Date: Fri, 17 Jul 1998 21:54:25 -0600
From: George Trail <gtrail-AT-UH.EDU>
Subject: Re: PLC: Space and death


>
>So I'll be moving through space to help someone die, and to help another
>person face the death of a parent.  "Big deal," I exclaim, aping the tough
>guy model of contemporary denial, "everyone on Phillitcrit List will die
>and all their loved ones too."
>
>How utterly human that unless we are forced -- by impending death or lost
>love -- we never write with the full force of these realities behind us.
>Instead we gambol in happy abstraction, which we presume does not occupy
>space or time.
>
>Regards to all,
>Eric Yost
>

My empathy, sir. My father died in October. My mother in March. My father
died of a fall caused by exhaustion from trying to take care of my mother
in late stages of Altzheimers in the hope that a drug she was taking was
resulting in improvement, when in fact it made her nastier, an insomniac,
and vilely loquacious. She had written letters (in 1997), in Alabama, about
having met a nice fella, and where they were going to live. They were
written "from" a vacation "from" the Canal Zone--1935.  It is an eerie
thing to read a letter written by your mother in realtime 97 when she is in
alternate time before you are born and she discusses her plans to marry
your father.

I have known my mortality since elementary school, when I was supposed to
die. I know now that time is space--that the two are inseperable, so
utterly interdependent as to mock discussion. Try the opening sequence of
2001. From bone to starship in 30 seconds. Exactly.

As Dylan Thomas wrote, "After the first death, there is no other." He means
(meant) that literally (as well as every other way).

We could not live life with the intensity that the loss of loved ones
entails for long periods. We thus play in abstractions. Reality _must_ be
our construct. Eliot was wrong. Too much reality in not unbearable, it is
inconceivable.  There is no space-time continuum. Time is the only way we
have to measure space--it thus (space) is utterly temporally understood.
It is indeed "inconceivable" in any extra-spatial conception.

Write if it occurs to you at all that I can help.
g





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