shai
09-13-2007, 02:53 PM
1
It started when I was young at home and in religious school. Walk single file on the right side of the hall. Don’t push. Honor thy mother and father. Stop spitting your gum into your sisters’ hair. She didn’t even mind it after my mother started the peanut butter shampooing, rinsing and repeating for the better part of a few hours. Use your words was one rule I didn’t follow until I was four, and when I started speaking I had a speech impediment. During class I would have to go to speech therapy in a trailer parked on the fields next to the school. The trailer was frustration, a packed space with ugly grey carpeting. “Girl,” she would say. “Girgle,” I’d repeat. “Tree,” she would say. “Shree,” I’d repeat.
At that time my grandfather couldn’t say a word of English. We spent a lot of time outdoors together. There was a stream near our apartment we would visit and set up traps made out of glass jars, and the next time we’d come a water snake would be trapped in it. He’d point to a tree and ask me what it was, and I’d scream “Shree!” and he would laugh.
2
Natural selection has left both unity and diversity between organisms. All organisms use the same language; if the DNA of an evergreen tree was implanted into a human cell, we would begin to produce evergreen tree proteins. Obviously though, an evergreen and a human are not the same. There seems to be no one answer to what exactly is the most biologically fit. A tree, rooted deep into the earth, cannot move. If death is impending it does nothing but whittle away slowly. A sea urchin, in apparent wisdom, will release an enormous cloud of sperm into the surrounding seas seconds before its demise, keeping the possibility of procreation alive. Internal copulation, though, has left mammals with a somewhat more subtle death act.
After the invention of the defibrillator, a phenomena known as near-death experience began to be somewhat common. Those who suffered from cardiac arrest, the sudden and complete loss of function by the heart, were able to be revived back to life. Patients began to report a distinct experience afterwards: a sensation of floating, calmness, and overwhelming feelings of peace and love. This transcendental experience has been linked to the production of the neurotransmitter DMT, which was found to occur naturally in high amounts only before death in mammals.
The connection between DMT and near-death is contested by many scientists. What then could cause such a seemingly mystical experience in the inevitable face of death and for what reason? How is it that some, when faced with the inevitability of death react by slitting their wrists while others reach mystical heights, and still others release massive amounts of sperm or do absolutely nothing? This question is inherently linked to the broader more important question: What do we do, how do we live, in the face of the unavoidable end? The sea urchin has found its answer. Humanity though has been plagued by the question surely since the beginning of thought.
3
I thought that after three years it would be easier, but I still haven’t gotten used to the idea of killing mice. It’s their face. They lay lifeless, stomach up, limbs taped down, on the black lab tables. Their eyes bulge out a little, their small tongues stick out, and their two front teeth are broken because I put my finger behind their small furry heads and then pull on their tails until I feel the crack of their skulls separating from their necks. It is a humane process though. The mice are put into a large container filled with CO2 beforehand, depriving them of oxygen so that eventually they fall asleep and lose consciousness. I’ve done it a million times but I still get anxious when I have to do it. They also smell terribly.
And now, once again, the task has come. I turn the nozzle of the CO2 container. Nothing comes out. Worried, I look around.
“What is zee problem?”
It’s Professor Michaela. She is skinny, and wears slightly oversized glasses. Her German accent suits her. The students call her Professor Michaela Eichmann.
“There’s no more CO2.”
She comes over, grabs the mouse out of the container with no gloves, by the tail, and lets it crawl around on the lab table for a few seconds. From the tail, she slowly moves her fingers up the mouse’s back until she reaches the neck. She takes her index finger and pushes down, and in one fluid motion grabs the tail with her other hand and pulls. The mouse’s limbs convulse for a few seconds, it urinates and releases its bowels, and it dies. She tells me to finish up. I thank her and she leaves to her office.
Turning it over I see that familiar face. I tape down the limbs and start cutting from just above the stomach. Any blood that comes out is absorbed by the white fur, making for somewhat of a clean dissection. Cutting through the diaphragm, I see the heart, still beating. I cut it out and place it in a dish of clear solution under a microscope. Through the microscope I see a seemingly lifeless, dark red, and cluttered mess. It only takes a few seconds for the heart to recover from the shock of leaving its former enclosure and suddenly, it beats.
I touch the heart with my finger, and feel the force of the tissue expanding against my skin. A moment later it contracts, and blood squirts out, swirling into the solution, and around my finger. I remember the mouse, open, heartless. I walk over and put it into a plastic bag, date it, initial, and then squeeze it into the already packed freezer.
The research position has become little more than tedious work. I have become somewhat used to this stale process of repeating steps mindlessly until I have something that will make Michaela happy. At one point the whole thing excited me, but graduate school has found a way to remove and trace of a soul I used to have.
4
It was summer, so I was visiting my aunt in Long Island, on the beach. Stepping onto the sand, I felt that sharp hot sensation on the bottom of my feet quickly dampen into comforting warmth. Above me a seagull beat his wings and I couldn’t tell if what I heard was the sound of the air whipping through his light feathers or the ocean waves crashing onto the sunned sand. My grandfather stood tall next to me, my head reaching up to the denim belt loops on his jeans. It came without warning. My hand shot up to my scalp before I knew what I was doing. Warmth and wetness. I looked up to see only sky. On my fingers I noticed a smear of crimson blood, paint-stroked across the top of my nail. On the sand next to me was a shell, cracked open and shining black like asphalt on a hot day. On the edges where it broke I could just make out small amounts of the blood from my head. I picked up the shell and showed my grandfather. Seeing my head he knelt down to inspect. His hands moved through my hair, I could feel wetness surround the tip of his finger. He asked me if I was ok. I asked him what happened. My grandfather explained to me the process in which birds would find shelled animals in the ocean, swoop down and catch them in their mouths, and fly around in the sky with the shelled animal looking for a rock to drop it onto so that the shell would break and it could eat. My dark head was that rock, but the bird never came down to eat his food. Excited I kept the shell and took it home. It smelt of salt and sea death. A few days later my mom made me throw it out.
5
It’s 5:30 PM and already it is dark. I walk home through the cold. The whole scene is grayed as if in an old movie, except for the annoying high contrast the streetlamps give off. “Poetic,” I think to myself sarcastically. And then: “I need a girlfriend.”
I had been in love once, or I thought I was. It was towards the end of high school. Each time I would close my eyes my mind would fill with thoughts of her. Her smell. Her eyes. Her hair. She completely consumed me. I couldn’t sleep. My grades started dropping, my friends thought I was sick, my parents even accused me of doing drugs. But looking back on it I realize I wasn’t in love at all. I’ve watched pornos where I’ve taken special notice of the girl’s eyes or hair, and that love was hardly real. Or that love is more real; it usually ends up in the garbage can though. But that feeling that kept me up all those nights, it sure as hell felt more real. Life was better when I thought I was in love. A certain divinity crept into the most concrete inanimate things. I could look at an ant, a tree, the chimney of my house, the string tied onto a balloon, that broken blade of my ceiling fan and I’d be in complete awe of their existence. But I’m better now. Once I remembered to jerk off, love and god died and I could sleep again.
6
The sky has always been a source of inspiration. Ptolemy looked up at the stars and felt a departure from the mortality of Earth. The Mayan civilization found splendor in the stars, making up gods not for purposes of explanation, but as a way to give homage to the beautiful night skies. The German author Hermann Hesse wrote about the “cheerful serenity of the stars.” To him, the stars were a reminder of the deepest happiness: a subtle happiness which was not frivolity, and which was at the heart of every true piece of art and thought. But if the stars can lead us to happiness, it can also lead us to misery. Looking up at the night sky, Albert Camus, could not escape a feeling of enormity. Like Ptolemy, he felt the immortality of the stars, and the mortality of the Earth, but instead of inspiration and happiness, Camus was left with a feeling of relative smallness and meaninglessness. Ptolemy was able to escape this Earth and be in the stars, while Camus was stuck in the soil. For the ancient Chinese Poet Li Po, the night sky was at once his ultimate happiness and his demise. Li Po was fond of taking night time boat rides along the Yangtze River alone. One night, he noticed the reflection of the moon in the water. Overcome by the moons beauty, Li Po tried to embrace the reflection, and drowned in the river.
7
I remember walking on the beach as the sun was setting with my grandfather, how there was no one there, how it was so windy it was hard for me to walk. The whole of my being was concentrated into the task of walking forward. My hair, like my shirt, waved uncontrollably, trying to leave the constraints of my scalp, and Newton screamed his third law: every action has an equal and opposite reaction; so I felt my hair trying to fly away and my head pulling tightly back. And I felt each thread of my shirt pulling on the next one, wanting to float away into oblivion and the skin of my back tugging in step, conforming to that screamed rule. I looked over to my grandfather. He looked frail and the skin of his face seemed to have been dropped onto his skull like a wrinkled sheet onto a bed. I thought he wouldn’t make it back. I told him that it was just a little farther, that we just had to go a little more. The wind carried the pale sand around in the air, the color of the sand melting with the pigment of my grandfather’s skin; at times he seemed to be disappearing.
8
I live in an apartment across from a rabbi, a real rabbi, a beard, a hat, everything. He invites me over every once in a while and he gives me a beer or a shot and some of his wife’s homemade snacks and talks to me about religion or life or whatever. I ask him what god is. I ask him what does spirituality have to do with not eating pork, or lighting candles on Friday. I tell him that I can feel spiritual without saying a prayer from a siddur, that I can even feel the unity between all things and eat pork, and that everything I see and experience leads me to the conclusion that the universe is indifferent. He tells me those are only feelings, that truth and beauty are a manifestation of God.
He’s also an alcoholic. The alcohol, he tells me, is spiritual lubricant. I think of Sartre, who looked at a glass of beer and became uneasy by its existence.
9
My grandfather lies in his hospital bed. He knows he is going to die. He’s been laying there for a month now, and he’s bored. I talk to my father outside the room. I ask him if we should say the Shema, the traditional Jewish prayer one recites before death. My grandfather calls in the nurse and asks her to end it. She says that it is not up to her, that the matter is up to God, and that we must wait for His action. He rolls his eyes as if to say I’m dying, not dumb.
In the waiting room the television is on. Israel has attacked Lebanon. The news reporter goes into the details of the situation. I’ve had enough of it; I leave to see my grandfather. I ask him what’s up, if I can do anything for him. The awkwardness of the situation makes me anxious. He holds my hand in his, and looks at me. I ask him if I should close the blinds to the window; he says later tonight. We sit there silent, his hand in mine, and I fall into it. The tranquility is intense. I feel his complete understanding and agreement with the conditions of the world, with his death, and he lets me share the sentiment. He takes his hand and makes a fist and punches my arm playfully. A few minutes later he asks me if I am ready and I begin to cry. I nod even though I couldn’t possibly be. He closes his eyes and seems to concentrate, and then silence. A moment passes. The light shines in through the window, lightly coating the blanket over my grandfather’s body, shimmering on the thin fragments of cotton not completely attached to the base. He opens his eyes and looks around surprised, and then sees me. Realizing he is still alive he gives a silly grin.
Later that night we go to CVS to pick up antidepressants for my grandmother and mother. Coming back to the hospital we go to the room and find my grandfather dead, my mother and grandmother standing around his body. His mouth is open and his head is lying on his shoulder. Each of my family members kiss his lifeless head. I stand by watching, staring. My father tells me that I can touch him, I don’t want to, but I do it anyway. My sister takes a slinky which she bought to give to my grandfather as an 82nd birthday present and puts it over his finger as a ring. She sets the hand back down and steps back and watches it for a second. “I guess that’s weird,” she says, and takes it back off.
10
It is true. To argue logically one has to accept that there is an absolute truth. Any axiom which denies an absolute truth is itself an absolute truth, and so the whole tower crumbles. What then, do I make of this ever-present feeling of meaninglessness, of the skies laughing at me? Is it, like the rabbi said, only a feeling? I find two answers.
Pythagoras, who, like most mathematicians around 500 BC was also heavily concerned with metaphysics, believed that the universe was composed of two entities: the limited and the unlimited, a whole and voids, roughly analogous to the supernatural heavens and the tangible earth. The natural numbers (0, 1, 2, 3…) were the highest form of reality for Pythagoras because they too were comprised of wholes separated by voids (musical notes and scales are also of this form). Truth and reality could not only be described with natural numbers, reality was natural numbers. When a student of his discovered the existence of irrational numbers, numbers that can’t be expressed as the quotient of two natural numbers, he thought that this was a flaw in nature and could not accept their existence. Pythagoras had the student drowned. Plato found both rational and irrational numbers to be true and perfect, more real than our own physical world, which was only a reflection of the abstract world of truth and beauty which was run by math. Imaginary numbers were later discovered. Descartes, at first, had trouble accepting them, using “imaginary number” as a derogatory term. Later, Euler created what has come to be known as the most elegant equation in mathematics. My math professor was in tears as he wrote it on the board: e^(iπ)+ 1 = 0. For mathematicians, contemplating this equation is the equivalent of tripping on acid. The equation features a connecting of the five most important values in all of mathematics, two irrational numbers, an imaginary number, and two natural numbers. Richard Feynman, perhaps the greatest theoretical physicist since Einstein, would say that even this is not real, that nature knows nothing of it. Emerson told us that even nature is not real, only we are. Sartre would say that it makes no difference if there is a universal reality or not, that man could not tell the difference in any case. This is the first answer: God’s existence would change nothing; man cannot possibly know Him.
The second answer is Feynman’s. It is said that he was a magician, as opposed to a genius. He would come out and declare outlandish things like photons did whatever they pleased, moved any way they wanted, at any speed they wanted, faster or slower than the speed of light. Everyone thought he was completely nuts, but five years later the physics community figured out he was right. And it is because it was found that photons, the particles of light, move anyway they want, anyhow they want, that so many peoples notion of reality and truth was turned upside down. Truth, it seems, does not have to follow logic, it is not necessary. No amount of elegance, intuition or logic will ever amount to truth if it is simply not so. Feynman was a scientist of the highest order, and yet he condemned the whole subject for being something that was ultimately not true and real: “If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that Nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!”
11
My grandfather rolled up the cuffs of his pants, took off his shoes and socks, and stepped in. I followed. Looking down I saw the wavy form of my toes clear through the water. Above me, leaves swayed, letting lines of sun shine through, spotting my toes and lighting the waters surface like foil. The stream ran cold that day, and slow. We tried to stop it. We took rocks from the shore and piled them. We covered holes with twigs, and then grass, and then dirt. I looked over and saw my grandfather, knees in the water and putting his hands over where the water was still running through. I felt around our wall, and tried with any part of my body to stop the relentless flow. Soon we were both lying in the river, bodies tight against our wall of rock and tree, grass and dirt. And though the water was so clear, as if nothing, and so cold, as if frozen, and so slow, it seemed as if no amount of rock or twig or grass or dirt or bodies could stop the slow subtle power of the stream.
We came out dripping, shivering, but the sun warmed my skin. My wet feet clung to the soil of the shore, and my toes dug into the earth. My grandfather rested his hand on my head; we stood there watching the water flow past us.
It started when I was young at home and in religious school. Walk single file on the right side of the hall. Don’t push. Honor thy mother and father. Stop spitting your gum into your sisters’ hair. She didn’t even mind it after my mother started the peanut butter shampooing, rinsing and repeating for the better part of a few hours. Use your words was one rule I didn’t follow until I was four, and when I started speaking I had a speech impediment. During class I would have to go to speech therapy in a trailer parked on the fields next to the school. The trailer was frustration, a packed space with ugly grey carpeting. “Girl,” she would say. “Girgle,” I’d repeat. “Tree,” she would say. “Shree,” I’d repeat.
At that time my grandfather couldn’t say a word of English. We spent a lot of time outdoors together. There was a stream near our apartment we would visit and set up traps made out of glass jars, and the next time we’d come a water snake would be trapped in it. He’d point to a tree and ask me what it was, and I’d scream “Shree!” and he would laugh.
2
Natural selection has left both unity and diversity between organisms. All organisms use the same language; if the DNA of an evergreen tree was implanted into a human cell, we would begin to produce evergreen tree proteins. Obviously though, an evergreen and a human are not the same. There seems to be no one answer to what exactly is the most biologically fit. A tree, rooted deep into the earth, cannot move. If death is impending it does nothing but whittle away slowly. A sea urchin, in apparent wisdom, will release an enormous cloud of sperm into the surrounding seas seconds before its demise, keeping the possibility of procreation alive. Internal copulation, though, has left mammals with a somewhat more subtle death act.
After the invention of the defibrillator, a phenomena known as near-death experience began to be somewhat common. Those who suffered from cardiac arrest, the sudden and complete loss of function by the heart, were able to be revived back to life. Patients began to report a distinct experience afterwards: a sensation of floating, calmness, and overwhelming feelings of peace and love. This transcendental experience has been linked to the production of the neurotransmitter DMT, which was found to occur naturally in high amounts only before death in mammals.
The connection between DMT and near-death is contested by many scientists. What then could cause such a seemingly mystical experience in the inevitable face of death and for what reason? How is it that some, when faced with the inevitability of death react by slitting their wrists while others reach mystical heights, and still others release massive amounts of sperm or do absolutely nothing? This question is inherently linked to the broader more important question: What do we do, how do we live, in the face of the unavoidable end? The sea urchin has found its answer. Humanity though has been plagued by the question surely since the beginning of thought.
3
I thought that after three years it would be easier, but I still haven’t gotten used to the idea of killing mice. It’s their face. They lay lifeless, stomach up, limbs taped down, on the black lab tables. Their eyes bulge out a little, their small tongues stick out, and their two front teeth are broken because I put my finger behind their small furry heads and then pull on their tails until I feel the crack of their skulls separating from their necks. It is a humane process though. The mice are put into a large container filled with CO2 beforehand, depriving them of oxygen so that eventually they fall asleep and lose consciousness. I’ve done it a million times but I still get anxious when I have to do it. They also smell terribly.
And now, once again, the task has come. I turn the nozzle of the CO2 container. Nothing comes out. Worried, I look around.
“What is zee problem?”
It’s Professor Michaela. She is skinny, and wears slightly oversized glasses. Her German accent suits her. The students call her Professor Michaela Eichmann.
“There’s no more CO2.”
She comes over, grabs the mouse out of the container with no gloves, by the tail, and lets it crawl around on the lab table for a few seconds. From the tail, she slowly moves her fingers up the mouse’s back until she reaches the neck. She takes her index finger and pushes down, and in one fluid motion grabs the tail with her other hand and pulls. The mouse’s limbs convulse for a few seconds, it urinates and releases its bowels, and it dies. She tells me to finish up. I thank her and she leaves to her office.
Turning it over I see that familiar face. I tape down the limbs and start cutting from just above the stomach. Any blood that comes out is absorbed by the white fur, making for somewhat of a clean dissection. Cutting through the diaphragm, I see the heart, still beating. I cut it out and place it in a dish of clear solution under a microscope. Through the microscope I see a seemingly lifeless, dark red, and cluttered mess. It only takes a few seconds for the heart to recover from the shock of leaving its former enclosure and suddenly, it beats.
I touch the heart with my finger, and feel the force of the tissue expanding against my skin. A moment later it contracts, and blood squirts out, swirling into the solution, and around my finger. I remember the mouse, open, heartless. I walk over and put it into a plastic bag, date it, initial, and then squeeze it into the already packed freezer.
The research position has become little more than tedious work. I have become somewhat used to this stale process of repeating steps mindlessly until I have something that will make Michaela happy. At one point the whole thing excited me, but graduate school has found a way to remove and trace of a soul I used to have.
4
It was summer, so I was visiting my aunt in Long Island, on the beach. Stepping onto the sand, I felt that sharp hot sensation on the bottom of my feet quickly dampen into comforting warmth. Above me a seagull beat his wings and I couldn’t tell if what I heard was the sound of the air whipping through his light feathers or the ocean waves crashing onto the sunned sand. My grandfather stood tall next to me, my head reaching up to the denim belt loops on his jeans. It came without warning. My hand shot up to my scalp before I knew what I was doing. Warmth and wetness. I looked up to see only sky. On my fingers I noticed a smear of crimson blood, paint-stroked across the top of my nail. On the sand next to me was a shell, cracked open and shining black like asphalt on a hot day. On the edges where it broke I could just make out small amounts of the blood from my head. I picked up the shell and showed my grandfather. Seeing my head he knelt down to inspect. His hands moved through my hair, I could feel wetness surround the tip of his finger. He asked me if I was ok. I asked him what happened. My grandfather explained to me the process in which birds would find shelled animals in the ocean, swoop down and catch them in their mouths, and fly around in the sky with the shelled animal looking for a rock to drop it onto so that the shell would break and it could eat. My dark head was that rock, but the bird never came down to eat his food. Excited I kept the shell and took it home. It smelt of salt and sea death. A few days later my mom made me throw it out.
5
It’s 5:30 PM and already it is dark. I walk home through the cold. The whole scene is grayed as if in an old movie, except for the annoying high contrast the streetlamps give off. “Poetic,” I think to myself sarcastically. And then: “I need a girlfriend.”
I had been in love once, or I thought I was. It was towards the end of high school. Each time I would close my eyes my mind would fill with thoughts of her. Her smell. Her eyes. Her hair. She completely consumed me. I couldn’t sleep. My grades started dropping, my friends thought I was sick, my parents even accused me of doing drugs. But looking back on it I realize I wasn’t in love at all. I’ve watched pornos where I’ve taken special notice of the girl’s eyes or hair, and that love was hardly real. Or that love is more real; it usually ends up in the garbage can though. But that feeling that kept me up all those nights, it sure as hell felt more real. Life was better when I thought I was in love. A certain divinity crept into the most concrete inanimate things. I could look at an ant, a tree, the chimney of my house, the string tied onto a balloon, that broken blade of my ceiling fan and I’d be in complete awe of their existence. But I’m better now. Once I remembered to jerk off, love and god died and I could sleep again.
6
The sky has always been a source of inspiration. Ptolemy looked up at the stars and felt a departure from the mortality of Earth. The Mayan civilization found splendor in the stars, making up gods not for purposes of explanation, but as a way to give homage to the beautiful night skies. The German author Hermann Hesse wrote about the “cheerful serenity of the stars.” To him, the stars were a reminder of the deepest happiness: a subtle happiness which was not frivolity, and which was at the heart of every true piece of art and thought. But if the stars can lead us to happiness, it can also lead us to misery. Looking up at the night sky, Albert Camus, could not escape a feeling of enormity. Like Ptolemy, he felt the immortality of the stars, and the mortality of the Earth, but instead of inspiration and happiness, Camus was left with a feeling of relative smallness and meaninglessness. Ptolemy was able to escape this Earth and be in the stars, while Camus was stuck in the soil. For the ancient Chinese Poet Li Po, the night sky was at once his ultimate happiness and his demise. Li Po was fond of taking night time boat rides along the Yangtze River alone. One night, he noticed the reflection of the moon in the water. Overcome by the moons beauty, Li Po tried to embrace the reflection, and drowned in the river.
7
I remember walking on the beach as the sun was setting with my grandfather, how there was no one there, how it was so windy it was hard for me to walk. The whole of my being was concentrated into the task of walking forward. My hair, like my shirt, waved uncontrollably, trying to leave the constraints of my scalp, and Newton screamed his third law: every action has an equal and opposite reaction; so I felt my hair trying to fly away and my head pulling tightly back. And I felt each thread of my shirt pulling on the next one, wanting to float away into oblivion and the skin of my back tugging in step, conforming to that screamed rule. I looked over to my grandfather. He looked frail and the skin of his face seemed to have been dropped onto his skull like a wrinkled sheet onto a bed. I thought he wouldn’t make it back. I told him that it was just a little farther, that we just had to go a little more. The wind carried the pale sand around in the air, the color of the sand melting with the pigment of my grandfather’s skin; at times he seemed to be disappearing.
8
I live in an apartment across from a rabbi, a real rabbi, a beard, a hat, everything. He invites me over every once in a while and he gives me a beer or a shot and some of his wife’s homemade snacks and talks to me about religion or life or whatever. I ask him what god is. I ask him what does spirituality have to do with not eating pork, or lighting candles on Friday. I tell him that I can feel spiritual without saying a prayer from a siddur, that I can even feel the unity between all things and eat pork, and that everything I see and experience leads me to the conclusion that the universe is indifferent. He tells me those are only feelings, that truth and beauty are a manifestation of God.
He’s also an alcoholic. The alcohol, he tells me, is spiritual lubricant. I think of Sartre, who looked at a glass of beer and became uneasy by its existence.
9
My grandfather lies in his hospital bed. He knows he is going to die. He’s been laying there for a month now, and he’s bored. I talk to my father outside the room. I ask him if we should say the Shema, the traditional Jewish prayer one recites before death. My grandfather calls in the nurse and asks her to end it. She says that it is not up to her, that the matter is up to God, and that we must wait for His action. He rolls his eyes as if to say I’m dying, not dumb.
In the waiting room the television is on. Israel has attacked Lebanon. The news reporter goes into the details of the situation. I’ve had enough of it; I leave to see my grandfather. I ask him what’s up, if I can do anything for him. The awkwardness of the situation makes me anxious. He holds my hand in his, and looks at me. I ask him if I should close the blinds to the window; he says later tonight. We sit there silent, his hand in mine, and I fall into it. The tranquility is intense. I feel his complete understanding and agreement with the conditions of the world, with his death, and he lets me share the sentiment. He takes his hand and makes a fist and punches my arm playfully. A few minutes later he asks me if I am ready and I begin to cry. I nod even though I couldn’t possibly be. He closes his eyes and seems to concentrate, and then silence. A moment passes. The light shines in through the window, lightly coating the blanket over my grandfather’s body, shimmering on the thin fragments of cotton not completely attached to the base. He opens his eyes and looks around surprised, and then sees me. Realizing he is still alive he gives a silly grin.
Later that night we go to CVS to pick up antidepressants for my grandmother and mother. Coming back to the hospital we go to the room and find my grandfather dead, my mother and grandmother standing around his body. His mouth is open and his head is lying on his shoulder. Each of my family members kiss his lifeless head. I stand by watching, staring. My father tells me that I can touch him, I don’t want to, but I do it anyway. My sister takes a slinky which she bought to give to my grandfather as an 82nd birthday present and puts it over his finger as a ring. She sets the hand back down and steps back and watches it for a second. “I guess that’s weird,” she says, and takes it back off.
10
It is true. To argue logically one has to accept that there is an absolute truth. Any axiom which denies an absolute truth is itself an absolute truth, and so the whole tower crumbles. What then, do I make of this ever-present feeling of meaninglessness, of the skies laughing at me? Is it, like the rabbi said, only a feeling? I find two answers.
Pythagoras, who, like most mathematicians around 500 BC was also heavily concerned with metaphysics, believed that the universe was composed of two entities: the limited and the unlimited, a whole and voids, roughly analogous to the supernatural heavens and the tangible earth. The natural numbers (0, 1, 2, 3…) were the highest form of reality for Pythagoras because they too were comprised of wholes separated by voids (musical notes and scales are also of this form). Truth and reality could not only be described with natural numbers, reality was natural numbers. When a student of his discovered the existence of irrational numbers, numbers that can’t be expressed as the quotient of two natural numbers, he thought that this was a flaw in nature and could not accept their existence. Pythagoras had the student drowned. Plato found both rational and irrational numbers to be true and perfect, more real than our own physical world, which was only a reflection of the abstract world of truth and beauty which was run by math. Imaginary numbers were later discovered. Descartes, at first, had trouble accepting them, using “imaginary number” as a derogatory term. Later, Euler created what has come to be known as the most elegant equation in mathematics. My math professor was in tears as he wrote it on the board: e^(iπ)+ 1 = 0. For mathematicians, contemplating this equation is the equivalent of tripping on acid. The equation features a connecting of the five most important values in all of mathematics, two irrational numbers, an imaginary number, and two natural numbers. Richard Feynman, perhaps the greatest theoretical physicist since Einstein, would say that even this is not real, that nature knows nothing of it. Emerson told us that even nature is not real, only we are. Sartre would say that it makes no difference if there is a universal reality or not, that man could not tell the difference in any case. This is the first answer: God’s existence would change nothing; man cannot possibly know Him.
The second answer is Feynman’s. It is said that he was a magician, as opposed to a genius. He would come out and declare outlandish things like photons did whatever they pleased, moved any way they wanted, at any speed they wanted, faster or slower than the speed of light. Everyone thought he was completely nuts, but five years later the physics community figured out he was right. And it is because it was found that photons, the particles of light, move anyway they want, anyhow they want, that so many peoples notion of reality and truth was turned upside down. Truth, it seems, does not have to follow logic, it is not necessary. No amount of elegance, intuition or logic will ever amount to truth if it is simply not so. Feynman was a scientist of the highest order, and yet he condemned the whole subject for being something that was ultimately not true and real: “If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts — physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on — remember that Nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!”
11
My grandfather rolled up the cuffs of his pants, took off his shoes and socks, and stepped in. I followed. Looking down I saw the wavy form of my toes clear through the water. Above me, leaves swayed, letting lines of sun shine through, spotting my toes and lighting the waters surface like foil. The stream ran cold that day, and slow. We tried to stop it. We took rocks from the shore and piled them. We covered holes with twigs, and then grass, and then dirt. I looked over and saw my grandfather, knees in the water and putting his hands over where the water was still running through. I felt around our wall, and tried with any part of my body to stop the relentless flow. Soon we were both lying in the river, bodies tight against our wall of rock and tree, grass and dirt. And though the water was so clear, as if nothing, and so cold, as if frozen, and so slow, it seemed as if no amount of rock or twig or grass or dirt or bodies could stop the slow subtle power of the stream.
We came out dripping, shivering, but the sun warmed my skin. My wet feet clung to the soil of the shore, and my toes dug into the earth. My grandfather rested his hand on my head; we stood there watching the water flow past us.