The Great Unknown
So there I was this morning, sitting outside with my dogs; the "super moon" (in appearance, 15% larger and 30% brighter to our eyes) was somewhere in the distance having already done its dance earlier in the night. And as I sipped my coffee, I sat pondering the great unknown. Certainly that one, the one we all ask now and then, the "what's out there" or the "why are we here," questions usually asked at such times or such states when we are usually alone or have time to reflect. But also the unknown people who have come and gone, the cemeteries full, the people waiting in rest homes and hospitals, the lives from civilizations past. Other than a few historical figures (from emperors to dictators, and from sports figures to celebrities), I found it odd who we chose to remember (other than family) and why. Wouldn't the nurse who tended a severe wound be more important and memorable than a wealthy baron who built an empire? Wouldn't the masons and laborers who pieced together the towering Gothic church we still enter with awe be more important than the king or queen buried under its floor? I had reflected before on this in an earlier post, but then a few other names appeared...all likely unknown to most.
Looking back I had grown up with a lot of classic musicals, perhaps due to my playing an instrument and finding the standards both explanatory (ah, so there's a language for this sound) and somewhat easy to play (how it all comes together). So I knew that Natalie Wood couldn't sing in the movie version of West Side Story* and neither could Deborah Kerr in The King and I, or Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (all three parts were sung by unknown Mami Nixon who was paid a lump sum of $420 for her King dubbing role and told to never tell anyone or "...she'd never work in town again.") But the dubbing was spectacular and could easily make you feel that the actors were actually quite good singers (Judy Garland, at 16, was one exception as she did her own singing in The Wizard of Oz). Or there's Rodney Lynn Temperton (who passed away last month), composer of the hit song, Thriller. Wait, didn't Michael Jackson write that? Uh no, it was the relatively unknown Temperton. Or champion ballroom dancer and stunt man who danced with Marilyn Monroe and taught John Wayne how to shoot a gun while riding a horse, Lakota Chief David Bald Eagle. Who?? But think about all the people still alive with equally compelling stories to tell, and all those who passed away with their histories and secrets buried along with them. What have we lost?
This all came to mind once again as I read a review in the London Review of Books about Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a review written by Thomas Laqueur. I had also written about Kalanithi's courageous notation of his ongoing disease in a post in April, but it was Laqueur's additional probing that caught my attention, that of illness and more precisely, serious illness (or perhaps in hitting your 90s as is the case with my mother) which he writes has: ...undergone a conceptual transformation that allows us to think of ourselves as sojourners in the land of illness, hoping to return to the land of the well, fearing and preparing for death. The first question – the universal cliché – that everyone diagnosed with cancer or any other serious illness asks is: ‘How long do I have?’ In the old days no one would have expected a precise answer and to a large extent that precision is still illusory. Then, someone was simply ‘mortally ill’. Today we want more...Before the middle of the 20th century there was very little writing devoted to the experience of living with illness. There were many reports of bodily ills in the letters and diaries of 18th-century men and women but no sustained narratives of disease...The 19th century brought a few memoirs of invalidism...Memoirs of illness and dying almost always begin, as The Death of Ivan Ilyich does, at the moment when nothing – the little ache, the ordinary vagaries of living in a body – turns out to be something. Ivan bumped his side as he fell while adjusting a curtain; it hurt a bit but he continued in good health that day and the next; then one day he wasn’t...Forty years on, in 1926, Virginia Woolf noted how astonishing it was that ‘illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature’. What could be more weighty? In illness ‘we go down in the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads’; ‘when the lights of health go down’, ‘undiscovered countries’ come into view...Then, by the end of the 20th century, book-length accounts of illness were suddenly everywhere: more than thirty accounts of Aids and more than a hundred of cancer alone were published in the United States between 1988 and 1992. Their numbers keep growing and their scope expanding. Now there is even beginning to be a serious literature on the illness and death of pets, especially dogs, through which the emotional and ethical issues around the end of life, theirs and ours, can be newly imagined. The proliferation is so noticeable that writers despair of rising above cliché. In Jenny Diski’s first dispatches to the LRB from the ‘Cancer World’ that she had just entered she despairs of being able to say anything new: ‘I was handed my script, though all the lines were known already and the moves were paced out. There were no novel responses possible. Absolutely none that I could think of.’
So why now? Are we truly reflecting on life and such matters more than people before us did? Or are we simply feeling more of a general impending end that we feel that there's a need now --now that it is so easy to do so-- to leave a record of our travails? Or do we think that people are actually more interested in our lives and apparently, our getting closer to death? (how many more aging rock and movie stars biographies can there be?). Or perhaps as Chief Bald Eagle simply said, "We can't go back to where we were, but we can tell the young ones how it was, and they can remember, and they can bring it back."
For my aging mother, comfortable but steadily growing more feeble both in mind and body, I often wonder what thoughts enter her mind now. It is easy for me to stare at the morning sky and enjoy my coffee and dogs and ponder such things; but likely the thoughts of such escalate exponentially as the time grows closer. How long do we have? That is likely the great unknown because we all know that we will perish at some point. Perhaps we will be lucky and live a long life, or perhaps a random bullet or car crash will end our lives in our teens. The line I found most captivating in Laqueur's review was his quote of Alphonse Daudet’s In the Land of Pain "...the first moves of an illness that’s sounding me out, choosing its ground. Adds Laqueur: When one is encouraged to think of oneself as a warrior battling against an internal enemy, is there much energy left for existential reflection?
Okay, back to those unknowns, and there are many especially among people who have passed. One documentary I highlighted in an earlier post was the volunteer group called White Helmets, a group of volunteers in Syria who risk their lives to rush to recently bombed buildings and try to save and pull as many people out of the rubble. The short film is worth watching, for one unforgettable scene is the cry of a baby, buried for nearly two days, the volunteers scrambling to gently remove the heavy chunks of concrete and not have it all collapse onto themselves or the baby. When the brave rescuer --happily married and father to a young daughter himself who earlier had talked earnestly to the camera of why he does this work when he does indeed have a family himself and is so young-- pulls out the crying baby, there are more tears in his eyes, tears of happiness that soon leak out of the screen and onto yours. It was life saving life, and a moving testament to challenging one of the great unknowns. His name was Khaled Omar Harrah; and at 31 he himself died recently in an airstrike while rescuing even more people. Khaled Omar Harrah. Khaled Omar Harrah. It is my hope that I will remember him far more than a sports figure or a newscaster or a movie star, that he will not be doomed to become one of the great "unknowns." He didn't have to write a book for he left a far greater impression.
*Another nice insight into this is the version of the "making of" West Side Story as composer Leonard Berstein --who always wanted his composition to be performed by opera singers-- brutally conducts Kiri Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras to his specifications, thus giving you an insight into how a composer's mind works.
Looking back I had grown up with a lot of classic musicals, perhaps due to my playing an instrument and finding the standards both explanatory (ah, so there's a language for this sound) and somewhat easy to play (how it all comes together). So I knew that Natalie Wood couldn't sing in the movie version of West Side Story* and neither could Deborah Kerr in The King and I, or Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady (all three parts were sung by unknown Mami Nixon who was paid a lump sum of $420 for her King dubbing role and told to never tell anyone or "...she'd never work in town again.") But the dubbing was spectacular and could easily make you feel that the actors were actually quite good singers (Judy Garland, at 16, was one exception as she did her own singing in The Wizard of Oz). Or there's Rodney Lynn Temperton (who passed away last month), composer of the hit song, Thriller. Wait, didn't Michael Jackson write that? Uh no, it was the relatively unknown Temperton. Or champion ballroom dancer and stunt man who danced with Marilyn Monroe and taught John Wayne how to shoot a gun while riding a horse, Lakota Chief David Bald Eagle. Who?? But think about all the people still alive with equally compelling stories to tell, and all those who passed away with their histories and secrets buried along with them. What have we lost?
This all came to mind once again as I read a review in the London Review of Books about Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a review written by Thomas Laqueur. I had also written about Kalanithi's courageous notation of his ongoing disease in a post in April, but it was Laqueur's additional probing that caught my attention, that of illness and more precisely, serious illness (or perhaps in hitting your 90s as is the case with my mother) which he writes has: ...undergone a conceptual transformation that allows us to think of ourselves as sojourners in the land of illness, hoping to return to the land of the well, fearing and preparing for death. The first question – the universal cliché – that everyone diagnosed with cancer or any other serious illness asks is: ‘How long do I have?’ In the old days no one would have expected a precise answer and to a large extent that precision is still illusory. Then, someone was simply ‘mortally ill’. Today we want more...Before the middle of the 20th century there was very little writing devoted to the experience of living with illness. There were many reports of bodily ills in the letters and diaries of 18th-century men and women but no sustained narratives of disease...The 19th century brought a few memoirs of invalidism...Memoirs of illness and dying almost always begin, as The Death of Ivan Ilyich does, at the moment when nothing – the little ache, the ordinary vagaries of living in a body – turns out to be something. Ivan bumped his side as he fell while adjusting a curtain; it hurt a bit but he continued in good health that day and the next; then one day he wasn’t...Forty years on, in 1926, Virginia Woolf noted how astonishing it was that ‘illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature’. What could be more weighty? In illness ‘we go down in the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads’; ‘when the lights of health go down’, ‘undiscovered countries’ come into view...Then, by the end of the 20th century, book-length accounts of illness were suddenly everywhere: more than thirty accounts of Aids and more than a hundred of cancer alone were published in the United States between 1988 and 1992. Their numbers keep growing and their scope expanding. Now there is even beginning to be a serious literature on the illness and death of pets, especially dogs, through which the emotional and ethical issues around the end of life, theirs and ours, can be newly imagined. The proliferation is so noticeable that writers despair of rising above cliché. In Jenny Diski’s first dispatches to the LRB from the ‘Cancer World’ that she had just entered she despairs of being able to say anything new: ‘I was handed my script, though all the lines were known already and the moves were paced out. There were no novel responses possible. Absolutely none that I could think of.’
So why now? Are we truly reflecting on life and such matters more than people before us did? Or are we simply feeling more of a general impending end that we feel that there's a need now --now that it is so easy to do so-- to leave a record of our travails? Or do we think that people are actually more interested in our lives and apparently, our getting closer to death? (how many more aging rock and movie stars biographies can there be?). Or perhaps as Chief Bald Eagle simply said, "We can't go back to where we were, but we can tell the young ones how it was, and they can remember, and they can bring it back."
For my aging mother, comfortable but steadily growing more feeble both in mind and body, I often wonder what thoughts enter her mind now. It is easy for me to stare at the morning sky and enjoy my coffee and dogs and ponder such things; but likely the thoughts of such escalate exponentially as the time grows closer. How long do we have? That is likely the great unknown because we all know that we will perish at some point. Perhaps we will be lucky and live a long life, or perhaps a random bullet or car crash will end our lives in our teens. The line I found most captivating in Laqueur's review was his quote of Alphonse Daudet’s In the Land of Pain "...the first moves of an illness that’s sounding me out, choosing its ground. Adds Laqueur: When one is encouraged to think of oneself as a warrior battling against an internal enemy, is there much energy left for existential reflection?
Okay, back to those unknowns, and there are many especially among people who have passed. One documentary I highlighted in an earlier post was the volunteer group called White Helmets, a group of volunteers in Syria who risk their lives to rush to recently bombed buildings and try to save and pull as many people out of the rubble. The short film is worth watching, for one unforgettable scene is the cry of a baby, buried for nearly two days, the volunteers scrambling to gently remove the heavy chunks of concrete and not have it all collapse onto themselves or the baby. When the brave rescuer --happily married and father to a young daughter himself who earlier had talked earnestly to the camera of why he does this work when he does indeed have a family himself and is so young-- pulls out the crying baby, there are more tears in his eyes, tears of happiness that soon leak out of the screen and onto yours. It was life saving life, and a moving testament to challenging one of the great unknowns. His name was Khaled Omar Harrah; and at 31 he himself died recently in an airstrike while rescuing even more people. Khaled Omar Harrah. Khaled Omar Harrah. It is my hope that I will remember him far more than a sports figure or a newscaster or a movie star, that he will not be doomed to become one of the great "unknowns." He didn't have to write a book for he left a far greater impression.
*Another nice insight into this is the version of the "making of" West Side Story as composer Leonard Berstein --who always wanted his composition to be performed by opera singers-- brutally conducts Kiri Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras to his specifications, thus giving you an insight into how a composer's mind works.
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