The Wisdom of the Foolish

My Facebook feed reminded me today, in its charming Facebook way, of a piece I posted back in August of 2015. I don't remember whether I posted the same piece here in the blog. In fact, I don't remember writing or posting the piece at all, which is no surprise, actually. I'm too lazy and too functionally clueless to check on past postings, so I re-post it today, and add a few contemporary observations as well. 
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I am a burden. I am a burden because I cannot hear well. I am a burden because I cannot see well. I cannot walk well. I cannot remember things. I have a neurodegenerative disorder called multiple sclerosis. I am a burden to myself, and it is a burden to me. Or maybe it simply is me. I have become my own disorder, the way a schizophrenic becomes his disorder, no longer his original self, but swallowed by disease and re-actuated with the inside out, as John Lennon said. The outside is in and the inside is out.

I remember how my dad became a burden, and my mother as well, though they were much older than I. My dad could not hear well anymore. You had to shout to speak to him. It was a effort, a nuisance, a burden. And so you stopped speaking to him. When I was young, he taught me how to fish. He left his own pole against a tree and walked along the lakeshore with me and showed me where the fish would be. He put his hand over mine on the grip of the rod and taught me the motion of casting the line so that it settled easy on the water and the fly lit on the riffles before the line and then you took up the slack so there was nothing on the water where the fish were except for the fly and the invisible leader.

When we were young, we went on a seven mile hike into the Mt. Jefferson wilderness area. Coming back, I left my backpack at the top of a snowbank and slid down the bank with my brother, far down to a lower turn in the trail. My father retrieved the pack. There's a picture of him, taken by my mother, stark, distinct as stone against the backdrop of white snow and blue sky, one hand reaching for the strap of the pack. He carried it the rest of the way. It was no burden to him.

But later, to a forgetful, self absorbed young man, he became a burden, an irritant, not worthy of the effort of raising one's voice.

Before he died, he said there were Indians in his hospital room at night, doing some kind of war dance, beating on tom-toms. He was afraid. There was a tall man standing behind me, he said, the tallest man he had ever seen. He reached his hand toward mine and asked me to take the keys, go get the car, bring it to the front, get him out of there.

But there were no keys, though he shook them in his hand.

Go get the car.

I can't. I can't.

Oh faithless and twisted generation, Jesus said, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you.

How long am I to bear myself?

One thing I know. If a burden I be, it is my burden only to bear with myself, and I shall not be a chain or a weight to any other. I would sooner die. I would sooner be abandoned in the sands of a desert, to want, to thirst, to shrivel alone and shed my own skin. I shall not want, nor be the cause of want. I was here to be of use, and if of no use, I shall not further be.
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I see on the old Facebook post that several friends offered kind, encouraging comments. "As long as you can write like this, you will always have worth," they said. 

So what now? What is left when that particular toehold slips? Am I unable to write like that now, or do I simply lack the emotional engagement? Did this matter then, four years ago, because it still seemed that the tide could be turned? At the gates of despair, the last line of defense is hope--blind, unrealistic, extravagant hope. 

Hitler comes to mind, oddly enough. Not that I'm anything like Hitler. God forbid. But I'm thinking of Hitler, cornered in the Bunker as the irrepressible Soviet juggernaut pounded into Berlin itself, yet fantasizing over the possibility of deliverance in a decisive blow to be delivered by "Steiner's Panzerkorps", which, in fact, was all but nonexistent, a phantom consisting by this time only of several grossly understrength battalions and several tanks. Perhaps Hitler himself knew, in the back of his addled mind, that there was no such panzerkorps, and yet there had to be, because there was nothing remaining between convenient delusion and a bullet in the head. 

Less and less often do I imagine a resurrection of the flesh except in desperate, temporary degree. Breathing space. More and more deeply is my heart invaded by love, something pure, willing, heartbreaking, inhuman. The more urgently I want to speak of these things, the less able I become. I am trapped behind impenetrable walls of words. 

The capital city has all but fallen, and is now peopled by life's last enemy.

But here's the good news, the wisdom of the foolish, the hope of glory: that the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.