Underwater
In recent months, I’ve experienced a new dimension of memory loss. It used to be that I’d struggle to grab ahold of the name of an actor in a movie I’d seen thirty years ago. Usually, it was Christopher Walken. Sometimes, I was at a loss to remember a town in the Alentejo where I spoke in pidgin Portuguese with a man scraping old paint off a wooden statue of Mary in the courtyard of a church. It was Estremoz. I don’t know how people used to answer these questions, but now it involves nothing more than entering the query in the search bar or appealing to Siri. My new sense of being underwater comes from being unable to retrieve my own ideas, my own language. On a number of occasions, someone whose intention I know to be unimpeachable, whose depth of intelligence ripples out towards me, asks me a question about my work that I can’t answer. I am in the weeds, in the seaweed, and I know that I won’t be able to respond until I somehow come up for air. The difference between the ordinary forgetfulness that can be fixed by Google and this kind of brain vacancy is like the difference between leaving your credit card by the cash register by mistake and losing your child, God forbid, in a department store.
Pastel by Susie Kaufman
I’m rummaging around in the deep, looking for explanations that are not degenerative, that do not suggest some organic flaw, which leads me to consider the content of my ideas. What am I thinking about and why might it be slippery? The truth is, I’m thinking about mortality and that is the truth. Not for nothing was I a hospice chaplain. I’m interested in where we come from and where we’re going…How we can hold the infinite and the finite at the same time, one in the palm of each hand…How we can bear witness to people in our own cohort slipping into the next dispensation every day, the passing parade. And how we will live fully with this knowledge, waking each morning with love and gratitude, observing the glittering, iridescent red and yellow fish from behind the snorkel mask. I return to this subject matter again and again, but I am also discomfited by it. How about you? I worry that people will think I’m a downer, as if in the end it matters what people think. It occurs to me that I lose the drift of my subject because, as much as it preoccupies me, it also unnerves me and this anxiety clouds my memory with dirt stirred up from the bottom of the ocean floor.
I’m starting to think that the only clarity is no clarity, not knowing. The effort to nail these ideas down, to fence them in like so many cattle, like so many refugees at the border, dehumanizes them. I can feel the words sinking, drowning. I consider the possibility that I’m giving language, specific finite syllables, too much to carry. Maybe the truth of mortality is so deep that mere words splinter under the weight of it. It can’t be retrieved with a simple mnemonic - every good boy does fine - like the lines on the musical staff. I may have to recalibrate my way of being in the world so that the infinite has more room to stretch. And this is an enormous shift on the order of moving out of the green northeast woodland with its recognizable maples and oaks and into the vastness of the desert.
I begin by asking myself to practice seeing without naming. It’s magnificently difficult. Walking up the road, I notice pink and deep rose shoots coming up out of the ground. If I tell myself that I’m looking at burning bush, the experience is domesticated, narrowed down. If I look without defining what I’m seeing, the view is much wilder, more spacious; Eden before the naming of the animals, a reprieve from the discriminating mind. The very old limit their naming to the essentials. When my mother died at the age of ninety-nine, she knew five people and assorted scraps of French left over from her school days in the twenties. Otherwise, it was hot, cold, love, irritability. She had a limited capacity to engage with life, certainly, and I am not reaching out for that prematurely. But she was also free from the invading army of words that claim to explain what life is and what mortality might be. She swam into the deep underwater realm with grace and no idea of what she would find there.
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Thank you for your continued interest in my writing.
Thank you, Don. It's important for writers to recognize the value of feeling totally vulnerable when we share our thoughts. This one really got to me.
I talk much less now that I'm in my mid-80s. To cover up I tell friends and family I've taken a vow of silence. Susie, your post was substantial and provoked a very thoughtful conversation. One line I found helpful was: "I may have to recalibrate my way of being in the world so that the infinite has more room to stretch." Recalibrating may be the secret. I only hope I can remember that.