She heard a music of the mind those years living alone, sorting clothes on the dryer, pretending to be a non-thinking circle member, afflicting Acme, yakking on the phone. The amazing thing I realized this morning is she didn’t want to die any more than my black chows. Two of them now have shown the ultimate courage and gratitude for life, the most loyal creatures with fur of the sweet earth. She is among cases of insurmountable will, but really spirit you know.Three women, if you count their mother, tolerated the one son and brother, my father. Irritated with her sense of realism, stoicism boasting she was terminal, with zero gelassenheit, I heard accounts of her passing. Betty Miller held her hand, sat with her for hours, as did Carole Watkins. Just 5 days before she had been angry at an electrical short in her brain which briefly, partly paralyzed. She had to be fed. She died in her sleep though, quoting Ira Byock’s Four Things, please forgive me, I forgive you, thank you, I love you. That’s what she meant when she said she didn’t think things would turn out as they did. Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. She would like to hear that.
I flew Christmas night '04 with Aeyrie to Philadelphia. We spent New Year’s eve in Arkadelphia on the way back, ended up with things never known to identify. Calls afterward roused the move. I’m talking on the phone with her about pain. She takes offense, says you can’t call cancer arthritis. Risk- taking laughter. She laughs, mocks again the time she and her sister, maiden aunts, visited me in the hospital after the cartilage was cut from my knee the old way, says they had a good laugh at my “pain” in the parking lot. I called her the family Curator years ago. Every family needs a curator to survive, but after countless queries of old photographs, looking into the Macks these years, she never thought to mention that Lizzie and Jesse had their pictures in the old photo album in the attic.
Now that those family letters exist in printed form in Tulip it seems like they have always been so. The pieces of the puzzle change in the light like the painting on her wall, like the desire to understand. What is permanent anyway? When Henry Mack was 90 I was 5. Don’t sell children short, “a little child shall lead them.” I have recently entertained the new Jacob, he’s two. He took home a stuffed white kitty cat bigger than himself. I sent a tortoise doll to Paris for Slow Club. Nick bit me in twelve places. I told him to sit. I asked Chris on my lap where the kitty was. He said, meow! Remember me! She’s getting communion at 11 AM today.If glory is going to be revealed in families, in the earth, it has to be in our deeds and the attitudes of our hearts. The hymn of the realist occurs to the Preacher. “I the teacher.” What does he teach? “What is twisted cannot be straightened; what is lacking cannot be counted.” But I have more understanding than all my teachers says Psalm 119, so there will be healings and miracles today. Odds will be surmounted. Faith is what matters.
The big problem is the preacher’s natural mind. If the Virgin Mary told her Mom she was pregnant her Mom would be supposed to say, “it takes two honey.” Natural expectation covers every degree of “normal” expectation. The way things are the sick must die, the rejected fail. But revelation contradicts nature, turns rough places plain; virgins conceive. Passing natural understanding through revelation reverses opposites, brings union, deliverance. Oh yes it does. Religion is bondage. Anybody can cite abuses and failure of revelation, but never of natural expectation because the natural never fails. A little bit of doubt reverses natural expectation. That is faith.
The techniques of human destruction have no purpose. What’s the point of holding a grudge in the afterlife? Give it up. Everything can be restored. What’s the point of keeping a scorecard for real and imagined losses and transgressions in this life that reach far into the past. You can’t even the score. We can resurrect the offenders and torture them in a Dantean barbeque, rehabilitate them in the halfway house, or stand up to them while they’re in the flesh. So stand up! They wanted money from Jake, but when he offended they didn’t oppose him. Afraid it would afright the mark? It stuck in the craw. Weakness creates resentment. Saving the appearances to his benefit, the grandson stood up to Jake.
Here’s the problem with the Way of Jesus. When you’ve made your best case, rehearsed it again and brooded over it, cursed the deed and darkness, He tells you, forgive. Bless those who curse you, bless and curse not. Pray for those that persecute you. This probably doesn’t break their teeth. Loose peace on them, blessing, the liquid comfort.
When you grow up you find the body imperfect. Old dogs can tell you. The neighbor across the street, a curmudgeon who worked for the Indian bureau had stacks of Playboy to the wainscot, took care of neighborhood business, he got old. It was a slalom bounce from car to post to house, landing akimbo, to cross the street. Wherever his mind wanted to go, he sent his body.
But at the end of life my dog is worse, can’t see, hear, walk, but he can eat. His mind is as alive as ever. The Dutch torturers in the Martyr’s Book thought they could kill the Anabaptist body and the mind would die. That’s backwards. You can’t kill the mind, it lives, communicates its passions when the body is gone. In the memory of neighbor Hank his desert tortoises bring news that the youths who now own his house stand in the street and stare at cars going 30. By this standard nothing can be lost, even if never made it will out, be remade. In the eternal library all the lost works of merit and all works not done exist. They’re eternal. Want to get on Google and find it, rather like the last work of Traherene, Poems of Felicity, found in the British Museum manuscripts accidentally, published in 1910, 200 years after his death, or Tolkien’s essay on Beowulf of 1936 published in 2003 in its unrevised form of hundreds of pages. Reputations are waiting to be made. Consider if that one copy of Jerusalem had been lost.
Families have made comebacks when they reduced to one. J. Howard was the only son of an only son, keep that up long and it leads to extinction. But what about those who never were but were supposed to be, and the lost coin, pearl, orphan? Those who never were are promises to the world that lie down with the lamb, progeny of childless Abraham. Is that the difference between the works of man and the works of God? The first is possible the second is certain, after the fact.If they are works of man they can be done by men. Not just frakturs, diaries, records, letters. Once lost they can be found, if they exist, but if they have ceased to exist? The resurrection of the body leads to the record. The Father has kept those letters. That’s why they call it redemption. It brings back what is lost. Anabaptists hold this. In rejecting the body, the book, the oeuvre, they help it along. Such a lot of questions just to understand that nothing is lost. Say it, "nothing is lost." I know my redeemer lives.
Isaiah says, “Lord open his eyes that he may see.” Nothing is lost. Regrets are lost, but not one species, not one baby, not one attempt to put into the body, into form what all creation seek, the redemption of the body. Not only are the lost restored above all expectation, but get over the notion of physical existence as a curse. It was turned to a blessing by Jesus.
Her afterlife begins for me in the AM of April 6, four days after her death when she calls me up with the information that she has a “Washington Jefferson,” 1766, one of twenty. She is back in the house, looks a little younger, pulls the b/w print carefully from its envelop, the tissue paper slides off. Do you like the symbolism? She says she was never able to get a price on it. Her skin is fair, she is in her kitchen, about forty. I had another dream last night. My dog is hanging out, head down, humpbacked, like in his last months, curled head to tail, but that Sunday, Easter Sunday at communion, that dog was running flat out in those tight circles he loved, barking, barking and barking, carousing around the throne of God. My dead bodies shall live. You will not suffer your holy one to see corruption.
Rimbaud’s Attic
There’s a lot of nonsense written about Rimbaud, that he was an angel, fallen or otherwise, That he had a destiny rather than his own. Nobody has a destiny until the fact of earning it. Not that he hyped himself for the ages to be great and lived a grand lie in competition with all the other great liars of politics and literature. Let him rest, even if he contradicted all the free thinkers and licensees want, because in his end he wants is peace with God. What else is there? Rimbaud was called a saint for struggling with his savage nature. Up close the savage is lightened in the old survivor; they are not at all what you first thought or lived with all of life. That Rimbaud walked out on the false world of culture and civilization, denuded his spirit of artificial trappings was his notion of Christmas on earth. Well in the interim or aftermath there is fame, achievement, fortune. "Are these what is destined? Is destiny greater than honesty? " She doesn’t answer any of this, turns her back and chooses silence. A better question might be, does it matter at all? Weigh fame and fortune against self sacrifice, honesty and the life of the mind to no end other than itself. The mind as an end in itself, and add that no one would know. There’s Rimbaud. None of these delights shared with the world.
Daniel restored Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, remembered it for him, which he couldn’t do himself, so this Portfolio of paper and ink, images on a screen, illustrates her best and worst self. Push it down here, won’t it come up there? Majority truth can be counted. Unable to annihilate talent, genius, destiny, it will out of eclipse. Here on the ground a corn of wheat falls. What happens to the grit? It goes down like the envelope she keeps her memoir of her mother in, an envelop sent originally to her in 1982 from Bennett Publishing Company with the proof revisions of her sister’s book. Will it show up in the attorney’s inventory of the estate? No. She and my old dog are standing, but not side by side. There are six mourners at the private grave. I don't make it. I guess you’re allowed to visit. “Died the same day as the Pope,” no other epitaph. Well, one more, “buried the same day as the Pope.” Were they able to process her right away or did she have to wait for the crush to die down. It’s not every day it's the Pope. Anyway he died first. These and many other answers we wait to receive when satellite communications are restored. Suddenly there is a rash of deaths. Saul Bellow. Prince Rainier, so there is good conversation anyway for the last Pennsylvania Dutchman in our family, Anna Elizabeth Reiff Young.
This blog, Animal Person, connects.
I compare her to chow-chows, two of them six years apart, who died at home. For a year, I expected both dogs to be gone by morning, but there they would be, hungry, ready to walk, if you could call it that. Six years apart, but otherwise the same, one time I had to carry him home in my arms. How light he was. At her last I carried her out and lay her gently on the grass. Even his last week he could jog to the gate were another dog passing, then collapse out of breath. One time he had a fit from the noise of the mower, but came back even from that. The night before he died he lay on the bed panting with the will to life, a heating pad beneath him. About 10 PM he began to bark as he always did when he knew his family was coming home. He would bark in anticipation for her minutes before his mistress’ car ever came in view. How did he know? It was his welcome bark, deep and commanding, as he barked for life that night in all the hours. We put our hands on him and he stopped, breathed and heaved for breath. Then he barked. He barked hour after hour and only then did it begin to lessen. She, his mate, couldn't walk on the slippery floors so I put carpet everywhere she wanted to go and being near blind, lights near the floor like on a runway. I would hear her coming by her breath and gently guide her outside, then wait by the door until she came back to bed. It was a warm night in April when she left. She was so comfortable I left her out by the aloe. The previous night or two she lay in the kitchen while we cooked dinner and said I love you, thank you, thank you. I learned I can never love enough.
It was Palm Sunday when he left. I stayed home while the others went to church, didn’t know what to do. I think maybe I expected him to get up and run. But he stayed panting. His mistress came home in an hour. She has shepherded plenty of souls to the door, held their hands when they were alone, sung to them, communicating comfort. So she sat with him, her hands on his chest and brow. I came out to check. He breathed his last. Then we wept. There was never any of the spirit of resignation in him.
Works Cited
Three volumes on Pennsylvania Dutch origins, 2004 :
Volume I: A Red Portfolio: The Life of a Pennsylvania Dutch Radical.
Volume II: A Tulip Blooms from the Heart: Some Lives and Letters of the PA Dutch.
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Volume III: Truth and Lawlessness in the Pennsylvania Religion.
I had wanted to catalog her affairs in a matter of speaking, but was confronted with relatives' doubts and hers. Family doubters said, better do nothing, what will come of something? Anything to prevent the salvation to be revealed, the body, to save their points of view. You can’t drive all that way. One, how can you do it? Two, the weather will prevent it. Three, she doesn’t want it done. Their doubt made me doubt them, the people on the sidelines are nuts.
