It was seventeen degrees at seven thirty a.m. one day last week in Beaufort. Well, actually itwasn’t, but I decided to pretend it was. That way I could decrease the dread of what kind of air was waiting for me as I got ready to walk the dogs. I figured if I tried to remember what it was like to walk in the freezing cold, the reality of the increasing inferno outside might be lessened(now boarding—full flight from reality).
In actual reality, in this agreement we call our occurring world, it was another high-humidity day with a real feel forecast of 110+ degrees. The bake was on, with a flash broil on the side. How can you really talk about heat like that when what you really mean is “Dear God have mercy on our sweltering souls!”
So maybe it was the heat (but, if not, the humidity), coupled with the mental gymnastics that got me going in a curiously twisted mental direction, right down the rabbit hole of image and illusion, the real and the simulacrum. How we tell ourselves, and sometimes others, one thing when what we really are feeling or meaning is something different.
Remember those Mad Magazine cartoons where the character said one thing in a speech bubble but in an alternate thought bubble revealed what they really meant? I looked it up and the feature was called, “What They Say and What It Really Means.”
I don’t recall any specific cartoon exactly, but it would be something like Norm the neighbor guy hosting a cookout and greeting an arrival with, “Oh thanks for bringing your wonderful potato salad Gladys…” Then in the thought bubble it would reveal that what Norm meant was, “Yuck, this stuff makes even the dog puke.” And Norm’s mutt would be illustrated as tiptoeing away from the scene. You get the idea. I loved that cartoon.
Growing up in a household ravaged by mental illness and addiction, I could relate to subtext, subterfuge, wishful thinking, and outright insane thinking. I was telling my wife Allison the other day about a random memory of my schizophrenic brother Mark. One time he was playing a seriously warped Stevie Wonder album and my 12-year-old self told him that it sounded funny. He insisted with a big smile on his face that, no, that was how it was supposed to sound. And he believed it. I said okay but my thought bubble said, “My brother is crazy.” Other delusions he held weren’t so benign, but that’s beside the point.
The point is, short of psychotic wanderings, we all play the “say one thing and mean another” game with ourselves and others as we travel this serpentine path of life. And then we believe it, and sometimes even act on it.
Much of it is about getting through the day or some degree of unpleasantness (like my pretending it was freezing) but other aspects are deeper and darker, tinged with desperation.
I have three people close to me who are battling cancer. Each of them is a bad ass in their own way and all are examples of grace and dignity in their resistance. When we talk, we sometimes hit the “C” word head on, and I’ll listen and offer something from the heart that nearly always feels inadequate but is necessary and appreciated. What I mean when I speak, the thought bubble if you will, is “I want you to live and not suffer.”
When these brave souls talk about what they are going through, depending on where they are in the process, they mention their next appointment and the new round of radiation or chemo. The faint outline of their thought bubble says, “I don’t want it to be my time, I’m not ready.”
It brings to mind Charles Bowden, the philosophizer masquerading as a mere writer. In his book Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing he offers this.
“I live in a time of fear, and the fear is not of war or weather or death or poverty or terror. The fear is of life itself. The fear is of tomorrow, a time when things do not get better but become worse… once the given is accepted, fear is pointless.”
This prismatic quote suggests several directions at once. All those things he says he does not fear (including death) are fear-worthy in my book. But he is referencing a more generalized fear of what might be around the corner in life, and how it might be nasty. How tomorrow could be a step back instead of forward. The conclusion that fear is pointless, because we can’t live in the future, makes this grand fear of tomorrow the collector of all the “lesser” fears. Tomorrow is dead on arrival, we only have today to live. At least that is how I understand Bowden’s point.
These days the Lowcountry is hades hot, and being outside in the middle of the day is a given that’s hard to accept. So we stay inside or run to more AC, and we tell ourselves it’s going to end someday while we think “Will it ever end?” Of course it will, just like the passage to dust will find us all.
As lousy a concept of the inevitability of death can be to focus on when it comes to trying to live a positive life, Bowden has it right. We mustn’t live in fear of tomorrow but accept today as the gift it is. This is echoed by many spiritual traditions, new age shamans, hucksters selling gratification dressed up as growth, and Instagram influencers.
The tough part of that acceptance is knowing that we are going to die, and that all our friends and family members are too.
So, when it comes to telling ourselves we know we’re not going to live forever, acceptance is the key in both what we say and what we mean. That makes the whole thing palatable, but we don’t have to pretend to like it.
