What Was I (Not) Thinking?

     Oct...think of all the words that can form from that three-letter prefix: octagon, octopus, October, octogenarian.  Author Abigail Thomas turned 80 while writing her memoir, jotting down bits of memory before such thoughts slipped away: My memory is full of holes.  Maybe I wasn't paying the right kind of attention to my life.  Was I in so great a rush to get to the next thing that I forgot to notice the present?  Or maybe the weight of too many memories piled on top of others crushed some, deformed others...I discover that memory, mine anyway, seems to be an independent creature, inspired by circumstances rather than faithful to it.  I could dig my mistakes up by the roots, plant the more literal truth in my damp mind, but inevitably the memory, or the way my brain preserved it, grows back the way it was recorded... What happened last week?  I come up with nothing.  But nothing happened, which is a point in my favor.  Does losing memories presage losing my mind?  It's odd that I'm not afraid.  I'm curious, but I'm not afraid...I figure I have a choice.  I can worry myself into the ground.  That's one.  Or I can think of my failing memory as an achievement.  I am finally living in the moment. 

     While I am years away from the author's age, at least physically, I am not so sure how far I may be from the octogenarian's mental-memory part.  Just as with slipping on the ice, discovering that our mental cognition has noticeably diminished may come upon us too quickly to stop.  You can do the pills, do the brain "exercises," get lots of sleep, and perhaps still realize that, like the author, you forgot to notice the present.  And now that is all you may be remembering.  But whatever happens, and maybe because it's coming from someone at the ripe old age of 80, her outlook was/is a refreshing one.  As she wrote in her introduction: Pushing eighty, the future is behind me; the past is unpredictable; I am living in the ever-shifting constancy of now.  Sometimes the present is interrupted by a memory so vivid that I am in two places at once, an inexpensive, unpatented, readily available form of time travel. These are the moments in which past and present are fused.  I like to imagine them as little paperweights, holding my life together before it all blows away. 

     So blend some of this together and mesh it with what's approaching us as the political arena shifts with the new year, perhaps one not as smoothly as a lunar phase but more of a solar flare.  Here was one take from The New Yorker: Is it possible that, these days, heavily agenda-laced ideas from afar flow within each of us with such power that we mistake them for our own?  Possible that the way we receive information, and the form in which it arrives, is causing certain issues to assume an exaggerated importance in our lives, out of proportion to 1) the extent to which these issues actually affect us and 2) what we might be able to do about them?  Isn't this frightening, because it makes us feel that our influence ought to be vast, but it isn't?  Is it possible that we have come to feel responsible for too much, for everything, even things outside of our control, and that this makes us feel like gods who have been unfairly disempowered?  Isn't it depressing, feeling like a denied god?  Doesn't it fill us with despair, which might make us less effective if a time comes when we actually can do something, and might also mess with the enjoyment we should be feeling re: the rest of our lives?

      Sometimes we can fall into a stupor: all is right and going smoothly until suddenly, unexpectedly, it isn't.  Three things happened in the past week.  First, an electronic transfer of money from my savings in one bank to my checking in another bank (it was the holidays and time to pay off a balance or two): it was "sent," as it had been so many times throughout the years, and... nothing.  So I waited, thinking that the weekend had arrived and I had fallen into that banking pothole that 2 days meant 2 "business" days.  Then the weekend passed and it was 2 days into the next week, and nothing.  The sending bank sent me their tracking number (such transactions all have a federal deposit tracking number), but the receiving bank wrote back that the number did not match my account.  So what happened to the money?  It's there, both banks assured me, because such electronic transfers don't just "disappear" (although they can get hacked).  Wait another week, they both said.  Wait, for a supposedly speedy electronic transfer?  Then within the next few days, our car died, as in no clicking, no jump-starting, no nothing... and it was Sunday.  The battery was good, the alternator was good, but the car was dead.  And then my wife headed to the ER (and yes, it was again the weekend).  It was another bout of diverticulitis, something she's had several times before over the years but nothing like this.  Her retired-surgeon friend listened to her symptoms (extended abdominal pain, her usual antibiotic meds not working, and how it felt like it was getting progressively worse), and told her to get to the ER in case it was a blockage or an internal rupture (it wasn't, luckily).  The ER doc changed her to a stronger antibiotic.  On Monday, her GP saw her and told her to keep taking both antibiotics.  Then a few days after that, her gastroenterologist put her on a third, even stronger antibiotic.  Take all three, she was told (bye, bye microbiome).  So while each of these issues got resolved --the money was found, the car was towed to a mechanic (it was the starter), and my wife's condition cleared up (mostly)-- it made me aware of how casually we treat the everyday, as if all will continue to run smoothly as it does day after day, especially when it comes to our life and our health.  And then you slip and crack your pelvis (me), or you realize that you may be forgetting things at a concerning rate (you forgot where you parked for the third time in a week), or you turn 80 and realize that you feel as if you just stepped off the train of life to stretch your legs and now find that the train is pulling away and will soon vanish into the horizon.  But how much, a review in the same magazine asked: ...can any living being, human or otherwise, truly grasp about what it means to die?

     So I am aware that this is no way to welcome in the new year.  What was I thinking?  But it did get me wondering if such topics --even for an 80-year old author-- were less about fearing death, or even seeing an end to your life, as much as it may be a diminishing of time to reflect on your life, a looking back that grows larger and larger while the time to reflect on it --and thus the time to make changes-- grows shorter and shorter.  What have I done to deserve such a fate,? wrote The Beatles: I realize I have left it too late.  And though it's true pride comes before a fall; I'm telling you so that you won't lose all.  Of course, this is all coming from our society, and the (usually) moral compasses embedded by our parents and friends.  But what if those "controls" were shut off, or substantially turned down...that order to "kill" the enemy, or to ignore the cry for help to save yourself?  And what if it wasn't society or public pressure telling you that but something coming from within your mind?  The late Richard Pryor did a skit about his addiction to crack cocaine and how his "pipe" would talk to him and tell him not to listen to others, especially in one case, his good friend and the massive-in-size fullback, Jim Brown.  "Don't listen to him," the pipe would say, "he doesn't know what he's talking about."  Then we watched a series of true stories, The Long Shadow about the Yorkshire ripper who would use a hammer on the back of his victims' skull, and the Acorn series, Manhunt (not the one on, Apple TV) about a serial rapist in the UK who only violated elderly women (and sometimes men) but otherwise lived a "normal" life (he evaded capture for 17 years, all while continuing to place fear in women the ages of 80-year old Abigail Thomas).  What goes on in that sort of mind?  What shuts on or off that tells them, like Pryor's pipe, to not listen to that "other" side.  As The New Yorker asked, if everyone has drunk from the poisoned well and become insane, who are you to judge?  Should you also drink from that well: ...that even the wells that are full of truths aren't great, since the method of delivery tends to enlarge one truth (one way of seeing) at the expense of others, thereby making it difficult to sustain such fragile things as ambiguity, doubt, sympathy, complexity, or genuine curiosity?

     

     Speaking of the expense of others, what sort of mind does this scenario (from The London Review): In June, several major London hospitals declared a critical incident and launched an urgent appeal for blood donations after a ransomware attack targeted Synnovis, a company that conducts blood testing and provides transfusions for the NHS.  More than a thousand procedures were postponed, including at least a hundred cancer treatments.  As well as disrupting essential services, the hackers stole around 400 gigabytes of data, including results of blood tests for sexually transmitted infections such as HIV, along with patients’ names, dates of birth and NHS numbers.  Qilin, the group behind the attack, demanded $50 million from Synnovis and leaked the data after no payment was made...Over the past two years, groups such as Qilin attacked the Royal Mail, the Guardian, the BBC, British Airways, Boots and MGM Resorts.  As Scott Shapiro writes in Fancy Bear Goes Phishing, ‘cybercrime is a business, and businesses exist to turn a profit.  Cybercriminals don’t want to read your email or use your webcam to spy on you making dinner.  They are, by and large, rational people out to make a living.’  And it’s a good one.

      And then came this in the book Hitler's People by Richard J. Evans: ...opinion among historians and biographers remains deeply divided.  Understanding what motivated Hitler, and why he was able to exert such power and fascination over so many people, continues to pose real challenges to the historian...[he] released people from the normal constraints that society imposes on the violent and abusive desires that exist to a degree among all of us, and actively encouraged people to act them out.  Ideological and historical context in the end was more important than individual psychology.  Picture the names: Heinrich Himmler, Albert Speer, Adolph Eichmann, Rudolph Hess, Joseph Goebbels, Herman Göring (and a host of women the author notes, who unleashed: ... base and violent instincts against the prisoners, instincts that brought them a notoriety which far outdid that of most male camp officers and guards).  Wrote the author, and the premise of his book: As individuals, the perpetrators whose lives are recounted in this book were not psychopaths; nor were they deranged, or perverted, or insane, despite the portrayal of many of them as such in the media and the historical literature.  They were not gangsters or hoodlums who took over the German state purely or even principally in order to enrich themselves or gain fame and power, though when opportunity knocked many of them did not hesitate to take advantage of it.  Apart from flying in the face of the evidence, thinking of them as depraved, deviant or degenerate puts them outside the bounds of normal humanity and so serves as a form of exculpation for the rest of us, past, present and future.  Nor were they people who existed on the margins of society, or grew up beyond the social mainstream.  In most of their life, they were completely normal by the standards of the day.  They came overwhelmingly from a middle-class background; there was not a single manual laborer among them.  Many of them shared the conventional cultural attributes of the German bourgeoisie, were well-read, or played a musical instrument with some proficiency, or painted, it wrote fiction or poetry.  But they all had in common the shattering emotional experience of a sharp and divine loss of status and self-worth at an early point of their lives... It is none the less striking how Nazis and other perpetrators, in the army or the professions or the world of business, failed after the war to realize that they had committed gross violations of human decency and morality or, if they were out on trial, understand why they were in the dock.  Many, if not most of them knew, like Himmler in his Posen speech of 1942, that they were breaking the legal and moral norms accepted by most societies across the globe, but like him, they felt deeply that they were doing this in the service of a higher necessity -- the future of the human race... Some historians have argued that Hitler and the Nazis came to power with overwhelming popular approval, ruled largely by consent, and only targeted small, unpopular, deviant social, racial and political minorities with their violence, to the satisfaction of the vast majority of ordinary Germans.  All that said, I still have to wonder that when the time came, did those people still think that such acts, horrendous to many, were "okay" to carry out, or to pretend were not happening and in a sense, to play dead.  And the larger question: has much changed since then? (hint: reading Evans' book will leave you wondering)...

      So we jump to the possum.  Wait, the possum?  In a review of the book, Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death, by Susana Monsó, it was noted that the possum: ... has opposable thumbs, fifty teeth (more than any other land mammal except the equally improbable giant armadillo), and, if female, thirteen nipples, which are arranged like a clock face, with twelve in a circle and one in the middle.  These nipples are concealed inside a pouch on its belly, because the Virginia opossum is a marsupial, the only one native to North America.  All this is strange, but none of it is as strange as the behavior for which this possum is most famous: playing possum.  Contrary to what you might imagine, that does not simply entail curling up and holding still.  A possum that is playing possum keels over to one side, its tongue hanging out, its eyes open and unblinking.  Saliva drips from its mouth while its other end leaks urine and feces, together with a putrescent green goop.  Its body temperature and heart rate drop, its breathing becomes almost imperceptible, and its tongue turns blue.  If, in a fit of sadism or scientific experimentation, you cut off its tail while it is in this state, it will not so much as flinch.  Idiomatically, “playing possum” means “pretending to be dead,” but what exactly playing possum means to a possum is considerably harder to say.  Does the possum have any idea what it means to be dead (to say nothing of what it means to pretend)?  When it is moved to begin its Oscar-worthy performance, does it know that it is in mortal danger?  Does the implacable fact of death have any purchase whatsoever on its possum-y heart?  And if it does not—which seems likely, given its unusually small brain—what of all the other creatures that feign death: frogs, snakes, spiders, sharks, swifts?  And what of all the other creatures in general?  The octopus, the elephant, the great horned owl, the house cat, the giant tortoise, the chimpanzee: who, in all the vast animal kingdom, joins us in having intimations of mortality?

     Hey, you say, lighten up already.  But I guess that this arrival of another year brings out my own time to reflect, not only on the years past but on life itself and how fortunate so many of us still are.  Few regrets overall, and dreamily feeling that what mistakes we've made we may still have time to correct: to be more open-minded, more compassionate, and to use what time we have to try and better the world.  But after reading and seeing so many other viewpoints, I couldn't help but wonder if a billionaire or a violent criminal, a racist or a politician thinks in the same way?  Okay, enough of that because can we pretend that all is right in the world and that by turning on the tellie we can escape to our blissful ignorance?   Still, if one thinks about it, we sort of can, most of us anyway.  No bombs or missiles heading our way, no homes destroyed or food being scarce, no crippling diseases or water being rationed.  For the most part we in the "developed" world, have been able, almost without realizing it, to convince ourselves that we will reach a "ripe old age" without a problem.  So what happens next?  If we're lucky enough to continue to be so blessed, we will live long enough and normally enough, to find out.  But maybe we should also take this time to expand our view, that we should listen a bit more, that we should not turn away, and that we should imagine ourselves not living in a Marvel universe but in one of our own, and that there are many shoes we could step into and discover that reality for many is nowhere close to ours.  And perhaps by doing that, when the time comes, when it is truly the "end" as we know it, we will realize that life has been one heck of a ride, full of thrills and expectations, winning moments and disappointments, roads taken and roads passed, but that there is no going back.  I guess if we take this coming year as a chance to view things that way, to recognize that we all still have time to change things in our lives, and others lives, the "end" won't be that bad.  As 80-year old Abigail noted: ...it's a beautiful word, "mortal" rhyming with "portal," which sounds optimistic.  And really, who wants to live forever?  How tedious life would become.  Mortality keeps life interesting.  And right now, right this minute...that's all I ask.

    So I close this year's worth of posts with yet another observation from that wily octogenarian, Abigail Thomas, answering a question that has even plagued my own thoughts: When something catches my eye, I write.  I've been at this long enough to know that the next interesting thing often shows up in disguise, a bug, say, or a certain shade of blue., or a joke someone told that wasn't funny.  These bits and pieces don't have to get dressed up for the occasion.  I am distilling, not decorating.  All I have to do is get it down and get it right.  Get in and get out...I never know if what I'm writing will add up to anything but I'm always curious to see where my mind goes when it's off-leash.  What does it stop to inspect, what does it return to?  What the hell am I doing?  What are all these memories doing in there?  To all of you out there, young and old, healthy and otherwise, even wealthy and otherwise, to the years ahead and to the years behind, this is my wish for your truly happy, or happier, new year.