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1989
Making a bank deposit at an ATM just now I was reminded, to my surprise, that I’ve been banking with Wells Fargo for thirty years. Of all the notable things I recall about 1989, switching banks for the last time wasn’t one. While I don’t think as highly of Wells Fargo as I did even eleven years ago -- when they came out of that last banking crisis looking better than most everyone else -- I’ve stayed with them for the same reason I switched -- it’s easier than dealing with smaller banks that are always getting swallowed up or closing down. Also, they are one of the few local banks left.
Of course I’ve had an account with PG&E even longer, forty-three years, and I don’t trust them at all. It’s nice to be a monopoly. I buy my electricity from the city but still have to pay PG&E just as much money to deliver that electricity.
MCU
I’ve been thinking again about the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how science and magic mix. Harry Potter and Thor are special by birth, the notion of nobility that is surprisingly popular in popular culture. But Marvel characters tend to be average people that something unusual has given special powers to. Superman, like Thor, was born to his power. Iron Man and Batman have power largely due to wealth (Green Arrow, too), but anyone can be bitten by a radioactive spider or get zapped by some strange energy force (Captain Marvel or the Flash or the Hulk). I would actually rather not read how these powers are supposed to work as the pseudo-science would just be painful. As much as I enjoyed the Captain Marvel film, the whole idea of her power is ridiculous. As with the TV show Eureka, I just pretend it’s supposed to be about magic. Magic isn’t supposed to make sense.
The Violet Hour by Katie Roiphe
The Dial Press - 2016
The Prologue was excellent. I don’t know Roiphe but I like the way she writes.
Susan Sontag -
This is really excellent. And necessary. Illness As Metaphor needs to confront this final chapter in Sontag’s life and that’s what Roiphe is doing. I have to confess that I keep thinking of Trump when she talks about Sontag’s self-myth. I completely sympathize with David, but when so many people are actively engaged in pretending that a fantasy is reality, you know something is really wrong.
On page 51 now and I’m wondering if Sontag will ever admit that she was wrong and that death can be a friend. That is what Sontag’s “courage” and “love of life” has come down to, an almost pathetic fear of death. Not a good look for a philosophy student.
I missed noting the page, but this is after they return to NYC from Seattle. The word that is missing here is Penelope Liveley’s favorite word, solipsism. I’m not sure Sontag truly believes in a reality outside herself. I’ve always thought of solipsism as a problem for Epistemology but if you are a true solipsist, it must become a metaphysical concern. Without you there is nothing.
This is why you have to read a story to the end. I mean the story of a life. The story of the survivor, of the person who always beats death can, ultimately, have only one ending. Just as Napoleon’s story of endless war could have only one ending. I’m tempted to say that she got the death she deserved, but that sounds cruel. She got the death that was true to her nature. She could never come to terms with death. She saw death as the enemy. And that’s fine, better than Foucault, for example, but in the end she paid for this with more suffering than was necessary. Though, of course, suffering is a kind of living.
Occurs to me that eschatology must have been for Sontag what gynecology is for me, something I think doesn’t apply. Also, Sontag’s “battle” with bone marrow transplant and what followed took about five months. I don’t think I would try this even if I was guaranteed 10 good years.
Freud -
p80 I may be with Freud here. People forget that morphine doesn’t suit everyone. Just as Sontag would cling to life (and Annie would photograph anything) I don’t see the point of living if you are not able to think clearly. Also, I’ve not had to deal with much pain. My opinion is subject to revision.
Wow! The bit about Lun not coming near him. Now here’s an aspect of my belief in Dog that I hadn’t anticipated. Dogs do have the wisdom to go off and peacefully die. This also suggests the idea (from Pullman) that our death is always with us and the dog can see it. Or probably smell it. This book is so exceeding my expectations.
P85 Lou Andreas-Salomé, I don’t know why I’m surprised to find her here. Roiphe seems to be hostile to Freud’s Stoic attitude toward death.
P89 Okay, now I see what she’s doing. And I completely agree. It is one thing to say that we have nothing to fear from death as when it arrives, we shall be gone. It is another to seriously face the end of your self. (And this would be true even if your body would continue to live.)
(Princess) Marie Bonaparte is yet another interesting women in this story.
P90 “In taking on a personal physician, Freud entered into a personal relation with death. He was beginning what could almost be called a negotiation. He asked Schur to promise that when the time came he would help him die, which Schur did. He also asked Schur to promise to be completely honest, which he did as well.” Quite a deal.
P91 “...Freud took up what he called ‘the sweet habit of smoking’ when he was twenty-four... he... was soon smoking twenty cigars a day...” I am reminded of Hans Castorp.
“... he wrote, ‘For six days now I have not smoked a single cigar, and it cannot be denied that I owe my well-being to this renunciation. But it is sad.’ ”
P92 “...Life without cigars was unbearable, a misery. From very early on he linked smoking to his imaginative work, to his creative side. It seemed to him impossible to work, to concentrate, to envision without a cigar, almost, to live. Something vital, crucial, was tangled up with cigars, something akin to identity.”
P93 Schur: “ ‘I asked myself repeatedly whether I was entitled, or even obliged, to insist more strongly on the enforcement of abstinence... I could not, and in retrospect I realize that I should not regret this fact. It’s questionable in any event whether such an attempt would have been successful.’ ” I am reminded here that my own father could not stop smoking until getting his rib cage cracked open threw off his golf swing... and by then it was too late.
She covers how he saw his passionate smoking as being opposed to his otherwise “petit bourgeois correctness.” His identity as an intellectual.
P94 “His smoking... is crucial to his biography, to understanding his life and times. Freud is interested in this other story, this story written out in smoke. He is not careful. He is not correct. He is not the punctual, controlled, financially responsible, bourgeois Freud. ‘The fellow is actually somewhat more complicated.’ There is the wildness of his passion for cigars: it is the fire, the fuel, the fruitfulness. Elsewhere he calls it his ‘sin,’ which is an interesting word choice for a man of science, a man so naturally disinclined toward religious frameworks. The word ‘sin” endows the habit with a glamour, a richness it might not otherwise have; it is his taboo, his vice, his irrationality, and as such it is crucial to him, it is animating.”
P95 ...”Smoking, he suggests, is a substitute for the sexual; it is the expression of the libido.”
P97 “In... ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle.’ which came out in 1920, Freud raised the possibility of a silent drive toward death, a secret desire for annihilation animating each of us. He wrote a line many analysts would resist, finding it too extreme, too sweeping, too unsettling: ‘The aim of all life is death.’ And in this strange, speculative work, he began to address the irrational draw toward death, the desire for it, the mysterious attraction of undoing oneself.”
I need to refer here to other people interested in this at the time from my Foucault work. And of course Hans Castorp comes to mind again. Here is a quote from The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller, he is writing about Foucault’s time in California exploring “limit experiences” in the Gay bath houses of SF and knowingly exposing himself to AIDS.
p 34
Foucault’s work was drawing to an end; and his life... was ending in an ambiguous gesture, as if he had finally grasped the full significance, too late, of the fatal temptation he had first identified nearly ten years earlier, long before AIDS had become a tangible threat: “The Faustian pact, whose temptation has been instilled in us by the deployment of sexuality, is now as follows: to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself, for the truth and the sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying for.”
This ties in so well with what Freud wrote above about smoking and the libido. Neither man could resist their personal temptation.
And Freud’s self-image that required smoking is in a way similar to Sontag’s survivor self-image.
While talking about dreams,
P78 ...”In the depth of his dream,” writes Foucault, “what man encounters is his death, a death which in its most inauthentic form is but the brutal and bloody interruption of life, yet in its authentic form, is the fulfillment of his very existence.”
Foucault got some of his ideas about death from Georges Bataille and the Surrealists. But I’m not ready to work out if they were getting ideas from Freud or the other way round. Or if it was a Jungian thing and the ideas were just floating in the collective unconscious at the time.
P100 “He would write later, ‘Only the collaboration and the conflict between both primal drives, Eros and death drive, explain the colorful variety of life’s phenomena, never one of them alone.’ ” Again I can’t help thinking of Foucault.
“...He wrote... ‘What we are left with is that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.’ ”
P102 Bonaparte makes up the following response to her from Freud, “Fr: Why sad? That’s what life is. It is precisely the eternal transitoriness which makes life so beautiful.’ She was making this dialogue up... but he had often expressed this view -- in a short essay on Goethe, in his letters; it was a recurring theme in their conversation.”
P103 ...”So the work he is doing now is the work of dying: He is doctor and patient, subject and writer, analysand and analyst.
“Freud seems, at times, to be studying his own relation to life: the subtle and nuanced fraying of the connection... ‘The change taking place is perhaps not very conspicuous; everything is as interesting as it was before; neither are the qualities very different; but some kind of resonance is lacking.’ ”
P104 “When in 1904 Lou Andreas-Salome wrote a floridly sentimental poem about how she would like to live a thousand years, even if those years contained nothing but pain, Freud commented wryly, ‘One cold in the head would prevent me from having that wish.’ ” (Amen.)
P109 “Freud finishes the last page of the Balzac novel and closes the book. He is not working anymore. He is not reading. He says, ‘My dear Schur, you remember our first talk. You promised me then you would help me when I could no longer carry on. It is only torture now and it has no longer any sense.’ ...
...
“At first Anna says no, and then Anna says yes.
“Schur gives Freud a third of a gram of morphia. He drifts to sleep. Later, Schur administers more morphia when he becomes restless.
“A quiet falls over the house. Freud is quiet under the mosquito netting.
P110 “...he died in the manner he chose to die, at the time he wanted to die. He chose and controlled something most of us are not privileged to choose and control. He imagined for himself this death. It looked to others like he had fallen asleep... Anna wrote, ‘I believe there is nothing worse than to see the people nearest to one lose the very qualities for which one loves them. I was spared that with my father, who was himself to the last minute,’ ...
“‘We cannot observe our own death,’ Freud wrote so authoritatively, so convincingly, and all the while he was trying his best to do exactly that.”
I have to say I can’t imagine a better death than this. And yet... it is also a death he didn’t learn anything from because he was in complete control.
John Updike -
P117 “legerity” - le·ger·i·ty. physical or mental agility or quickness; nimbleness.
When "legerity" first appeared in English in 1561, it drew significantly upon the concept of being "light on one's feet," and appropriately so. -Merriam-Webster
Very well written. His death is in some ways even better than Freud’s -- the one and done approach to chemo. But he doesn’t get to control the timing as Freud did. Interesting that I found this moving and yet I still have no desire to read him.
To return to sex and smoking and limit experiences, it would seem that that Krishna-like Updike had died long before.
Dylan Thomas -
And this one is about his marriage. But also about drinking and the “metaphor of being sick.”
Oh, Roiphe tricked me. She played the crime procedural game on me and I fell for it. It isn’t those earlier, obvious subjects but the loss of his talent that is the root of the problem. Perhaps.
P182 About “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”: “When you hear him (in these last readings) reciting the familiar line, ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light,’ the cadence is so mesmerizing that it seems to be a poem about acceptance; it lulls you into a feeling of goodwill toward the workings of the universe. Its emotional effect is in fact the opposite of the meaning of the words: It is a paean to the natural order. When one hears the last soft, caressing ‘Do not go gentle’ one can’t help but be lost in the loveliness of the lines, seduced. When Thomas stands up onstage, incanting it in his unnaturally beautiful voice, ‘Though wise men at their end know dark is right,’ it is a lullaby, drained of violence, drained of anger. You can suddenly hear in his voice what you cannot see on the page: This is on some very peculiar level a love song to death.”
That was amazing.
P186 “...They brought him to St Vincent’s Hospital... His medical records show that he had suffered ‘a severe insult to the brain.’ ”
Dear God, we are all doomed as we’ve suffered nothing but insults to the brain since 2016.
What an ass. I hope Caitlin did well after his death.
Maurice Sendak -
P241 “Maurice viewed artistic influence as an active process. He picked an artist to borrow from for many of his projects. As he put it, ‘The muse does not come pay visits, so you go out stalking, hoping that something will catch you. Where do I steal from?” ... ‘He had a way of swallowing an artist whole, but what he came out with was wholly his own, unmistakably a Sendak drawing.’...”
This reminds me of Martha Grimes and Faulkner.
P243 “After Eugene died, Maurice wanted Lynn to take photographs of his body. He held on to these photographs and liked having them.”
This seems to be a call back to Annie and Sontag.
“Eugene was cremated and his ashes were buried in the garden with Jennie...” Okay, that line got me.
P247 “This seems to be key: Staring into something you have always been terrified of [death] and finding it beautiful.”
P260 So like my father’s death. The time of day when we seem to be least tethered to life.
All but one of these deaths were hospital deaths. Even the great have a hard time avoiding that fate.
Thinking about deaths in The Brothers Karamazov -- as one does -- the two deaths that Dostoevsky uses to show Christian values and attitudes and possibly a connection with the Perennial Philosophy, are completely unlike these modern deaths in that there is so much less fighting and intervention. Only Sendak seemed to enjoy a degree of peace and transformation in his final days. Sontag certainly didn’t.
It is curious that Christian civilization, which has traditionally denigrated this life, has spawned a medical system that fights death as though it were sin. Freud may have been aware of the appeal of death and he did decide to go out on his own schedule, and yet up until then he had fought it as tenacious as had Sontag. Really it was only Thomas who was not ready to do nearly anything to avoid death -- though there is Freud’s smoking to consider.
If I were to write a book like this, I would try to find subjects who had had time for a more contemplative death. I think that is possible, though increasingly rare with our medical system.
It amazed me how many things I recognized from my father’s death (and life) in this book. His death was exactly like Sendak’s. I held his feet in the hospital just like Updike’s first wife when he was having congestive heart failure. And the discussion of how painful a heart attack is reminded me (thanks a lot) of how, when he had his first heart attack when I was 16, I drove him to the hospital (mistake number one) and dropped him off at the front door so that he had to walk through the hospital to the ER, because I didn’t know where the ER entrance was. Of course one could make a good argument that, in fact, my Id was throttling my Super Ego until it passed out and then gleefully convincing my Ego to avoid the ER entrance. Bad Id!
James Salter -
I was unfamiliar with him but I love his way with words. I need to read this section again.
P283-4 This is why I’m grateful that my mother in a sense betrayed my father, by calling 911 when he went into congestive heart failure the night after his 79th birthday, giving me time to attend his actual death four or five unpleasant days later. I haven’t experienced death coming for me, but I have been around death at work and it is strangely natural.
I would like to know what happened with some of the incidental people after the deaths of these famous people. The helpers who were a little more than servants but not quite family.
I have some things I would like to ask my parents now, but they are just about random things in my childhood that they might remember. Confirmation of what I think happened.
With not smoking, it’s not so much wanting to live forever as not wanting to die in that particular way.
And shouldn’t the subtitle be “Great Authors At The End?”
There was an element of finding and needing meaning in life in all these stories. The meaning of their art (or self-image) sustained them. But when it failed, as with Thomas, they fell apart.
