The final aim of man...
Contains spoilers of a few novels but shouldn't ruin their reading anyway
Food, flowers, books about grief, from friends or old friends or strangers. It’s a relief to have someone else deciding what I should eat and smell and read. There’s a line from a Death Cab song,“Love is watching someone die.” I used to think I understood it. I think that actually now I understand it, before I only thought I did. Because I had never actually watched someone die, even though I thought I had or was in the middle of it. But my attention was on the wrong person and she is still alive, she calls me to ask how I’m doing. I had no idea, actually, what it meant to watch someone die. Now I know how to read hospital monitors, watch them like cinema, along with the little skips of my father’s chest, his garbled requests for air conditioning and ice cubes. Double check the protein shakes from the nurses, they keep giving the ones that have potassium and he’s on a renal diet, what’s a renal diet. What this beep means and how to pause this alarm, or fixing an oxygen mask and making a man gag, for his own good, you will feel better. What two things need to happen that require intubation. Which catheters present a higher risk of infection.
Love is watching someone die, even when you want to pretend they are not dying, that death can be meaningfully evaded if not delayed for a sizeable reasonable stretch of time. A few weeks ago, my father called me. Cancer in the pancreas, spleen stomach liver. He felt fine. It could go badly. We went for a walk by the water. I assured him it wouldn’t.
Section VII of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow ends with a death, but before the death there is a life, made possible by a machine. I read the book in winter and had no reason, besides the book, to imagine what it would be like to live on a ventilator. The book makes it seem less terrifying than it seemed in the hospital, where everything, everyone, smelled of Hibiclens and bleach. My dad was never put on a ventilator, but the doctors figured it would happen, told us so many times. Some doctors thought it was worth the shot, the chemo worked the cancer shrunk, he’s young he’s strong. Others thought otherwise, he’s very sick. So we thought about it a lot, with hope and with guilt. Would he be even more terrified, would he know what was happening? But I never looked it up, what life might be like, I was afraid it would make me throw all of our plans and ideals and dreams away. Stash it, stop it, let him go.
It was easy to say before all this: he didn’t want to live on a machine. But people come off these machines. Letting someone go meant letting them go to France or Florida, call me maybe one day when you’re ready. Death is irreversible, irredeemable. Right, wrong, selfish, honorable. They are gone, they won’t be back, words are words, gone with them.
My problem (one of them) has always been that I believe in redemption. I believe that people may come back. Any apology is also a possibility, a choice. Things may go right as much as they have gone wrong. I have trouble with finite lines (my lines all get drawn in the sand, washed away by the tides, blank slate for new impermanent impossible lines).
As Marx (from the book! Remember, I’m talking about a book?) lives out his final days on a ventilator, friends, family, ex-lovers make their way to the hospital. To say hello, goodbye, don’t live, it’s okay to die. Zoe, one of the ex-lovers, says: “Marx, you had better be all right. I absolutely can’t bear the thought of a world without you…No, I won’t bear it. I refuse to bear it. Love you madly, my sweet friend.” It prompts him to think clarify state to himself and the reader:
“The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.”
This is the thing about what we can and can’t bear. It never measures up to what we thought. This will be impossible, we say, we adjust anyway. Or this will be possible, but it’s not. Because what can be born and what can’t does not submit to reason at all, because there is not actually a requirement that anything make any sense to anyone, especially not to me. I am mentioning this passage because I dog-eared it all those months ago, reading about life on a ventilator and thinking of an ex-lover of my own. I spoke to my dad about it. Once you’ve been in love, he said, how can you settle for less? And I’m trying to remember why I dog-eared it but all I remember is this conversation with dad.
The idea of love as constant and variable is a sweet one that makes me think of physics and Italo Calvino (yeah), namely because the duality of this idea begets the insensible and illogical nature of love and any other event that colors shapes informs the stories we tell ourselves in order to live. In The Baron in the Trees, Cosimo, a young baron literally moves into the trees and vows to never come down. He does everything everyone else does, sleep, eat, cook, fall in love. His brother, the novel’s narrator, explains to Voltaire: “My brother considers that anyone who wants to see the earth properly must keep himself at a necessary distance from it.” Voltaire responds: “Once it was only Nature which produced living phenomenon. Now, ‘tis Reason.” The question of Reason as having a productive, generative capacity runs through the novel, predominantly through Cosimo’s relationship with Donna Viola:
“You’re right to be jealous. But you try to make jealousy submit to reason.”
“Of course; so I can do more about it.”
“You reason too much. Why should one ever reason about love?”
“To love you all the more. Everything done with reasoning grows in power.”
“You live on trees and have the mentality of a notary with gout.”
“The most arduous deeds must be undertaken in the simplest states of mind.”
He went on mouthing maxims, till she fled; then he ran after her, desperate, tearing his hair.
He uses reason to control and coerce, but ultimately achieves nothing; she flees and he remains desperate, controlling nothing, trusting an illusion.
Bad things can make life feel illogical, insensible, unsensing. So I don’t need to write a conclusion.
In another Calvino book I read since I’ve been home, he has a line: “Not to be frightened any more, that’s the final aim of man.” The idea is this: lacking control makes us afraid, because we cannot know or make sense of or explain. Reason allows us to know or make sense of or explain. We may be less frightened, for a bit. But our aim is futile, impossible, because life refuses us at one point or another. It isn’t an inherently bad thing, this refusal, unless we apply reason because then it is the thing that makes no sense. But the embracing of the lack of sense and order, of explanation and narrative arc, makes possible the holding of hands and the forgiving of foes, believing in miracles when there’s literally no reason to. But a miracle is subjective, like a weed or a dream.