HALLELUJAH
This is a continuation of my irregular reports from my creeping extreme of old age. I say ‘extreme’ because I have exceeded my statistical life expectancy at birth by 8 years - that being 72 in the US. Even my cohort life expectancy - for those having achieved 65 - was15 years; I am there, too. So I think the term ‘extreme’ applies. A good bit of my consciousness is dedicated to memories these days, wherein I find myself subject to intense feelings of nostalgia. The “-algia” moiety is indeed penetrating, or “lancinating” to borrow a medical term. Much of this, in turn, constitutes a preemptive form of grief - a deep sadness for what I would miss - if, somehow, some part of me managed to keep hold of self-awareness after death.
Below, I will speak of author Mark Helprin, who writes many memory-worthy things. I have not encountered a similarly talented writer; he is having a great effect on me, which includes considerable delight. There are few things as affirming to find someone else express one’s own important philosophical understandings, especially when all but verbatim.
My daily life remains quite full, satisfying and meaningful. My wife, Gigi’s, cancer - though not in remission - is at least quiescent at the moment. She is still quite limited physically by the several ongoing neurological (and other) after effects of chemo. Her pre-existing lupus arthritis is presently somewhat blunted by systemic and intra-articular steroids. She still needs a lot of help and I remain deeply grateful I am able to provide it. It affords me meaning every day, without fail.
Her main problem - mobility - is due to severe spasms in the adductor muscles - innervated by the obturator nerve - of her right thigh, with weight bearing. It makes ordinary walking quite painful and difficult. A few weeks earlier, she had this same problem in the distribution of the right femoral nerve (quadriceps muscle spasm) but I was able to perform a nerve block with steroids. this cured it (I did around 1000 of these before I retired from anesthesia). Because I cannot block the obturator nerve without an ultrasound machine to visualize it, I’m unable to fix that one. The working hypothesis is that these are late-onset neuropathies due to chemo. It seems to be (hopefully) starting to resolve.
As I said, I am busy. I continue to exercise on a Precor Adaptive Motion Trainer (AMT) for 2 hours every day - usually beginning around 9:15 am. Prior to that I ‘fly’ an instrument approach on my flight simulator with my morning coffee. I do this religiously, both because it is enjoyable and because there is persuasive evidence that such activities help ameliorate age-related cognitive decline. It requires maximal mental concentration, focus via scanning multiple visual inputs from instruments which properly analyzed (in real time), gives the necessary situational awareness to fly and navigate the plane. It can be thought of as “exercising the brain muscle”. It takes about 20 minutes, which goes fast, as I “become the task” of piloting.
Time on the AMT (in the bedroom) also passes quickly, as I can either converse with wife Gigi (usually still in bed most of the morning), or browse the many things I read online. In addition, I watch online videos (Jordan Peterson, John Lennox, Stephen C. Meyer and others). Sometimes, instead, I read one of the several books I am always reading on Kindle. Never has exercising been so easy, thanks to the shelf I bought which mounts on the AMT machine and holds my devices.
After exercise, there are always chores to do around the house; dishes in the sink, many self-assembled balls of cat hair to be vacuumed throughout those parts of the house where our two beloved Ragdolls (neutered boys) are domiciled. Scooping their litter box is among my daily chores at mid-day. A couple times a week, I make quick trips to the grocery store, Sam’s Club or the pharmacy. Of course, there are several doctor’s office visits a month for each of us.
On the emotional front, I find my lifelong “depression” has largely lifted. Looking back, I’m not sure “depression” was accurate; some of my shrinks called it “dysthymia” instead. I now consider it the more-or-less appropriate mood state for someone like me who is 1. introspective thus aware of the existential issues of the human condition - i.e. of vulnerability and mortality and 2. unable/unwilling to mood alter regularly with either bread and circuses or chemicals. Actually, I tried the latter in my mid 40’s , became addicted to fentanyl and fortunately discovered 12 step recovery (before I succeeded in destroying myself, whose practice has greatly improved every aspect of my life ever since.
There is another - a third means - besides the two above dysfunctional defenses against continual existential angst, but it is available to only a few individuals: artistry. I have found myself saying - in trying to describe my erstwhile chronic low mood and self-esteem - that I was an artist without any talent with which to express and share my angst (other than mere pedestrian plaintive words). This may well have been true, as I have discovered some artists recently, with whom I relate strongly. Take Leonard Cohen.
One of the arts I lack is the ability to adequately describe to you the genius of Leonard Cohen - may God rest his soul. And God surely knows that his soul had little rest on Earth; I identify! Somehow, I only learned of Leonard’s existence and his works shortly after his death in 2016! Yet I think I have shed more tears hearing his music and poetry than I have shed over all my prior years. I hardly know at which level to begin this encomium, as I it ought to cover the gamut of human experience - as do Leonard Cohen’s words and music. Allow me to begin, then, with epistemology.
Magically, Leonard consciously melds harmony, melody and mere words into nothing less than the logos of whatever aspect of reality he is exploring. I use this word, “logos” in the fullest breadth and depth of its meaning. “In the beginning was the logos” - that which ineffably underlies all we may know. Hearing various renditions of Cohen’s “Hallelujah” by many artists you see, leads me to an inescapable conclusion: regardless of their individual beliefs, most every one of them has been transported to an elevated plane by this music. It is sublime and from it extends a sense that it was composed pains-takingly over years - as life wore off Leonard Cohen’s rough edges (as it does to every one of us). This kind of intentional self-awareness is only available to those with the courage to admit it to the core of their being. For each of us, that willingness to allow ourselves to be moved, itself I’m pretty sure, is a gift from God and not created by our own will.
The many, many verses of Hallelujah (extant but not often played and many never recorded) address most important elements of human ontology and experience. As a welcome consequence of them, I personally, have been moved to forgive myself for many of my many youthful transgressions - especially those of the sex and love varieties. I was so very desperate and needy, you see, that these felt like urgent matters on which my very survival depended. In other words, these were compulsive/addictive feelings and behaviors but were actually rooted, I came to believe, in the universal survival instincts we all share. But these instincts in modernity, are usually acted out in a manner which is completely out of balance. I look back on those intense feelings which caused my actions with puzzlement since, from today’s perspective, they appear to have been childish delusions. My motivational state, back then boiled down to “I’ll be OK if just this one affirms me by her willingness to be sexual with me”. Then, that was the only form of affirmation which had any effect on me. Getting ‘A’s in all my courses may have been a distant second in giving me any sense at all that I might be possibly be a worthy person.
Every word of Hallelujah is chosen (did the words come through Leonard or from him?) not only for the essence of its meaning, but for connotations which almost vibrate the listeners’ emotions like harmonics - sympathetic vibrations - as are induced in a taut string by oscillations of the surrounding air molecules. Each word is the tip of a linguistic iceberg of subtle meaning - connotation - standing on the shoulders of synonyms, rooted in a virtual thesaurus of emotion. Some clever self-reference also succeeds so very artfully, in literally fusing the lyric to the music: “The fourth, the fifth, the minor fall the major lift” are so spare and exquisite as to become a unique coupling of word/music; a musicological onomatopoeia! There is some transporting magic in this brief confection which stirs my soul no matter how many times I hear it.
Given that I’m 80 (yes, I DO repeat myself)- in the winter of life - and I haven’t found the ‘end of life’ chapter in the instruction manual for life, so I’m doing what I’ve always done (however imperfectly): trying to learn from my own errors and from others’ experiences (witnessed or related). Leonard has had some instructive things to say in that regard and has given me something of a roadmap to the end. I’m still reading his biography, but recently twice watched a video documentary “Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen, A Journey, a Song”. If you are interested in Leonard and/or his work, I recommend it as a warm and touching exposition. Numerous very articulate artists offer thoughtful and insightful comments on Leonard. Regina Spektor (never heard of her either), for instance, well describes Leonard’s ability to share living “instruction manuals” as to certain aspects of life - in her case, how to offer ones’s self authentically, to an audience in a performance. I think it’s of a piece with the musical onomatopoeia.
My present intense interest and magnetic affinity for Leonard Cohen (as far as I can really know him [there’s that troublesome epistemology again]), have led me to realize that several such attachments to a few individuals have become staples of my shrinking horizon. Biography of heroism, sadly, has been replaced by ‘pathography’, which focuses only flaws, to the exclusion of any positive contribution which may exist in an historical personage. The calculus of this is exemplified by the revised history of Thomas Jefferson (and all others connected to the Founding). Whatever his meagre contributions to history, these are all precisely cancelled out by the fact he held slaves in the 18th century.
Nonetheless, I have re-acquired some heroes, you see. I had a few in childhood, before heroism was banned in America; beginning in the ’60’s political and psychic and social economies were amalgamated by the ‘experts’. This required that only Marxists (initially), then the State (once these same Marxists had successfully marched through all the institutions) could possibly be looked up to or viewed with reverence. God was - at least politically - dead. For me, there were still Mickey Mantle and Pat Boone. As their careers faded so, too, did my worship; any replacement in my heart was culturally verboten!
I can hardly tell you how comforting it is to again have personal heroes, particularly at the emotional level. Besides Leonard Cohen, I include musician Bob Dylan as well as mere writers like Philip Roth and Marc Helprin. Finally, in the intellectual (rather than emotional) category, there are John Walker and Stephen C Meyer Ph.D. Walker, a friend until his untimely death earlier this year, was founder of Autodesk and by far the most brilliant and broadly knowledgeable person I have ever known. I am privileged to have known and met him. Meyer is author of Signature in the Cell, Darwin’s Doubt, and Return of the God Hypothesis.
I must credit Dr. Meyer for arming me with the cognitive tools to convert my secular Jewish, blurry agnosticism into a clear, comfortable and intellectually-satisfied theism. My beliefs - thanks to Meyer - rest not on faith, but upon scientific evidence. What we now know about the universe (and its workings), life (and its origins), and logical causality - Meyer compellingly teaches, is that the cause of all this is best explained by intelligent design rather than random, unguided natural processes. The latter “scientific” belief is intellectually sloppy and incoherent.
In great depth, Meyer expounds upon various threads of accepted science (such as ‘fine tuning’ of all the physical laws and constants) to not only show that intelligent design is the best choice among possible hypotheses attempting to explain the universe and the life therein. He convincingly also shows that undirected random processes simply lack the creative power to explain the origins of the universe, life, or the evolution of new species from pre-existing forms. In each of these phenomena inheres an essential characteristic, not previously taken into account: information - and vast amounts of it. This information simply cannot have arisen spontaneously so as to credibly explain the reality we observe. It is a mathematical near impossibility that any of these ontological events could have taken place, as promulgated by “the science”. The combinatorial resources required of random processes to explain material reality and/or biology are many orders of magnitude less than necessary for even a plausible hypothesis for random creation. In short, it requires more blind faith to accept the “consensus” “scientific” rubrics as to origins of reality and of life, than to believe in an intelligent designer.
By way of simple example, when the Rosetta Stone was discovered, no one looked at it and said, “wow - look at the work of wind, rain, erosion or some combination of random processes and how they created the symbols on the stone”. It was obviously the act of mind, of intelligence. All manmade historical objects are similarly understood. How about computer code? Do we find it lying about anywhere, randomly assembled? There is simply no other credible source of code - of specified, functional information - than mind. As there exists no other possible source of computer code so there is none for DNA code. And it is the same with specified information in protein, DNA and RNA, as it is in code or even the mere writing writing of language. it is our universal, uniform experience that such information can only exist as the result of mind and never from random, unguided processes. Further, random mutations of computer code invariably degrades - not improves - it. The same result applies to DNA. RNA proteins (and their folds), and written language.
As I reread and edit this foray, I realize I have omitted an important component of my present much improved attitude toward the life I have lived. In addition to becoming the husband and father of two (now adult) children (three, if you count my stepdaughter, to whom I became ‘dad’ when she was 8) I had always hoped to be, I am the caregiver and lover - in the spiritual sense! - of two Ragdoll cats. I grew up with dogs and didn’t much care for cats. Well, 3 years ago our daughter gave us Theo (short for The Adore-d Cat) as a gift. We loved him so that we believed for his (neutered pronoun) happiness we ought to provide a companion. So, along came Rudey - accent on the ‘rude”. He was a bit willful you see, from the get go.
Now, compared to dogs, cats do not express their love very readily - if at all. This turned out to be helpful to me in revealing an improvement (with age and erosion) of my psychic economy. Thus, instead of seeking the cats’ love for me, I sought to express my love for them in terms meaningful to them.
Thus, I set about combing/brushing their long, often knotted fur, feeding and watering them using scrupulously clean bowls twice a day, and improving my “litter-acy” by scooping the litterbox every day (and musing many philosophical matters, cogent with my scatological sensibility); these actions (and not the feelings of love), I now understand, are what show my unconditional love for these two wonderful companions. These mental calisthenics, nonetheless, do not in any way reduce my feelings of love for them. I will admit that, when they groom each other by licking each other’s faces, necks and ears (NOT in other body parts!)… I am sometimes tempted to join in. Weird, I know, but true.
Leonard Cohen closes the cited documentary about him and the song Hallelujah with a hefty quote for the interviewer: “You look around and you see a world that is impenetrable, that cannot be made sense of - you either raise your fist, or you say, ‘Hallelujah’. I try to do both.”
That short statement - like much of his poetry and music - is so very insightful and actually helpful. It functions for me as a source of comfort and forgiveness. It works as a simple operating system for the winter of my life. I, too, try to do both - though more often than not - and although it was completely absent from my young life - nowadays I am most always grateful.
In my earlier stunted worldview, you see, I believed that anything I desired which did come my way, was wholly caused by me - by my will. I have come to understand that this former belief - certain though it was - was an illusion. I now see that everything which has come my way in life, has been a gift; that I actually have power to control very little and have most control only of my self - my own actions and to some extent (marginally) my own beliefs. Once that understanding hit home, I became able to abstain from employing my will to try to control others; I worked to improve my self and, to my great surprise, gratitude flowed freely in the wake. That gratitude is, I believe, the greatest gift and it can only come from God; I have no doubt I could not have willed it for myself as though I were the author of my own life; maybe only inadvertently, by misdirection.
Much of my conscious life nowadays, as I suggested at the outset, is almost a meditation and leaden with grief, loss. I remember people and incidents from my life - seemingly randomly. I recall friends with whom I discontinued contact when I moved on to a new place or endeavor. I regret this repeated pattern and practice of my life. I didn’t plan to do it in that way and I don’t understand why I acted as though people were disposable. Nonetheless, I regret it even as I miss some of these people intensely. As I said, I think these thoughts amount to anticipatory grief for all which will be lost to me at my end and regret for my many imperfections.
As part of these informative meditations/reaching out to God, I do pray explicitly and randomly throughout the day. I pray for those I love, I ask for relief of suffering for the afflicted - of which there are many. For myself, I humbly ask God to allow me to know him and his will will for me.
So ends my winter report.
