Reposting an older one today.
Some while ago,
wrote in his Writer’s Diary:Modernity convinces us that there’s a means to control everything in our lives; that there are mechanisms to control both the nature outside of us and within. There are pills, apps, machines, as well as ideological rules and social mores that promise to ameliorate the most frightful and wooly aspects of being alive, being an animal in a complex social reality. This pills, apps, machines can work for awhile, or seem to be, but at the cost of our complete disabling; before too long, we’re dependent on them, can’t function without them. The control freak is born out of the terror of realizing there is no real agency over uncertainty, and that whatever native strength one has has been un-trained.
This is very true, and puts me in mind of what has long seemed to me the most pressing of our current “intimations of deprival”—to adapt a phrase from the Canadian political philosopher (or, better, student of political philosophy) George Grant. The “deprival” in question is that of death, of death as something outside our control yet casting its shadow over our lives; the deprival consists in our wish to remain in touch with this force being reduced to an arbitrary preference, like “natural birth,” or, as it diminishes further, a quaint predilection, as for vinyl records and rotary phones.
This thought struck me vividly while reading Sheila Heti’s novel Pure Colour—or, maybe before that, an essay that relates the same experience, the death of the writer’s father. This death is portrayed in both works (more compellingly, I find, in the essay than the novel) as an occasion of vigil, ritual, rite of passage.
“Recollecting the bedroom in which my father died,” Heti writes in the essay,
I also primarily see colors, as George did in recalling that canvas. I do not see the sharp line where the wall becomes ceiling but rather a swirling of the deepest greens and maroons, from my brother’s covering the windows with posters and towels, and the slight flickering yellow of the beeswax candle that my brother and I put on the dresser. And the brighter light that flooded in from the hall. The nurses came and went. My brother and I turned our father’s body over and helped him move his legs. His eyes were generally closed that week. His mouth was very dry. My brother and I sat on opposite sides of the bed, looking at each other across it with wide eyes, staring, often not knowing what to do. My mind needs only to glance back on the week my father was dying to feel a trembling at the terrible magnificence of life and death—it is how I imagine the religious feel when they contemplate the majesty of God. The memory of that week threatens to take over everything: every single memory of my father and every understanding I have of life.
In the novel, this scene is transposed from the hospital (where I suppose Heti’s father died in real life, with its “nurses” and “brighter light that flooded in from the hall”) to the family home, but without notable increase in “magnificence.” In both, there is the sense of a task to which one has been summoned, of which one must show oneself worthy. The beeswax candle on the dresser, tended by the siblings during their vigil, is not far off from the rite of carrying a lighted candle from one end to another of a sunken pool in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia. Death, when it comes, is something earned—earned by both the dying man and his children, and in the nature of a culmination. (Hence the discomfiting coda the episode receives in the novel, where, upon her father’s death, Mira realizes she has felt “his spirit ejaculate into her.”)
Pure Colour was published in 2022. The essay “A Common Seagull” appeared in January 2020. Between those two dates, the federal government of Canada, where Heti lives, passed Bill C-7, which extended eligibility for euthanasia (legally available to the terminally ill since 2016) to a broader set of “patients,” including those with disabilities and chronic conditions. (The latter apparently include homelessness—a shocking turn that should not be shocking at all, given recent years’ omnivorous medicalization of seemingly all concepts—what only my most principled literalism will prevent me from calling its own “trauma” or “epidemic.”) The possible extension of legal euthanasia to sufferers from mental illnesses—infallibly to be distinguished, I have no doubt, from the sorrow and pain of life—is currently being studied. Thus does the discourse of “accessibility” adds a fringe to what already seems a triple veil: “MAiD,” standing in for “Medical Assistance In Dying,” itself standing in for the now apparently strengthless original euphemism, “euthanasia” itself.
There is, as always, much to be said, and much opportunity to be glib. It is not lost on me that “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”—to speak of suddenly quaint things—is a son’s poem, not a father’s; its wish is for the heroic perpetuation of a strength now, presumably, already broken. (That it is a masculine poem—whose exhortation to Learlike rages makes MAiD seem like nothing so much as a “pelican daughter,” albeit one who has high-mindedly lost the taste for blood—is also not lost on me.) But whatever one’s necessary caution in speaking about what, being among the living, one has by definition not experienced, I am certain there is a gulf to be crossed between the longstanding lay practice of easing the dead upon their final journey—think here of Paul Morel and his sister in Sons and Lovers, giddy from nights of waking, feeding their mother a dish of milk laced with an overdose of morphia—and the emergent regime. And I am just as certain that, when a member of my family recently told me, unbidden, that “hospice care in the United States is already functionally providing medical assistance in dying,” she speaks (to say the least) tendentiously. The difference lies in the sense of an external power, of something beyond one’s control. Whatever one thinks about giving an overdose to a dying person, the fact is, they are dying. Whoever enters hospice care has already crossed the threshold. The concern from then on is with management. The management, whatever else one wants to say about it, is of something outside human decision. (Though do I betray myself if I say that suicide, as such, does not trouble me—but only this, so to speak, reduction of that potentially sublime act to the paltry and clinical? Is it really that I resent only the absence of blood, and think—or have an unreflective sense—that such matters should be left to those in whom it is still abundant? ‘Twere to consider too curiously to consider so, surely…)
Does the scene of the encounter with the “magnificence of life and death” in Heti’s novel and essay mark it historically, as peculiar to a place in time? Not necessarily. As I have noted, assisted suicide for terminally ill patients has been legal in Canada since 2016. Such recourse was in principle available to Heti’s father at the time he became terminally ill. His children’s decision to keep vigil by his side as they did, whether at home or in the hospital, was already both traditional and, in its vehemence, idiosyncratic; it was, perhaps, already beyond the reach of fashion.
Still, you can’t help wondering. Are you disinclined to be burdensome, or are you not? (If you don’t already, can you learn to enjoy wryly the rolling of eyes and clearing of throats as when, changing planes recently in Charlotte, North Carolina, I “opted out” of a biometric scan?) Whether or not people wish to accommodate themselves, many will succumb, no doubt, to their wish to accommodate others. (I assume, for argument’s sake, that the pressure to accommodate proceeds from within rather than being imposed from without, as I should expect it to be in all but most deranged fantasies of our possible future; though, of course, the distinction between inner and outer promptings is exactly what conformity blurs. Is it coincidence that medical death should proliferate in a country notorious for being polite?)
Even Heti will not insist on her own idiosyncrasy beyond a certain point. In her second-most recent novel, Motherhood, the narrator seeks treatment for depression and anxiety. She tries psychoanalysis, then antidepressants. Her anxiety disappears. “Am I annoyed? Am I disappointed?” she asks herself.
A little bit, yes. I wanted my own magic to get rid of the pain, but I suppose one’s private alchemy never works as well as drugs. Philosophy, psychology, God, writing down one’s dreams—they work as well as a bloodletting, or leeches, or any medical intervention that does not work.
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