Out of Nowhere
This essay appears online in TELEPHONE A game of art whispered around the world. It also appears in print from Crosstown Press, TELEPHONE Writings.
“But I’ll not widow the world.” - Li-Young Lee
Basic
In my 20s and throughout the first half of my 30s, writing was my access to the ineffable. The ineffable deeply mattered, I thought, because what could not be expressed must embody the most rarified truth.
This is the basic problem of metaphysics. It’s also the basic problem of being alive. We are sentient beings capable of conceptualizing our absence. How do you think about what cannot be known? How do you communicate what cannot be expressed?
Contradictions, called koans in Zen Buddhism, are meditative instruments used to get beyond the mind since “Out of nowhere, the mind comes forth.” If nothing makes something, what then is nothing—the basis of something as distinct from nothing?
The paradox is the point.
Koans break us out of sense-making, of the mind imposing structures on structureless experience, and into our senses: the momentary truths that contextualize our brief, confounding lives. These lives that come forth out of nowhere.
Baptism
Wednesday, August 14, 2019. Ten weeks after Jen’s diagnosis of invasive ductal carcinoma and seven months before the West Coast of the United States suspends schools and public gatherings due to a global pandemic of novel coronavirus. The day began with a dream authored by reality. It ended with a reality dressed in the bewilderments of dream.
First, the dream.
Jen was dying and then she was dead and I was left alive with our young daughters. I woke up crying. I’ve been sent out of sleep for shouting, laughing, talking, and humming. Crying was new.
I got up. Wiped my face. Went on a run, like I always do. Because, what else—sit around, try to explain? Explain what—that she had cancer and we had children and maybe she would die, leaving us behind?
That evening, my mother called.
My 80-year old father had collapsed at an HOA meeting. He was in an ambulance on the way to the ER. I spent the rest of that night and most of the early morning at Good Sam with my father.
We were lucky to have a room. Most patients were triaged in the hall. Exposed, raw. Bodies fractured across the many-sided die of pain. If the scene was at all emblematic of our collective condition, a sweeping application of dignity, fluids, and opiates might solve a lot.
I was uncomfortable with how comfortable my father looked in the rigid, narrow hospital bed. IV stuck into his arm. Flesh atop his head freckled and badly dented beneath the lights. His intermittent napping. This was not the man I knew. It wasn’t even his body anymore.
The VA scalped the first of my father’s sarcoma from the sole of his left foot, a contusion the size of a racket ball. Apart from soldiers like my father, four million Vietnamese civilians were exposed to Agent Orange during the American War. Dioxin systematically mainlined into the highlands, poisoning the soil and water tables and birthing generations of disease and disfigurations.
My father kept his memories of the war on a slide projector. Two-by-two cardboard frames of the photographs he had taken on his tours of duty, early 1966 to late 1967. Cannons too long and dulled by mud and smoke caught in the aperture. Guns at the doors of the helicopters, the arms of the blades heaving wetly in the heat. Sandbags and wire. The bed where he slept beneath the ground, a rifle hung at the head. A young ARVN officer and his wife, small and smiling. The monkeys he shot. Buffalos in the grass. A prisoner in a cage and another roped to a tree. His squad squatted in the red dirt of a firebase—every face a question you didn’t want answered, and my father standing in his youth, wiry and sinister and strong.
On May 4, 1970, National Guardsmen shot 13 students on the campus of Kent State University. By then, my father had been promoted to Major. 14 years of decorated service. West Point graduate. Special Forces. 18 months fighting in the highlands of Vietnam. But he couldn’t let the killings at Kent State slide.
He went AWOL in Kansas, drifting upward through the Midwest and into Canada with my mother. Two years later, they arrived in the Pacific Northwest. I was born in Seattle. We moved to Bremerton and then Portland. Somewhere in there, my father found God, and he became, for the second time in his life, a Christian.
Childhood was a Sunday without end. The dark moisture that bloomed from the basement walls of the church. The crayoned illustrations of Jesus we made in children’s meetings. Stick figures at the Temple Mount. The butcher paper where we practiced our names. Church mothers serving dishes they grew up cooking in Taipei, Kamchatka, or Omaha.
Every month, the brothers pulled open a trap in the floor for baptisms. The water beneath the floor was stale, flecked with film. I was seven-years old. Small, shirtless. My father had his hands on the balls of my shoulders. The woman ahead of me in line had stripped to her bra and shorts. Her hair was purple. Piercings notched her face. Black tattoos slapped on her body like fish or snakes. She was crying.
I watched the brothers lead her down into the water. An elder asked the room to call on the name of the Lord. The woman seemed very sorry for something I could not understand but knew one day I would. When the brothers brought her up out of the water, she was spitting and shouting to be put down again. Her face had changed. Splotchy, epileptic, not exactly pain. We die. We are buried. We are returned. But returned to what?
My father helped the brothers walk me into the water. One held my neck. Another pinched my feet. Water rushed into my nose, my throat, and I was coughing. My father hugged a towel to my body. He was exalted. He wanted me to say something. But the experience was stuck, unformed in the structures of my mouth.
I was cold, confused.
I wanted to go home.
Coexistence
So softly syllabic, the many names of cancer.
Small cell. Soft tissue. Thymoma, thymic. Vascular tumors.
Basal cell. Bone, bladder, and bile duct.
Lymphoblastic.
Ductal carcinoma.
On December 22, 2007, I moved back to the United States after a two-year stint in the Czech Republic and Azerbaijan. I got a job teaching English to exchange students at Portland State University and rented a cinderblock shell of an apartment in Goose Hollow. I was 30.
I met Jen that New Years in Waldport, Oregon. She was 27. Each of us was entangled in the barbwire of other lovers; hers sharper than mine.
When she walked through the door that evening with her boyfriend, also my friend, I made the sound our little Coral now makes after purposefully upending a plate of macaroni, cheese, and peas onto the floor.
Un oh.
The writer Steve Almond says that love “is a process built by the will and the intelligence and the heart.” He also says that every story arises from “desire placed into doubt.” Or the problem between the magic of desire and the instability of magic.
“The true work of love,” writes Almond, “resides in sticking with the process [will, intelligence, heart], especially in those moments, and eras, when desire is forced to coexist with doubt.”
Life desires life. To be alive is coexistence with death. Coexisting with death means magically, willfully thinking your way through moments and eras of unmitigated doubt, when the thought of you—the people you love, the work you do—won’t survive the dark.
Imagining my life without Jen is like imagining death. The mind stops working because it cannot conceive of nothing independent of something. And the something, in this case, would be her absence, or our lives in the wake of her absence. And we would, I imagine, swim about for the remaining pieces that are not remainders because they only worked as part of the whole and are therefore now detritus. Splintered from the life that had been and floating worthlessly in the black waters of the future.
“You need to try on a little levity,” Jen would say. “If only for me.”
Instead, I convinced myself that I had a pressing, undiagnosed terminal condition. My kidneys. My liver. The cellular lining that keeps my body from spilling outside itself. And I would touch my ribs or my back, the large, blue vein running down the inside of my left thigh, and I would think, there it is: my death.
I was ridiculous. Also, pathetic. Also, not wrong. The ingredients of demise are always, already at work in the workings of our organism. We are over as soon as we begin. Though however intractable, that fact cannot cancel the curious phenomena of before and after.
Before and after chemo.
Before and after months and months of fear and lost wages and humility beget by the simple, overwhelming generosity of friends and strangers.
After surgery and complications from surgery. After radiation.
After the exhaustion that seeps into you more deeply than love.
After calamity has taught you the isolating language of calamity.
After the recovery that never feels like recovery.
After healing that never feels like healing.
After realizing you’ll live until you won’t. After time.
After romanticizing toughness and grit and adversity and resilience, the vocabulary of hustle and earning and succeeding and dominating.
After knowing there is no knowing.
After learning the lesson that your undoing probably isn’t up to you.
After giving up control and taking it back if only for it to evaporate into the nothingness it is.
Before and after nothing, there is something.
Dogs
My father and I have less and less to say to one another even as the time in which there is to say something dissipates. And this gradual unspeaking makes a kind of unnerving sense.
He is closer now than ever to abdicating the symbols and signs of life for the elsewhere that cannot be signified. I am losing him. He is losing me. We’re losing the language we built together. With less to say, there’s less to say—a stubborn tautology.
Living is the friction of contradictory space, the Venn diagram of somethingness and nothingness. And beneath all the machinations we conjure, our politics and fantasies, we’re just hapless children soldered to our desire for life and our drive toward death. Eros. Thanatos. Two junkyard dogs whose scrapping and snarling give substance to the business of being.
And that’s the rub. We can’t muzzle one without muzzling the other. To negate the opposition, the scrapping and snarling, is to obliterate the unifying materials that hold the syntax of our existence together. Life occasions death. And death, once everything else is stripped away, gives meaning to life.
Consequence. Finite, tenuous beauty.
Nobody tells you this
Meditation is untenable. Breathing and exhaling the life/death dyad is untenable. Barring the door against decadence and your wants and the corrosiveness of frivolity is untenable. As if by design, we forget what we always know. Truth slips out, scurries away. And we return to our passive self-determinism.
Act first, think second. That’s how I work, spending the first part of everyday figuring out the thing I got myself into the day before. Magical, willful, thoughtless thinking. That’s what I call this leaping from the high dive and inventing water on the way down. It is a cocktail of arrogance, naivety, privilege, and creative impulse.
It is also analogous with the practice of writing. You go in blind every time. And either you finish the work, abandon the work, or fuck with the work for as long as the work allows. And as much as I like to claim the contrary, planning does not precede doing. Brilliance is built by not giving a fuck, giving all the fucks, and luck. In that order.
“Fuck it,” I remember thinking when Jen showed up at the door of my apartment. She was coming from her boyfriend’s place. He was my friend. He was her lover. He was the unsaid thing standing in our way. The decisions that followed left a colossal human mess. 10 years later, Jen and I have a home in Portland, two children, and ductal carcinoma.
The woman who went before me into the water. Her tattoos screaming from her body. The incongruities of her piercings inside our church. The decisions that had led her to that place. To the trap door in the floor. To the stale water beneath. Committing to baptism her past that would always be her past plastered there over her skin and in the holes the piercings would leave behind.
When Jen came out of surgery, I couldn’t stand it. Not the room with her mother and her sister nor the oncologist we adored nor the blood that began filling her breast, turning it the color of eggplant. This is a trap, I thought. Bardo between being and nonbeing. “Nobody tells you this,” the oncologist said to Jen and I on our first visit with her, “but 80% of cancers are independent of lifestyle, genetics, or environment.” Errant cells. Luck, neither good nor bad.
Fuck it. The most life-affirming statement I know. Fuck the odds. The doubt. The unknowing what it is we are doing. Fuck the dark. Fuck losing your way. Fuck the trappings of failure and success. It is what the killer Gary Gilmore meant when he said “Let’s do it” to a firing squad in Utah. And it is what Dan Wieden did when he lifted Gary Gilmore’s last words and used them to make Nike’s tagline “Just Do It.” Two junkyard dogs thrashing about through the many seas of living—destruction creation chemo children debt hustle. Losing your hair, your sense of self, ideas you once had about what it means to be a body. That you are and are not an accident. That you matter but are nonetheless made of matter. That you are finite. That you fail and grow through failing. That fighting doesn’t feel like fighting. That fighting feels like wading into water weighed down with stones. Fear, frustration, gratitude. More fear. More gratitude. No guarantees. No promises. Only the magical thought that you’ll survive long enough to do something with it.
Timestamp
Today is Monday, May 25, 2020. I have no idea what happens next. But I bet I will remember.
I’ll remember thinking that it was nothing. I’ll remember thinking that it was something. I’ll remember the tests, and then the call.
I’ll remember waiting to learn whether or not Jen could beat this. I’ll remember the relief and resolve when we learned the news wasn’t the worst that the news could be.
I’ll remember watching her walk through fire with unfathomable grace and pain and fear and courage that probably never felt like courage. I’ll remember shaving her head.
I’ll remember asking for help with nothing but my promise to pay it forward. I’ll remember the infusion of love that people shot into our vein of darkness.
And I’ll remember when this is behind us. I’ll remember the desire, the doubt. The thoughtless, illuminating magic that arrives to us out of nowhere.