Thursday, February 16, 2006
Positive sums
Just read Ronni Bennett's A mother's final, best lesson. That link goes to the first of 12 long posts. It's an amazing series that reminds me of my own mother's final days.
A couple months back I thought about something I wanted to tell Mom, then caught myself. I was suddenly stuck by how much love Mom gave, and how now I was in no position to give any back. Then I realized that giving back is not life's deal. Love is giving. It's not an exchange. There's no market for love. Or if there is, it's all at the conversation and relationship levels. No transaction involved. If something looks like a transaction, it's just giving in converging directions.
Mortality — death, frankly — forces us to give love to the living. Love creates and nourishes life. It is the opposite of cheap, the opposite of a deal.
Time may be money, the linguists tell us (try to talk about time without using the language of money). And life is a journey. At its end, it delivers freedom. Not to the deceased, but to the living. Its worst burden is in the ways it can no longer be addressed. The gone cannot take delivery. Where, to whom, and how, do we give our love?
Those are the questions. Big families make answering those easy. Small families like Ronni's keep the question on the asker's lap.
Ronni's story is not just of her mother's death, but of others who shared in that experience. At the end of those subplots, Ronni is the only survivor. Yet the deaths she survived point away from death, toward places that can still accept her gifts.
Her blog, and her skill in writing it, are gifts. The bright light she shines on aging, and on her generation — the one they call "silent" are gifts beyond measure by rankings or linkings or any of the other numeralities by which we are becoming perhaps a little too accustomed to judging each other, and judgint the constructive goods we bring to the shared world we're building here together.
Flawed as it may be, this is a human place. It's made of people, their ideas, their stories.
Try this. Look at how much is given to this place some of us call the Live Web. Look at how little is taken back in the form of money, much less fame.
What we have here, the best of it, cannot be reduced, cannot be understood, in terms of transaction. It demonstrates, even in stories by elders about death, what Whitman called the procreant urge of the world.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex,
Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.
And later,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.
At 58 I'm still young enough to think death unlucky. (Though probably older than Whitman, who became intimate with death as a civil war medic, was when he wrote that.)
Reading Ronni's account, death seems more nothing than something. Less a closed door than an arrow in the general direction of life. Which is what we must give before pointing forward for the rest who follow.
Thought du jour
Don Marti: The distributed online forum called "blogs" is slowly reinventing all the features that the distributed online forum called "Usenet" invented 20 years ago. Who will reinvent "kill thread" for the RSS aggregator?
Way to move
Congrats to Steve Rubel on his new gig with Edelman (the man, the blogger, the enormous PR firm).
Vice
I've been waiting for the Vice President to say something — anything — about having shot a man.
He finally did. He was remorseful. In more ways than one:
...it was unprecedented. I've been in the business for a long time and never seen a situation quite like this. We've had experiences where the President has been shot; we've never had a situation where the Vice President shot somebody.
Except Aaron Burr, as the interviewer then pointed out.
Anyway, I'm no fan of Cheney's. But I also don't think there's much more here than a real dumb and bad mistake. And the personal consequences for the Veep and the lawyer he bagged. And, this being America, vice versa.
Motorcycles and the art of body maintenance
Alan Karl is back to his old blog, and recovery, stateside, after crashing his motorcycle in Bolivia partway along his around-the-world journey. Quite a story. Or series of them.