My last post here was in October. There's a reason for the long silence, and I'll give it in my usual fashion, by going the long way around. So please be patient.
Dylan Thomas has a poem that he wrote for his father. This is the first stanza:
"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
I'm a great admirer of Dylan Thomas; he and W.B. Yeats are probably my favorite poets, although whenever I try to name favorites, no sooner than one name comes into my head another comes too, and on and on. Still, that poem about not going gentle has stayed with me through my life and I always thought I would be one, when it came my time for old age, who would "rage against the dying of the light." It's how I believed I would want to go out, raging.
Now that old age is upon me, I find I am not that person at all. To "go gentle" is much more what I do want. Rage is not what I want to feel now, in years where I'm declining more rapidly than I might have wished. Therefore, whatever anger or frustration I may feel at what I'm about to post here, I reject it, I make a choice for the gentler feelings.
The reason I haven't posted here since about mid-October is that was the time when I first came down with what became a recurring infection that was resistant to antibiotics. I was never acutely ill for more than 24 or 48 hours at a time, but I never got entirely well either, and week after week of that kind of thing will drag a person down. I was going to my doctor, of course, who reminded me that I should keep in mind the fact that, under whatever other physical ailment I might have at any given time now, I do have congestive heart failure, and the ever-hovering asthma. Eventually, in mid-December, I apparently passed a kidney stone, in spite of not having had specific kidney pain before that. Then my doctor changed me to a different antibiotic, which appears to have done its job. But my energy level is still somewhere down in the pits. And all of this has meant that I haven't been able to write and my attention has been on other things.
A word to the writers and to the avid readers: The writers will know, and I expect the readers may suspect, that writing only appears to be a sedentary, non-energy-consuming activity; you just sit in front of a blank screen or piece of paper and fill it up with words. But in actuality, a great deal of a peculiar kind of energy is consumed in that process of putting the words onto the blank surface ... and I simply do not have that kind of energy anymore. I have barely enough energy to do the necessary things to care for myself and to keep up my little house.
So I've changed my focus. I've let go. Let go of that vision I had of me writing until I could no longer get even an elbow above the grave; of me raging against the injustices I've always raged against and using my writing as an indirect expression of that rage. You didn't know there was rage behind Fremont Jones? Read again. It may have been filtered considerably, but it's there.
The concept I was working on and writing about here, THE HALLOWS, was filled with my particular sort of rage, thinly disguised in the main character's quirky sense of humor, and transmuted in a secondary character into another mode of expression. At the point where I stopped writing, I was working out what specific crimes best suited a plot dealing with the things that make me rage. There was much to choose from, I hadn't made up my mind. And there it will remain, because I ... am ... letting ... go.
It's a matter of focus, where I want my focus to be now that my body is not able to do for me what I want it to do anymore. To put it another way, I might say that I'm teaching my mind to accept, to want, to need only what my body is able to do. My focus now is no longer on what I want to accomplish in any remaining months or years. I do not want to accomplish anything. I want to appreciate the accomplishments of others, and learn from them.
I do have a willingness to share with others whatever I may have learned over the years and along the way, when and if that happens spontaneously, but even that much sharing is not my goal. My goal is whatever comes next.
I'm not yet dying, not in any sense that Medicare would accept as a reason for calling in Hospice. But my body is losing its usefulness, even in some ordinary functions we don't normally think about (such as breathing), and I choose to let that happen without any but the most commonplace intervention. I do not think of death, when it comes, as an end to anything but a body. This is because I believe the essence of a person resides not in the body, but in one's soul. I think of death as a transition, and more than that, a transcendence.
And I believe it is possible to begin a process of transcendence now, by changing my focus to a point beyond that I can't even begin to describe. I will need to learn how, and this will be its own adventure.
I'm taking the first step, a baby-step, by letting go of THE HALLOWS, my work-in-progress. It is in progress no longer, and I'm moving on.
I won't stop Nonny's Blog, because there may be things that come up that call out to be shared, and if that happens I'll let you know. Thank you for reading my stuff.
