from
Mexico:
Part II
How have you and I changed in these last thirty-five years? For my part, they've taken much of my physical power from me --- and some of my brain power, too. Sometimes I will write 'd' when I mean 'b', and 'p' when I mean 'q' or 'g'. My cousin Hans did that when we were growing up. He was a classic dyslexic fifty years ago when there was no such word as 'dyslexic.' His father my Uncle Hans used to beat him to make him write better. Now I am getting dyslexia too, but unfortunately, there is no Uncle Hans around to beat me to make me stop --- not minding, but switching --- my p's and q's.
I know one thing for sure. I know I am not sixty-five. I look in the mirror, spotting the few remaining points of beauty (nice ears! good toes too!) and know that I am no different than that pot of anger called me that went through those passions of knowledge and love and change-the-world so long ago. There's a Pennsylvania Dutch saying that says, "We are too soon alt and too late schmart" but I would rather think of it in terms of rich denial: I am not really sixty-five, that is an illusion --- but, at the same time, sixty-five is not really that old. After all, I was only born in the middle of the depression, before WWII, and that isn't all that long ago.
As part of this Rich Denial, whenever I get something that makes it yet harder for me to walk, or to get up, or even to turn over in bed --- I see it as merely temporary. It will go away as soon as I,
- Lose some weight
- Give up beer, and
- Do my exercises.
My friend Robin used to say that "You can't learn less." (He learned that particular phrase from his father, of all people: his father wrote I'm OK You're OK.) Contrary to that kind prognosis, I notice that I am, indeed learning less. Fifteen years ago, in the midst of nervous breakdown, I decided to return to school. It was an idiotic idea, but one that forced me to know --- not guess, but know, that indeed, I had learned less...much less. When I took one of those School of Social Work Graduate Entrance Exams, there was an English component and a Math component. The English, of course, I popped right off the top of the charts, like a teen-aged pimple. The math: despite cramming, I found I could barely squeeze into the 50th percentile. Math had always been my best subject in high school; however, when I did the GREDs, not only could I make little sense of math, but that no amount of studying could get me back to where I had been in 1949. And what's more --- I could screw up absolutely no enthusiasm for forcing myself to study it.
It takes a mountain of energy to relearn thas stuff. On the other hand, some things I couldn't conceive of doing forty years ago I do readily now. Sitting and doing nothing. Or if there is a visitor from next door, putting off going to the store, and, meanwhile, avoiding all responsibility for my nervous, drug-crazed country to the north. At the same time (this also saves energy), in Mexico, I avoid getting acquainted with new gringos. I also avoid thinking about the fact that there are so many galaxies that we now know about, and that, before we die, there is every likelyhood that we will know about another million million, despite the fact that there are too damn many stars and galaxies all about us. Just one new galaxy should make a difference, but they have come up with so many that I react to the mysteries of the universe exactly the same way I react in a visit to a library: There are too many books, I won't have time to read them all, so I had better get the hell out of here.
I find myself in the old god-prayers from time to time, but instead of praying "God please don't let it happen" or "God, if you do this, I will be good, very good, and say all my Hail-Marys, for the rest of my days." Now, I am praying "God please do it now," meaning, "God, please snatch the very breath from me." It isn't a despairing desire for death; I see it as more gentle than that. Maybe we want to die just to see what it is like. But --- as well --- it is weariness, let-me-go, "I'm done with it." Cendrars remembers the day of the Liberation of France,
- that famous Sunday in September 1944, when I sat in my kitchen-without-a-fire in Aix-en-Provence, where, crushed by the weight of the world, I had been voluntarily confined for four years, listening to the radio and to the Te Deum they were celebrating in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, and to the bells of Paris, drunk with freedom. When I am living through moments of such exaltation, I often imagine the following scene: I put a revolver into my mouth and commit suicide. That day, with the candles buring right down to the end, the stones dying in the guttering light, and darkness invading the strong room, I could see myself quite clearly, stretching out right along the work table, putting the big boss's Colt in my mouth, shooting in the dark.
All my life I have been haunted by the idea of suicide, and more particularly in moments of joy, of happiness or exaltation rather than in moments of depression or weariness. It is the manifestation of a superabundance of life. I am not afraid to die, I am ready. The idea of death is very familiar to me. Perhaps I acquired a taste for it very early, in my tenderest infancy, as I sucked the black breast of my nurse, who was an Egyptian, a poor, courageous fellah, fatalistic and superstitious, as this ancient race in the Land of the Dead has always been, ever since the time of the great Pharaohs, who, immured in their hypogea in the form of pyramids, are still dreaming of their destiny today, and who took their revenge on Lord Carnarvon, who came to disturb them. Perhaps this haunting, which is by no means an obsession, is also atavistic, for my father made a failed attempt at suicide by throwing himself off a bridge at the age of eighty-five, not out of despair, but, as he wrote to me, announcing his fateful decision: "Because I am beginning to get a little hard of hearing in my right ear. Nature is badly arranged, dear boy. Man should die like a thousand-year-old oaktree in the forest, in a single crash, crumbling to dust..."