Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone

Every Time I Scribble A Thought With Artistic Intent

May 12, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

I’m fortunate, in a sense, to be the type of person that gets more sentimental about the times I read a certain book or heard a particular album than I ever do about holidays. But I’m still human. I still recall the almost breathless inability to accelerate time and make Christmas arrive more quickly. Or the Halloween costumes, Easter candy or the great Thanksgiving feasts (and the not-so-great family fights that would sometimes ensue). The holidays, as idealized rites of passage, still resonate; but these occasions are not capable of enhancing or obliterating whatever mood I’m already in. As such, the absence of my mother might feel more acute on holidays, but none of these events have been unduly marred during the past decade.

Surprisingly, even the week that presents a triptych of raw remembrance, comprising her birthday (August 23), and the anniversaries of her death (August 26) and funeral (August 30) have been bearable. These have become prospects for celebration, however somber, and I am mostly able to channel that grief into gratitude for the times she was around. Similarly, Mother’s Day is seldom joyful, but it provides an imperative to consider happy times and my relative good fortune—despite what is obviously lacking, now. It also obliges me to behold my family members and friends who have become admirable mothers themselves, and I am humbled to see my mother alive in the looks they give their children.

And if I’m ever inclined to stop and consider how corny, or manufactured these sentiments may be, I console myself with the awareness of how increasingly corny and manufactured holidays in America have become.

***

Any time I need to be reminded that I am one of the lucky ones, I look at the picture taken the day I was born. The pose is not unique; virtually every child has at least one frameable shot of the post-delivery adoring gaze. Or, every child fortunate enough to have been born in a hospital (or home) under safe conditions to a mother who welcomes the moment and, most importantly, is prepared for the moments (and days and years) that will follow. I don’t need to resort to religion or sociology: I can simply consider the circumstances and the infinitesimal odds that I ever made it from my father to my mother in the first place (if you know what I mean).

What child cannot recall asking, on Mother’s Day, why there wasn’t a Kid’s Day? The response was always the same: Every day is Kid’s Day. Most of us who have lived a single hour in the so-called real world quickly came to register how accurate this tired cliché actually is. Indeed, those of us who were sufficiently well-raised didn’t need to wait that long for this epiphany to occur. A year or two punching the clock, paying bills, cleaning up one’s own messes—the literal and especially the figurative ones—and generally attaining that independent status one strove so single-mindedly to attain is impetus enough for reflection. Not merely an appraisal of how impossible it would be to repay the investment made, measured in money, time, affection and approbation, but a recognition of what was truly at stake: the selflessness your parents displayed, putting in all that effort to enable you to become your own person. The best gift a parent can give (you come to understand) is loving you enough to allow you to not be exactly like them; to encourage you to figure out exactly who you are supposed to become.

***

Holidays have not been intolerable, no more than any other day, especially the bad days when I miss my mother most. As a result, I reckon I’m not the only one who has found that my birthday is the single occasion that can never be the same. Inexorable nostalgic pangs, the pull of biological imperatives, or the simple fact that I’m still human has ensured that the annual recognition of my birth day is imbued with sadness and a heavy longing I don’t feel any other time. If so, it seems a reasonable trade-off: that deep and uncomplicated connection, along with the longing any child can comprehend, signifies that yet another cliché holds true: absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Every time I scribble a thought with artistic intent I am inspired by the support my mother offered, going back to the days I was a kid with crayons, coloring outside the lines while listening to The Nutcracker Suite. She will never be forgotten; in fact, she will never be gone. This is what helps and it is also, at times, what hurts.

***

How do you get over the loss?

That is the question I asked a former girlfriend who lost her father when she was a teenager. “You don’t,” she said. Hearing this, you can acknowledge—and appreciate—the sentiment; you can easily empathize with how inconceivable it is to possibly heal from that kind of heartbreak. But it isn’t until you experience it that you comprehend the inexplicable ways this reality is an inviolable aspect of our existence: it’s worse than you could ever envision, but if you’re one of the lucky ones, it’s also more redemptory than you might have imagined. Mostly, you accept that a day will seldom pass when you don’t think of the one you loved and lost. And more, you wouldn’t have it any other way.

Every day is Kid’s Day, and who would hope to change that?

Every day, for me, is Mother’s Day. And on my birthday, I don’t celebrate myself so much as acknowledge—and appreciate—the one who did the most to help me get here.

* From a memoir entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone.

A Day To Remember; A Life To Celebrate

May 11, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

August 30, 2002*

Everything that is good about me is because of my mother.

Fortunately, I was able to convey this simple truth many times in my adult life, but one of the unexpected blessings of the past few weeks was that I had the opportunity to repeat it, often, and in so doing, I understood that the greatest gift I could give my mother was showing her that she was the greatest gift in my life.

Everyone that cares about Linda, or cares about one of us who love her, has had a certain heaviness in their hearts these past five years, as she has bravely battled this illness which ultimately claimed her body—only to ensure that her spirit could survive, like a million small fires inside of all our hearts. And so the hearts that once were burdened should be relieved, aided by the knowledge and acceptance that she found peace, that she was reminded, repeatedly and without reservation, how dearly she was loved every moment these past two weeks, that her act of dying defies death, because I can assure you, she is with me right now, and she has already found ways to comfort and console me that I could never have conceived.

It is an arduous, probably impossible undertaking, to attempt to find sense in the insanity of illness, to seek comfort from what seems an incomprehensible injustice, to calmly accept what the heart and mind have every reason—and every right—to reject.

However, as the great poet Longfellow wrote:

Lives of great souls remind us

We may make our lives sublime

And departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time.

The time was World War II, and like so many others of her remarkable generation, the little baby girl her parents named Linda came into the world on August 23, 1943, while her father, Martin, was half a world away honorably doing his duty for the country his own father had only recently learned to call home.

The first of seven siblings, she became in many regards a mother long before giving birth. It was a role she had already, in large part, perfected and prepared herself for—a preparation that would serve her well when she became a young mother, suddenly several thousand miles from the family she lived with and then left, along with her husband, having the courage and conviction to make their way and create a life of their own.

And so: a daughter, an older sister (always the older sister), a wife (always the same wife, married to the same man she fell in love with four decades ago), a mother (always a mother, making the fulfillment of others her primary purpose) and finally, a grandmother, a role she cherished and illustrated—against all probability—that her capacity for love and generosity was even more abundant: it was inextinguishable, unending…infinite.

And, of course, while the job of Grandma was one she was ideally suited for, she certainly had more than sufficient opportunity to see this function performed flawlessly by her own mother, who showed her the way to move on in the world, as a woman, a wife, mother and grandmother. Like everyone, the premature passing of her mother, Susan, indelibly shook her and while this was a loss she (and we) never fully recovered from (so profound was her love and admiration), she had the power to persevere, and intensify her already considerable efforts to bestow joy and hope to everyone in her life. And in this way, she defeated the darkness and in her admirable, inimitable fashion, turned the impetus for grief into the opportunity for great giving.

Therefore, the redemption and glory of this untimely loss is the timeless certainty of the life she lived, an enduring record of words, deeds, gestures and memories, all transcending the tempest of our brief time on earth. And her lasting legacy, the most gracious gift she could have given any of us, reinforces our faith, reawakens our resolve and strengthens our capacity for kindness and the struggle to live truly Christian lives.

It is not, in my estimation, inappropriate to assert this simple fact: each time we imitate the example Linda Murphy ceaselessly set, we are celebrating her life, and assuring each other that there is only one way to live.

How wonderful, and humbling, to acknowledge that all the tools, which enable you to pursue what you love in life are directly traceable to the example and encouragement of that person who put you first, above herself, and dedicated her life—made it her job—to make your life as positive and productive as possible.

The reason I can confidently and enthusiastically proclaim that my mother is still around is because of the obsessions that infuse my identity: the passion for art and expression, the advocation of justice and tolerance, the unending pursuit of honesty, integrity and compassion—these are inexorable imprints, they are, in fact, the essence of my mother, and her soul is in my soul, as it always has been, as it always will be.

I have long been aware that it is the very least I can do, in an effort to appreciate and honor the work my mother did, to endeavor each day to be more intelligent and aware, to act more kindly, give more generously, love more unreservedly, and exceed the expectations that even she held. It is the least any of us who were touched in some way by her life—her words, her deeds, her happiness, her heart—to spread that spark and do our parts to leave the world more abundant and meaningful than it otherwise might be.

Another poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, asked:

O Wind, If Winter comes

Can Spring be far behind?

What will I remember? I’ll remember everything. The things I’ve expressed and the things I saw, the things I still see in the eyes and actions of those around me. I will remember her as my first teacher and first friend, the angel who brought me into the world and allowed me to help her leave it. I will remember that soft, sweet silence, just like she had gone to sleep. Only more.

Everything that is good about me is because of my mother. I said that to her, then, and I say this to you, now, in the hope that when you see me, you see my mother, and when you see yourselves—especially when you reflect upon the ways in which her influence and example inspired and encouraged you—you will see Linda, and we can all do our part to honor her memory, and make sure that she never leaves us.

*Eulogy delivered at my mother’s funeral on August 30, 2002

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: Bob Marley, Mother's Day, Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone

Two Years To Write, One Year To Revise…

March 28, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

Exactly one year ago, I wrote the following words:

It takes a village to raise a family; it takes a forest to write a book.

They are true, both of those statements. At least if you hope to do either (raise a family, write a book) as well as possible.

I can’t speak to the former, but I can certainly talk about the latter, having it done it (depending on what counts and how one counts) at least four times.

And I can attest to the rush of adrenaline, the joy of attainment, the sense of closure, crossing that proverbial finish line.

And not just the thrill of accomplishment, that box checked, that mission completed, but the fact that you are still alive; you lived to see it through. I don’t expect anyone who has not experienced the ecstasy and exhaustion (physical, spiritual) of undertaking such an ill-advised, audacious adventure to comprehend such a seemingly inane observation. But it’s true: once you are more than half-way into a project, you actually worry about it, you really do go there: What if I die before I finish; what if I’m not alive to see the reward of all this solitary effort? All kinds of questions, all of which beg more questions.

Question: Who has the temerity to sit down and write a book?

Answer: People who want to, people who need to.

It’s that simple, that impossible. But to think there are people who may want to actually read it? That’s where it gets tricky. Or not, actually. In a sense, getting it done is the ultimate objective, and the only thing the writer can control. It’s the only thing the writer can measure himself against. Although it’s more than that; it has to be, or else it would remain hidden, inside a diary intended for an audience of one. So it’s equal parts faith and compulsion that enables one to navigate the choppy waters of putting it all on the page, for public viewing.

In any event, I was flush with that fulfillment exactly one year ago. I did it; I’d made it (in at least two senses of the word).

Even then, I understood (from experience): it can’t –and shouldn’t– go out into the world until it’s ready.

Question: How do you know when it’s ready?

Answer: Who knows.

Any writer worth anything is seldom, if ever, satisfied with the finished product. That’s not vanity, it’s integrity. It’s not about the work or even the writer; it’s about respect and awe for the act of creation, and trying to get it exactly right.

If you had told me, one year ago, that I would be working on and revising the manuscript for another twelve months…I probably would have believed it. No point in putting in all that effort if you aren’t willing to put in all the effort. All it takes.

And, as always, it seems incredibly pretentious and unsatisfying to discuss it. Who wants to read a writer talking about how and why he writes? I don’t (unless it’s a writer I admire, and even then, it’s usually the same routine, similar words from people doing identical things: that fact is at once comforting and intimidating).

As ever, it’s never over until it’s over. But I’m working on it. The work remains in progress, and we’ll see where we stand a year from today.

L’amour de l’art fait perdre l’amour vrai.

I did not say that.

Although that is the sort of thing I might say, since I am the sort who feels obliged to quote the books I’ve read and I allow art to remind me how to relate to myself.

The love of art means loss of real love.

Some people, sometimes, choose to make their lives more complicated. Life, sometimes, decides for them; sometimes life gets there first.

To win? To lose?

What for, if the world will forget us anyway?

I didn’t write that. A poet wrote that. I’m no poet. Poets are always looking for things, like heroes. Who wants to be a hero these days? Who can afford it? The world could be—and might very well already be—full of folks who will ring changes and do their part to shake up the constricting and crazed institutions that keep us chained, bound and complacent. There are lots of these people, I’m sure: tons and tons of them. But the thing is, most of us are too busy trying to live. It’s enough to just survive without seeking to pursue such lofty, such poetic propositions.

This is the new poetry: the more things stay the same, the more they change. Here is our art: haikus of horror in the cities, sonnets of sin and corruption, limericks of deregulation, free verse free trade, rhymed lines of laissez-faire, and the emboldened ghost writer, Death, forever at work on our collective life stories.

These days we look for poetry in all the wrong places. Some of us even believe we are gazing more deeply into the murky waters of existence when all we are actually seeing is our own reflections.

And so (I think): A life is not unlike a novel: too often they are eager to please, predictable, safe. I think: you should, therefore, feel obliged to occasionally ask yourself complicated questions. Such as: what are you doing to keep things interesting? What can you do to generate momentum, keep the narrative flowing?

Listen: When some of your best friends are people who exist elsewhere—characters in books you’ve read, musicians you’ll never meet, people from the past who died decades (even centuries) before you were born, or people you knew intimately who are no longer around—it might be time to ask some complicated questions.

Who are you?

That is, or should be, the first question, as well as the last question, and it should be asked as often as possible along the way.

You see, all men are islands. After all, no one else is inside you when you’re born, no one is going with you when you die, and between those first and last breaths, the decisions, actions and accountability are your own. All, all yours.

So: you find friends, you seek solace in yourself, you learn to discern redemption through the aimless affairs that comprise the push and pull of everyone’s existence. You realize, in short, that you are going through it alone, so you should never go through it alone. You can’t run away, and the farther you run, the closer you get to yourself. And you’re all you’ve got.

If you are fortunate enough to figure this out early on, you find friends: the real ones who exist in your everyday world, and the other ones who have been there all along, the ones you can always turn to, wherever or whoever you happen to be.

Please talk about me when I’m gone. That is the title of this memoir. It is also the presumptive title of any memoir. More, it’s the unwritten title of any work of art—a desire to have those thoughts and feelings articulated, read, understood, appreciated. More still, it’s the often unexpressed message of any individual life: we want to be discussed, loved, and celebrated after we’re no longer around. Mostly we do not want to be quickly or easily forgotten.

When you hear voices, or find yourself talking to people you are not sure can hear you, you should cut yourself some slack. We’ve all been there—or will be at some point. We’ve all, on occasion, looked up to the clouds and wondered if there was a kingdom beyond the skies, the place some of us were told our dearly departed looked down from. Haven’t we all, on occasion, taken comfort from a one-way conversation we forgot to be self-conscious about? Aren’t we all, at times, unable or unwilling to entirely abandon the idea that someone else is listening?

And so: you talk. And maybe, someone listens. Anyone might be listening up there, and that’s more comfort than anything you could ever find in a church. And so: you talk. Say something; everything. Say anything you need to say to survive.

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?

What he said.

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: Czeslaw Milosz, Mozart, Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone, Ralph Ellison

Solitude*

February 25, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

Anyone who has lost a parent (or worse, a child) can understand that when this happens it becomes an indelible line of demarcation: your life before and your life after. It does not mean nothing is ever the same or that you can never get past it (everything is the same and you can get past it except for the fact that nothing is ever the same and you can never get past it. You don’t want to).

Of course, one need not suffer the untimely death of a parent to appreciate that their presence—in the ways we can measure and the ones we can never fully fathom—are inextricable from one’s own. Up to a certain age my mother was my confidante, my confessor, my friend, my mother. It is discomfiting to imagine how I might have handled her death if it had happened earlier—not to mention much earlier—in my life.

According to the less than immutable laws of society, by definition I became an adult at eighteen. By my rather more reliable reckoning, I did not become an individual prepared to wrestle with adult realities until I’d finished graduate school and then spent several crucial years learning new things and unlearning others.

The period of time that did more than anything else to prepare me for the rest of my life, with and without my mother, were the months from early summer 1995 through late spring 1996. A mutually broken engagement and opting not to enter the PhD program that had accepted me are two decisions that befuddled friends and family, then, and likely perplex some of them, still. It was during this year that I figured out, for the first time, how to take care of myself. I was alone, really alone, for the first time, yet I found that I seldom felt lonely. Being on my own, alone with my thoughts, questions and concerns provided the space—physical and mental—to unravel the reveries that signaled the kind of person I hoped to become.

Being one’s own best friend is dangerous, potentially delusional territory and I knew it. But I found that the more time I spent alone the better I was able to love everyone around me, and my capacity to learn and evolve did not abate. By the time my mother got sick the first person I talked to was myself. If this had happened five or ten years earlier I would have been lost, without a foundation. My mother remained my number one resource in so many regards, but I was finally equipped to withstand the ordeal I had unwittingly been fortifying myself for. Depending on my mind, my music and an ability to take care of myself, I managed to get through it. Barely.

*Excerpted from a work-in-progress entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: Charles Mingus, Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone, Self-Portrait in Three Colors

Q & A* (Revisited)

January 11, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

Question: What would you do differently?

Answer: Nothing.

True answer: Everything.

Truest answer: I don’t know.

***

If the death of a loved one provides the ultimate answer it also prompts all sorts of questions.

There are the universal ones, for starters: When will I die? How will I die? Why do we die? There are the personal ones: What will I remember? What might I regret? And ultimately the question that could define the rest of your life: What would I do differently?

What would you do differently?

I’ve never asked my sister this question. She did everything she could, and in many ways she did more than any of us. She worked the Internet like it was a convention and introduced herself to every article she could find. She obsessively sought all the inside information she could uncover, even if so many short cuts to insight led to locked doors and dead-ends.

(Our mother had been left with the unyielding aftershock of sorrow. When her own mother died everything happened too quickly, there was no time to facilitate any sort of strategy. She and her siblings hardly had time to react, much less regret what could have transpired; they never knew what hit them. The cancer that took their mother was like an anonymous assassin: before anyone could look for faces or fingerprints the crime scene was already in the past tense.)

What could we have done differently?

We knew what we were up against, yet still had no idea how little we knew. “If this had been ten years ago I would send you on your way,” the surgeon said after the first surgery, in ’97. “But knowing what we know now, I’m recommending a round of chemotherapy. Let’s blast your system so it doesn’t have a chance to come back.”

We wouldn’t worry about what we could have done (we thought), we did it.

The cancer came back, of course. A second, successful surgery in 2000 did not give us false hope and it could not lull us into a false sense of security. This time the surgeon advised radiation followed by chemotherapy, and we knew we were doing all we could do.

Do you think it’s going to come back?

That was the question my sister asked me, in July 2001, just before my mother returned for her annual check-up. “No,” I told her, truthfully. “She looks good, she feels healthy, we did everything we could do.”

This is what I said to my sister, and to myself. They caught it before it spread—again—and then her system got the chemical scrub, again. What possible chance was there that it could find another foothold?

The cancer came back, of course. A third, not entirely successful surgery left us no chance to kid ourselves. The prognosis was ugly but not impossible: she was still ready to fight and we would back her up as far down that road as we could go.

Do you think it will ever go away?

That is the question none of us ever asked. We knew it was in there and we knew it was not going anywhere. But it could be stalled, it could shrink, it could, hopefully, be managed. There were clinical trials to consider, there were reasons to think positive thoughts, and there was always the chance that a miracle might occur.

Here’s the thing: what you don’t know will hurt you, whether it involves cancer or used cars. Here’s another thing: my sister learned more about cancer, symptoms, treatments, and clinical trials in a little over a year than most people could—or could want to—learn in a lifetime. One of my good friends is an oncologist, another had been a hospice nurse. We also lived in an era where the click of a mouse could uncover more detail than a thousand old medical journals. And still, looking back, it’s disconcerting how little we knew; how little we still know. how much more we could learn, and how awful it would be if we were ever obliged to do so.

So: we can’t change what we could not do, or know, or ask, or say. And we collectively recognize, and accept, that all the information in the world may have done next to nothing to change what happened to my mother. We knew enough, and were fortunate enough, to sign her up for some experimental treatments. The fact that they ultimately proved unsuccessful (too little, too late?) does not mean we should not have explored those options; perhaps we could have explored other ones as well.

What could you have done differently?

This is the question we were never able to ask the assorted surgeons, doctors and administrators. And what would they say, if we had? What could they say?

How much more time does she have?

This is the question we asked, as directly as possible, always leaving enough room—for the doctors, for ourselves—to avoid predictions that might be too true or come too soon. The surgeons told us, depending on the way you hear the words (especially in hindsight) as little as they could get away with or as much as they dared while steering us as far as possible from an answer we would figure out on our own, eventually.

*excerpted from a memoir entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone.

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: McCoy Tyner, Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone, Valley of Life

Compassion*

January 6, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

License registration, no I ain’t got none,
But I got a clear conscience ‘bout the things that I done…

When you find yourself singing Bruce Springsteen lyrics in New Jersey to a state trooper in the hopes of avoiding a ticket, you might as well close your eyes, see what happens:
Maybe you could talk to the cop and explain that it was not disrespect for the rules of the road, but love of—and getting lost in—art that caused you to forget. To forget where you were and who you were, only to find yourself in the unfamiliar role of fugitive.
And maybe he would understand.
Maybe he would engage you in a discussion about music, and how it helps us, how it is always there, and occasionally compels us to do things we would not otherwise do.
And maybe, after everything was said and done, you would stop, and ask him if he was real, if this could ever actually happen.
And maybe he would wink familiarly, as if to say: This is America, ain’t it? Anything is possible.
And maybe you would believe him, even as you heard his footsteps fading away.
And by the time you opened your eyes, maybe you were still rolling down the road, the only reality being the speed and the sky, and the siren song of metal and machinery.

A vision:

Finally, his car needed fuel, he needed fuel; so he had no choice but to stop at the godforsaken rest area. Everyone, it seemed, had stopped at the same rest area: equal parts public toilet, food court and concessions stand. It was at once appalling and extraordinary; it was, in short, America.

Who were they, the people all around him? They were everyone: departing or arriving, leaving for vacation, returning to work, delighted, delirious, above all, anonymous. In New Jersey, or in any small town, or everywhere in America, there are people who find themselves lost; the people with nowhere left to go. A cliché? Sure. But clichés are made, not born. Reality, of course, is a cliché, and we have discovered that clichés—even as they are the enemy of art and authenticity—can be our friends. And so: going to church makes us sense spirituality, so we go; playing carols at Christmas facilitates a feeling of festivity, so we play; falling in love makes us feel loved, so we fall. We need all the help we can find, so we find friends and never look back.
He looked back; he looked around and in front of him, seeing the stereotypes: the ones in his mind that everything but experience had created. Or was the Cliché unfurling itself, the one that perpetuates from a particular place: experience, repetition, pattern, tradition? He saw them, he saw how he wanted to see them, he saw how they saw him, he saw how they saw him seeing them, and so on.
And who was he?
What was he all about? What had he done? Where had he been? Where was he going? Who did he think he was? Everyman? No man? Or worse: the type of person who actually asks questions like this.
Walking away, stomach full and mind clear, he saw her. He could not help noticing the forsaken sister walking in circles, seeking a corner of the room that wasn’t there. How old was she? Eighteen? Eighty? Somewhere right in between? Satisfied with a meek drink in the water fountain, she was the type of person who unthinkingly drank from public water fountains. Does anyone drink from public water fountains anymore? Do they still exist? Does anyone even notice them?
It was hard not to notice her, impossible not to notice that pain.
Pain: Dostoyevsky, disconcerted as he was with crime and punishment, saw all the suffering of the world in a prostitute’s eyes, and sobbed when he witnessed a peasant, hard-pressed with impotent anger, beating his horse to death. He opened his eyes and half expected to see this woman whipping herself while Nietzsche—knowing full well that God was dead— held his head and wept. Who was she, and what was she doing here?
A hooker, a homeless person? A mother, a case of mistaken identity? A human symbol of hope, or Hope herself—a deity deferred, paying the price for us all, all of us sinners and those sins we can scarcely describe.
She’s just like me, a voice inside attempted to say, a voice he very well may have listened to—a voice he had come dangerously close to growing into, under the shadow of the ivory tower—had he opted to make certain decisions along the way.
He walked over, ready to help: offer money, lend a hand, do whatever needed to be done, even and especially the things he had neither the ways nor means to make happen. He walked over and smiled, and she spoke, making him an offer he had no choice but to refuse.
It was enough to make one wonder if (and even wish that) the stories in the bible, and those fairy tales and myths men have made all have a foundation in fact. That the slow, ceaseless suffering some of us occasionally see is in accordance with a plan, a motion picture we have no part in producing. That it was not even personal, all this erstwhile, enigmatic madness, it was strictly business. It was enough to cause the hardest of humans to hope for a beneficent Big Guy (or Lady, but it is asking too much for God to have the decency to be a woman) upstairs, shuffling that proverbial deck. Or cutting and pasting the appropriate pieces of the puzzle, always keeping a wise eye on the endearing idiots underneath, and generally doing and saying the things that the creator of an entire universe says and does.
But how the hell are we supposed to have hope when Hope herself had been reduced to this, turning tricks at a rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike?

*Excerpted from a work-in-progress entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: Bruce Springsteen, eyvind kang, Mary of Magdalene, Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before*

January 1, 2013 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

Let me tell you a story.

It involves a white male born in a steadily prospering town to a slowly prospering family. His father, the first in his Irish family to attend college, like his wife, was raised Catholic.

This young boy played soccer, listened to music, read any book he could get his eyes on and went to a public school amongst kids whose names he could not always pronounce.

He served, faithfully, as an altar boy and developed a profound appreciation—and respect—for tradition and ritual, a lingering humility regarding forces and impulses larger and not entirely conceivable.

He was, and remains, comfortable with how much he does not know, as a visitor on a planet that expands outward each second, into infinity.

He was encouraged by parents who, more than once, reassured him that his curiosity would never dissipate so long as his capacity for learning did not abate.

He talked, listened and learned.

Looking back, the habits and routines inculcated inside his impressionable mind served as a foundation for who he’d become: flawed, tolerant, empathetic, insatiable, in love with the gift of life.

The pursuit of higher education, even as it necessarily exposed him to classes, books and teachers that ardently challenged—and often contradicted—many of the precepts he was once instructed to emulate, was a priority. It was the gradual, not always painless process of understanding the ways he could not, and should not share his parents’ perspectives in every matter that secured the respect for them he solidified as an increasingly independent adult.

The exposure to religion and the example set by his mother and father ingrained an acute solidarity with underdogs and the dispossessed. The charities he has supported (HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE) reflect the causes and crises he endorses and decries.

He appraised the often enigmatic, occasionally debilitating specter of depression that stalked relatives on either side like a demented daemon; this condition a wind-whipped and sun-scorched flag planted deep alongside his family tree, a genetic calling card he has had, at times, a more than casual acquaintance with, obliging him to check himself lest he wreck himself.

Too much eyewitness to illness drove him to learn more than he might have cared to know about cancer, leukemia, and the various, run-of-the-mill maladies that all the doctors and dollars in the world can’t completely shield us from. This cognizance, coupled with an ineradicable conscience forged on altars and inside confessionals, further amplified an appreciation of how fortunate anyone is to be born in a first world country. To be born a healthy white male a blessing, just as being alive at all is an obligation—at once sacred and secular—to interrogate, expand, live: to abhor the self-indulgence of ennui and cultivate antidotes to quiet desperation—by any means necessary. To explore the creative impulse he could never fully fathom or explain, and expedite that dialogue (with himself, with others) by writing down those thoughts, images, feelings and fears; sharing them, so that as soon as they escape their frail human vessel they are free, without any power to scare or sabotage. To express emotions, allowing the heart to breathe and the mind to swim, the body a humble temple unto itself: a self-portrait of a work perpetually in progress. To encourage these sensations inside oneself so that they might awaken feelings in someone else, some not yet born and others alive but no longer living.

*So here’s the part where I address you, gentle reader.

First off, thanks for reading this blog. I resisted the blog thing for years because so many of the ones I read were either uninspired or a public airing of dirty (or worse, boring) personal laundry. Diaries and journals are kept in bedside drawers for a reason: they are an act of catharsis, celebration or introspection –or, at least, interrogation– that is best kept private. Remember when they used to actually come with locks on them? Do they still do that? Do they still make diaries anymore? Maybe I’m just old school. Here’s how I put it back in 2009 when I first considered the fact that I had, in fact, become one of those people who could use the word blog as a verb. Almost four years later (this blog commenced in November, 2008) I think the sentiment still applies:

Blogs are, or can be, like diaries.

Except that diaries, by nature, are private. Which begs the question: do people who blog censor or soften the observations, complaints or critiques that in other times would exist inside a document designed to remain unread by others? (Or more to the point, should they?) To be certain, only a few years ago, thoughts like the ones I’m about to express would have been safely ensconced inside a journal, not read by anyone else, even including myself (I don’t often return to old journals, hopefully because I’m too busy living in the here and now). And for whatever it’s worth, I am humble enough to know that modest numbers of people visit this blog, and I have enough sense (or self-respect) to instinctively acknowledge that nobody is well served by overly earnest airing of personal trivia.

Put another way, I don’t begrudge anyone else documenting every last detail of their existences (no matter how mundane or mawkish); I simply remain uninterested in reading about it. In that regard, blogs are self-regulating: if you don’t write things that others will find interesting, you won’t have an audience. And who cares anyway? In that regard, blogs are like diaries: people post on them because they want to, or need to, and the concept of friends or strangers reading their innermost thoughts won’t necessarily hamper their willingness to compose. Still, only the sensation-seekers looking for notoriety (usually the already famous, and even those folks have a shelf-life of about six months) go out of their way to wax solipsistic in a public forum.

All that being said, I was already publishing regular thoughts on music, movies and literature (alongside the occasional sociopolitical soap-boxery) at PopMatters –a site I encourage you to check out– so keeping a blog was not unlike working out: it was a way to keep in shape, mentally, and push myself to put thoughts in a semi-coherent form for a public forum. This is an endeavor that obliges you to edit with extreme prejudice: once you’ve written something that goes into the electronic universe, it stays written. I’m mostly delighted to consider that I’ve written a great deal of material that otherwise would have been lost to e-mails, conversations or that creative impulse killer, apathy. We should all do our best to remain allergic to apathy, because we owe it to ourselves and the world. Obviously.

Anyway, I was eventually humbled to acknowledge that the next formal project I’d been preparing to tackle, as a novel, could –and should– be a non-fiction piece. Indeed, once I realized this (after several years of false starts, frustration and best intentions), I wished it had occurred to me sooner. And it was then that it dawned on me that I likely would not have been able to conceive of writing a memoir if I had not been blogging. Non-fiction and personal essays were not foreign territory, but a sustained examination of life and how it’s lived (including death and how to live through it when it rocks your world) turns out to be the best real-time training for getting one’s mind –and pen– around a full-length, unfettered attempt to make sense out of deeply, if not profoundly personal things. And then you realize (you are always realizing as you write, or think, or talk) that a great many of these matters are universal: we all wonder who we are, where we’re going and where our loved ones may or may not go when they are no longer here. It not only seems possible, but oddly appropriate to embrace the audacity of putting it out there, so to speak. Best intentions clash against execution and at a certain point it’s out of your hands: other people will determine if the work in question works. It is at once intimidating and liberating, the way it should be for anyone who puts words on paper.

Just about two years later I’m coming down the home-stretch, I hope, of a memoir that regular readers of this blog are already familiar with: Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone. The plan for 2013 is to see this sucker come to life in a format that is both formal and final. I’ve already been fortunate enough to secure the involvement of some amazing people, and that has inexorably made the project better than it would have otherwise been. It also has made it more likely, if even a tiny bit, that I can pull this off. For a variety of reasons, some of which I’ve touched on HERE and more extensively via the analysis I do for my “day job” (it won’t be hard to find it if you try), it makes increasing sense in the current state of publishing to embrace a DIY ethos; the same one so many others have already proven not only viable but, in many unbelievable regards, preferable. Even better, he who controls the production and distribution also controls the momentum: it need not be a big opening-weekend type all-or-nothing initiative (the sad and consistent SOP of entirely too much creative work). In fact, it can be the opposite, and get bigger and better as it goes along.

This is where you may very well come in: I plan to donate all or most of any proceeds to a yet-to-be-determined charity (but anyone who knows the illness that rears its hideous head throughout the story should be able to make some educated guesses where and what I’m investigating). Social networking and word-of-mouth will, naturally, play a hopefully-prominent role in disseminating the project and then who knows what might happen. If you have opinions, advice, connections or cautionary tales, I welcome your thoughts anytime (contact me privately or feel free to put comments below). Simply put, this thing is not going to design, market or endorse itself; if you’ve gleaned anything positive from my writing thus far, you can do me the biggest service by helping my mission become something I could never accomplish on my own. And in the final analysis, that is the secret not only of writing, but of living. Right?

To be continued…

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: Living Colour, Myself When I'm Real, Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone

Deconstructing the Theory Generation

November 3, 2012 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

I spent some time this morning reading (well, skimming) a mostly fascinating piece from n + 1 magazine. The author is Nicholas Dames and the essay is entitled “The Theory Generation”. Check it out here.

This is how it begins. If you are inspired to keep reading, click on the link above.

If you studied the liberal arts in an American college anytime after 1980, you were likely exposed to what is universally called Theory. Perhaps you still possess some recognizable talismans: that copy of The Foucault Reader, with the master’s bald head and piercing eyes emblematic of pure intellection; A Thousand Plateaus with its Escher-lite line-drawing promising the thrills of disorientation; the stark, sickly-gray spine of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics; a stack of little Semiotext(e) volumes bought over time from the now-defunct video rental place. Maybe they still carry a faint whiff of rebellion or awakening, or (at least) late-adolescent disaffection. Maybe they evoke shame (for having lost touch with them, or having never really read them); maybe they evoke disdain (for their preciousness, or their inability to solve tedious adult dilemmas); maybe they’re mute. But chances are that, of those studies, they are what remain. And you can walk into the homes of friends and experience the recognition, wanly amusing or embarrassing, of finding the very same books.

If so, you belong to what might be called the Theory Generation; and it has recently become evident that some of its members have been thinking back on their training.

My own (comparatively succinct, less, well, theory-laden) take, from a piece entitled “Deconstruction” (excerpted from my memoir) is below.

Il n’y pas hors-texte.

Or, there is nothing outside the text.

If the names Barthes, Foucault and Saussure (for starters) mean nothing to you, it would be difficult to argue that you are missing much. And yet: in the autumn of 1992 I spent more time with these gentlemen than I did with actual, living people. You see, they were all literary theorists, and they were all dead. I arrived at grad school expecting to become more intimately acquainted with some of my favorite Russian authors and dive deeper into American literature.

This happened to be right around the time that Cultural Studies had infiltrated English departments with the fervor of a rotavirus. It is tempting to say I was unlucky in this regard; as it happened, I was also fortunate in ways I did—and did not—perceive at the time. To put it as plainly as possible, if the circumstances had been different, the likelihood that I would be writing these words right now is less than remote. I almost certainly would be, if I was lucky enough, a tenured professor. I also, most likely, would be well into my second decade crafting articles for scholarly journals that not even my friends would read, nor would I, being a good friend, want them to.

Long story short: after initially resisting the jargon, the unending analysis (which was initially like watching a Fellini movie on mushrooms) and the impenetrable pretension, I was, for a time, converted. Once the signifying pieces fell into place, I began to appreciate the maddening method of making molehills into mountains. Post-structuralism can quickly become a metaphysical cult, and once the scales fall from your eyes, you embrace the oddly cathartic notion that there will be a ceaseless stream of scales to be pulled off every day for the rest of your life.

As a result, like a soldier who has spent time on the front line, these experiences informed my subsequent relation to reality. Today, I carry deconstruction like a tool in my trunk anytime I need to change a flat tire in my critical acumen. For a while there I was not sure I would be able to read, much less write fiction ever again. Eventually, I learned how to think without seeing myself thinking, but it took many years to sluice all that onanism out of my system.

What are they after?

I came away from this experience mostly unsullied, intellectually speaking, and am glad for it (the experience and the lack of permanent damage). I came away convinced that, when it comes to art, theory and philosophical concerns certainly have an important place, but not at the expense of the work itself. Perhaps this is why, to this day, I find that actual writers compose the most insightful and convincing reviews and appraisals of fiction (and non-fiction, for the most part). Maybe, if I were to deconstruct my own line of thinking, I’m unintentionally (or purposefully) prejudicing my perspective as the more thoughtful, balanced one. Regardless, academia is, in its extremes, like any cult: it is usually worthwhile to avoid any group convinced they have figured out the secrets of the universe, particularly when the answers involve the creation of more, unnecessary questions.

II.

Toujours déjà.

What are we after?

From the moment my mother stopped living, everything that has happened can, of course, be measured along the continuum of before and after. But being alive, still, I now am unable to recall anything that happened before without some awareness that she is dead; that she will die. This happens in the abstract (the knowledge is there, which doesn’t change the memory, but it alters, however subtly, the process of remembering), but it also affects specific times and dates: I will recall an event from 1998 and some part of me thinks—or is simply aware in advance—how she will be gone in four years. An occasion from 2002 will prompt the troubling question: eight months left; she had no idea and neither did we. And so on.

It gets even more complicated during dreams. And that is only addressing the ones I remember, and the ones I remember remind me that most of us are dreaming constantly, endlessly, every night, creating screenplays and scenarios, concocting future stories while revisiting past mistakes or triumphs or slipping darkly through the glass into impossible escapades—the type that could only happen in heaven, or dreams, or else a Fellini movie.

In these dreams and in my memories my mother is always-already deceased. I am always-already predisposed to deal with her death, just like I can’t remember attending church without the eventual loss of faith, or my post-graduate studies without the abrupt decision to flee the ivory tower, or my ongoing quest to construct mysteries I might solve only through writing.

Mostly, perceiving existence through this lens applies to looking forward as well as looking backward. Knowing, ahead of time, how certain decisions or actions are likely to play out (based on experience, based on characters from books, based on intuition) obliges one to avoid clichés. This insight, a sort of prognostic radar, can be as paralyzing as it is liberating: you don’t want to make any moves that will contribute to a life someone else already lived, but you also don’t want to preclude the fortuity of chance. If you think too much you can outsmart the future, or else become Bartleby, preferring to do nothing in order to preserve the illusion of an unfettered free will.

III.

The living owe it to those who no longer can speak to tell their story for them.

Czeslaw Milosz, one of the great artists of the last century, was both a poet and a professor. He could appreciate literature from both angles: the creation of it as a writer and the appreciation of it as a reader. Having seen some of the atrocity humankind was capable of during his lifetime, his work uses words to elegize, accuse and above all, to remember. His great obsession was doing his part to ensure that the suffering and the bravery and the cruelty were a little less possible to ignore and forget. His poetry, in part because of its brilliance but mostly because of its restraint, all but resists analysis: he knows what he is trying to say and you know what he is trying to say. It’s more than that; it’s always more than that. Like all the best poetry, the deceptively simple words are fraught with feeling and affect. You cannot, in short, deconstruct Czeslaw Milosz.

I came across a poem of his around 1993 that I strongly suspect would have affected me in a profound fashion whether I encountered it before or after grad school. It does, nevertheless, seem to epitomize—with astonishing clarity and conciseness—what miserable if well-meaning theorists spend chapters and careers agonizing to articulate half as well.

What I know of my laborious life: it was lived…

I don’t need to write memos and letters every morning.

Others will take over, always with the same hope,

The one we know is senseless and devote our lives to…

So the Earth endures, in every petty matter

And in the lives of men, irreversible.

And it seems a relief. To win? To lose?

What for, if the world will forget us anyway.

Poets and professors are ultimately in search of similar things: not necessarily the answers to specific questions but the process of discovering, and interrogating the things that perplex us. It is not the answers or even the questions but the act of investigating: that dissatisfaction; not an act of rebellion or defiance, but an appreciation and, ultimately, acceptance that we can’t know. We can never know but we must try.

This, it seems to a former altar boy and once-future scholar, is the most satisfactory elucidation of what impels us to learn and love and live.

*From a non-fiction work-in-progress entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone.

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: Czeslaw Milosz, Deconstruction, Derrida, Guillame Apollinaire, Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone, Post-Structuralism, Serenade To A Cuckoo

About Miracles*

October 26, 2012 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

(2002)

Believing in miracles requires faith. Faith in miracles, faith in faith.

The bible, taken on faith, is God’s word and the document of His work. Miracles are, for the faithful, not merely possible or even expected, but inevitable. Blood into wine. Eyesight to the blind. Conception and then ascension, beyond and back into the skies. Death into life, eternal life after we die. With faith all things are conceivable.

ii.

One becomes wary of miracles the same way—and for the same reasons—one disdains forced faith. After seeing a magician reveal his tricks, whether he’s wearing a black cape or a white collar, the spell can never again be unbroken.

One conditions oneself to put away childish, or unreasonable things: one learns not to pray for miracles, to neither count on nor believe them. It has less to do with forsaking faith in the possible and more to do with reconciling oneself with what’s not possible.

iii.

We found ourselves in need of a miracle. July, 2002: fourth time would not be the charm, we knew that going in.

The summer had started badly. When my father called Memorial Day and said he and my mother could not make the family picnic, I knew. She isn’t feeling well, he told me and I knew. It wasn’t the resigned tone of his voice, or the abruptness of his announcement (she had been doing so well…); it was a feeling, somewhere between my gut and my brain, that told me we had dodged too many bullets, had too many strikes called balls, gotten out of too many traffic tickets, as well as other clichés I hadn’t considered. I just knew, the way I hadn’t known in ’97 (none of us did) or in 2000 (none of us allowed ourselves) or in 2001 (I can only account for myself here). I knew.

Things had gotten worse in a hurry, because with cancer once things get really bad they stay bad. A little less than halfway through the summer we brought her in for what we suspected would be the final surgery. The big question this time was not whether they could save her, or what they would find, but if they could even do anything once they got in there. We never know until they get inside, we told ourselves, a shard of hope, a last fortress against fate.

The worst moments, of course, occur in the waiting room. It is unconscionable the way families are obliged to receive the news, good or bad, in front of each other: one negative diagnosis a public spectacle hardly tolerable for loved ones, much less strangers; a positive diagnosis a slap in the face of those anxious and suffering within earshot. In ’97 the news had been unexpected—and not good—but they caught it (They got it!), so the shock was mitigated by how much worse it could have been (She’s going to make it!). In 2000 it was the same scene, only more so. 2001 was disconcerting, a surprise (It’s back) coupled with an inconclusive report (We can’t get rid of it all). We absorbed this verdict in the crowded space where everyone else sits and waits, a nerve-wracking purgatory we pay to provide (and, if possible, avoid).

“I’m going to the chapel,” my father announced, and I followed him. “You don’t have to come with me,” he said, almost gently. It was the first time I’d seen him this close to defeat, the first time I’d noticed the thinnest red streaks on either side of his mouth—burst blood vessels from clenching his jaw so long and so hard. “No, I’ll go with you,” I said. It was the first time I’d ever voluntarily accompanied him to a place where you pray for things.

I sat while he kneeled. I put a hand on his shoulder and we each thought our own thoughts. And even here, in this poor approximation of the churches we’d always attended, even as matters of life and death were being decided all around me, that familiar voice could not keep quiet. That voice inherited as birthright by anyone born into a family of faith, the conscience inside and beneath the sense of right and wrong, somewhere between my gut and my memory, the voice that sustains itself by feeding on fear and fantasy: Maybe if you believed it would work. Maybe, I thought, looking at my old man, his eyes squeezed shut and his mouth mumbling words I didn’t need to hear. Maybe if we all believed nothing bad would ever happen and the troubles we cause could be more easily explained. Maybe if nothing bad ever happened we would not need to believe. Maybe if we didn’t believe we would never inculcate this formula that can make a human being, at his most frail and vulnerable, capable of entertaining thoughts like this.

In 2002 we sat in or near the same seats we’d sat so many times before, covered on all sides by people in similar boats, lost in magazines, conversations, fervent attempts to keep the worst fears in check. We were unflappable, for the most part: we’d been here too much and expected too little to put too much on the line. We were waiting to hear words like stable, sustained, and second opinion. We also had seen too much to count on anything half as good as we’d heard during our last visits, however awful some of those things actually were.

I saw them first. They didn’t see me. I had walked toward the lobby, pacing as the wait stacked one interminable minute on top of the next, each one infinitely more excruciating, offering an endless menu of possibilities and horrors. It’s interesting the way we’ll feel compelled to move in order to quiet our minds: sitting still makes us defenseless against an onslaught of unwelcome thoughts; pacing around provides distraction, however weak and fleeting. I saw the surgeon, accompanied by the oncologist, striding down the long hallway, coming toward us to tell us our fortune. I saw them and experienced a sensation, somewhere between my gut and my heart that I had not felt in so long. It was the feeling of Hope fulfilled: the presents under the tree, the last day of class, the first drive in a new car. They could not see me and I saw something I could not believe. They were laughing. I saw them laughing and in that instant I understood. It’s a miracle!

And I did not renounce my faithless ways. I did not make immediate bargains with dead people. I did not feel the warm glow of divine intervention. I did not see God’s face in the empty spaces above me. My reaction was at once more simple and profound than that. I thought, modestly, It’s a miracle.

I thought: They are laughing which is unbelievable which means it’s good news and that means something good happened and maybe Mom’s okay and therefore it’s a miracle and they are going to tell us everything is under control and they can’t believe it but this is the way it is and shouldn’t we be glad to hear such amazing news because this never happens but that’s why we never say we know until we know because we never know until we see with our own eyes and that’s the only way we know for sure…

And then I watched them transform into the people I had known all along. As they walked closer, still not looking up to see me I saw them slip back into character. I saw them assume the detached air of authority, exuding the aloof ambivalence that preempted accountability. I saw my mother’s life flash before my eyes and the sinking feeling of the ultimate betrayal. They were no longer laughing and I watched, somewhere between what my eyes saw and what my mind imagined, a future that held things I had not, until this second, allowed myself to entertain.

They approached and my father and sister stood on either side of me. Unsmiling, they delivered the grim news, their voices conveying the austere lack of identification they required in order to perform their roles as sometimes saviors.

*excerpted from a memoir entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone.

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: John Coltrane, Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone

Q & A*

October 12, 2012 By Sean Murphy Leave a Comment

Question: What would you do differently?

Answer: Nothing.

True answer: Everything.

Truest answer: I don’t know.

***

If the death of a loved one provides the ultimate answer it also prompts all sorts of questions.

What would you do differently?

What could we have done differently?

We wouldn’t worry about what we could have done (we thought), we did it.

Do you think it’s going to come back?

Do you think it will ever go away?

What could you have done differently?

This is the question we were never able to ask the assorted surgeons, doctors and administrators. And what would they say, if we had? What could they say?

How much more time does she have?

*excerpted from a memoir entitled Please Talk About Me When I’m Gone.

Filed Under: Myself When I'm Real Tagged With: McCoy Tyner, Please Talk About Me When I'm Gone, Valley of Life