The flowers of my life wilt, they lose their fragrance and their colors, but I cling to them, preferring them to nullity. I hear less, see crookedly, lose weight and height, grow spotted and stolid, placid and inept. A writer named Guy Davenport reminds me that for Edgar Allan Poe time was the unstoppable tread of death. This sound I hear more clearly than once I did, when the steps were muffled by activity and love, or drowned out by my hot pursuit of notice and satisfactions. I used to fly; now I linger or stumble. Once, it was always dawn; now it is twilight.
I collect metaphors for death. Driving down US I toward the flat and unexceptional Florida town of New Smyrna Beach, I pull over onto the shoulder of the road. I get out, and walk toward an elongated boxcar with grillwork at the sides. There, in three narrow cages, are six tired, sick-looking lions, with yellow, aged manes and flabby, ineffectual paws. Their eyes are full of tears. Scabs line their mouths. They lie in sawdust and excrement, haunch forced against haunch, and their flesh hangs upon their bones like drapery.
They are stationed there to call attention to a display of secondhand Chevrolets. Their trainer (keeper?), who wears knickers and a jungle shirt, flips his whip in the direction of the parked lines of dingy automobiles. We do not stir, so fascinated are we by the boxed-up captives who look as though they may be dying. He tries to enliven them by poking at their legs with a pointed stick. They do not stir. He flashes his whip across their faces. They stare back at him, understanding perfectly but too weary, too sick, too wise to obey.
Two children standing near me scream with delight at the sight of the six princes of the jungle now reduced to proletarian paupers. Children love animals, I think, even stuffed ones. These prisoners, locked into their coffers, especially delight them. The children are free; these poor guttersnipes are down on their luck, recumbent, enslaved. What a pleasurable turnabout, I imagine they are thinking.
The children move away, toward the cars, holding their parentsâ hands. I stand still, enclosed like the abject lions in the unreasonable quarters of my old body, confined to the bars and sawdust of a future that can end only in the black light of oblivion. What remains of their lives is a dirty joke, told with a snicker by an obscene keeper in cowboy boots, holding a taunting whip. What remains of mine is not much more elevated: There are too few years left to make another life. My age is my cage; only death can free me.
Or:
My friend, the editor of two of my books, dies. His death is not a solitary phenomenon; many others are dying of the same irrevocable disease. The tragedy of his death, and the death of others, is that they are all young. Their talents have been blasted away by a God seemingly blind to their value and deaf to their prayers and the prayers of their friends. Feeling older than ever, I board a train at seven in the morning, a shining silver bullet aimed at a straight shot up the East Coast from Washington to New York, depended upon by this aging body to get me to the Hotel Chelsea on Twenty-third Street in time to bid my friend goodbye, to tell him how much I will miss him, how I despise the irrational fate that determined it.
Would I have said these things? I will never know. Arrived at the door to his apartment, I find he is not there. His friend, Tony Blum, tells me he died three hours ago. Bill, a man at the height of his physical and intellectual powers. A young man (to me) who understood the value of full friendship with this old writer. I rage against my own survival in the darkness of his disappearance, I hate being an age he will never see, I detest his leaving before I can bid him farewell.
Oddly, I cannot cry. I am too angry with the God I trusted to save him, to lift his affliction. All the way back to Washington tears press against my eyes, but they never come. Two weeks go by. I do
I collect metaphors for death. Driving down US I toward the flat and unexceptional Florida town of New Smyrna Beach, I pull over onto the shoulder of the road. I get out, and walk toward an elongated boxcar with grillwork at the sides. There, in three narrow cages, are six tired, sick-looking lions, with yellow, aged manes and flabby, ineffectual paws. Their eyes are full of tears. Scabs line their mouths. They lie in sawdust and excrement, haunch forced against haunch, and their flesh hangs upon their bones like drapery.
They are stationed there to call attention to a display of secondhand Chevrolets. Their trainer (keeper?), who wears knickers and a jungle shirt, flips his whip in the direction of the parked lines of dingy automobiles. We do not stir, so fascinated are we by the boxed-up captives who look as though they may be dying. He tries to enliven them by poking at their legs with a pointed stick. They do not stir. He flashes his whip across their faces. They stare back at him, understanding perfectly but too weary, too sick, too wise to obey.
Two children standing near me scream with delight at the sight of the six princes of the jungle now reduced to proletarian paupers. Children love animals, I think, even stuffed ones. These prisoners, locked into their coffers, especially delight them. The children are free; these poor guttersnipes are down on their luck, recumbent, enslaved. What a pleasurable turnabout, I imagine they are thinking.
The children move away, toward the cars, holding their parentsâ hands. I stand still, enclosed like the abject lions in the unreasonable quarters of my old body, confined to the bars and sawdust of a future that can end only in the black light of oblivion. What remains of their lives is a dirty joke, told with a snicker by an obscene keeper in cowboy boots, holding a taunting whip. What remains of mine is not much more elevated: There are too few years left to make another life. My age is my cage; only death can free me.
Or:
My friend, the editor of two of my books, dies. His death is not a solitary phenomenon; many others are dying of the same irrevocable disease. The tragedy of his death, and the death of others, is that they are all young. Their talents have been blasted away by a God seemingly blind to their value and deaf to their prayers and the prayers of their friends. Feeling older than ever, I board a train at seven in the morning, a shining silver bullet aimed at a straight shot up the East Coast from Washington to New York, depended upon by this aging body to get me to the Hotel Chelsea on Twenty-third Street in time to bid my friend goodbye, to tell him how much I will miss him, how I despise the irrational fate that determined it.
Would I have said these things? I will never know. Arrived at the door to his apartment, I find he is not there. His friend, Tony Blum, tells me he died three hours ago. Bill, a man at the height of his physical and intellectual powers. A young man (to me) who understood the value of full friendship with this old writer. I rage against my own survival in the darkness of his disappearance, I hate being an age he will never see, I detest his leaving before I can bid him farewell.
Oddly, I cannot cry. I am too angry with the God I trusted to save him, to lift his affliction. All the way back to Washington tears press against my eyes, but they never come. Two weeks go by. I do
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