep them straight) we’ve utilized in that pursuit. 

            So truth is both critical and rare as this world goes. In politics, it’s even rarer; and, I would maintain, more critical in situations like the deadly one we are facing now. When thousands, millions of lives are at stake, being able to rely on the truth is the glue that holds a  culture together, a matter of life and death. Of course, this is the case in other critical situations, like war. But the thing about war is that often, being able to lie, to deceive the enemy about one’s intentions or troop strength or movements becomes more than critical. It becomes, again, a matter of success or failure in battle, of literal life and death. So commanders must know how to deceive, and be ready and willing to do so. The same is true of political leaders. It is part of the job of protecting the nation or state to have the capacity to deceive, which is what much of statecraft is about.  And it is even necessary for leaders to deceive their own people in order to preserve morale; too much truth could lead to despair, and a failure of will. Doctors know this same imperative: surgeons often choose not to reveal the true prognosis or all the details of treatment because many patients would opt to die rather than go through the pain of possible recovery. Truth, then, can be a very squishy concept. But there are degrees.

            We, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, are facing a threat like few in history. In such a situation, knowing the truth about the true danger that exists and about how to cope with it is far more important than usual. It’s all well and good for a leader to lie to obtain tactical advantage in a war. But when whole populations are at risk, and need to know the actual nature of the threat, the truth is critical. The best scientific (and science tries to, and should, always deal in the truth—as far as it can be known. Anything less is a total failure of the scientific enterprise.) evidence should always be foremost in any public presentation. The problem is, we have been led (I use the term loosely) for the past four years by a habitual, a pathological liar. Donald Trump has spent his entire life relying on his ability to flat-out lie, and then pretend, if caught, that it either didn’t matter, or was not what he meant, or insist that his words were meant as a joke, or sarcasm, or some other form of evasion or blame. And he has discovered through a massive body of experience, that he can nearly always get away with this. Enough people will be too lazy or too indifferent or too dismissive of the issue’s importance to give him the margin he needs to slide by with a lie once again. 

With the Covid-19 crisis, though, he has reached a new situation entirely. The problem is that he has not yet, it seems, recognized the novelty of his situation. And so, he has continued to lie, to fudge, to extemporize based on his impulses, and assure the nation that the crisis isn’t really a crisis, that it’s not as serious as his own scientists say it is, that it will soon be over, that it isn’t worth the cost of a plummeting economy, that he’s done everything wonderfully and made supplies available and cut off entry from China, or that he cannot be blamed because it’s someone else’s fault. And each of these lies, though no different from thousands of lies he’s told in the past with no consequences, are suddenly proving to have dire consequences. The death count steadily rises. The clamor for equipment for hospitals and first responders and for testing materials grows louder. The commentators who monitor these things, and who have always been so malleable to his deceptions, are suddenly using harsh language, apocalyptic language to describe his utter failure; his abysmal, unforgiveable failure to do the primary job for which he was elected: protect the nation and, especially, protect the people he has sworn to serve.

            Now, suddenly (as it must have done in Nazi Germany when Hitler’s lies about the genius of invading Russia, and the invincibility of his army were seen, their consequences seen, in massive destruction and death), the lies and the damage attendant on those lies are becoming apparent to anyone with eyes to see. Anyone, that is, can see the death count passing a thousand, then tens of thousands, now fifty thousand and more to come, on their screens. Anyone can see the businesses closed by the thousands, and the unemployed lining up in the millions. Everyone can gasp as this diabolic liar of a president recommends drinking bleach as a possible cure, following which bleach companies have to warn people not ever to believe such a preposterous thing. Everyone can see, and hear, and count the astonishing cost not just in income or prospects but in actual lives lost unnecessarily— unnecessary, that is, because of the absence of a little truth. 

            In short, despite what we all know about every human’s capacity to lie at times, about the absolute necessity to lie in some situations, the real consequences of presidential lying have suddenly become crystal clear. Truth really is a precious commodity in a crisis. And lying really is a dangerous weapon in the wrong hands. And the difference—being able to discern the difference, and especially being able to know when it is important to lie, and when it is important to tell the truth, no matter what the cost—is an indispensable quality even in our postmodern world. And it is doubly indispensable in a national leader. 

Too bad it has become so difficult, and even impossible for so many Americans—raised as we are on the George Washington myth, but increasingly cynical about its necessity—to tell the difference. 

Lawrence DiStasi

The Nearness of You

Our new reality, the looming threat of the corona virus, or Covid-19, really means one thing. It means that one way or the other, all of us are now facing, up close and personal, the threat of death. And we don’t even know what that means exactly. We see death nightly on our screens, we see someone gunned down and pronounced “dead” in a TV drama, but we seldom actually face the reality of what that word signifies. And I suspect that’s because in our era of remote viewing and quarantining death in hospitals or nursing homes and cremating rather than sitting with dead bodies in coffins, we really don’t quite know what death means, even though it terrifies us. Terrifies us precisely because, in fact, we don’t know what it means. 

            We used to know, or thought we knew, what death meant. It meant for most of us in the West that something called the soul was leaving our body and going somewhere else. Either a lovely place where all would be happy and joyful because we were in the very presence of God and angels—a place usually termed “heaven” or paradise or some variation thereof—or the bad place where we would be punished for our sins, which we termed “hell” or Hades. And that place derived its power from its endlessness, its infinity of flames and suffering that would never end. Any Catholic with an imagination could be terrified by just thinking for a moment about that. Other religions had different scenarios, but all more or less depended on the same idea of an afterlife: be good and be rewarded, or you will be punished in what is to come after death. As Hamlet so enduringly puts it, “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil/ Must give us pause.”

            In our time, however, there are few people who still subscribe to this view. Oh yes, there are still fundamentalists or those who still adhere to the faith of their childhoods, who are quite sure that they will be taken up bodily into “heaven,” but I have nothing to say to such people in any case. I am talking about the mass of modern, so-called ‘civilized’ people for whom these ideas have taken on the literary aura of fairy tales. They may have been comforting stories ‘once upon a time’ but they are simply that—stories that people used to believe and which can no longer be given credence. For this mass of people, death is something that is terminal, the final stop; which is why they generally are frantic to live as much of life as possible, and as well as they can. ‘You only get to come around once, so you’d better enjoy it,’ is the idea. So death has this one meaning for most of us in our time: the end of the only thing that matters, which is living. Staying alive, for as long as possible. And anything that threatens that, that threatens to end that precious living before its time, is to be avoided at all costs. Shunned. Quarantined in some faraway place and fought off, if at all possible, forever. It should go without saying that Covid-19 is a direct threat to all that.

            With so much freight and weight attached to it, one would think that we all knew exactly what death is. To keep such an adversary at bay for as long as possible, that is, one should really know all about it. Study it. Know exactly what it does, and what it holds in store. But the truth is, we do not. We do not know what death portends for this thing we call our “self”, nor do we know, even scientifically, what it means to die. This is why we have terms such as “brain death.” A person can be “brain dead,” that is, totally unconscious and unaware and unable to maintain even the basic elements of breathing and heartbeat and metabolism, and still be considered technically “alive” by means of breathing ventilators and heart pumps. The body can be kept warm thereby, and the organs of that artificially-kept-alive person can still be transplanted to another live body and used for several more years. Indeed, that is an offered option for many people who are “brain dead.” Their organs, still ‘alive,’ can be cut out and transplanted quickly to another body to keep that other body alive.

            So when is a person “dead?” This question occurred to me personally when my late wife suffered a cerebral aneurysm that left her “brain dead,” though the doctors never used that terrifying term. And it was proposed to us that her organs could be harvested, and donated to others (to begin a new life?). But that isn’t the real point here. The point is, in the face of someone artificially kept alive by a ventilator and heart drugs, when did we, keeping vigil, know she was actually dead? Because at a certain point, she certainly was. There was no doubt about that. From a warm body with color that showed indelible signs of life, she transformed, at a certain point, into something rigid and cold and pale. It is a phase shift as common as it could be. And we all recognize it. But what actually happens? What causes that transition that is feared above all else in our world? The common, inevitable transition from life to death? It happens all the time, so often that we fail to notice it usually: leaves turn brown, wither, and fall. Animals become rigid and begin to waste away. And still, we don’t really know what it is, what happens. And if what is left is really all there ever was to “us.” 

            That is the real question. If we sense that the dead body left to us is not really “her,” that what was “her” in the first place is not there anymore, then what was her? What was the essence of who she was? It’s not a question of movement (the cells and elements that make up a dead body still are made up of atoms and electrons that ‘move’), nor of breath or heartbeat, both of which can be kept artificially active. So what is it then? What is the crucial difference between a living thing and a dead one? This became glaringly obvious to me when contemplating my above-mentioned wife’s dead body. Something crucial had left. Was, as if, gone. We used to call this the “soul.” But that overused term doesn’t quite signify any more. Some religions still use it, but many religions, especially eastern ones like Buddhism, specifically disbelieve in it. It is considered an illusion. So then, what is it that departs, if “departs” is the proper term? We don’t know. We really do not know what the animating principle is that enlivens us and surrounds us. We can identify it without any trouble. We can easily see that machines, computers, though they appear to operate like living things, are not alive. They are dead metal and plastic until they are animated by electric current. And need to be programmed—told what to do—by live beings like ourselves. We know this without question and normally don’t require reasons. But again, what is it, precisely, that animates that which is living? And leaves, or seems to leave when they, we, are dead? 

            We should be able to define this. State it in no uncertain terms. Especially at times like these when death is so near. Especially for those of us who are “old,” because every verifiable opinion says that we are most at risk. Most likely to die as a result of this deadly virus getting into us—whatever that means. We should know, then, what is going to happen to “us” if we should succumb. Which we will, all of us, be it now or later. That precious something that we call “life” will have to depart. And we will be “dead.” But again, what is dead? Am I—my brain, my consciousness, my awareness—what I mean by “me” in the first place, and alone constitutive of that which dies? Or is it my body? Or, are we making a fundamental error here in trying to see the two—body and mind (or brain or consciousness)—as separate? And that there is no discernible element that “leaves” to signify death, but rather that it is all one indissoluble entity that breathes or doesn’t breathe, whose heart beats or doesn’t beat, together. But then, what of “brain death?” What of a body that is still “alive” even though its lungs and heart cannot operate on their own? But whose organs, just parts of them, are still useful, i.e., alive, for and in another body?  

            Science, in other words, has put our language, our intuition, up against a knotty problem. Before life support systems, there was rarely any room for doubt. If a person got to the point where he or she could not breathe, that was it. If the heart stopped, that was it. Death ensued. No organs were discernibly alive afterwards, either. The whole thing was dead. And the soul had, presumably, left for another life. And that was that. Aside from a few alleged ‘miracles’ where a person was supposed to have come back to life, there was no problem telling the dead from the living. 

Now, however, the line has become more obscure, and so has the definition. And that may be the core of the problem after all. Definition. Language. Our language has not kept up with what we see. Or think we see; and want to define, that is, separate. Life and death may not be separable in the way we would like them to be. Consider, for example, the lowly virus that now has us transfixed. As a virus, it is said to hover somewhere between life and non-life. And so is hard to define. So may our own life/death be. It may be that we cannot say what life consists of, what defines it, what separates it from non-life because the dividing line is cloudy. As in quantum mechanics, as in Schrodinger’s cat. Life is life and, more or less simultaneously, it is not. And there is death. And there may be nothing to define or see. And if we analogize it with all other forms of life, we see that life commonly shades into death and then again into life with hardly a by your leave. It’s a closed system. That which dies is immediately or before long  filtered right back into the system (whatever that is), to become part of the living again, and so on. Leaves become humus, animals become food for bugs and other animals which eventually die to become nitrogen and other chemicals, all of which nourishes the plant life around it, to in turn nourish the animal life around it, and nothing is lost. Life and death shade into each other and the cycle simply (it is by no means simple) continues. And no one asks where did life go, where did death come from, where will I go when I die, and will I be happy there? It simply never occurs as a question. Language and thought and trying to frame the unframeable are what create the question and the problem. Trying to make an open system, an escape hatch to keep us from recycling back into the whole mess (hence our mania to bury our dead and preserve them from decay and merging with all else), is what creates the problem. 

So does that mean we should simply forget about it? I think not. Otherwise, why did I write this whole discourse in the first place? No, we ought to at least be aware of what we’re doing. What we are—these creatures that are terrified of something that we cannot figure out, cannot place in a frame that will suit us, that will ease our anxious minds. When really, a better thing to do is just see: how hopeless is our endeavor, how basically unnecessary. We simply cannot know, in the way we would like to know, what will happen. Not only after death, but in the next two seconds. And the idea that we can, the idea that we somehow should know is what gets us into trouble in the first place. Life and death are inextricably intertwined, like night and day, like front and back, and like them always will be. And however much we would love to separate them, however much it discomfits us that we can't, however desperate is our need to know, doesn’t really matter in the end. What matters is seeing what we do; and how we are; and how the entirety is all we can and always do see, even if we don’t realize it. 

Lawrence DiStasi