Well, when I was driving around today, it seemed as if there were endless things to write about. Now that we come to it, however...
One really random and unimportant question, just to get rid of it once and for all -- how is it possible, when I'm stopped in traffic, behind a line of other people turning the same direction as me, that none of our turn signals blink at the same frequency? I would think that, given what I suspect is a rather simple circuitry for turn signals, and the standardization of so much of our mechanized world, at least all the Hondas, or the Audis, or the Fords, would all blink in time with each other. But... they don't. Is this to keep us drivers from being hypnotized by a line of synchronized turn signals? It's just curious, that's all.
One not quite so random observation, with a little bit of validation thrown in -- the other night, while I was waiting for the Combat Paper evening to begin, at the Montclair Art Museum, I ran into an acquaintance, and as we were chatting, the subject of age came up. I said I was 66, and would turn 67 in the fall. Then I mentioned that my father died just a month or so after his 66th birthday, and the fact that I've edged past him, age-wise, has made me feel... I don't know, creepy somehow. As though I'm being disloyal, or greedy. And I expected to get the usual lecture about how silly it is to think like this... But to my relief, this woman acknowledged that, in her experience, this isn't all that uncommon, and she said she's got friends who have wrestled with the same sense of survivor's guilt, upon having outlived a parent.
What a relief, not to have to feel that my emotional irrationalities were on trial, or that I was going to be shamed again for the way I feel (as though I should have found the 'off' switch long ago already); and, partly as a result of this simple act of giving me permission to feel the way I really do, I think I found just a little bit of clarity, about this persistent sense of unreality with which I've been wrestling for so long now -- the sense that I'm not entirely engaged in my own life.
I keep saying, at least to myself, that I feel like I'm already dead, and that what's going on now, with the walking around and the eating and the talking, is just a series of after-effects that will soon wear off. What I think is actually at play here are guilt, and shame, and dread. Among other things.
My father's death was by no means a surprise. He'd been sick with spreading cancer for at least a year, and had been given only days or weeks to live, when I last saw him alive. But after the visit to McKeesport, for the funeral, and by the time I got back home, I was already going a little crazy.
I couldn't sleep. I switched my choice of underwear, from briefs to boxer shorts. I kept seeing my father all over the place.
I also felt tremendous relief. I noticed that I had stopped thinking, first thing every morning, about where my father was, relative to my bedroom. East? West? I would lie there, waking up and trying to get the internal compass needle pointed in the right direction. I began to think about going to graduate school, for my Master's degree. In art.
When I had done just that -- had been admitted to the Glass program at RIT, had borrowed nose-bleed-inducing amounts of money, and was preparing to go to Commencement, I got a graduation announcement from one of my younger brothers -- he'd just finished, finally, the bachelor's degree he'd been working on for years. I congratulated him; he called, to tell me I was the only one in the family who'd acknowledged his accomplishment, and we both kind of realized that it was no accident that we had both achieved these goals at the same time, and only after our father had died. We realized that, in our home, too much success was threatening, and that we'd had to keep a lid on our ambitions, lest we outshine our frustrated parents. Dad having moved on, as it were, we were both now free at least to try to succeed at something.
This business of outliving my father, though, seems markedly different. I'm recognizing, reluctantly, that I don't feel entitled to these extra days. I'm certain that I'm going to be punished for having survived for even a few months past the expected, parentally-modeled expiration date. I can, as I've mentioned, do the ordinary things of a life, but there's a kind of hollowness behind everything -- as though what I'm living through is actually imaginary. I keep plugging away, and even seem to be engaged in some satisfying projects, like some writing for Combat Paper, and a book I'm making with paper I'm creating myself -- but even these things seem slightly unreal, and prompted more by the familiar need to please others, than by any inner drive of my own.
I wonder if this will pass? I think about death constantly, and want to ask every single person who's manifestly older than me -- how do you get out of bed in the morning? Aren't you afraid that today might be... the day? For me, it seems unimaginable that I'll ever get to a place where the omnipresence of death won't be the first thing I think of when I wake up in the morning, and the last thing I think of when I go to bed at night -- with many similarly-themed musings liberally scattered throughout the day.
An old friend, when I confessed this murky mess I'm in, said that, when he'd found himself in a similar state of mind, he told a professor/mentor of his that he felt as though he were either dying, or already dead. The older man suggested, with a seeming blitheness, that my friend just go ahead and be dead. Which, my friend said, turned out to be astonishingly good advice. Of course I don't quite know what he meant by this, or how he navigated living deadness (is it a coincidence that zombies are all the rage these days?), while apparently sustaining a healthy appetite.
To me, being dead will mean throwing away everything I own, the way my stepmother did the day of my father's funeral -- giving my youngest brother most of my dad's clothes, because the two men were of similar build. I can do little bits and pieces of this purging now -- and I entertain, on a regular basis, the notion of contacting a local art-centered school, and simply dumping all my paints and brushes and paper and inks on their doorstep. After all, in most cases I've had these things for decades, and haven't even unwrapped that roll of Arches drawing paper, or opened a single tube of oil paint. What would it feel like, I wonder, to surrender these persistent hopes and dreams that I know full well I'll never even come close to realizing? What would it feel like, to take all those weird sculptures apart, and see if I can sell all the copper tube they're mainly made of? What would I do with the hundreds and hundreds of blown-glass... things, the accumulation of which I used to think was a good thing, pointing to diligence and discipline and persistent hard work -- but which now seem just to be evidence of a kind of erotic work-lust.
It's a puzzlement, this limbo state into which I've drifted. I feel most keenly connected with the world now, if and when I can coax a smile or a laugh out of a fellow human being; as soon as that cheeriness has been achieved, I'm back in the fog again, both present and absent at the same time.
To be good and dead. And then...
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
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