Latch Fatigue

There's a particular intersection on Highway 2 near Nebraska City where a nice, older man missed the red light thus not missing the front of our car pulling out on its green light.  One minute--leaving the truckstop full of plains kitsch, next moment--  life's compass lost magnetic north, tumbling our storylines (and bodies) like so many monkeys from the barrel.

As I mentioned previously, I find the Jack-in-the-Box a disappointing toy:  First, because it becomes rather too predictable.  The fun factor--the surprise part--so quickly isn't...both fun or a surprise.  After the first-- I dunno--three go-arounds of the crank'n pop cycle, it is not surprising.   Crank, sing, sing, pop!  Crank, sing, sing, pop.  Right? As for the fun? The song--perhaps one of the more promising bits--is totally interrupted: Musicalus interruptus.  No matter how much I channel my inner John Cage, it's bound to pop and the song hangs up.  Lastly,  and not at all least, the latch always does seem to wear out and the whole point of the thing--a peekaboo with a bizarrre peeker and a musical score--ends up without a peek or a boo.  Just a rather irritating, unseemly party-guy overstaying his lines in the play.  "Fooled you" in a box--much like the specter of mortality. 

I think we may have a bit of the same kind of fascination and impatience with mortality's refusal to be sensible.  There seems to be a notion of story we cling to--birth, kindergarten, arts & crafts, sex, naptime, death--but, really?  Most lives have all kinds of surprises and the damned latch always. always. always
wears out.

We just don't know when.

After Highway 2 and its broken glass, insurance and C-T scans, I felt a bit like something small with a rapid heartbeat, crouching in dimmed air beneath the hawk shadow.

The predator features rather more heavily in the story than we like to think.  It lurks. It is not timely or sensible on our terms.  It waits and pounces. 

 Blake wrote of the the "Tyger:"
 Tyger Tyger. burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye.
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

And in 5 more stanzas he makes it clear how fearsome and mystifying the Tyger is--fearsome enough to cause Blake to wonder on our behalf if the creator of the Lamb could possibly " dare seize the fire" of the very creature bound to stalk the lamb. The storyteller's narrative is far more opaque than we hoped.

So while the ominous MRI made me feel a bit Love-Story-ish about the arc of my life-novella, Highway 2 reminded me that I don't get to know when or how my Jack-in-the-Box gets sprung.  Is this a comfort?  A threat?

It doesn't much matter.  I'm turning my little organ-grinder handle, toying around with music and anticipation, maybe even paying verrrrry close and paced attention....but there's a tyger out there, too.  The latch may give out, sure.  But really, the tyger might catch my scent, as well.  Innocence/experience. Experience and innocence. Tyger or Jack-in-the-box. Both have "finis" written all over them.



I suspect that old-fashioned toy is a bit of ruse we cling to, the idea we have some say in the matter.  There is perhaps a bit of the toddler in us when confronted with unwanted suspense--sometimes we break it--we go for the clown and insist he stay visible--we break the latch. There--no surprise now!

In hide and seek, I never liked hiding.  I sometimes made noise in order to ensure being found on my terms. Like breaking the latch, this is pretty silly.....and pretty human. Long ago, even before the proliferation of speeding bullets, we went looking for the Tyger, with fairly fragile weapons.  There is something in us--marvelous or horrible, I don't know--that doesn't want to wait it out, doesn't want to see the same old punch line, feels better hunting the hunter, even if it risks an early "finis." Freud framed this as a "death wish."  This has been widely misinterpreted as a desire for death. 

I think it is more a fatigue with fear--the real latch fatigue--when the dread of turning the crank one more time seems unbearable, when the walk in the wilds seems just too frightening; we are fatigued with our own latching to life.  This is not a desire for death but rather more a desire for agency--for some say in the matter.  Tired of being stalked, tired of the small disappointments or surprises--the small losses along the way--we long to run full tilt into the shadows, break the latch, reveal the architecture of the story and wrest it into our own hands.

I used to wonder about those sailors who put to sea, even with maps limned in monsters.  I think I get it, now.  It's not so much an ark as an arc. 

How to Build an Ark

Stop counting.

Empty all vessels. 

Do not sharpen what cuts.

Breathe in

what is unbelievable—

that which seems most obvious:

Heartbeat and bread,

firelight, 

the beading of night upon leaf.

Like the past—it is only in the face of perishing

we find a way to float.  Unlike the past,

lumber is not needed and the timing

uncertain.  Meanwhile, whenever possible, practice

practice floating.

 Scupture photo and poetry by Julia Dadds
 Sculpture: Falling Man by Ernest Trova 1969 at the Laumier Sculpture Park

Boy Hiding from stock photos.

Researching the monsters

It was not light reading.

There are about seven different possible etiologies for these MRI results I got the other month.   One of the seven kills people--100%.  "You should see a neurologist...." is what the doctor said. But  after several years of interacting with brain injury patients, I have a deep regard for just how little neurologists can actually do.  The brain is still a vastly uncharted territory. Neurologists are like those sailors who sailed off with maps that had edges marked "Here be monsters." Neurology maps say "here be neurons."

So, because I was about to be between health care providers while I moved domiciles and work, I researched. The neurons and ganglia and all that good stuff in the cerebellar region regulate autonomic functions.   Autonomic functions are the ones that are, well, automatic, so to speak.  That is, they are bodily functions that cruise on autopilot...a really crucial, the plane will crash if they don't cruise autopilot. The autonomic functions are the signalling systems that ping and manage balance, blood pressure, elimination of wastes, swallowing, breathing and heartbeat. Nothing much.

And when MRI's show things amiss in this cerebellar region you know what can be known for sure?  Not much.  How often does one find that actually written in black and while about modern medicine?  The only way to diagnose what might produce this kind of MRI image is an expensive and largely inconclusive process of elimination.  They'll only finally and conclusively diagnose the causes of those shadow and light gradations at death. Really.  And you know what good a firm diagnosis does?  You guessed it --nada, zip, zero.  No current treatments other than "palliative."  No brain repair available.

Initially, I found this a bit freeing:  Well, okay, I'm not going to piss off an MD for going alternative on her or him because the traditionals have nothing to give me but bad news.  I mean really--no treatments, period.

So until I can coordinate all the contacts with health care that will launch my little craft upon this map limned with new mysteries, I  decided I would meander around in the shallows eyeballing the horizon and think deeply on monsters.  Or rather I would write as if I understood that we are all sailing on maps with the edges labeled  "monsters." Say how does that compass feel in hand, given all the sepia-toned scaly splashing on the periphery?

Maybe it was just a bad MRI.

But I thought I might well know the worst case scenario.  And you know what?  This is not something written up much.  Apparently no one wants to talk about the dying process much.  Not in any disease, it turns out, does one find an unflinching portrait of what is likely to happen when one abuts a monster.  The discussion I found was appallingly couched in how to prolong life...honestly. For example, I found a rather lengthy scholarly treatise on how to prevent patients from dying in their sleep. 

The biggest monster on my map takes out people in several ways.  They stop breathing in their sleep. Their hearts stop. They get such chronic urinary tract infections that the infections take them out. They stop eating to the point where they have to be tube fed and things go amiss with that.  I'm in favor of the stopping breathing in the sleep. And the paper I found discussed how to interrupt that peaceful process. But no one asked me. 

So I had a moody day after this research.  I sailed on a plane traveling halfway across the country. When it was time to land, the attendant came over the PA and what I heard was this:  "Your time suspended in the air is over, watch for falling baggage, don't stand too soon and thanks for this little jaunt.  It's over."  All of a sudden, I felt like the plane was life and it was time to disembark.  Me and my fellow shipmates.  Despite the monsters ravening at the edges of our maps, we were to gather our water bottles, power up our cell phones and leave in an orderly fashion. I felt tremendous tenderness for those around me. We tried to smile and be kind while moving through mundane and tedious logistics:  Wait, wait, jostle, be polite even while feeling urgent, remember stuff, move on, move out, face what I don't know, face what is next....which is what none of us really knows.  

Little wallet pictures

There are selfish reasons I am writing this: I have boys.  Three guys who are actually men, now.  And they were born of me and we grew through the world together for some intense years. And we still are entwined at some cellular level that I see as proof of God.  Or what many call God and I prefer to call Mystery. ***

The not-so-selfish reason I am writing this is because knowing we are dying; living with the daily truth of that is the ground we all must walk.  This is not an anti-life statement but rather the very statement that allows life to become the powerful punctuation that shakes us from our reverie and points us to the dance floor.

Remember, I'm just sailing along on a hand-drawn map with "monsters" scribbled in the margins--an MRI and enough information to make a real doctor roll her eyes and groan. But I find this instructive, I'm using this moment of ambiguity to explore the one of life's truths which is its brevity. Really living with that brevity in mind--waking with it, sleeping with it.  Feeling the throb of mortality in a dizzy moment or a bad headache day provokes mindful attention, blazing focus on the mundane. And I find I want to see what happens if I frame that now blazingly precious mundanity on behalf of those beside me on this free fall.

For example: These pictures.

It was a day-after-Thanksgiving moment on the edge of Lake Nakoma in Madison in about Zero degrees wind chill.  We were doing the goofy family drive-through tour of town.  I insisted on a boys & mom lake shot.   I didn't yet have a picture of my guys and me all together on this holiday.  They had made special effort.
They coordinated, scrounged up transport, left girlfriends to their own families  and met me in Madison, Wisconsin at my sister's home that is now the apex of a Midwestern triangle of family. For boys that sometimes take DAYS to respond to my motherly texts, they done good; they showed up.  And they were sweet, smiling, friendly, kind, good sports in a swirl of family interaction They really showed up. The picture was necessary:  The joyful, here-we-are-together, okay and loving and--bonus!--handsome.  I was a driven women seeking this picture, looking for one they could hold in hand and say "That was a nice, time, wasn't it?....We showed up for mom and she was happy. We made mom happy...and we didn't even steal each others socks."  I planned this one.  I wanted to make sure they had this "Little Wallet Picture

Underspent and too young, too
I stumbled onto a, a picture of you
You wild bitter tale, all cherry oak and tears
As the branches looked in

The summer is done and we are too, dear
Pull back the drape
And let the silent light in
Soon, I'll be on that highway

And damn this stretch of 99
That takes so many lives
One of them was mine

Hand me that lil wallet picture
1985, one more time*


We all have those little wallet pictures.  For my sister, this is an art form.  When she sent me these pictures, I wrote her back, telling her that they made me weep in a good way.   She replied:


I also love sharing the moments I see with pics b/c they are all around us, most times an image falls short but sometimes...for me, it's pure content when it connects - connects people, memories.. all my life, I've been fascinated with documenting and capturing moments of life- at least in my minds eye, and while critical of myself, remarkably I've still enjoyed it - almost to obsession when I get to crafting the images, etc.  I really do see SUCH beauty, I think a part of me feels that if I can note it - not really 'capture' but note...it will never leave me, and it will carry me through those moments of loneliness... ...I am so blessed with my girls, and you with your boys, and our healthy family, we are so lucky...really, amazingly lucky.  But you know, I think that's always been it for me, I want each moment to count.  Good, bad, euphoric, devastating - I want to show up.  Sometimes I don't know how to show up, for myself and especially for others it's hard to know how to show up.

I have never been good at capturing the picture.  I even have eschewed doing so, at times--no videos at wedding, no pictures of births.  I decided that messing with the mechanism, for me, with my inclinations, distracted from my ability to inscribe the moment on my heart...to show up.  To be there.  But, this Thanksgiving holiday, I wanted to get a little wallet picture for my boys.

Hold It

I want a moment with you

like a picture, or better yet--a

Daguerreotype--something on glass

that develops so slowly that the faces

lose their smiles and peer out 

somberly, as if they know how little

they will matter to other eyes and

how little that matters.**

***(Apparently, mothers' brains contains cells from their children, this just in in.   Talk about some interdependent co-arising of being!)
*(Little Wallet Picture, song by Richard Buckner)
**poetry by Julia Heimer Dadds Beebe all rights reserved
                                                                   

Ganglion of Okay Yes

We spend our whole lives dying.  Even as the cells divide and clump in utero--because they are cells and cells age--little engines of entropy rev and slide into sneaky gear. Our timelines unravel even as our cares knit our brows into the sweetly idiosycratic skin maps that we call faces.

Facing this--our limited time--is a puzzle.. Brilliant minds like Stephen Hawking explain patiently that time does not exist the way we experience it--like a story with a beginning middle and end but instead is more like a body of water or a fabric comprised of space and particles and light that can be draped and folded--tacked into unlikely shapes by the heavy staples of black holes.

We--mammalian bundles of arcing and sparking neurons and corpuscles--seem oriented somehow to beginnings middles and ends.  Is it the diurnal journey thing?  That we wake with the sun we move through a day, and we then close it with a brief spell of dreaming and unconsciousness couched in a velvet blanket of night?  This is a common explanation for our story fixation.Or is it the neuronal journey sparked here, traverses a course and landing there. 

The lifespan is proposeed as the template for storying, too--the weird morphing from infant--tenderskinned and brimming with potential--to elder--thin-skinned, fading from ripe to wizened concentrate.  But it's a ruse.  A puppet show put on by itinerant mummers taking advantage or our yearning ganglionic impulses to see ourselves made sense of.

The story line is a lullaby we croon throughout our days to offer handholds in the gravity-less freefall of a non-omniscient, non-story-line reality.

And like those players on the stage, we can all fall down or draw satisfied applause.  And it is is just a play.  A story within a story that is not a story.  Once upon a time.  Time once upon a.  A time upon once.  Upon once a time.  See how easy it is to try and grammar out a meaning where there really is none?

There is an exercise where a sentence is placed on a page, the words just the first and last letters with a few salient once in between.  One can read these sentences with surprising alacrity.  Apparently, we will find the sense in nonsense, sniffing out clues to piece together the word, the sentence the meaning.

 

Yet I like to remember that our original organizing principles are faces, the timbre of family voices and the smell of mother's milk.  These are what babies notice and know. These are the original code key and they are not stories. The dots are connected only this far: Eyes go with mouth goes with nose.  That smell is Her and She is Yum.  Those voices are yes, holding, here. They are moments. They are enfoldments.  They wrap the infant into "yes, okay."  And that is the whole story.  Yes.  Okay. The ganglia fire up ever so briefly simply to say....

Okay. Yes.

Pop goes the Weasel

by InkWriter copywright held by Disney

I am not a Tigger.  Just thought I'd get that out there, right off the bat.  You know that guy, the physicist who knew he was dying and stated that "Of course everyone wants to be a Tigger not an Eyore."  I'm not him.  Nor am I an Eyore.  But like him, I may have an intimation of my end point.  Unlike him, I currently do not have irrefutable affirmation that a particular clock is ticking.  I've got a solid "Heads up," for sure.  And six years is the pessimistic timeline (depending on how morose one really is, that could be the optimistic one).

One in seven chance I've got the six year clock; that is what I can conclude.  Etiology (unless put through expensive and rather useless in the end, genetic testing) unknown. Here's the kicker:  Absolutely no current "modern medical" treatment reverses or even ameliorates the progress. 

I am not feeling Tigger-ish about this. Not Eyore either.  Because., I'm not AA Milne's baby.  I'm my own baby.

I don't want to be morbid.  People say that all the time when they are about to be morbid.  "Morbid" meaning--doom and gloom.  But morbidity in the true sense of the word is simply death.  The morbidity rate for the 1 of the 7 etiologies is 100%.  And it hits in one's 50's and one gets just enough years to do something.  Some few things. The other 6 are no cake walk, either.

The morbidity rate for life is 100%, too, by the way. So I'm not so alone.  Hence, these reflections.

Suspecting that one is more than less actively dying is a strange little space to inhabit. But not so strange, really.  There's a stern pilgrim somewhere in me that says I'm being melodramatic.  And I confess--I am a fan of a good romantic swoon.  We love our tragedies because they acknowledge how tragic our real truth is: We don't get to stay around and that is a grand sorrow for the little narrator in our head.

photo by plasticfetish

So this is a truth I'm going to sit with rather more closely than I used to.  And rather less closely than the tigger physicist.  I'm in a third space.  Knowing I'm dying...just like you...and you.  But I'm ot sure if I've got a ticking clock with a little cukoo set to sing at a clearly appointed hour or not.  We've all got the cuckoo....or is it a Jack In the Box.  The catch on those always broke, right?  They always wound up permanently Jack Outta the Box at some point due to some small child's over enthusiastic cranking. Or just latch fatigue, maybe.

Today my Jack is in the box. So I'm going to write from this place.  This place we all are--turning our little organ-grinder handles, trying to get the notes to play attenuated one-by-one little tunes. I'm turning  the crack as slowly as possible. I'm the John Cage of Jack In the Box.  Don't jostle me, okay?