Marking time, the conclusion of my 82nd orbit of our nearby star, without which we would not exist (along with myriad other factors – distance from, timing, nuclear cycles, all remote from our hands.) Depending on the culture you live in and how much one complies with its views, we’re here by some divine appointment, or, in my view, by a near impossible roll of the dice, though however infinitely small the chances of simply being here, as we are, is, infinity seems big enough to allow 9 billion of us at the moment, never mind those who preceded us, and all the other millions of billions of other equally amazing creatures which are “life.”
My family 1946 or so, Hinsdale Illinois
My own little trajectory, commenced in Chicago, May 16, 1943, has been, so others tell me, lucky/adventurous/amazing, which is all from some perspectives, true. A sperm met an egg, and bio-logic happened, and I arrived. Later my mother told me, in utter innocence and naïveté, that I hadn’t been planned/wanted, and had abortions been as available then, as when she told me this – sometime when I was in mid-thirties – I wouldn’t be here. She had not given a thought at all about what this could do psychologically, and fortunately, as I had long before withdrawn from my erstwhile family, the impact was more one of amused detachment, wondering how a mother could so casually tell her child such a thing.
When I was born, as had been the case with my brother, I had pyloric stenosis, to say a blockage at the bottom of my stomach, at the valve which keeps food from passing on to the intestines for digestion. In my brother’s case, apparently nothing was done, or perhaps they did not know, or a procedure for “fixing” didn’t exist. He was not the brightest bulb in the world, though not “retarded” at all; I think he likely suffered from infantile malnutrition and his brain development was hampered. He apparently cried and puked to the wall his first year, surely not exactly endearing himself to his way too young parents of 18 and 19 years of age. I think this in turn ended in psychological damage as an infant and young child. He escaped the house as early as he could, lying about his age to join the military.
In my case, my birth-defect was detected, and I had an operation in a day or so, removing the blockage. It left a tiny scar, which as I grew older, grew bigger with me – about an inch and a half vertical incision above my navel, to the right hand side. Busy with that, they did not do the, at that time, ordinary matter of circumcising me, leaving me a minority among my peers, with a foreskin. Sometime – not really sure just when I was told this story, it occurred to me that my life was all owing to accidentally borrowed time. In hindsight I think this in a way liberated me from complying with all the conventions that define a culture and its society. Early on, I was an outsider.
From this perspective, one which many friends who in the last years have ended their trip in this world and did not enjoy, mine has been a normal journey: it is speckled with long ordinary days, ho-hum biding-time days; and then the occasional tragedy – a deeply loved daughter, Clara, whom I’d raised for 3 and a half years, almost alone, then kidnapped by her mother, sequestered and brain-washed (common in these cases) and blocked from access to me, ending utterly alienated from her father, mired in a life of lies, now 24 years later. A long ago “friend” committing a betrayal of a vicious and palpable kind; another thought-to-be friend doing something similar. And auto injuries caused by other people, imposing life-long consequences. And on the other side, times of transcendent joy – whether triggered by some deep creative impulses; the brief glance of a landscape; or a quivering heart snared in “love” (whatever that is) – evanescent as life itself, in which the past and future are ever linked, with an instantaneous now, ever fleeting. This, and all the mundane things, “of the world,” (as noted in an early short film, 13 Fragments & 3 Narratives from Life Pswd FRAGS) which in passing seem dull and boring, when added up and called “a life,” become in our minds intensely important.
From 13 Fragments & 3 Narratives from Life, 1968
Entering solar orbit number 83, my obit coming up, my life spreads out behind me, like the wake of a ship, a fractal matter of repetitions, looping eddies, the cycles of days and years diminishing in the distance, lost on the horizon. Ahead is the dead certainty of erasure.
I’d meant to write something else today, but sitting to think and type, whatever it was evaporated and out came this. I thank myself that here at the edge of my life, I’m not a cranky old man, despite the physical and psychic bruises and pains life has issued, but instead seem to contain an inward contentment, calming and happy. Whatever I have done – the catalogue of films made, paintings, poems, silly C&W warbles – are all nothing to me. I did what I did because there was and is no choice. We all do exactly what we do, and we can do no other. It is our fate to be who we are. And similarly here at the closure of my life, my only wish is for those few whom I have come to know, that in whatever small and modest way possible, I can help them be as inwardly as happy as they can be.
Philosophically these days I am a mixture of a Pogoist, and a Pessoaist:
Whatever the ideology, religion, philosophy, all of our “problems” are rooted in the same reality, and that is the problem: humans act like humans, and the honest and clear-eyed truth is that we are the problem.
“I am nothing.
I’ll never be anything.
I couldn’t want to be something.
Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.”
― Fernando Pessoa
Photo by Joseph Podlesnik
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Jon Jost's Blog (Vol 2) 