Journal Archives - almost everything is unexpected.

Fragment

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It is not so hard to imagine these papers, in some few years from now, consigned to some drawer, mingled with other artifacts of a time in your life which, when you weren’t paying attention, finally lost their resonance, their energy, as a candle burns down or a stem sags slowly in its vase. Then, the words written here will have been pressed finally dry and flat, beneath the weight of consequent events.

It is selfish and naive of me to believe that it should be otherwise.

Acknowledging that the impression of our lives upon each other will and must fade (for how else are we to go on?), the need to leave you with something of myself persists still. I don’t wish, however great the temptation, to be sentimental. If anything, the thin strands of sentimentality will surely cause what I write here to lose its potency as if somehow writing were itself the agent of devitalisation. Sentiment floats, like motes of dust in sunlight, when love, fallen from the tree and not finding the substance to nourish its potential, endures its slow annihilation.

The World’s Oldest Children

Separate, for a moment (bear with me), the speaker and their position of influence upon the world, from those who find themselves, either intentionally or accidentally, subject to the direct and indirect repercussions of decisions made by the said speaker.

There are those (increasingly, more so) who welcome those repercussions from that speaker, whatever those repercussions might be, and even if they will (inevitably) make their lives worse in ways that they can, or are not willing to admit or imagine. This is, is it not, the old pie-in-the face gag?

In the pie-in-the-face gag there is an implicit understanding – between the pie-er and the pie-ee – that the pie-ee will imminently be publicly ridiculed (or worse) by getting a pie in the face. Yet, they are both the victim and the coronated fool. The audience (essentially) watches on. We know what will happen (it will happen, just like it always has) and yet we participate gleefully in the impending ridicule, our anticipation actually – and curiously – heightened by that same inevitability. We can’t help responding as if the pie in the face is a shocking surprise. And that, in essence, is what makes the pie-in-the face gag so enduring. We humans never cease to be entertained by affecting surprise in the face of the dully inevitable in a way that celebrates some weird human vulnerability . It is (isn’t it?) a powerful, willful resistance to seeing and admitting the obvious so that we may feel – individually and collectively – normal and unified.

Perhaps I should, at this point, provide one or two concrete examples of what I’m describing. Yes, perhaps I should. Vladimir Putin is now also turning living loving, human beings into meat piles, remotely – in Kiev and elsewhere. Putin acts from a position of influence that he has spent many years building. He is a monstrous pie-er but still, a pie-er all the same. He’s taken it upon himself to be the epauletted, mole-eyed field marshal of launching life-extinguishing pies into the faces of people living in the Ukraine.

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, in the (dis)United Kingdom were also pie-ers until recently. They were very enthusiastic about putting a few pies in the face of the majority of people in that country. Ms. Truss said she wanted to grow the pie, but what she really wanted was to throw the pie – a bigger pie, that is – into the face of people who had the temerity not be millionaires.

We know where these misadventures lead. We know where they always lead. We are the all-hearing, all-knowing audience. The pie will smash into the face of the intended victim and we will respond, likewise, again and again, even though we know the routine inside out, beginning to end. And yet the irresistible and recurring illusion of novelty teases us to imagine, over again, that each instance deserves independent, balanced and rational inquiry. What motivated the pie-er?; what arguments had they for holding up the pie and launching it?; could we have acted to prevent it?; did the pie-ee perhaps deserve it in some way?

After all, we know the answer. The pie-er represents that one element in our human world that we think we cannot control because it comes dressed in power, and so choose (conveniently) not to control. It is the child who lacks love, or control over or understanding of their own self; who spends their life trying to deflect pain upon the rest of us, in a desperate, attempted compensation for some perceived injustice inflicted upon them long ago. And yet, we, the audience, choose, determinedly, not to ask why they are really throwing the pie. We offer all manner of sophisticated explanations based on their status, real politik, policy, or rational interest and response. How cleverly – and stupidly – we weave an empathetic alter-narrative fabric from the wooly strands of their (otherwise) obvious human frailty. Their being president or prime minister does not preclude the argument that these are disturbed individuals acting from some livid residue of some unresolved developmental injustice. An expensive suit should be allowed to hide that. But here we are, trying – reasonably, disingenuously, erroneously -to justify why the world’s oldest children are still throwing deadly pies at the rest of us.

Goodbye Jack.

Attendant upon death, particularly that of a relative, a close friend or a pet, are the rituals and learned behaviours designed cleverly to distract us from the horror of death – and especially the unattributable cruelty of premature death – that get us through those first few hours and days. Those first few hours and days. The brutal, butcher’s rendering of our reality’s comfortably-aligned fabric that we cannot possibly turn away from; the chasm that opens before us; the recorded fact confronted, that reaches out impertinently and slaps us in the face, again and again, leaving our salted skin reddened and raw. The answer will not come, will never come, and yet we must ask, again and again: why? why him, or her? Why now?

On September the 24th, a cloudy Tuesday morning, I finally gathered Jack in my arms, his remaining front leg lolled over my shoulder. I’d had to drag him from under the bed where he’d retreated spooked by his preserving instinct. Under the bed; always the last resort, inevitably.

We imitate the professional insouciance of our vet – compassionate but efficient. We muffle our ears from the voice that tells us, stop! We pull shelves aways from walls, we drag furniture aside, lift chairs and reach behind sofas. We are sheep shearers, cattle prodders, heartless cullers, late-for-school chastising parents. Finally, we are the bailiffs of death and our pain does not spare us from the irrascibility of impatience. We want this all to be over.

Jack feels heavy in the carrier as we walk the half-mile to the vet’s clinic. The carrier rocks back and forth as I walk. Bumpy ride for Jack. Then the thought, Jack is a bag of bones compared to three weeks ago. His vertebrae are countable, his haunches are hollowed out. I’d convinced myself he had a kidney disease, or some hormonal imbalance Google said was common to felines. He does have one leg less than he had a year ago. Cancer had dissolved his femur at the shoulder. We’d gone through the drama of amputation and recovery – and then the expatriation and beginning a new life in a new country – but his long term prognosis wasn’t certain. Of course it wasn’t. Every day I woke to Jack’s eyes – sleepy and green – staring into mine, inches away, imploring breakfast, was the confirmation I needed that death can be eradicated from consciousness if only one feels enough, tries hard enough, for long enough.

At the clinic my attention always lingers momentarily upon the clean, stainless-steel examining table. The space between examination and autopsy can so quickly collapse. Cold steel. Jack turned to look at me as the vet squeezed his mid-section and winced. Cold, clinical steel. That animal you’re squeezing now, like a bag, I recall the very day I brought him home and opened the cardboard carrier box given by the shelter, watching him emerge, cautiously, tiny and wide-eyed with that soft, kitten sheen, thrust into a sensory wilderness in my unproven care. The steel examining table. He turned his head and gave me a look – a certain stare. And wanting (expecting?) to think that, at that moment especially, he was communicating something to me alone, I looked back and I thought, Jack is asking asking me: when can we we go home? I’m really not enjoying this.

The next half hour passed in what seems now a state of unseemly haste. Indoctrinated into the veterinary creed, I concurred with the prognosis. Nothing more to be done. We could take this approach but of course…. quality of life, inevitable, likelihood, months maybe, suffering, prolongation. Better to… . It’ll be quick and painless. Would I like to hold him?

A pinprick in the rump and after perhaps thirty seconds Jack exhaled, heavily and noisily, and was still. I waited to watch his chest rise again, but it lay flat. And there it is. There, he was. Our journey together at an end. For Jack, no more. Never more. Jack was, like us all, a tiny spark ejected from the universal fire. I was unprepared. It didn’t yet make sense. As if it could: the excision of life, the bridge to love, sense and graspable meaning. With the tick of a clock’s hand, delight in body warmth and slowly blinking eyes passed into a future of memories and shelved photos.

I walked home, blubbing, shamed by the flimsy, now empty carrier. It’s another morning in the neighbourhood; the world is unmoved by the commonplace horror of another death, and my beloved, three-legged Jack with three black dots on his toes, will no more be in need of his breakfast.