Thetis Cried
Every so often, as is my custom, I return to the original river. The first post on this site went like this: “The race is on. Can the fire department shake the rust off before it faces oblivion? Scoff if you must. There are so many institutions with deep rich histories that also thought forever was a thing. and poof…just like that.” Just like that.
The idea was to figure out what the future of the 21st Century Fire Department would look like. What hubris! Who can know what is next? Never mind the teleology. Never mind you Stuart Kauffman. Even if we assume it as a thought experiment, there are so many variables. How to make sense?
In the Year of Magical Thinking Joan Didion wrote, “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.” I understand this. I want to keep my fire department with me. I’ve left a light on.
I think the fire department is in hospice and it can’t shake off the rust because it is too weak.
It can’t shake off the rust because the rust has consumed the frame of the very vehicle on which it intended to drive home, it has fallen onto the ground, and it has been swept into the swirling air waiting to be deposited in some distant place.
It is dead.
And with it the deep rich history of performative altruism evaporates like fog. Poof. A fog so thick that you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Then the sun comes up. And then no one can explain the crash in the context of a perfectly normal sunny morning. Just like that.
But how can it be dead, it is still with us? “…we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.”
People are always running out of time. This business of saving lives teaches you that people leave this life with unfinished business. Tepid cups of tea on the table. Hampers full of clothes. Half written letters with one line that gets jumpy and trails off, extending past the page, clearly indicating the specific point where the patient began to feel different. Crumbs litter the floor, crumbs that obeyed gravity and entropy at the specific moment just after the falling man, refusing to quit, reached for the tablecloth. He knew that he did not have forever. He knew that the tablecloth couldn’t help. He reached anyway. This time, there was no more time.
And if I am to write an honest obituary of my beloved. My fire department. How am I to characterize it? Am I to tell stories of daring or am I to tell stories of scrambling under the table for crumbs? Which is it? Can it be both quiet and meaningless?1
Are you are curious?
Curious enough to wonder what the medical examiner found during the post-mortem? I am interested too but, only because I know why we try to keep the dead alive, and I know that I want to delay the inevitable, and I know that the post-mortem is a timestamp of fact that must be at least acknowledged, even if it cannot be accepted right now. It may be too soon, but I like the illusion of closure it brings.
It was an autumn death. It came at the time when the forest sheds its summer apparel. After a long summer of converting carbon into glucose, the work of each leaf ends, one at a time, and they fall to the forest floor where they will provide shelter for bee queens, mice, and other little creatures.
The medical examiner, noted that on examination of the heart, “it resembled a forest floor, a dense carpet of shriveled ideas, shriveled like dry leaves, so fixed that they clogged the adjacent arteries completely,” she continued, “the surprise is not that the lifeblood stopped flowing, but rather that it flowed at all.” What blood was to be found was pooled, according to the laws of gravity, in the lower regions, coagulated, green, the shade of envy.
She examined the brain and found lesions, evidence of a “persistent incoherence, consistent with confusion of purpose.” She mused that after hundreds of post-mortems this one was particularly striking in how tangled the axons were.
The abdomen. “The abdomen was empty. It had been consumed completely or it had been dissolved into a singularity. There were no reference points, no signposts. Everything below the diaphragm was just gone. Completely.”
The oddity of the left heel. On that heel was a barely legible tattoo, four letters- “s-t-y-x”. There was bruising there, on that heel, very old bruising, bruising consistent with severe compression, as if the heel had been strangled like a neck.
The organism died, “not with a bang but a whimper.”2 She concluded that it got drunk on a toxic potion of self-importance and self-indulgence that rotted the internal workings. If it had been cow with multiple stomachs, it still would have died, only over a longer span.
She explained the forest floor of the heart, postulating “it too likely contributed to the demise of the organism.” Of course, this part was uncharacteristically speculative. It seems that the only plausible explanation for the dead leaves in the heart was that persistent pathological stillness common to organisms that become so confident in themselves that they lose the incentive to move. Contentment it seems can be a poison too.
The report finished with no one definitive causality, no modal realism, no scientific realism, none of it. Only the persistent suggestion that, in her words, “It seems that the organism chose glory.”
I don’t think the medical examiner knew what Wilhelm Stekel knew. I am sure that Salinger knew because he repeated it in a book. “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” I am repeating it here, primarily for effect and alternatively because it somehow makes me feels better. It does not, however, relieve my grief.
It does not relieve me of my grief.
It does not relieve me of the need to eulogize a longtime friend. So, I grow out my mustache, put on my dollar store sunglasses, and place an unseemly stress on the buttons of my double-breasted, gold plated, formal wear. I stand at the dais. There are people were filing in. Many people there are there. “As they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they’ll ‘say something about it’ or not.” I know that I will, like Mr. Lewis, “hate if they do, and if they don’t.”3
Thetis was alone in the front row. In all black. With a veil.
I leaned over slightly, and into the microphone, I whispered in the voice of dry leaves. I said, “I miss the idea of you.”
Thetis cried.
https://allpoetry.com/the-hollow-men
https://allpoetry.com/the-hollow-men
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed