The Complexity of It All

   Several days have now passed since we laid to rest our one remaining dog.  And the feelings that remain are a mix of emptiness and of also knowing that whatever may be next for her (if anything) she is now free of pain and whatever shackles physical life placed upon her.  My friend tells me of the Vikings believing that their animals followed them into an afterlife, a pleasant thought and one echoed by several religions; but as anyone who has loved and lost a pet, the silence and void that remains seems to linger for far longer than expected.  You come home and open the door, you glance at their bed in the middle of the night, you stare out at the patio and there's...nothing.  At such times it seems natural to glance back through photos, which is what I've been doing, frozen pieces of days when both of you were younger and playing and acting as if this world and this life would never end.  But mixed in with all those photos were also those of others in that same young stage of life, my aunt and grandmother, my own mother...me.  And among all those memories of my cluttered life was this  piece of writing I'd done some 40 years ago when for some unknown reason I decide to write about my visit to museums in Washington, D.C.: Museums take us on a journey often beyond our comprehension for in a moment --a day-- we are supposed to absorb generations of thought...beyond the printed explanation on the museum's exhibits may rest the human guide filled with trinkets of information, stories that are as precious as flecks of gold.  Yet after the voice fades away and we no longer read the letters on the signs, what then?  What thoughts do we harbor or new sights --insights-- do we see?...We are surrounded by a working world that says "hurry, hurry, hurry," as if life itself were yet another exhibit we could choose to whisk by with a shrug of our shoulders...We don't need a museum.  We have exhibits galore: winds that rise each summer evening, deer that stop in our headlights' beam, hills that turn green and brown with beauty.  Life exists, we should scream.  Time be damned.  We may not have all the time in the world but if we take the time offered, it should be plenty.  And yet in moments such as these when a loved one passes into a world of which we have no comprehension, the idea of having had enough time crashes down like a monstrous wave that pins us under and forces us to struggle for air, tossing and tumbling us in what seems a deathly throw but for the wave a mere moment as it moves on, unaware that we were or are even there.

Excavated portion of Pompeii; photo:Chiara Goia for Smithsonian

   A recent issue of Smithsonian featured a cover story on the new discoveries being made at Pompeii, a city buried under 16 or more feet of pumice and ash; it was a city that was populated with 12,000 people at the time and had what you would expect in any city, including some 80 snack bars ("the McDonald's of its day") and a thriving trade.  But I had no idea of the city's size (and one third of the city still remains to be dug up) or that most of the population is thought to have escaped the deadly eruption despite its estimated midnight occurance in early autumn.  Among the new findings: ...a wooden bed, a stable harboring the remains of a thoroughbred horse (bronze-plated wooden horns on the saddle; iron harness with small bronze studs), gorgeously preserved frescoes, murals and mosaics of mythological figures...unripe pomegranates, heavy clothing  found on bodies, wood-burning braziers in homes, wine from the harvest in sealed jars.  Said the article: The paradox of Pompeii, of course, is that its very annihilation was its salvation, and that the volcanic violence created the enduring narrative of an entire town frozen in time, its inhabitants baking bread, shaking hands, making love.  In 1816, this seeming contradiction inspired in Goethe "the painful thought that so much happiness had to be erased, in order to preserve such treasures."

    Even in our everyday world it may be difficult to understand the interconnectedness of life, a lesson Michael Pollan learned when a farmer told him of how a forest blocks the wind which helps the grass and holds the water and brings the birds and on and on, "something every farmer used to understand before 'fencerow to fencerow' became USDA mantra," said the farmer.  Said Pollan in his earlier book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: These woods represented a whole other order of complexity that I had failed to take into account...For some reason the image that stuck with me from that day was that slender blade of grass in a too-big, wind-whipped pasture, burning all those calories just to stand up straight and keep its chloroplasts aimed at the sun.  I'd always thought of the trees and grasses as antagonists -- another zero-sum deal in which the gain of one entails the loss of the other.  To a point, this is true.  More grass means less forest; more forest less grass.  But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-between or both-ands.  So it is with the blade of grass and the adjacent forest as, indeed, with all the species sharing the most complicated farm.  Relations are what matter most, and the health of the cultivated turns on the health of the wild.

    Bill Bryson's recent book, The Body, talks of our skin actually being the body's largest organ but that the outer layer: ...is made up entirely of dead cells.  It is an arresting thought that all that makes you lovely is deceased.  These outer skin cells are replaced every month.  We shed skin copiously, almost carelessly: some twenty-five thousand flakes a minute, over a million pieces each hour.  Run a finger along a dusty shelf, and you are in large part clearing a path through fragments of your former self.  Silently and remorselessly we turn to dust.  But just underneath that protective dead layer is a factory of life, your red blood cells reproducing at the rate of a million each second with each cell containing our DNA which, if tied together and laid flat would reach out past Pluto, a distance that took Voyager 1 some 12.5 years to reach.  Even more interesting was the discovery of mold to produce penicillin...but not just any mold (yes, they are that different).  During its early days during WW II, hundreds of molds were tried to see if any would prove effective and all but one were rejected; it was a golden mold that appeared on a cantaloupe in Peoria, Illinois, a mold that proved 200x more potent than any of the others.  Said Bryson: Every bit of penicillin made since that day is descended from that single random cantaloupe (in an ironic ending, it was found that the original mold was quickly scraped off and the cantaloupe cut into pieces and eaten by the researchers).

   Such random and jumbled thoughts have made me realize that perhaps we are not meant to understand much of anything; I've stopped wishing to see my dogs again as if fearing that my failure to let them go might be proving to be a leash of sorts, that I need to just unhook them entirely and let them have their fun playing in some spiritual playground.  I still miss them dearly, of course, and that won't change; but life moves on like an ocean wave, constant and emotionally unmoving, as if to tell me that that is just how the world works.  And now I get it, and that is that I don't get it.  It is far too complex, so much so that it appears simple and that what it is telling me is that I should just step back and take it in.  I can view the afterlife however I want, but by keeping it in some physical or human-world form it becomes easier for me to understand, at least at this point.  Perhaps just as with our skin --one that sheds water and yet opens to allow sweat and hairs to come out, and one which is sensitive enough to relay even the lightest touch or the deepest burn-- that skin is actually dead.  But the rest of me is teeming with life.  How can that be?  Viewed from another realm, another world of sorts, it seems that it can "be" rather easily...it's just too complex for my feeble brain to understand.  As Bryson said, "all that makes you lovely is deceased."  My dogs have taught me that; and even if that life lesson might be something I've yet to fully grasp, I now know that it came from two of my life's greatest teachers.
 
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