Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Well today my dad had his knee surgery. i called my mom on her cell
while she was still at the hospital. his surgery was only a half hour
and it seemed like all went well. i even talked to my dad and we joked
about how they weren't giving him pills. i was like "what? that's no
fun!" that made him giggle, which i liked a lot.

i got a chance to chat with mom and thank her for all the great gifts
she sent along with my cousin's husband who came into town last night
for work and brought with him more portuguese homemade food than one
family should really produce, and a great outfit my mom bought for me.
i told her i loved the stuff and thanks and i was eating the sausage
they'd made when i talked to her.

but i promised to call her at home from work tonight so i could find
out more about the surgery and things were a little nutty at work and i
spaced out and didn't call.

i feel like such a shitty kid. i know i'm really not but how could i
forget? she was going to be alone in the house and the worry about my
dad (and trust me, i definitely had worry) should have been at the
forefront of my mind.

i feel pretty bad about not calling. stupid time-zone difference.

but i'll just call her at work first thing in the morning and i guess that'll have to suffice.



here's what i think might be going on underneath all this talk about aging parents and worry...

i've been reading joan didion's The Year of Magical Thinking,
on the loss of her husband and her daughter's year long critical
illness that led to her death this august. didion, as you know, is a
brilliant writer. someone i've admired for years. someone i respect
very much. ever since rogue reporter was little, surly rogue reporter
she knew she wanted to be a journalist. when she read Slouching Towards Bethlehem
she knew just what kind of journalist. i can't say i've been at all
successful in following didion's model in reality but in my fantasy
world i am always striving to write like her and in some way think we
are similar ladies. but didion has, obviously, written much more, seen
much more and lived much more than i have. and probably does not
think we're similar ladies.



what freightens me at this moment is this:

having looked up to didion for so long and believed that she is the
toughest of "cool customers" i'm scared of how scared she was. how
confused. how alone. how she sought out the only certainty she had -
literature - in a time of complete uncertainty.

this is not some fucking mitch albom the five people you'll meet in heaven
kind of shit here, people. this is a real strong, thinking lady laying
out the ways in which grief is an animal we will never understand. a
primal emotion. it takes over body and mind. no matter how cool the
customer.



some of you, i know, already know this feeling. i know i'm naive and
don't mean to trivialize your experiences in any way by talking out my
fears.

but here's how fast my fears work in my head...



the title of didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem is taken from a W.B. Yeats poem called "The Second Coming" written after WWI about, essentially, the end of the world.

here's the poem...

The Second Coming - W.B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot
hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is
loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of
passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming
is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out


When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight:
somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the
head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is
moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the
indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know


That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare
by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at
las



oddly, the first poem i ever recited aloud was Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." i still love that poem.

when i read it my teacher said that it was the best reading a student
had ever done of a poem in his class and i believed him and finally
felt confirmation of what i already knew: i was a writer.

when i told my parents i was a writer they thought i was silly. when i
went to college to write they thought i was silly but also thought i
maybe had talent (who can guage such things anyway?). now years later
they think i'm silly and a writer with no money.

are they disappointed in me? should i do something now to change that? do they still believe in me?



and doesn't the world yeats laid out - one of war, tyranny and violence - resemble the america we live in today?

has living in this country been a gigantic disappointment to my
immigrant parents? has the new world and the better life they sought
out really just worn them down? and what about all the immigrants like
them. disappointed. struggling to afford their lives. the slow
destruction of the "spiritus mundi" or the soul of the world.



those toughts and questions go on into infinity. ranging from fear of
death to whether or not my mother remembered to lock the back door
while she's home alone for the night, to how dangerous cars are, to
motherhood, to bill payments, to anything.



i think the next book i read will have to make me laugh.



yes. yes. i am sure, so very sure, we are living in the age of anxiety.