On the way to living

The past few days have seen some work, and a great deal of not working: in the midst of some lovely weather, much quiet, much space.

Today I followed several patterns familiar from this summer: up at 6, surfing the web unimportantly; then slept another hour or two; then...

but here the patterns broke a bit: I inadvertently diverted myself right into the mainstream of thinking about living by watching one of the two videos left by Randy Pausch, the computer science professor who just died, famously, of pancreatic cancer. He reminds me a lot of my brother-in-law (the one still recovering from my sister's death last December – I should call him, and will today, and will call my mother too); thin, smart, energetic, pragmatic, very American, a regular sort of guy.

One reason for me to watch Pausch's work is that I think I know at least as much, if not more, about illness, dying, mortality, and what it means, than he did (he wasn't ill for all that long). However, obviously, he's a guy with a family, with an energetic approach to things, someone who was very busy and engaged – none of which really applies to me, at least not much of the time. So: what does the optimist do when faced with these awful, anti-optimistic things?

And it was useful to see him talk: a bit fast and pragmatic, but good at rousing me from my overly introspective lethargy.

Indeed, one of the first things I did at the end of his 'Time Management' talk was to throw one of those beautiful Indian shawls that I leave over the doors in my apartment over the television set. Not that it's impossible to watch the hulking beast, of course, but now there's a brief barrier that might help me ignore it more often. I took notes on his talk, too; downloaded some (more) time management software, and moved it all to one folder.

(Slightly eerily: he gave that talk at the University of Virginia, where I was an undergraduate more than thirty years ago; and, at the very end, as the camera panned back to show the room and its architecture, I realized that it was in Old Cabell Hall – smack in the middle of the music building, a hall where some of my more thrilling and more embarrassing performance moments happened in the 1970s. A source of intense and sometimes very unhappy memories... one of the places where, in fact, I first gave up on myself, washed my hands of myself as a hopeless case, a lazy fraud, a dreamer not a doer.)

Speaking of giving up on myself – it becomes clear that one of the big differences between Pausch and myself in attitudes towards death/loss is that he really had a short time to deal with it, where I've had more than twenty years (twenty-five years, if you go back to Reid's death). And in fact the entire color of my life has been determined by decisions made at the end of the 1980s: realizing that I wouldn't live long, I understood many things about life – but also because I was sure that I wouldn't live long, I didn't work to implement any of those things, to change my own life to something that would make more sense. And still, that is how I operate, at some deep and all-encompassing level: waiting for my life to end so that I don't have to do the work to live it... and now it is twenty years later. Amazing stasis (that should, perhaps, be a hymn: amazing stasis, how sweet the sound, that destroyed a wretch like me).

At least I know all of that is absurd.

While finishing those notes, organizing, I played some music – since I'm writing about the classical works, I put on some of Ned Rorem's choral works. I don't care that much about Rorem, but his two settings of Paul Monette's AIDS poems need to be written about early in this book, as they are rooted in much the same aesthetic world as the AIDS Quilt Songbook and Corigliano's Symphony no. 1. And, in the midst of writing/thinking about all of this, and how the main barrier to writing/living for me is a range of foolish decisions to give up on myself that I made between 1973 and 1987, the Rorem/Monette came on – a vast, dark waltz, intensely sung, with a certain savage power and beautiful falling melodies, unmistakably more powerful and attention-grabbing than the pieces around it, so that I recognized the sense of it without even knowing the piece. Ending with the phrase, howled passionately and repeatedly over the crescendoing waltz of time, the one that defies any possibility of giving up: I'm here, I'm here, I'm here...