The Aerie
And suddenly there it was. Really, it just illustrates the power of
clichés.
I mean, most people deride clichés as being as ugly as a mud fence, as
dumb as a brick, too stupid for words, and other cliché descriptions.
Nobody has any respect for clichés.
And yet... clichés are just words, phrases, scenes, rendered
contemptable by familiarity or frequent misapplication. Tea-leaves of
folk wisdom with all the meaning boiled out of them. They are, to use
a pseudointellectual buzzword, memes. Ideas. Concepts whose value has
been compromised by an overlay of social approbation that divorces
them from their underlying context.
Or to be less fancy, they're tiny little keys to mental locks that are
worn from overuse.
Anyway, there I was, settled in to what has become a pleasant
Hallowe'en ritual. For the last several years it has run this way:
after a hasty dinner my wife and I get the kids into their costumes.
Then she puts a CD of spoooky sounds on the stereo, and lights candles
all around the house. She shows me all the candy and advises me on
exactly how many candies to hand out to each person. Then we get some
photos of the kids in their garb, and she escorts them on their
rounds.
Back at home I turn off the spooooky CD which experience has
demonstrated is not audible from outside the front door. Instead I
load up the CD player with my favorite music, figuring that the notion
of a man sitting home alone listening to the Indigo Girls is probably
scary to some people. I turn off all the house lights, and sit down
with the laptop to write between the infrequent visits of neighborhood
children. When they arrive I hand out candy in awe-inspiring fistfuls,
and usually have a third left at the end anyway.
So I was settled peacefully into place for some writing when my mind
returned to the topic which has been troubling it for some time:
death. All my regular readers (ha!) know that I've been troubled by
the unusual number of tragic deaths lately in the news, and the way
that death cares nothing for character or justice. Jim Henson, dead:
Idi Amin, alive. Paul Wellstone, dead: OJ Simpson, free; ad infinitum,
ad nauseum.
And it was wrong, it was just wrong. It was shaking up my view of the
world. I mean, I had become accustomed to the idea of this frenetic
token liberal senator, a horsefly buzzing in the faces of the
back-room reactionary cabal that has taken over our government. And
I'm sorry, but for those of us who grew up with Kermit the Frog, his
present incarnation seems like a space cockroach climbed inside his
skin.
Who's next? I wondered, Who? Some aged relative? Some young celebrity?
A friend my own age? Someone near and dear to me? Who among all of the
people I know will be the next one to vanish, and according to what
unknowable schedule?
And that's when the cliché key turned in the right mental lock, and
understanding glowed through the newly-opened door. That's when I
realized that the unknowability and unpredictability are exactly the
point. Because as my mental spotlight turned from one person to the
next upon the proscenium of memory I saw each one anew. "What if he
were gone?" "Oh no, what if she were gone?" Reminded of the mortality
of each of my friends and loved ones, I grasped how sad the world
would be without them. For just a moment I glimpsed each person's true
value, and the depth of what the world stood to lose if they were
gone.
For just a moment, I failed to take for granted the people I love.
And I was struck powerfully that that is the whole point of death.
It's not a punishment, and it's not a reward. It's not justice, and
it's not according to some plan. Death is a random light, illuminating
the fragile web between all of people.
Because of death's erosion it is incumbent upon us to make new links
in web, or find ourselves wholly disconnected. Its randomness
threatens our complacency and urges us to appreciate those around us.
And its inevitability compels us to accomplish something with our
lives in the limited time that we have.
And it's cliché. It's all cliché. Mundane sentimentality expressed in
cliché phrases. And yet for me the clichés leapt to brilliant life
when placed in the proper context. Under certain circumstances and
from a particular position, illumination poured through the old
clichés like sunlight through the Tenochtitlan temple on midsummer's
day.
And that's just the point: death is there to make us appreciate life.
Droll cliché, springing to magically to life at the cold touch of
death.
The feeling has faded, the glamour worn off, but in a brief epiphany I
got it, and understood a little bit more of What It's All About.
It's not about justice. It's not about right. It's about appreciating
whatever it is you've got, even if you haven't got much.
Like I said, cliché.
Somebody's at the door. Trick or treat!
[1]Last
Posted by Albatross at November 1, 2002 12:00 AM