Talking Nonsense

     Talking nonsense can take on so many meanings, from "hearing" a person in shock ramble on, to listening to someone speaking a foreign language.  For some stroke victims, there can be a phase (temporary or permanent) called aphasia, one where your mind is clear but your speech is unintelligible to others (the other form is the opposite, where a person speaking to you sounds jumbled and cannot be understood).  I can vouch for the "shock" version from my teen years, emerging from the ocean after being caught in some rough water, riding back with my roommate some 30 minutes to our apartment and him turning to me to ask what had happened.  I just told you when I got out of the water, I said, as well as the whole drive home.  "You were talking gibberish," he told me.  And yet, to me it sounded normal, clear and organized.

     When that happens, who knows what our brains prioritize, basically telling our bodies that it has more important things to attend to and that it needs time to process whatever had happened, as if throwing us a few bones for our speech or whatever to placate our need to feel "okay."  So it was interesting to pick up the book on our final words, those captured dying words from many ordinary folks, and a few well-knowns.  It was from that book that noted the words of Steve Jobs saying, "oh wow, oh wow;" or Roger Ebert saying, "this is all an elaborate hoax, this world, this place."  Given all that (and all of the book's research was done with each person's or the family's permission), it made me wonder what if anything most of us would say at the end?  Anything?  Would a planned speech emerge, or would we be so stunned or so scared that trying to say something "memorable" would seem, well, pithy.  Perhaps if we felt that what we were going to say was so important at those last few seconds, we would wonder why we had waited until the end (or we'd recognize that our words weren't that important after all).  A simple "I've always loved you," or a tearful "forgive me" might be all that would really matter, as if suddenly discovering that life does indeed end, even for us, and that we should have treasured it more than we did.

     Jump now to opera (yes, that's a leap), because honestly, I don't understand it or even come close to appreciating it, even with the powerful, sustaining voices of so many operatic singers.  But soprano Renee Fleming wrote on her album Voice of Nature: This music begins in a time almost two centuries ago, when people had a profound connection to the beauty of nature.  Now, in the Anthropocene, we see the effects of our own activity, and the fragility of our environment.  Nature has been so good to us: we have not been so good to nature.  She contracted with some of the best: Pulitzer Prize winning composers, music directors of both the Metropolitan Opera and the Philadelphia Orchestra, brought in both old classics and new compositions, all for her vision of how crucial a state we were in and how we needed to get back to nature, and how her powerful vocals coupled with emotional arrangements would convey that urgency.  And the result?  Gibberish, at least to me.  The same result (for me) happened with an album by Dimitry Shostakovich, his name a memory from my own orchestral days in high school when our conductor surprised us with a short piece by the composer (almost all of us had never heard of him).  What we played by him was off-beat, fun, full of turns and diversions, stops and key changes that somehow still remains in my head  --in full-- decades later.  And yet, his operatic album of "protest" cantatas (I never knew that he even wrote opera or cantatas) was also gibberish to me (and what the heck was a cantata anyway?).  Both artists were obviously quite passionate about their works, music which probably touched hundreds of thousands of other more appreciative listeners.  And yet here I was, hearing it without so much as a drop of feeling.  It was all seemingly nonsense to me, despite the passionate drive of the artists...

This real banana duct-taped to a wall, sold for $6.2 million...

     How passionate?  The Estonian conductor Paavo Järvi introduced the Shostakovich album this way: How does an artist cope with being forced to live a double life?  Where is the line between moral and immoral, acceptable and unacceptable, patriotic or hypocritical?...The concept behind this CD was to show the stark realities of one great composer's life: his need to compose music in his own homeland while at the same time being unable to create freely due to the censorship and terror of its totalitarian regime..."The Execution of Stepan Razin" is a thinly-veiled critique of the Soviet regime, comparing it unflatteringly to Tsarist Russia.  But musically it is a true masterpiece: Shostakovich at his best.  Rebecca Solnit, mentioned in previous posts, also expressed what so many of us may feel but are perhaps hesitant to actually express in her book, The Beginning Comes After the End, that of how the far-right can seem to feel so emotionless when it comes to helping others, especially if those "others" are from another country or not white: They believe they are not strangling a new world being born; they are rejuvenating a dying world, making it thrive again, or pretending it never declined.  Donald Trump's slogan, "Make America Great Again,," I always thought of a a code for "Make America 1958 (or perhaps 1858) Again."  Like all fascism, it promises to restore a lost majesty, a lost hierarchy -- in this case, the tidings of a rigidly hierarchical order in which men and women, whites and non-whites, citizens and immigrants, rich and poor all assumed their assigned roles, in which mobility, fluidity, equality were banished, in which conformity as heterosexuality, female submission, and Christianity (the version of it at odds with Jesus's teachings) are all obligatory.  Fascism claims the past, or a fantasy version of it, as paradise while it tries to strangle the future and insists that order only comes through repression and the reinstatement of inequalities.  But, in a phase sometimes attributed to Pablo Neruda, "You can cut down the flowers, but you can't stop the spring."

     MacArthur Foundation recipient and author, Tommy Orange, wrote a reflection in Traveler about his family visit to Hawaii, and his disappointment in not seeing an actual lava flow or eruption from the Kilauea volcano: So much has happened since I took this trip at the start of 2026, and I don't know what any of it means.  For me, for my family, for the country.  But I'm trying to keep the faith, not in what will happen in the political arena but in a highly capable earth, which has always held us -- which made us over long, geologic, evolutionary time...Land can disappear even as you see it.  It falls away beneath you, becoming merely the ground under your feet because you're thinking about where you're going, or it's a place that slowly blurs out of focus from the airplane window.  Land is a primal word, primordial even, like lava.  And it is a loaded term if, say, you're Indigenous or descend from a people whose land was taken from them.  No one ever thinks about where land itself comes from, just where its borders begin and end...If it is still making itself new, still capable of growth and rebirth, maybe we are too.

    Rebirth.  It's an interesting term since as author and physician Giulia Enders wrote: Why bother with all this life, relationships, learning, and improving if it came to an end?  What was the point of it?  All of a sudden so much seemed silly to me.  When I looked at the people around me, in this state, I kept noticing that everyone was wrapped in a mantle of keratinizing cells.  We wander around in our skin, concealing beneath it just how wet, vulnerable, and bloody we really are.*  Okay, all of that is getting a bit too heavy (see below if you want to keep reading about our skin since our outermost layer of skin, yes the part you cut and burn and tan, is totally dead).  But what exactly am I missing here?  Yes, I've jumped back to opera, or abstract art or jazz, or whiteboards full of mathematical equations.  How are so many talented artists and writers and professors and everyday mechanics and grandparents witnessing and enjoying a world I don't seem to be able to grasp?  One example: do you ever stare at some piece of art that looks like someone tripped over several cans of paint, only to discover that it sold at auction for a record bazillion dollars?  A banana peel duct taped to a board?  Really?  Who's selling who a bill of goods?  

     My wife and I again watched the rather classic movie, August Rush, a 12-year old who is a musical prodigy, but orphaned.  You don't really hear these things, he's constantly told, but he does.  Music is all around us, he tells everyone; all you have to do is just listen.  All the wisdom of the sea in a grain of sand, look around, just look around, sang Sergio Mendes.  Set the child within you free when you look around, just look around.  But there are times when I witness true genius, perhaps just in watching a local jazz band as players drift off into "the zone," their imaginations being set free and not worrying about physical notes or finger movements, just letting go and listening to another world.  A slow listen to So Flute by St. Germain brought this comment from Bandcamp: ...it's the kind of release that makes you mad nobody's making shit like this anymore. not because it's retro. but because it's alive. it breathes. it sweats. it doesn't give a damn about trends or playlists or algorithms. it just is. and here's the kicker-after all these years, "so flute" still sounds like the future. which is sad. because the future never showed up. we got tiktok loops and ai-generated filler instead. st germain didn't predict the future. he built it. and then we forgot to follow. so play it loud. play it late. let it rattle the neighbors. they'll thank you later. or call the cops. either way, you win.

                         

     

    But this talking, or hearing, nonsense goes further, even like the outermost layer of our skin, into death.  In her book Words at the Threshold, author Lisa Smartt wrote: When we look at the continuum of language from literal to nonsensical, something fascinating emerges.  These different kinds of language are associated with different parts of the brain, according to recent brain research.  Literal language, the kind you use to describe a chair, engages region in the left hemisphere, which have traditionally been associated with the language of literal, shared reality.  But figurative language, such as the simile "My life is like a red, red rose,: engages both the left and the right hemispheres in the brain.  In an article published in Scientific American the author explains, "Previous brain-imaging research has shown that interpreting metaphors requires a variety of areas on both sides of the brain, compared with literal language, which is processed in known language areas in the left hemisphere."  However, a nonsense sentence, such as "My love is thorning the spiraling plotz," engages the right hemisphere's regions associated with mystical experiences and music...

     She goes on to add this sobering reality: One day, if not today, you will sit at the bedside of someone you love and have a final conversation.  That conversation will invite you into a unique territory -- the one that exists between living and dying.  You may hear words expressing a desire for forgiveness, reconciliation, or the fulfillment of last requests.  You may hear phrases that confuse you, like "The circles say it's time to complete the cycle."  There may be reference to things you do not see or understand, such as "The white butterflies are coming out of your mouth.  They are so beautiful."  Or "If you have passed the quiz, you have passed the quiz, haven't you?"...So imagine for a moment: What kind of language might you use to describe the experience of dying?  Not only is it an experience for which the listener has no compelling reference point, but also it is completely strange and new to the person who is dying.  It is, in every way, completely without a frame of reference for most of us.

     Ira Byock, a palliative care doctor and author, wrote that studies reveal a few common questions dying patients ask (often internally): did my life have meaning?, did I contribute something?, and, did my existence make any difference in the world?  And Dr. Byock, who cared for his own dying father as well as witnessing many other patients, created a short list of "closure" statements for dying people to tell others: please forgive me; I forgive you; thank you; and, I love you.  Some of his patients also add "goodbye" and "I'm proud of you."  Added author Jennie Dear in her own book: People who are diagnosed with a fatal disease sometimes do more than cope.  They grow.  They repair or strengthen relationships.  They find a deeper spirituality or meaning in the life that remains for them.  They create a legacy of good memories for the people they leave behind.  When any of this happens, it tends to happen because of --not despite-- the challenges of facing death and struggling with pain and loss (Dear's webpage features this quote by Mary Oliver: ...when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?).

     Life happens, even as some would say, sh*t happens.  But as author Solnit observed: "Happens" means a tapestry woven together of many events or maybe a tangle, while "history" means tracing a few threads out of the many.  Writing history is often an act od disentangling, of creating the impression of a linear narrative, which sometimes clarifies and sometimes simplifies, and sometimes the simplification becomes a stripping down of context to create the appearance of coherence at the cost of meaning or the full picture or just the inclusion of complexity and uncertainty.  As she notes with the practice of Buddhism, it may be time to recognize the: ...interconnectedness both in how things work and in the moral sense of nonseparation and the obligation to care for the whole, motivated by compassion, with compassion itself arising from the recognition of interconnection.  Even among the evolutionary biologists studying the "same book of life," she notes that some see networks and others see hierarchies.  As with what seems to be happening in today's world, one could view all life as growing together and evolving, as if in a marriage; while others may see life only as dividing and separating in order to grow, as if in a divorce.

     In the end, nonsense or not, what may matter may be only what we take with us, our own evaluation of what we did on this one-in-a-bazillion ride called life.  So I happened to notice 2 names, Bob Hall and Lionel Rosenblatt, both of whom recently passed away.  Wait, who?  Exactly.  They could be people as ordinary as you or me.  But Bob Hall brought wheelchair racing to the forefront, accepting the challenge by Boston race officials that he would be recognized with an official "finisher's" certificate only IF he could finish the Boston Marathon in under 3 hours (he beat the mark by 2 minutes).  Last year, there were 50 wheelchair racers at the marathon.  Said Hall to reporters: It warms me up quite a bit and puts a smile on my face.  It's kind of like closing the circle of my life.  And regarding Rosenblatt, he worked for the Foreign Service in Vietnam, but was shocked to discover that the US was planning to abandon so many of the South Vietnamese who had helped during the war there.  So he snuck back in, made deals with officials to get documents, and got 200 Vietnamese out.  But he wasn't done, going on to form Refugees International, and helping to evacuate abandoned Afghans, Rwandans facing genocide, Somalis facing starvation, and those fighting in both Chechnya and Sudan.  As he told the Washington Post in 2022, refugees: ...are an inspiring example.  We need that kind of fresh blood and energy in this country.

    Substitute a care worker or a struggling parent, an immigrant working in unbearable heat, a restaurant server only able to afford cheap noodles for dinner, an everyday person feeling anything but comfortable financially, or you.   And yet in the end, each of them --as with you and I-- will have stories to tell, stories that will make sense, at least to us.  Stories about people we met, and animals we had, and loves we missed, and opportunities lost and gained, and how despite the news and the constant blare of negative media, deep down inside we know that they are talking nonsense.  Because people are still good underneath, stepping up to the plate when it's needed and wanting anything but another war because of some "leader's" fabricated ego.  Just as with our skin, we will eventually fall away, protecting those we love until the end, connected to life until we aren't.  And maybe at that final crossover, we too, will encounter another dimension or dimensions, another world we can't imagine or understand...or we won't.  Either way, our final "vision" might be that all that we had heard and witnessed by bigwigs and politicians was indeed just hot air.  But our lives themselves were anything but nonsense.  To paraphrase The Beatles: And in the end, the life you take is equal to the life you make...

*As Dr. Enders wrote: The outermost layer of our body is different from everything that lies beneath it.  It can't bleed and can't be infected by viruses.  Here we're absolutely pain-free.  In these uppermost micrometers the cells don't need nerves, veins, or arteries.  They possess these unusual characteristics for one reason: they're dead... When skin cells die they harden.  As a consequence, a thin layer of calloused skin covers our entire body -- the "keratinizing squamous epithelium."  Keratin is protection and a tool.  Like the horn of a rhinoceros, only much smaller and all over.  It makes us more stable externally and allows us to tackle the world more robustly.  We can see how sensitive our skin would be without keratin when we get a graze or a burn and we put it under running water. --A dead mantle protects us from viruses, which multiply only in living cells.  The viruses that attack the skin, such as wart viruses, cannot infect us unless they reach the living cells below through tiny lesions in the dead layer of keratin.  For this reason warts almost only ever develop on skin that takes a lot of wear, such as hands and feet, where such "microtears" easily come about.  If our layer of keratin is undamaged we are safe from warts.  --The reason dead skin cells don't simply fall away is their past.  They were formed from stem cells in the lowest layer of the epidermis and migrated up from there.  On their journey they began bonding with other cells.  If you look through a microscope you can even see small connecting arms between them.  When a cell dies these arms continue to hold on tightly to it.  Thus they remain attached, as do others after them.  Only when the last connection to the living is severed do dead cell fall away.  Up to 80 percent of the dust that we humans accumulate in our houses consisits of such discarded skin.  Like sand in an hourglass, people and their generations of cells trickle away. (bold emphasis is mine since I found that dusty tidbit so fascinating, if a bit disgusting)