The Fall of the House of Boughton

Some of you may remember a very old movie (older than I, in fact) called Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House, starring Cary Grant (1948). A more recent movie that is rather like the first is The Money Pit, starring Tom Hanks (1986). In both movies, a young couple has invested in a dream house for their future which turns out to be a nightmare. I remember watching the Cary Grant movie a very long time ago on an afternoon TV matinee. It was my first realization that Cary Grant was actually funny. All that I knew of him beforehand was that he was the one who said, “Judy, Judy, Judy”. Unable to find this online so far, I looked up The Money Pit instead and watched that one this morning. Hanks is also quite funny in this comedy of disasters as a young man trying to hold together a house that is self-destructing all around him while at the same time maintaining a marriage that is far more important to him than the money or the house. “The foundation is the important thing,” the building contractor tells Hanks toward the end of the story. “If you have a good foundation, everything else can be repaired.”

It’s an endearing sort of moral, and it may even be true. But the reason these two movies came to mind in the first place is that upon awakening this morning, after a rather sleepless night punctuated by pains and discomforts for which there seems no end of modulation, it occurred to me that my body is like the cursed house in these movies, falling apart bit by bit, beam by beam, from floor to ceiling to plumbing to wiring. Every evening, I go to bed in the hope that the night crew of time and rest will have mended some parts of the crumbling structure by morning, only to find upon waking that new holes have appeared, new pipes have cracked, that the floors are sagging and the timbers are groaning and that the latter condition is now worse than the former. Oh, the foundation is still solid—I’m still here, aren’t?—but all the parts above ground are tipped and skewed and leaning in quite an alarming manner.

Now, I don’t remember what ultimately happens with the house in the Grant movie. In the Hanks film, the thing is in a seemingly hopeless state, such that even the repairs are in need of repair. But when the foundation of the love itself is threatened, the house no longer matters to either the man or the woman. Repairs are finally effected, the structure made sound, but the foundation, the love that is the very reason for the house, has been undermined. Of course, it all turns out well in the end (this is, after all, a comedy). Love is restored and, with it, the house, the dream, and the future.

Would that life itself were a comedy. Or then again, perhaps it is. In 2 Corinthians, the apostle Paul speaks of dwellings in this manner: For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven, if indeed, having been clothed, we shall not be found naked. For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life.

Some of my troubles may be reparable. I don’t know. If they are, they are only so for a time—and God knows what period of time. Deterioration remains a constant process, relentlessly undoing repair, relentlessly degrading that which has arisen from the initial foundation. The great hope from the beginning is for a structure not subject to dissolution, the eternal foundation sometimes known as love.  

Wet

Another day of raining and storming and thunder and lightening in beautiful Renon, Bali, Indonesia. This resulted in a severe case of cabin fever by the time 5 pm rolled around, which itself has resulted a rather soaking trip to town for a cup of coffee. Actually, I'm only half soaked so far, but I still have to get home later, so I think I can count on a thorough soaking before the evening is through. Now that there's no longer a car at my house, I kinda miss that car. 

In the meantime, I'm still battling the flu--day 5 and going fairly strong. This, as I may have mentioned, is the third case of flu that I've had during this rainy season. Different strains, my friend tells me, and I guess I'm just lucky enough to get each of them in turn. 

Of course, although it is steadily raining, it is also still fairly hot--25C/77F. Which just doesn't feel right to an old Oregonian.

Morning

Two little birds with yellow heads peck at the cold ash in the fire pit, seeking the baked carcasses of beetles and wood ticks. A pale blue sun is on the water and wisps of fog skate above the face of the water, forming the final ruminations of dawn. The two birds fly off, then straightaway return, as if on elastic threads, or like honeybees to flowers. Everything is very large at morning time. Everything inhales and expands, throwing out arms, filling the lungs of the new day—large and robust and brittle and uncertain, waiting for the trout to begin to feed. Nothing of this day has been touched as yet. It has only just opened its eyes.

Orangutans

I wrote a short note to my wife the other day. Ex-wife, that is. Well, we’re still married, but you know what I mean. She is about to take a trip to Kalimantan with her boyfriend and other friends, where they will boat into the jungle to see orangutans.

I wrote: Have fun on your trip. Be careful. This would be way too much for me. I’m sorry.

She wrote back and asked what I was sorry about. What would be too much?

I explained that I am sorry that I have become so unable.

This is the first time, oddly enough, that it has occurred to me to feel “sad” about what has happened to my health. I’ve always been pretty stoic about it, just facing things the way they are. And yet, as I have become steadily more unable, I guess I’ve reached a sort of tipping point between feeling a little bit ‘challenged’ and actually ‘unable’; between feeling that I’m having a bad day health-wise and feeling that every day is a bad day.  

I see on my Facebook page one of these reminders from times past. Just two years ago, we were in Singaraja for a day-long snorkeling/water sports trip--and I see a stranger. Where has the person who could do these things gone?  There I am, swimming tirelessly in the open sea. There I am underwater in a diving suit. But this is no longer I. It is he—he who came to the tropics seven years ago full of a spirit of adventure, ready to explore, to trek, to swim, to dive, to tour foreign cities, to climb the stairs of Buddhist temples, to drink in the nightlife in Bangkok and Singapore.

I’m not so much ‘sorry’ for myself, really. I’m sorry in a more general sort of way—sorry that I have become other than I anticipated being, sorry for the nonnegotiable ‘reality’ of the thing, sorry that one cannot somehow overcome what he has been overcome by, sorry that I can no longer say “I can”, but must admit that “I cannot”. In some sense, my illness has removed “me” from participation in my fate; or, rather, has refashioned me according to the assignation of fate by disease.

It is not difficult for me to accept what simply is. After all, this fate rather painfully enlivens my person every day. It has simply, and rather suddenly, occurred to me that I might give myself leave to feel regret. I look back now on younger, healthier days with a mixture of keen nostalgia and something of awe, remembering a blithely able body, a nonchalant readiness to perform tasks and feats now quite beyond my reach.  

I suppose that one would state the typical moral at this point: that is, appreciate your health while you have it. Don’t take it for granted.

But the thing is, I did appreciate it. That’s why I miss it so much now.

The Return of the Flu

It seems that I have the flu AGAIN. I already had one on top of another not very long ago, and now I’ve started with coughing again and feel congested and dragged out. I must attend a luncheon later on today with Australian acquaintances, but I’m really not feeling like it.

Additionally, the pain in my shoulder and back continues (the most reliable thing in my life at present), and I’m experiencing a worsening of two little skin lesions, one on my right cheek and one on my right ear. These, I suppose, are little basal cell carcinomas resulting from over-exposure to the sun, and could probably be removed simply enough, if, that is, I had insurance or any money. Sadly, I have neither.

About one year to go now before I can receive health insurance through Social Security, if it’s still around by then (I’ll be 64 on January 23^rd). So, if I can keep from totally disintegrating and being swept away by the wind for another year, I may be able to have some of these problems treated (which would, however, necessitate a return to America as, of course, one can only benefit from this insurance if one is in America).

Until then, I will muddle through. Muddling is what I do best.

Reading

I have given up, for the time being, on reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go. I have, in short, let it go. The one thing I was trying to figure out, after a hundred pages or so, is Why in the world did they give this guy the Nobel Prize for literature? I mean, come on! Did they have too many brandies that evening? For one thing, it’s boring. I reckon that after 100 pages, a story should have sufficiently engaged the reader to the point where he would want to continue on, to find out where the story is going. But in this case, it was more like What story? This work was billed as a “dystopian novel”. Okay. For me, the first requirement of a dystopia is to convince the reader of the likelihood of said dystopia. The story here, however, hinges on a school where children are being groomed, ultimately, for harvest of their organs. What seems apparent to me is that most folks are aware that organs will soon be produced in the laboratory, through cloning and so on. In other words, the dystopian premise does not convince. One wonders as well why organs would not have been procured in the already existing manner. Perhaps some sort of sociological or societal statement was intended—but that would be just a guess, as the narrative itself gives no clue of this.

So I have begun to read instead Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, in Indonesian.  This is an interesting exercise in language, to see how Hemingway’s spare but fully loaded prose is translated into the Indonesian language.

At the same time, I am reading, in English, a book called The Experience of God, by David Bentley Hart, an Orthodox Christian philosopher/theologian. Hart is superbly well versed in the whole tradition of philosophy, from antiquity to the present, as well as, of course, in the religious traditions he is addressing, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. It is an incredibly dense, meticulously composed exploration of what is meant by the word “God”, to be compared not with accessible "religious”, inspirational treatments, or even with the common sorts of Biblical exegeses, but more with the nearly impenetrable intellectual mazes of Aristotle or Plato or Thomas Aquinas or St. Augustine, or even Kierkegaard. This sort of stuff is, to me, like rich dark chocolate, which must be savored slowly in order to be fully appreciated. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea by any means. You’ve got to be a little bit odd to begin with.  And I guess I tick that box. I think, in any case, that I will never again argue religion with anyone unless they’ve read Hart—which they will not have done, and will not want to. But that’s okay, because religious arguments never turn out well anyway. But religious experience? Well, that’s another subject altogether—or rather, an experience, and thus not very subject to being a subjectJ

A Beautiful Day in Our Neighborhood

I had the opportunity this morning to visit with my old friend and former next door neighbor, Vyt Karazija, along with his girlfriend, Tina. Vyt is originally from Lithuania, but spent most of his life in Australia, and the last nine years in Bali. It has been about a year, I guess, since he moved out of the house next door and to a district called Mudding, which is a considerable ways away from Renon. Vyt is just about the sharpest person, intellectually, that I know. We differ in opinion on many subjects--politics, religion, you name it--but we have always been able to debate with politeness and good humor. Moreover, opposing viewpoints color his kindness to me in no way whatsoever. While Vyt energetically denies being a Christian, or believing in any God whatsoever, he is, at the same time, one of the most Christian people, in basic practice, that I've ever known. He is always willing to help, always willing to extend the hand of friendship, always ready to offer a sympathetic ear. I reckon that there are more than a few 'professing Christians' who could learn a few things from Vyt. Ironically, Vyt has just entered a new relationship, after long being alone, while I am newly alone, after long being married. So we find ourselves at opposite poles of experience once again.