HOW DOES AN ATHEIST EXPLAIN DEATH TO A CHILD

This is in response to Cormac James on Aeon, who worries about what to tell his five year old son about death because Cormac is an atheist.  Big deal.  What’s God got to do with it?  There’s a particular irony in this man being named “Cormac,” a writer whose accounts of evil, suffering and death has hypnotised the whole field of Western literature profs.

Cormac says “Sigmund Freud’s belief that ‘in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality’”.  I think not.  I think everyone is convinced of their own consciousness being THEM and that their consciousness can escape their bodies and endure somehow out there in some form with no body.  But if all consciousness AND unconsciousness has left the body forever, that’s the definition of death.  That’s when someone can note the “time of death,” certify a “cause of death,” and dispose of the body since there’s no more use for it.

The idea of God is really an identity with no body -- nobody, nobadaddy.  Indefinable.  Can’t kill it because there’s nothing. It’s an idea, one that transforms and disappears.

The best lesson -- and a five year old should by now have had a pet that died -- is simple before-and-after.  Bob’s first wife was working in a nursing home that cared for an old woman who was only living because a machine breathed for her.  This caretaker was not “churchy” but she protested to the head nurse that she thought it was cruel and simply making money for the institution.  The old woman didn’t even have any living family.  The head nurse said,  “Okay.  Turn the respirator off.”

“I don’t have the authority,” said the hapless CNA.  

“I give you the authority.  YOU turn the machine off or you’re fired.”

Hapless needed the job.  She turned off the respirator.  The old woman died in a moment or two.  Hapless felt very strange and she never forgot.  Figuring out death is only a task for the living.  

It’s the EXPERIENCE that can only be felt.  The brain-dead are body-dead, identity-dead, GONE.  It is the living who know it and ONLY the living.  Everyone knew that once in the days when there was chicken for dinner on the farm and someone went out and killed it.  You can’t eat it alive.  Have you no culture?

On my cat post a few days ago I talked about reducing the size of a kitten litter by “human intervention.”  I drowned the extras.  (Cat litters can go as high as 13, though it is “normal” for there to be three or four.)  Three.  I cannot catch this feral female, Patches.  If I could, I would get her spayed -- if I had money or could find help.  Men here have offered to shoot her, but it's against the law to shoot in town.  

There are pop-up cat spay clinics on the rez, but not advertised off it.  If I COULD catch her and her kittens, I could take them to the nearest humane society (thirty mile drive), where they would be killed by plunging a needle into their hearts, because they are untameable and because all the kittens on the planet are born about the same time in a great wave of synchronicity.  Many of them will die soon, because this is the crushing wheel of life that creates thousands of beetles or whatever, and then kills most of them.  Kill death by reducing fertility.  Predators have to eat, too.  There are no vegetarian predators.

I asked the veterinarian for cat tranquilizers so I could catch them.  He was shocked and horrified.  “Just stop FEEDING them,” he said.  They’d find a way to eat, but it wouldn’t be as nice.  He charges several hundred dollars to kill a cat.

My bathroom sink is rather splendid.  I knew within an hour when the kittens were born.  Patches came for breakfast much thinner. I carried them gently, used warm water and it took only a minute or so.  It was not that different from a womb.  I wept.  I did something I can’t call prayer because who would I pray to?  Call it mindfulness.  Call it poetry.  

Then I took the little bodies out to the trash roll-off.  “Been gopher huntin’?” asked the old rancher unloading his pickup.  

“Had to drown some kittens and feelin’ bad about it,” I told him.

His wife said,  “A terrible job, but sometimes it has to be done.”  

What’s so privileged about kittens that it’s okay to kill gophers but not kittens?  Kittens are domesticated, meaning if they are tamed (ie: form a bond with a human, like the fox in “The Little Prince”) they are different, in a different category.  We’ve attached, or at least find them useful.  Owned so we protect them.  Give them individual names.  We tamed a gopher once.  It drowned by jumping into the toilet when someone left the lid up.

Why does the United States kill five-year-olds, not entirely by accident?  Sometimes with malice and enjoyment.  So long as they’re not OUR children.  Only Other.  Only Feral.  Meaning, no identity, no attachment, no duty to protect, no value.  Unless there’s a use for them, which use might not be sitting at a kitchen table eating Cheerios, without names.

And why does Cormac worry about what HIS son thinks when feral children have already found out about dead things, sometimes human -- call CSI.  The domestic children get up in the night and search the Internet to look for pictures of death, torture, suffering, to understand what it’s about that it’s so secret, a big door on the front of the subject marked “GOD,” who is purported to be unkillable, at least if you accept the proper definition.  Otherwise you’ll notice that God is dead.  ALL the gods are dead.  They’ve lost their identities except for poetry.  (Actually, by age five most American kids have seen a LOT of death portrayed, heard a lot about it.)

My mother's mother in the center,

Her sisters second in from each end.

My mother took the photo.

When my mother was dying, she asked me what I thought the “other side” would be like.  I said,  “It will be like where ever you were before you were born.”  She pondered that as a good Presbyterian, then moved over to science.  “I hope the next planet will be as much fun as this one!” she said cheerfully.  She was acting.  For our sake.  Her cousin knew.  “What were her last words?” she asked.  But can you count the muttering of a comatose person without their dentures?  I told her the “next planet” thing.

My mother’s identity was not lost.  Neither was her mother’s nor her grandmother’s.  Her identity was genetically and culturally blended from those of the people who raised her.  She was lucky.  Neither catastrophe nor drugs tore those identities out of her.  Some  people have to leave a hole in that place or invent a fiction or just not think about it or -- the worst, to regret the identities that created their own.  I knew that early and therefore refused to have children.

It didn’t do any good.  There are still people whose identities are in part derived from mine: students, readers, people I so dearly loved and tried to be like even if it meant damage or suffering.  Still, there a little part of me that remains feral.  I think it came from my mother.  Or maybe from books.  It makes me risk -- like telling you this.  I can already feel the hands slipping over my mouth.

"Hop"

My mother used to say, “All cats are gray in the dark.”  I would agree.  Except that sometimes a little gray half-kinkajou invades us despite resistance and now sleeps behind my knees. I’ve finally decided Hop is NOT related to any of these yard ferals -- in fact he’s not feral, just unfed.  Sometimes some cat like that will come busting onto the scene and his identity will be so loud, messy, stinking, and otherwise vivid that you end up tolerating the beast -- even though it just flipped my computer mouse on its back for the third time.  Can I help it if he gets comfort against my throat?  Makes it vibrate with his purring?  His song.

Double in size and still growing.

Very messy eater.

GENDER, GENRE, AND THE GRUESOME

Eden Prairie Book Club

Most of the women I know read mostly literary fiction (some would say only literary though they prefer best-sellers and prize-winners) a category that has been around since 1800 or so.  It is a reading category that is intimately linked with the middle classes, partly because reading takes time and education, and partly because books can run up a bill, though the women I know use the library at least weekly.  None reads sci-fi or sports, but a few read political analysis.

http://electricliterature.com/ursula-k-le-guin-talks-to-michael-cunningham-about-genres-gender-and-broadening-fiction/  

This conversation is a followup to a speech LeGuin gave when receiving an award, in which she pointed out that she has been closed out of being read by the massive female audience (a major part of sales) because of the idea that sci-fi is not a legitimate fiction category, a sort of low-class or child’s category.  If you’ve read any LeGuin, you know how silly that is.

It got me to thinking about how a couple of other categories of writing are verboten to middle class “ladies.”  One is about Native Americans -- except rarely a romantic account of the 19^th century in which an woman saves an Indian.  The category can be cover for the most forbidden kind of story: that of human evil imposing dark suffering.  Genocide.  I need help to think of a name for this category of women who insist on things being pleasant because the names I can think of are pejorative. They know agonizing things happen, but they will think of them only in terms of happy cures.  They’re like that in real life, too.

Two writers have become famous for the darkest of writing.  One is Cormac McCarthy and one is William Vollmann.  Men dearly love McCarthy -- I cannot fathom it, esp. the necrophilia and child abuse.  I don’t know anyone but me who reads Vollmann, but the critics (mostly male) love him.  Both write about the 19^th century frontier, but Vollmann will venture into contemporary filth, degradation, and perversion.  He's a gender bender so awful he's transcendent.  Here’s Vollmann’s newest 19^th century historical novel:  a review from the Library Journal below.

How to make it pleasant: a running Appaloosa.

Vollmann, William T. The Dying Grass: A Novel of the Nez Perce War. Not your standard historical: Vollmann here continues his “Seven Dreams” series, an examination of the clash between North American natives and colonizers that began in 1990 with The Ice-Shirt and now encompasses five volumes, not released in chronological order. The last title was 2001’s Argall: The True Story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith. Here, we see the 1877 Nez Perce War through the eyes of Gen. Oliver Otis Howard, a troubled yet devoutly Christian Civil War veteran who led the U.S. Army in its pursuit of the Nez Perce, which dealt the army its worst defeat since Little Big Horn. Readers of Vollmann’s National Book Award winner, Europe Central, will know to expect a layered treatment, heightened language, and an illuminatingly different read.

The review suggests that it’s all right to read Vollmann because he’s intellectual and it’s history.  But what about this book by Adam Mansbach, who is famous enough to have his name above the title.  His book, “Go the F**k to Sleep” is as much a classic as “Good Night, Moon” -- which shows how times change.  I suspect it’s dad who reads the first book to his kids and mom who reads the second one.  So who reads “The Devil’s Bag Man?”  In bed at night before going to sleep?

Mansbach, Adam. The Devil’s Bag Man.  Library Journal review:  Mansbach showed off in 2013’s The Dead Run and in this sequel. Imprisoned in a Mexican jail for a crime he didn’t commit, Jess Galvan struck a nasty bargain to gain his freedom. Now he finds his mind and body taken over by the dark soul of Cucuy, a 500-year-old Aztec priest and leading drug lord who’d love to see the world destroyed. Back at Ojos Negros prison, Cucuy’s second-in-command is in a panic over Cucay’s disappearance and springs another bad guy so that he and his particularly vicious biker gang can chase down Jess. At least his possession by Cucay has given Jess superhuman strength. One of those gut-wrenching, horror-flecked, edge-of-seat supernatural thrillers.

Why is this a thriller instead of sci-fi?  Why would someone read this rather than a true contemporary account of any one of an array of horrifying and unjust experiences?  Is it the idea of finally not being real after all?  (But I suspect that most of the people who read it think it’s anthropologically accurate.)  Is that why it’s a “thriller”?  Do people who scorn sci-fi put this book in a different category, maybe “magic realism,” which is already associated with South America?  (It developed there to escape literal minded oppressors.)

A nice mom.

Prosperous and secure middle-class life is fragile and some of this library-card group knows it on a deep level, and reads about the transgressive, outrageous, unknown but sometimes nearby worlds, only as a kind of vaccination so they can hope to survive whatever apocalypse may sweep them up.  Part of the fragility -- worrying that this planet will collapse so we’d best get tickets to a spaceship -- is not having a coherent powerful vision of what human life means anyway.  (Okay -- a "religion.")  I would argue that if that vision doesn’t include everybody (and like LeGuin includes trees, rocks and the sea) it won't work anyway.  No amount of redefining the traditional institutional religious systems will ever quite account for things like AIDS or Ebola.  

Another nice mom.

Middle-class educated women in particular are committed to their own children, therefore their family system, their shelter and feeding, which makes them want to protect those things for others, but they can be emotionally limited in their ability to grasp a woman with only a length of cotton for clothing, a can for water, and a dying baby.  Their own lives are caught up in fulfilling nutrition recommendations, household maintenance, keeping up schedules, and so on.  Aside from their career, of course.

Today the current prairie blizzard (arctic vortex -- we’ve had ‘em always) has knocked out my radio streaming from Bozeman.  I can barely push the doors open to get the paper and take a bowl of food out to the feral cat, who must eat it quickly before it’s frozen too solid.  Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote lots of books about this stuff and the nice ladies love them.   They’ll read endless tales of love and long family generational sagas.  It upsets them that I live this close to the edge, teasing the universe. 

Last winter one of the local older single men who get by in small towns froze to death sitting in his armchair in his trailer.  He may have been cutting back on fuel by setting his thermostat low, his furnace might have died, possibly he couldn’t pay the gas bill, or maybe he got too hypothermic to make sense.  The homeostasis of brains has a lot to do with temperature.  Cold is lethal.  Cooling a frog until it dies is as effective as heating the water until the frog is cooked.  Is this death material for a thriller, an indignant social rave, sci-fi, a heart-warming tale about a little girl discovering him just in time and reviving him with hot coffee made in his own Mr. Coffee?

Today, but not my photo.

The man who died was Native American.  Would anyone read a story about him?  He used to cruise the town in his little old car, tilted to one side because he was so fat, hoping to find a walking person he could engage through the open car window.  Most of what he wanted to say was about the history of his family and I knew some of them, so I’d generally chat for a few minutes.  But if I’d put it in a “book,” who would read it?  If it were fancy writing, it wouldn’t be him.  Vollmann could do it.  McCarthy would not.  Mansbach wouldn’t.  LeGuin -- I dunno.