THE ULTIMATE COMPANION - 1 December 2011
1st December, 2011
Last night, whilst waiting for friends to arrive for dinner, we sit by the fire and Joel reads to me from my already drastically slashed Provence manuscript. The draft he reads from has been further "edited" by me, so that there are pieces he reads which until this moment had been eliminated.
Slashed, edited, eliminated. As I listen to him read my words, I feel that "slashed" best describes the method I have been using. To my mind, slash is as close to slaying - and as brutal as one can get. To slash, is to personally attack and destroy the personal, which, as I listen, is shockingly what I feel I have done with this manuscript. I have slashed that which is most personal in order to provide the Commissioners with the "travel brochure" I think they want. I am appalled and saddened. Where is my courage, my discernment?
That's one of the problems with a commission: one is hired to fulfill someone else's, I was going to say vision, but that's entirely wrong. The commissioner rarely has a vision. What they have is a need to fill an idealogical space. I like to think Michelangelo would have painted the Sistine Chapel quite differently if it had been his ceiling and not the Vatican's. I like to think that instead of God touching forefingers with a mere mortal that the use of the mortal's middle finger might have been indicated.
Our friends arrive: 2 remarkable men, a photographer and writer, from Italy. One we have know for 17 years since he was in his mid 20's. We have watched his life both unfold and get caught, like everyone's does. As the four of us talk over dinner, and later around the fire, I am both amazed and inspired. I'm amazed that I am this old. That I was once that young. I am amazed at the distance I have come from a kind of personal turmoil that they are in the midst of. I am amazed that I feel as young as them and in some ways even younger and amazed that I survived what they are now learning to survive.
And I am inspired by them. By their friendship - with each other and with us. I am inspired by their creative collaboration and their dedication to their creativity in spite of the trials of love and life. Is that a male thing? The ability to turn to the work no matter what? Me? I use to have to drink a bottle of brandy at that age, to kill the pain, so that I could go into my studio. It has always amazed me, this oxymoron, that back then, in order to create I had to destroy myself.
Is it our recent illnesses, my brother's surgery, the illness of a close friend, that has me reading Joan Didion's "Blue Nights" - her recent memoir about the death of her daughter which came shortly after the death of her - Didion's - husband? Am I reading this because right now I need proof that you can survive the unsurvivable?
Death. Let's put it in writing. Death, the ultimate companion. The lifelong presence that greets us at birth. What if it's not the grim reaper? Why the drama? What if it's a great adventure? But let's get real: there are 2 kinds of death; your own and the death of loved ones. Don't get me wrong, I'm not keen on dying myself. Not at the moment. Although I have desperately wanted it at various times in my life. And then there have been the moments of feeling its benevolent embrace. Moments usually experienced in nature, when the oneness, the blissful oneness of self and universe, feels like the perfect moment to die.
And there's the rub: the demand for a perfect death. God's pointy touching ours. So these days I'm working on the possibility of embracing that final moment in whatever form it arrives. My perfect death would be to leave laughing. Which seems a lot to ask if, say, one goes down in a flaming plane. Is it the surrender to pain that seems humanly impossible and therefore makes the less than "perfect" death so unacceptable? Is that why this culture views mortality as a disease?
But isn't it the other death that is truly unsurvivable? The death of the loved one: the spouse, parent, child. I've long felt this to be the unconscious reason why the majority of humanity doesn't achieve the fulfillment of love, in spite of insisting they want it. Who really wants to love that much knowing that loss is guaranteed. Someone has to die first. Someone has to survive the unsurvivable. Who wants to sign on for that? And yet we do do. Some of us. Who was it who said, "Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all"?
The longer Joel and I love each other the harder it becomes to imagine life without the other. In the morbid moments we have spent contemplating the inevitable we have wept like babies while declaring the old cliche, "life wouldn't be worth living."
Well, f--k that! I'm sorry, but who ever is left standing must do the living. So now we are trying to help each other prepare for loss.The loss of the other's physical presence, the loss of the shared laughter and ongoing dialogue. We're trying to convince each other that who ever is left behind will feel the spirit of the other and that that spirit will encourage us to not only survive the terrible gasp of absence upon waking each day, but will get us out of bed, will urge us to shower, to prepare and eat breakfast, to listen to music, to notice the morning sun illuminating the dull facade of a building, to meet a friend, watch a movie, help a stranger, revel in the growth of a grandchild, allow one's own child to boss one just a little, to put on the lipgloss and maybe even have the courage to do alone what you both had planned to do together.
Is any of this possible? I have no idea. That's what really kills me. But I do know this: I do not have to slash myself while still alive in order to fit into someone else's coffin.