By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ The gray days turn now to early darkness – light-swallowing afternoons that have me leaving the apartment with my dogs when it is still daylight and returning 30 minutes later to sudden winds and the pitch black of precocious night. These afternoons end quicker than friendships when talking about places like Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine. Believe me, I know.
In the morning, darkness seems reluctant to give up its power. Eventually, as with all things, it does. This I know too. I suppose it must be normal for anyone reaching the latter stages of their life to gravitate from the mercurial to the stoical, from the frantic to the phlegmatic. Alas, with me, it doesn’t work; in fact, as I have always done, I seem to go the other way – a stony (though sometimes vociferous) refusal to cooperate. I become more intense and less willing to sugar coat anything in the name of tact.
I try to govern this impulse, but I fail. Too often I fall short. It occurs to me that perhaps such a fierce, furious assertion of independence that old age has aroused in me is simply my last line of defense, the writhing of the trapped beast, the doomed tactics of the keepers of an old fortress slowly crumbling under the siege of the life-takers at the gates.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Yesterday was Thanksgiving and it was the perfect early winter day. I am 75+ now (my next birthday is penciled in for 8 May (subject to change.) Google tells me that I have been alive for approximately 27, 575.786 days. Since it’s early morning here in Bulgaria, I don’t know where the .786 is coming from. Seems like a figure for later on in the day, but what do I know? Anyway, the turkey dinner (one of the few American customs I cling to assiduously) was delicious. Unfortunately, my wife is currently having blood-sugar problems that are making her tired quickly, so I ate alone with Casper and Poppendoshka.
I guess today must be Black Friday. I think – with some contempt, I admit (one of my symptoms) of mobs of people breaking down the doors of department stores to rush in and grab their booty. Somehow it seems vaguely symbolic of the times we live in – a frenzied grasping for plastic – but of course, being old and full of shit, I am probably wrong. Once this orgy of acquisition is done, the real run-in to Christmas will start.
Christmas is different now. I have never been religious in a formal or consistent sense, but I have always loved Christmas, and I guess it is only fair to show some respect for the ‘Christ’ part of the word. Mas(s)’ of course refers, not to the density of a nuclear bomb but to the ritual of the Catholic Church. The prelude of several weeks (Thanksgiving to Christmas), incorporates – especially in America – this Nod to God with some of the most ferocious materialism imaginable.
One of the differences I notice is that people don’t put up the elaborate decorations they used to. (I could see that when I was still in Florida years ago.) The other – and this is a sneaky-Pete flanker instigated by the ‘progressives’ – is that the beautiful old Christian carols have been omitted from the public airwaves. “Joy to the World”, “O Little Town of Bethlehem”, and the like have simply disappeared. Of course, “Jingle Bells” is still OK. Santa is alive and well and now comes in different colors.
But Christianity has been removed so as not to offend non-Christians. Now it would be illegal to put up a Christmas tree in front of the town courthouse for fear of jabbing a scalpel into the nerve endings of non-Christians. I guess that’s the reason. I have been around a lot of Jews, and they never seemed to mind, although Christ doesn’t mean anything more to them than Captain Kangaroo. Islam, I gather, is a different story and must be accommodated at all costs.
The manner in which traditional American holidays have been ruined by identity politics really pisses me off and I am not even a Christian. But that’s how it is. Politics abound. This year, among the Woke, an obligatory screeching about ‘Trump’ will escape the spouts their faces are equipped with, the Palestine crowd will find some way to try to disrupt everything, and, at the year’s end, literal drunks and spiritual drunks will sing “Auld Lang Syne” and bellow the hapless optimism that 2025 will somehow be better than 2024. It probably won’t, but you never know.
It’s not that people simply do not get better – and make no mistake about it, they don’t, not in the abstract, not in terms of basic human ‘nature’, they don’t, but that our capacity to turn ourselves in radioactive vapour has increased, as they say, exponentially. It has gotten so I can’t imagine what it feels like to be 25 again, just wrapping things up in grad school and ready to embark on the rest of my life. I can’t come to an understanding of what is in store for those who really are at that age, with this great and seriously dangerous cloud hanging over their heads. I have lived my life, they haven’t. But, sticking to my guns that, though technology changes, people basically don’t, I fully expect their lives to turn out like all other lives…if they make it that far. Mostly incomplete at their completion.
I remain an active workaholic, but I also have time to read, write blogs like this one, reflect on where I have been and what I have done, rejoice in things accomplished and regret those left on the table. Believe it or not, I am still trying to improve, to get it right. You young ones, in your passionate faith in yourselves, the magnificent umbrella that is Youth itself that helps you navigate through days of rain and thunder, your glorious sensuality and sexuality, your heroic energy – are in the gravest danger. Do you know that?
Nor am I the old caricature of a Doomsday Soothsayer selling hotdogs on the street corner white brandishing a sign that cries: “The End is at Hand! Eat while you Can!” I am not a ‘born again’ evangelist on a pulpit in the park shrieking about how “Sodom and Gomorrah are fallen! Prepare to Meet Your Maker, O Ye Sinners!!!!”
No, nothing like that at all. I see myself as more like the MC at the cabaret in the film of the same name starring Liza Minelli, Michael York, and Joel Grey (the announcer of the next acts coming on stage). The film is really about the rise of the Nazis (and here I am speaking of the REAL NAZIS, not just of someone you happen to disagree with), although their murderous ascent is always kept on the periphery as Sally Bowles (Liza) goes about her ‘divinely decadent’ lifestyle. It is pre-war Berlin, and everyone is having a Mask of the Red Death Ball, even if they don’t know it yet. But the MC does. You can tell by the gleam in his eye that he understands everything perfectly.
There is a cruel glitter there that remains entirely nonjudgmental. He is simply watching. His laughter seems as frivolous as the times – late ‘30s Germany – but there is a knife in it, and also a horrific glimpse of death that dances in his eyes and plays along his lips. It is chilling. Meanwhile the raucous merriment continues unabated. The cabaret is where you come to forget your troubles. It is where you leave the malevolent hissing of the streets outside, Come to the cabaret, Old Chum.
I have no gleam in my eye as I watch the news, listen to cries of hate, and simply sit there in sad anticipation of my worst forecasts coming true. I am keenly aware that one day death will interrupt my vigil, and life will flash out of me without ever having given a definitive answer to any of my questions regarding ultimate meaning and eternity. Oh, yes, I have learned many things. I don’t drink much now. I really do try to help other people when I can instead of faking it. I love my family and dread losing any of them (hardly a multitude). As my voice grows louder and rougher, my heart subsides in a profound sadness accompanied by inexplicable joy and light-heartedness – the same as I find when I listen to Chopin and Eric Satie. I understand that it is all much much bigger than me, and that I am just a little fellow about to rejoin the mammoth graveyards of the earth and the incalculable nothingness of the cosmos. I am nothing, was nothing, will be nothing. Just a squeak. And yet I lived and sometimes was happy.
But what of those who will need another 50 years to be like me? O, I envy them for their iron-gut youth, their ecstatic ‘hook-ups’, their presumed ‘potential’, and their overwhelming self-confidence (in many cases). But I fear for them.
I would be lying to say that this is an emotional, immediate fear that gives me bad dreams or leaves me pacing the floor. It is a fear based in abstraction (‘abstract’, ‘abstraction’ – are becoming favorite words of mine, for some reason), and this is because it is impossible to really care on an intimate level about (1) people you don’t know and never will, even if they are living next door; (2) people you don’t like and would not even pretend to grieve for if they died; (3) people who will be born hundreds of years from now and therefore remain non-conceptions. Knowing this, I am always skeptical of those who claim to care about ‘future generations’. Does it matter to them who will win the Super Bowl in 2052? Do most of them mourn the millions of would-be babies that were stillborn or aborted over the course of thousands of years? No, none of us do because we don’t have any way of knowing who they might have turned out to be.
If you remain compos mentis as the years lead on to years, you may start to forgive yourselves for what can and should be forgiven, while not hiding from the truth of what was horrible about you – but all of this assumes length of life. It assumes that nuclear cataclysm can be averted. Did the people of Europe know, prior to World War I, what they were getting into, what was about to happen? No, they thought it would be a brief parade. Twenty years later, just twenty goddamn years later, did they know that World War II was about to start? Apparently not. They were still thinking about what a great time they had had at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and what a bunch of nice guys those Nazis were. Apparently they learned nothing from the first go-around. Do they now think that nuclear war will be like a New Year’s Eve fireworks display? Apparently they do.
When I was young, I read about Death and treated it as a theory, a topic for late night discussions after a lot of beer. Back then I had more answers than questions. Now I have many more questions and not a single answer in terms of life-in-death and death-in life issues. But I do know about the inevitability of real death in ways I didn’t used to. And that’s because I feel it in my breath and bones. Even as I remain technically healthy.
There is nothing morbid about this. In fact, at times it makes me feel more closely a part of nature, as if, failing to reach ‘heaven’ I am nonetheless strapped to the golden wheels of nature’s great chariot. For long minutes I am not afraid.
So, my friends, as we stumble, with great uncertainty, to the end of another year, I suggest that we all cast a cold and serious eye at what we are drifting closer toward every day, just as the glaciers in the far north are turning to water, drip drop, drip drop, drip drop, every day. For there is NO Question – read my lips, NO QUESTION that one day the world will experience War on a level unprecedented. That is going to happen. I mean, have you ever seen a young guy starting to drink too much and saw clearly the alcoholic abyss he was headed for? He didn’t think so, but you knew. How did you know? Doesn’t matter, you just fucking knew because it was plain as day.
That’s what I see, as I sit this morning in the placidity of my glowing workroom, the bed behind me (I might have time for a short nap before I start work again), the dogs and cats on the floor, my dear wife preparing to go to the clinic for more blood results. It is Friday and there will be a weekend of many classes, a lot of football in America for me to check, and a jug of cold beer on Sunday night. I will do my rituals and try to stay alive.
Evening will come.
Oh yes, darkness will sweep over land and city and river and ocean and mountain and molehill, and if the stars are out, my dogs and I will gather at the edge of the woods and gaze beyond at the Black Sea. Dressed for the cold, I’ll allow my thoughts to run free, and tens of thousands of fleeting images will come and go, mere darts of electricity that contain the stories of all my days.
Sometimes I wonder what thoughts would pass through my head if one evening the sky lit up with unnatural glowing green and the air smelled strange, like sugary acid, just for a moment. And what would my last thought be as the explosion burst brightly into my brain, shattering its walls in hell-houndish nuclear laughter?
Ever think about that, Old Chum? Enjoy the cabaret, and please accept a Happy Year wish in advance in case I forget later. Or just don’t show up anymore, if ya know what I mean.
