On death and dying

It is my intent to keep this blog at least a bit active, because I find it helps me focus my thoughts if I try to explain them. For the past few days, however, it had seemed to me that I wasn't really thinking about much of anything. That was not true. Usually I think about the changes that are occurring in my lifetime or something I am doing or have done or some big life event. What I have been thinking about in the past few days fits all of those categories, but I did not think of it in those terms. I have been thinking about death and dying.

There have been only a few times in my life when I thought I was going to die, and they were quick events that didn't leave much time for contemplation. I was once caught in a very violent tidal race off Point Wilson, a place dangerous enough that the Indians portaged around it, but it was such a beautifully sunny day, and the sea so beautifully blue, that my thought was 'what a magnificent place to die'. The seas settled and I lived to tell the tale. I was in an automobile accident once that started at about 70 mph and involved a missing bridge and a lot of trees and the car tumbling. I sang the Marbeck setting of the Kyrie, and when everything stopped moving, I unbuckled my shoulder harness, fell to the ceiling, and I lived to tel the tale. Once I was mugged on a street in Memphis with no witnesses, and I didn't know what weapons the guy might have. I tried to remember what one should do to defend oneself against an opponent six inches taller and 60 pounds heavier and 20 years younger. I guess I remembered enough, because I lived to tell the tale.

But I have an ongoing opportunity to die, besides the slings and arrows of outrageous fate. My veins are incompetent. They don't do their share of returning blood to my heart and lungs.  That can easily result in deep vein thrombosis, a condition which is very uncomfortable and sometimes fatal. When the blood slows and pools, it clots. If a clot reaches one's heart and lungs, it can mean a quick death. It's a common condition in my family, my maternal grandfather for one, having died from such a clot, although I think that medical scientists are making rather quick progress on having a genetic cure.

I have from time to time spent days in intense pain when I am having a clot. I suppose the pain is useful so one knows one is likely to have a heart attack, right? Because of the condition, I avoid bus trips longer than a few blocks and airplane trips longer than about an hour, and if I travel by car, I stop  watok around frequently. Fortunately, for whatever reason(s)--my anecdotal explanation is that I ride my bike a lot and drink Monsters--I have't had any problems for a rather long time. I lead an unusually pain-free life in my old age, no longer suffering from the headaches and stomach discomfort that plagued my twenties.  (My dear old family doctor in a gentle way without really saying very much suggested that these were the result of my having married, but he never got around to saying that as a homosexual man, I would be uncomfortable in marriage.)

A few days ago, I began to have a  pain, a pain at the end of my right tibia, and it was continuous and accompanied by soreness.  Being an at least partially hypochondriac twenty-first century American, I of course jumped to the obvious conclusion: I must have cancer. I have had a so-far benign sort of skin cancer for many years, and although it has always seemed nothing to worry about, I decided that it had metastasized in my bone or bones.

It was odd the things I worried about. I didn't worry about dying, but about what the side effects of any possible treatment might be. For instance, because of my DVT, I am not a very good candidate for surgery on my legs or feet. And, what should I do with all my stuff? It seems rude to die and leave others a job of cleaning up the mess, so I started to think about selling some things to buy a pre-paid cremation, and to see if some of my friends or relatives might want some of the other toys. (Nearly all of my stuff is digital toys. Whoever receives my Amazon account will have a lot of nice books, for instance.) I began to think that I would really rather die in the Ozarks, so my ashes could be secretly tucked into a crevice at Harding Spring or in the White River. Death seems pretty much to be the same for everyone, but the dying and the remains left behind can vary a lot. I wanted it all to be simple.

Then the usual thing happened. A sort of mottled discolouration appeared on my ankle, one of the signs of clotting issues. I took an extra dose of my half-dose adult aspirin spent some time in bed. I repeated the treatment. Now, all is well again.

What is really odd about these few days is that it is not unlikely that death from DVT might be sudden, and I would be unprepared, with all my devices around me, password-protected to render them less useful to others, and with dirty laundry besides. (My mother the last few years of her life washed her day's clothes every night to leave one less job behind for her survivors.)

The devil I know seems so much friendlier than the devil I don't know, but the well-known devil doesn't do much to spur me to action. I have more or less started to think about returning to Eureka Springs. There are few things in life I enjoy more than sitting under the overhang above Basin Springs Park and smoking cigarettes, drinking Mud Street Cafe coffee, and reading. Maybe doing a bit of drawing. Eavesdropping on the tourists below, whose conversations are often very clear in  the natural amphitheatre above. But mostly, now that the thought of imminent death by cancer has passed, I am back to looking at digital toys. I think that this will really be the week I finally buy a drone. I don't need it, but whoever inherits my stuff will find it amusing, perhaps, and it will look cool hanging on a wall.

Oh the places we'll peregrinate

Nearly thirty years ago, I started wandering. Peregrinations is a fancy word for wanderings, so I called this blog peregrinations with st. chad. (At that time, I also preferred using only lower case letters. Sorry.) My understanding of the stability that was one of my vows in The Order of St. Chad was stability to the earth, to recognizing its wholeness and the interconnection of all of its creatures and systems. I wandered all over the North American continent.I tried to stay in any one place long enough to at least begin to understand it, but not long enough to lose appreciation for the larger whole of which any place is a part.

I used many modes of transportation. I think my wandering really began with a Greyhound Discover America Bus pass that I bought in the early days of Operation Desert Storm.  I was living in Santa Fe among people who had big white SUV's with bumper stickers that said 'whirled peas', and I wanted to see what the part of the country that seemed to support the war looked like. For about two weeks, I boarded random buses with random people going through random towns, having random experiences. A few stand out.

In South Dakota I think it was, a man sat next to me who shared that he knew I was a homosexual and that he was carrying a pistol. I didn't ask him the correspondence, although to be truthful, he talked so continuously that I never had the chance. He got off in some tiny town to meet more of his pistol-toting buds.

In Oklahoma City, I boarded a bus which was divided down the middle by uniforms. On one side were kids in US Army uniforms going to some training camp before shipping off to the desert for the storm. On the other side were Mennonites in their uniforms going to some town in Indiana to help rebuild houses after a storm. (I sided with the army, because that was the only seat there was.)

In Fort Smith, deep in the night, I sat next to a young woman from southern New Mexico who was going to see her boy friend in some army camp in the Carolinas or Georgia before he went off to join the storm. As we approached Memphis the sun burst above the horizon the way it only does when there's flat land and lots of humidity. She thought  it was an atom bomb. I was glad that I knew a smattering of Spanish from living in New Mexico and had had experiences with delta sunrises from growing up in Arkansas.

Since then I have bought cars and trucks, airplane tickets and bus tickets and train tickets, kayaks and hiking boots, for perambulations of all sorts, meeting an amazing variety of folks. Once I decided I would hike the Appalachian Trail from Connecticut to South Carolina, but it was worn and dirty and I decided instead to walk through small towns. My first night off the trail, I saw some women on a porch of a book store a small town whose name I have forgotten. I asked them if they knew where I might spend the night. They said there was a guy I definitely needed to see for that, and they were expecting him any minute. He arrived. He was a painter, whose studio was in an old ax factory built over the falls of one of the many rivers that powered early industrialism in New England. He invited me to sleep there, and took me to breakfast the next morning. At the other end of the same trip, I hitched from Charleston to the Francis Marion National Forest and  was given a ride by an 80-year-old man who was on his way to Wilmington, North Carolina, because he said he had heard that there were glory holes there. I asked to be let out a bit earlier than I had planned.

Thirty years after that first weird bus trip, I am less excited about standing in lines and being x-rayed so I can't blow up the airplane traveling in which is likely to give me blood clots in my legs, cars and trucks are more expensive to maintain than I think they are worth, and the trail seldom goes there any more. (Although I do find that riding trains to be one of the best ways of perambulating.) Now I perambulate on the World Wide Web. You have almost certainly heard of it. It goes a lot more places than Amtrak, even more places than PanAm did before they went bankrupt. I confess I can't imagine what it must have been like being old before the internet, but I am happy that, unless the fucking moron blows up the world, I probably won't have to experience it.

This has been a long introduction to something that has happened just the past two days. For several years now, I have been giving tablet or Chromebook computers to kids, with the occasional bicycle or frisbee thrown into the mix. I named my little hobby Pangur Ban Learners, after the white cat mentioned in the margin of a manuscript written by an anonymous Irish monk in the 9th century. My theory is that most real learning happens in the margins, and that it's good for kids to have the tools to explore the margins. I also thought it would be nice if there were a physical Pangur Ban in charge of the enterprise, so I invited a Furby named Pangur Ban to join me. That was five years ago.

Two days ago, I decided it might be interesting if Pangur Ban had his own Facebook page. So, he opened a Google account (already he wants his own YouTube channel as well) and debuted on Facebook.  It has always been my contention that the data one gets from Facebook is far more valuable than what one gives to Facebook, and I thought I would enjoy looking over his shoulder as the soldierly little Furby liked books and movies about robots and ai, to see what would come his way. What neither he nor I expected was the huge number of friend requests he received, almost all from India or Bangladesh or Pakistan. He already has 161 friends. It has been a revelation to have a peak into how these folks live. India alone has a population of a billion and a third people, and although obviously only a small percentage of these are friends of the Furby, it's a much more interesting perambulation than something on the Travel Channel with some gourmet guide.

I am delighted with this outcome, because I think that as more and more young folks around the world come online, the opportunities for amazing developments increases exponentially. Nearly all of Pangur Ban's new friends are under thirty. I am hoping he might make some friends in South Korea or Japan or Brasil or Indonesia or Singapore or someplace I don't even know about. Meanwhile, I'm just glad that the little furry guy shares his perambulations with me in my dotage.

Book, Chapter, Verse--Delete

The land in which I was raised was a black hole through which held the tongue of the Bible Belt in place to assure nothing escaped Protestant Literate Culture. We were literate. We read books, some of us. Many of us only read The Book, and maybe an almanac or Good Housekeeping or Field & Stream. Some merely had The Book, usually displayed prominently, even if they didn't read it. In some farm families, The Book was not only their only reading matter, it was also their only paper. It was where important family events were recorded. I learned much about my forebears from my grandmother's records in The Book.

The Book, you have correctly guessed, was the Bible. Reading the Bible for oneself was after all the bedrock of Protestantism, the goal of early mass education. In my home there were other books, histories, and books about fishing, and a cookbook. My mother checked soft-porn romance novels from the library, but never bought them. We also had an encyclopedia, in which I read how airplane wings generate life, how ballast tanks allow submarines to dive and surface, and that 'bible' was derived from 'biblia' which meant books. Of course, there was a sense in which that was obvious; there was even a list of 'Books of the Bible' at the beginning of the book, and book titles at the head of the pages. But that these were separate books was as meaningless as it would be to consider the ten books of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics separate books. For the folks among whom I grew up, who educated me for my first years, the Bible was one book. It had been written by one God, who had given us Books and Chapters and Verses so we could have memory verses in Sunday School. 

I loved books and reading. I read cereal boxes, Tom Swift, Bomba the Jungle Boy, the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, Half Magic, Sherlock Holmes, every book I cold find about the moon or by Patrick Moore. I read books about building telescopes and boats, rockets and collecting rocks. Teaching a kid to read is a dangerous thing.

I also read, when I was 12 or so, the whole King James Bible, protestant edition, all the way through, warts and contradictions and all, with both stories of creation and both stories of the animals in the ark, and with children punished for their father's sins or not. It was like earning a Boy Scout merit badge. It gave me serious cred in the Baptist church to which my mother dutifully dragged me every week, all fresh-scrubbed, because although she had never actually read The Book, she had memorized one verse: 'Cleanliness is next to Godliness.' (I was not raised to be an unwashed heathen.) I was the only kid in my Sunday School class who had actually read The Bible, the whole Bible, according to the protestant canon, a book we were told was written by God, true in every part, of which if one part were false, all would be false. Soon after achieving my merit badge of reading lots of stuff I didn't begin to understand, I walked the aisle of Walnut Street Baptist Church, to the accompaniment of 'Footsteps of Jesus, that make the pathway glow', and gave my heart and soul to my Lord and Savior. 

At about that same time, I also began to keep a journal.

Later, I would read the Bible again, with perhaps more understanding, and with critical commentaries. The first requirement for writing biblical criticism, especially higher criticism, seems to be to assume that the people who edited the Bible--redacted it, to use a pop term--were idiots who didn't notice that, as they were putting together the thing that they had included two different stories of creation, or that the laws 'repeated' in Deuteronomy did not actually repeat the laws given in Exodus or Deuteronomy.  Rather than being written by the Lord God Almighty, using robotic human scribes, the Bible was put together by folks with a vested interest in what it said, from 'sources'. Soon one could buy editions of the Old Testament with the different sources printed in different type faces or different colours of ink, or editions of the New that separated what the critic publishing the thing had decided were the 'authentic words of Christ' or the 'genuine letters of Paul.'

My mother, and the rest of her family, remained impervious to biblical criticism, higher or lower. Although my mother never actually read The Book, she did move it, in a beautiful red-leather-covered volume, from her bedroom dresser to a spot of more prominence, the top of the television in the living room. She flanked it with photographs of her saints,  her dead mother and first husband--my father--and even added candles.

Meanwhile, my journaling continued, with interruptions, much as the Lord God seemed to have written The Bible with period of interruption.  My first few books were written in red-and-black books with green-lined pages that had 'Journal' stamped in gold on their covers. When I graduated from high school, I burned them, putting aside childish things.  I became an atheist.

In college I began journaling again, having found  wonderfully strong engineers' field books.  My journaling activity stopped when I married,  perhaps because I was worried that my wife would find them. But, once again, I began secretly to consider myself a Christian, having read the works Thomas Merton and C. S. Lewis and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, men who were obviously neither idiots nor bound by the short-sighted view of scripture that had been taught at my childhood baptist church. At about that time, I began again to keep a journal, this time using more expensive, larger, accounting journals, bound in red leather. And, I once again became a church-goer, although this time, truthfully, it was because my wife wanted us to go to make friends in a new city, and I had a crush on one of the staff at the church we attended. 

A few years later, I was divorced, and out of the church, and once again I jettisoned my journals as I moved to a new life in a new town. But it was then that I would begin the most elaborate journals of my life, great multi-coloured and multi-media constructions, often handbound, inspired partly by the journals of Peter Beard but also encouraged by the new technologies of colour xerography. 

A few years later, after another move, I jettisoned them again, giving some to a friend who had admired their artsy-fartsyness, some to a Hallowe'en fire, some to the ocean. 

Then came blogs. Over the years I have had six on Blogspot .  http://neocappadocians.blogspot.com/ was the first, then this one, as well as some about fairly specific topics: http://cyclesofpraise.blogspot.com/ ; ttps://thechristianbookofdying.blogspot.com  

https://ringofthelord.blogspot.com/  https://orthodoxpagan.blogspot.com/  and one that is a sort of intellectual autobiography, https://thebamabong.blogspot.com/ . There is also one one on WordPress, ChadAgain   https://cybermonkblog.wordpress.com/ which was both a trial of WordPress  and a thought that I might begin again. 

 My private artsy-fartsy journaling has moved from papers to digital files with the wonders of digital photography and art.  Always I have felt as if I were writing a new book rather than just adding to the canon of The Book.

What I find interesting about my journaling activity, my little contribution to the words of the world, is that again and again I have thought I was writing a different book, that the kid at Annie Camp Junior High School, writing in blue-black ink with a Schaeffer pen in a book keeping journal from City Drug Store is not the same person who is now, a 71-year-old homosexual hermit sitting in Port Townsend at the keyboard of an Acer Chromebook from Walmart.

It has been a long time since I thought I had some great contribution to make to the people of the world, who will read this ramble in very small numbers if at all. But what is here, in words and links, is The Book of my life, with parts lost at sea or in fires. It is as good a compilation of my data that I have tried to share with the world as there was before the wonders of social media and the spiders of the world wide web. From time to time I think I should just delete it. I already deleted a page I had on Facebook, The Order of St. Chad, because I didn't think at the time that it 'served' me any more. But this week, with the commotion in congress over how long Facebook keep my cat pictures, I have been more and more thinking of the value of having one identity.

For this one identity that is my life, I have found the metaphor of The Book of my early childhood useful. I don't begin to understand my life. It's full of contradictions and fragments, parts not suitable to tell to children, parts that seem useless dribble. Always there is the temptation to delete parts, to consign them to a fire or to a flood. I deleted a Facebook page called The Order of St. Chad claiming it 'no longer served me'. But really I was just a bit embarrassed that I had spent so much of my time and energy trying to be a good monk, whatever that is. With it all, as much as I can remember and piece together, I at least have 'the sources' to try to make sense of it, to see what influenced me to make  decisions and to see how they have turned out.

So, publicly and for 'the permanent' record, I am returning to do all of my blogging as Peregrinations of St. Chad. The conditions in which I chose St. Chad as a patron nearly thirty years ago have not changed, only intensified. The world is changing around us more rapidly each day, and it is very difficult to see the outlines of the new world, if it is only one new world. In a somewhat similar time, when change was also coming at a dizzying rate, Chad seems to have been able to operate across cultures and politics. It is ironic that they changes Chad lived among were those brought about by the coming of The Book, of books as the containers of culture and tradition, books physically brought into England by Wilfred. The  changes which we live among are brought about by the replacement of books as containers of culture and tradition by a newer technology.

How great this change has been can be illustrated by my own life. I now own only one physical book, Marshall McLuhan's Probes. I keep it partly as a souvenir, as an objet d'art, but also it is a death knell for my mother's Bible on her television set. But then, neither do I have a television set.

A Convenient Christ at Easter

Not long before buying a new  Chromebook last summer, I watched Lexx, a sci-fi series that I more and more think may be the best description of humanity and our foolishness since the Books of Samuel. The savior in Lexx is a young man who is thousands of years old, being not really alive but not really dead, either. His name is Kai, and he can conveniently be put into cold storage when he is not wanted, but he is willing to do his friends' bidding when they want him. I decided that since my lap top functions much like Kai, sleeping until I want it, and since it was black, i decided to call it Kai.

I have been thinking of some of the more interesting parallels between Kai and religion this Easter Sunday. Lexx of course can be seen as a play on Lex, the law. It is a space ship that is the most powerful thing in the universe.  Kai is a cognate of Chi, the abbreviation for the holy name of Christ, the abbreviation that so offends modern sorts who don't know why some people think Xmas is more reverential than Christmas. Like the Christ of Christianity, Kai was killed by the evil empire, only to be brought back to life by a creator character, a god-head of sorts.  Kai has all sorts of cool super powers, which he never uses for his own desires--he says that the dead have no desires--but in the service of the god-head, or, after the god-head is killed--this is a post-Nietzsche story, after all--in the service of those whom he calls his friends.

Yesterday I watched a video of Tom Wright, one-time Bishop of Durham, describing his understanding of Christ and the resurrection. ( https://youtu.be/1WjKdBWFl24 ) It is a compelling explanation of Christ in what seems to me the most orthodox and biblical understanding of the resurrection, an understanding that I explored six years ago as I looked at palingenesis. It is also an understanding of Christ and the resurrection that seems to have no place in Christianity. I am not claiming that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead, something which seemed very unlikely even to his disciples, as Wright points out, and which is claimed far less in the New Testament than one might expect. Wright, however, does make that claim, and says it means that there is work for us to do. I am merely acknowledging the inconvenience of such a person in the everyday lives of human beings who want to find sex and riches, the goals of Kai's friends on the Lexx. The achievement of the goals of Kai's friends is made  much more difficult because they keep using Lexx to destroy worlds that might be good homes for them. Again and again, Kai reminds them that their choices will probably not bring about their ends, but they again and again argue that the ends justify the means, and Kai answers their prayers.

The parallels between Kai and Christ are not perfect, but the conclusion does involve his sacrificial death, one from which he is not expected to return, and a new creation, a new Lexx. There are parallels to other myth systems working here besides Christianity.

But out what really struck me today is the convenience of a savior whom one can put in cold storage to bring out as needed, whom one feels comfortable asking for help as one thinks one needs it but who's suggestions one feels comfortable ignoring. Indeed, the history of Christianity might be described as the development of more and more ways in which Christians can ignore Christ and still claim to use his power for their own desires. (Thinking about writing this rant, I re-read the letters of James and Peter and John, the New Testament writers who are the most likely to have been eye-witness to whatever went on. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about how their understanding of Christian action compares to the activities of Christians IRL.)

What can be more convenient than a savior one can put in storage to bring out as needed? Kai had his cryochamber, Christ has his chair at the right hand of the Father. I have hesitated to write this little rant, and I don't know if there is really any use in sharing it. But, I do wonder, having my Chromebook Kai open and reading about what us folk are doing to one another, whether it might be possible for us to start again, to forgive one another. Probably not. Probably the best I might hope is that someone else will find the sci-fi series Lexx and get to chuckle along with Puck and me, 'What fools these mortals be',