Say Hello, Wave Goodbye

Reader, beware:  What follows is a rambling and yet I hope coherent philosophical meditation on life, love, separation, relationships, death, all without the caustic and sometimes snarky asides you may have become somewhat used to in this space.  So Abandon All Expectation, Ye Who Enter Here, and don't say I didn't warn you.

As many of you already know, Alice is leaving on the 10th of March for 5 weeks or so in the sunny (praps) and tornado-free (we hope) southland.  She was accorded the honor, chosen from among hundreds, maybe thousands, of applicants, to be poet-in-residence at Connemara, Carl Sandburg ("The fog comes in on little cat feet," "Hog Butcher for the World...City of the Big Shoulders")'s homestead, now a National Historic Site/Nat'l Park in Flat Rock, NC.  You could Google it--it's pretty cool.  It even has its own herd of historic goats(!).  She'll be there for 3 weeks, then plans to hike the Appalachian Trail for a week or two in Virginia before returning home in mid-April.

So it's only for 5 weeks, but it's for 5 weeks.  It's interesting the thoughts and emotions this has called up, first for Alice and now for me.  She wrote to a friend "It's almost like I'm planning for a death--my death?  Like I need to tie up loose ends, finish obligations, let go of things and people I can't attend to right now, prepare for the unknown ahead, and prepare my family for their own version of that unknown."   On the face of it that may seem a little extreme, but is it?  Maybe it's the time of life, maybe the time of man (sorry, Joni), but everything in this journey we're all on is terribly tenuous and impermanent, isn't it?

I expect that everyone reading this has experienced real and permanent physical loss, the death of someone to whom they have been intimately close, whether parent, child, sibling, spouse, or close friend, and I certainly don't mean to trivialize those losses by likening them to a 5 week absence.  And yet, and yet: it's all on a continuum (As Bokonon reminds us in Cat's Cradle--Vonnegut, of course, and you MUST read the book if you haven't, or haven't recently--"Any man (sic) can call time out, but no man (sic, again) can say how long the time out will be.").  Life is mostly about sharpening our ability to let go of stuff.  All we can be certain of is loss, and we can't know what, when, or for how long.

Not long after reading that response of Alice's, I came across, in a New Yorker capsule review of Penelope Lively's new book, How It All Began, this striking thought:  "...beginnings and endings are arbitrary points on a time line of unintended consequences...."  I found that very moving and thought-provoking in its reference to arbitrariness and lack of intention;  no matter one's theological beliefs or lack thereof, the stories we tell ourselves about our ability to control aspects of our own lives or the lives of those close to us are just that:  stories.  The portion of our lives we can actually control, despite what we may think, is miniscule.  That lack of control, of self-determination, leads some to prayer, some to alcohol or other drugs, some to self-help tracts, some to hiking or other forms of physical exercise, to yoga, meditation, talk therapy, and many to outright denial,  all of which are basically means to get through dark nights of the soul.  I do not mean to belittle or judge any means of coping; if you are offended by my likening prayer to drugs, for example, I'm sorry.  I happen to see them as close kin.  If you don't, well, that's how you do it.  Life, though, I think we may all agree, would be nigh-unto-unbearable without one or another of the mechanisms we've developed.

And here's why, maybe, for me.  Because it's all so fleeting, and because it's all a mystery.  Jerry Jeff Walker says "Whatever ain't mystery is just guesswork."  And the course of knowing, or of attempting to know, is so fraught. The closer we get to someone, the further, or the quicker they recede.  Where are those little babies who used to crawl all over me?

My Dinner with Andre is one of my absolute favorite movies.  Many find it a total snorefest, but for me it's endlessly fascinating.  For the uninitiated, it consists simply of two men, Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, having dinner in a New York restaurant and conversing about life, careers, relationships, death.  The climax, if such a movie can be said to have one, comes in these last ruminations by Andre on exactly what I'm getting at here:

...the closer you come, I think, to another human being, the more completely mysterious and unreachable that person becomes.  I mean, you know, you have to reach out and you have to go back and forth with them, and you have to relate, and yet you're relating to a ghost or something.  I don't know, because we're ghosts, we're phantoms.  Who are we?  And that's to face--to confront--that you're completely alone, and to accept that you're alone is to accept death....  


You know, in the sexual act there's that moment of complete forgetting, which is so incredible.  Then in the next moment you start to think about things: work on the play, what you've got to do tomorrow...the world comes in quite fast.  Now that again may be because we're afraid to stay in that place of forgetting, because that again is close to death.... In other words: you interrelate and you don't know what the next moment will bring, and to not know what the next moment will bring brings you closer to a perception of death....

...have a real relationship with a person that goes on for years, that's completely unpredictable.  Then you've sort of cut off all your ties to the land and you're sailing into the unknown, into uncharted seas.  I mean, people hold on to these images: father, mother, husband, wife, again for the same reason: 'cause they seem to provide some firm ground.  But there's no wife there.  What does that mean, a wife?  A husband?  A son? A baby holds your hands and then suddenly there's this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he's gone.  Where's that son?

That passage always makes me cry, and reading and transcribing it this morning was no exception.  It's all so tenuous, this life, and it all goes so fast.  Goodbyes are for stages of life too, I think. "Hello" itself implicitly contains the ineffable if inevitable "Goodbye."  The two are inextricably intertwined. We welcome people into relationships, we are welcomed ourselves, whether for 5 minutes or 50 years, but at our backs we always hear, if we're attuned, whispers of goodbye.  We can't control, we can't very often create outcomes.  What we can do is accept and (see earlier post) love.

This week, then (noon till 2, eastern, 100.1 FM, wool.fm virtually), I'm playing "Goodbye" songs, such as the one that gives this post its title, from David Gray's cover of Marc Almond (it also incorporates passages from "Into the Mystic" and "Madame George", so you know it's a big winner for me), other Hello/Goodbye songs from The Beatles, of course, and Tim Buckley, plus lots of plain Goodbyes. Not surprisingly, there are many of them.  I'll also do a brief salute to Davy Jones, the first of the "Prefab Four" to shuffle off the stage permanently.

So goodbye, Alice, have a blast, write and hike and remember what it was like to have all of that unfettered time once, and let's hope you return to a world as unchanged as it's possible to be.