Death

The Queen is Dead

/ John David Duke Jr / Leave a comment

When I shot her, she cried out, perhaps to her friends, but presumably to her maker, and I felt bad. I knew I had hit her a bit high because I had determined to shoot her as soon as she saw me, so I was aiming center mass, toward the front of her body. A mere augenblick later and I would have managed a better-placed shot. She kicked at the ground for a bit, and I agonized, deciding to reload my gun in order to deliver the coup de grace. By the time I had the expended primer out of the breech, she ceased moving and expired. I was grateful to my maker.

Once I had torn her guts out of the carcass, I examined the heart and lungs. I had missed the heart entirely, but the fifty-caliber bullet had sliced through the top of both lungs. I puzzled, and still puzzle, how she managed to cry out for a few seconds. Nevertheless, beforehand, a few minutes after she grew still I approached her and spoke to her. “Did I do you a wrong? I hope not.” And she ceased from being a doe and became venison.

A wise man asked me recently what I find most joyous; what makes me happy. I answered almost without hesitating: “I find precious joy in being in the woods, armed, ready to kill. Nothing makes me happier than having a coyote come to me, with nothing between me and him but my .44 magnum. I love to touch the primal. I love to kill.” It was, in fact, a primal moment to even say such a thing. I waited for him to respond, and he did.

“We all have a need to kill,” he said. He then related experiences he has with murderers in prison, of a particular sort (I won’t bother to pretend I know the taxonomy of murderers as a group and over against other criminals). The gist of his comments was that we are all killers; we carry a desire to kill within our bosom, but civilized people manage to channel their killing so that it does no bodily harm. When bodily harm occurs, we must incarcerate, or we as a society descend into barbarism. To go hunting, for example, under the restrictions of the state which serve to manage wildlife populations for their own good, is a civilized channel for my desire to kill. As for me, I literally kill a large game animal.

Killing a large game animal participates in profound questions, the morass of living and eating. On the day I killed my doe, I tracked several coyotes, at least two of which hid under a spruce tree only early that morning, after the dawn broke open the day. They had rushed out upon two turkeys and tore them to bits while they were still alive. One of the coyotes then left a large deposit of his own scat, in a post-breakfast relief, I suppose, and then they were off to the further reaches of the woods which lay across two plowed fields.

When they approached the edge of the woods, they spotted a small herd of deer and intercepted them, and the deer leapt across a ditch full of ice, one of them breaking through the surface of the ice and stumbling onto the farm access road, where the two coyotes thoroughly harassed the deer, leaving torn up snow and mud where their tracks created a chaotic map. Eventually the deer overcame the coyotes, and they sped away into a western woods.

Perhaps the deer were circling back to the eastern woods when I caught them unaware. There were three of them. Two ran away while their friend cried out in realization of death. Perhaps my shot was unfair; after all, they had just given those coyotes the slip, and they were mere yards from safe haven in a bed-down area, a thicket of security.

One of my closest relations suffers from a mental illness. The illness itself remains a puzzle to those who are charged with diagnosis: she does not respond well to medication, yet the illness is so debilitating that the government was easily convinced to deem her a disabled person. The illness manifests itself in times when you and I would experience joy: she experiences misery.

What is it? What about joy causes her such pain? A wise person mentioned to her that perhaps it is ice: before she was conscious of feelings, she was taught to not feel anger. Anger is bad. Anger is wrong. Anger is not to be experienced. Anger, then, is put on ice. Of course, when you put ordinary anger on ice, you put all ordinary emotions on ice with it; anger and happiness are not somehow stored in separate buckets in the emotional realm. They all dwell together in one messy human being. If you ice one, you don’t ice them all, you ice it altogether, the emotional realm, that is.

A joyous occasion: birthday? Christmas? a musical recital? Joy is evoked, but compressed rage is waiting to boil over the ice boundaries like so much lava; though it remain beneath the surface, the water boils, and the pressure of the unleashing causes fissures and upheavals, and whatever it is that lurks beneath cannot be contained, not by any strength, not even medical strength.

So she wants to kill.

As a civilized person, she will stay in the channels, but the urge to kill is heavy in her bosom, heavier than it is as it lies under some sort of control within most of us.

Lady_Macbeth_Cattermole

Lady Macbeth by George Cattermole (1850)

In the Christian realm there is a lordly indictment. Jesus says (paraphrased), “If you say to your brother, ‘you fool!’ you have committed murder, and you are liable to the hell of fire.” All the saints themselves stand under condemnation by this epithet, guilty as hell and going to Hell for murder, murder, murder; murder many times over. And so it is, the saints repent, and they go about the business of expunging murder from their hearts and lips. But then Job’s wife founded Twitter.

I called a friend of mine a tool on that website, back in 2016, the petulant ass. He deserved it; oh, he deserved it so richly, the arrogant, idiotic, mindless, smug, pretentious, ignorant fool, and I was only too glad to bury the knife in his chest. It was a sin; I was ashamed; I removed myself from Twitter; nevertheless, I had murdered him. Just like that, in a slight fit of my own petulance, and in the heat of the moment, with the number of keystrokes not amounting to enough to measure the time it took, I murdered him. A handful of people chuckled, but I assure you, the angels were horrified at my deed.

What, exactly, are we to do with all this unexpunged sin? Even if there is no such thing as sin (surely the wise are correct to note that murder lurks in at least my heart, and I cannot believe I am extraordinary in that way), do we merely toss the carcass aside and go on guard for vengeance? The return shot may come soon; it may come later. Who prevails in this free-for-all neverending murder spree? We walk around scarred for life, gnashing our teeth, in Hell, thinking–nay, imagining–that we will find the way out of Hell if we could only just kill enough of our enemies.

And what do those do, those who know not to kill–what do they do to alleviate the innate desire and the attendant power to kill?

There are some choices over misery. If you cannot bring yourself to kill and be killed, you can turn the gun on yourself. Many people nowadays have ice so thick upon their hearts they find this the only escape from Hell.

There is another figure to kill, however; where all the killing comes to an end, and the outcry goes up into the dark nether.

Nihil Nisi Bonum

/ John David Duke Jr / Leave a comment

Death made an unexpected visitation upon one of our friends, and now he is excluded from our company, unless you happen to be of his faith, and then you are excluded from his company, for the time being, and, really, only by sight. As such, he has unfortunately embodied this website. Brock Cusick, requiescat in pace.

I was thinking about–can’t help but think about–our last conversation. It was…how shall we say…not one I wish was our last, but it stands as our last conversation, and it was unpleasant, so there you go. Until the great test of my faith shall come, it will remain standing as a monument to the ruin wrought by pettiness. How petty? How petty a conversation is it that mars the dignity of a perfectly innocent, genuine, kind, nihil nisi bonum fellow? He was giving me a hard time about my decision for my D&D character to roll initiative at disadvantage, and I was annoyed. That’s how petty.

I’m 45 years old with four children! He was 39 years old with three children! And all the responsibilities thereof, which we commonly consider of adulthood, requiring some measure of gravitas, sobriety, and maturity! It was so petty, so petty, but it was the last conversation I ever had with Brock. He private-messaged me, which annoyed me, but that was Brock. That was his way. And he was adorable that way, a wonderful teddy bear of a man, but I was so annoyed.

There was another important death in my life, one which I may or may not write about all the time, and I know without being told that his wife–the fellow who died importantly, his wife–I know she was in the room screaming at him about something, probably something important, and she walked away–he was standing while they argued, not at all ill, not visibly, accomplishing some chores around the house–she walked away, and when she returned a few moments later, he was dead on the floor.

And so we are excluded from each other. It is true.

Only in part, I think. A marriage of over thirty years, even a rocky one, has probably established some rather deep roots, giving life to life, a grandeur nourished to grow around a knot. Brock was kind to me, and I, to a lesser degree, was kind to him. In addition to the faith we share, we have nourishment in kindness which does not have to be overcome by the rot of pettiness. This petty conversation we had is no horrible disfigurement; it is a knot, character for the grand old living tree.

I was afraid to go to bed on Monday night, the day I learned Brock died. I was afraid in the realization that I could be so reaped by death, and excluded, leaving my wife and children excluded from me and all the roles I fulfill for them, along with friends, students, clients, and family. Unable to sleep, I wandered from room to room in the house, resolving to behave more gently, kindly, and, as it is with teenagers in the house, with long-suffering fortitude. I sincerely hope that I have been properly chastised, on the one hand, to act as fertile soil for the roots necessary for relationships to grow. I sincerely hope that I have been comforted, on the other hand, so that I can forgive myself for being so bloody annoyed at Brock.

I think it is childish and entirely selfish for me to have said, as I have been saying, “I never want to make another friend ever again.” For all the unnecessary hurt we dole out to each other, even by dying, kindness is far more nourishing towards growth, far more than withdrawal.

The Safety Razor

/ John David Duke Jr / Leave a comment

My friend Adam Gurri (who, if you didn’t know, adds excellent content to this blog on a regular basis) recommended, upon being asked, that I try a safety razor instead of a disposable razor. He recommended a particular style and brand, which I used as a basis to pick one for myself. When it came in the mail, I inserted the razor blade, tightened the nut, lathered up, and became grateful to Adam for the recommendation.

My father taught me how to shave, one of the greatest days of my life, that he should look at me and see that I need to shave, and that he should be the one to teach me. This was thirty years ago, I think, when I was 15 years old (I know without a doubt it was before I was 16). He demonstrated very clearly, using a not-inexpensive disposable razor. These were the days when a wet-shaving disposable razor had only two tiny blades embedded within.

“It’s your face,” my dad said. Now, we were not terribly poor, but neither were we rich. When he died, I discovered that he had basically kited credit card bills from that era unto the next one, which endured, say, fifteen years, just to float the family along in a lower-middle-class lifestyle. The four of us had the opportunity to go to college, in other words. Yet he was buying the expensive disposable razors.

“It’s your face, the first thing you present to people. You want to give them a well-groomed face, something pleasant to look at, not something pock-marked, scraped, and spoiled.” Then he showed me how to shave in the direction of my whiskers, even teaching me that it changes direction at certain spots on my neck. I must say, I had very few shaving-related blemishes throughout the remainder of my adolescence. On one occasion I sneezed and cut myself. I was late for school, bearing the cuts below my mouth, but that is all.

A year or two before he died, I discovered in the back of his station wagon (“Old Woodie” he called it) a sack full of the cheapest disposable razors available. I confronted him. He replied, “Aw, Dave, it’s just a face scrape. One scrape is as good as another.” He had just filed for bankruptcy after incurring some massive expenses due to the mental health issues of his adopted son–along with some other, er, irregularities that life had presented him, shall we say…

I did not believe him. As I have grown into middle-age, I have maintained his original philosophy of a well-groomed face as a presentation to the world. It is, first, love for self, which in turn becomes love for neighbor, and readily so. “Look,” I say when I present a groomed face, “I love myself, and I love you so much that I should care for myself to be in your company inoffensively, as inoffensively as I am lovingly able.”

In the meantime, disposable razors–or the industry thereof–has become risible. Not two blades! No, no longer two, but three! Three? No, four! Five! A million! And with comfort grooves here, flexion there, lubricating strips below! Were you just now comfortable with the last improvement? Now we shall reduce the quality suddenly and precipitously, in order to encourage you to move to the next, more expensive solution to face presentation.

But this is not necessary, is it? Men have been presenting their faces to the world, and in much more expectant societies than ours–for thousands of years! A proper razor is a piece of metal polished properly. That is all. The rest of the presentation is a little skill coupled with a little love.

Now for me, I am not brave enough to put a straight razor to my face, considering the fact that my father taught me with a disposable razor. I do wonder, however, how it is he abandoned the razor of his youth, the safety razor with its easy replaceable blade, a very cheap piece of properly polished metal, for the abomination that is known as the disposable razor. Was it the lure of the “space age”? The call of mid-Century ineluctable advance toward true technological utopia? Was it laziness? Was it loss of love?

I miss seeing his face, and talking to him. I’m grateful to him for teaching me to shave, but I’d like to ask him what it was that set him on a path, beginning with the disposable razor, leading to “one face scrape is as good as another.”

Whatever it was, he certainly traded away quality for it.

 

Everybody Knows Me Now

/ John David Duke Jr / Leave a comment

“Look up here. I’m in heaven.” When Bowie wrote it, he at least suspected he was going to die. Ostensibly, when he recorded the video, he knew he was going to die. “I’ve got scars that can’t be seen. I’ve got drama–can’t be stolen.” Going to heaven is an introvert’s worst nightmare.

Perhaps he wasn’t writing about his own death. Perhaps he was writing about Stephen Hawking’s impending doom. The brainiac Science-worshipers, the moral elites, the dispassionate purveyors of fact-based justice–they demonstrated their chops at the maudlin: “He’s zooming around the cosmos, now,” demonstrating that their maudlin sentimentality is at least on par with the unchurched Presbyterian daughter, whose father just died, and who says, “He’s looking down and smiling, now,” demonstrating their desire for something after a bitter end.

“I’m in heaven!” is greeted by a chorus of guitars tuned to the dirge. We know Stephen Hawking did not believe in heaven. Did Davie Bowie believe in heaven? “Well, David Bowie is looking down on us now, now, our celestial Major Tom.”

Ugh.

He’d built quite a catalogue. Perhaps the near-certain spike in sales would pierce into the heavens themselves, where we might achieve a near-certain nirvana, living in harmony. It was supposed to be here. It was supposed to be in New York, where ordinary men can live like kings, ruling the world with a mere scowl, a sardonic quip, and an encroaching horizon. The encroaching horizon was welcome. The cancer was not.

He’s dead, and now I’ve reviewed his catalogue, and with the wonders of YouTube, I’ve seen every televised or otherwise visually-recorded interview with David Bowie, of whom I am a fan on-again, off-again. I’ve analyzed every tic, probed every Straussian utterance, and scrutinized every single transformation as he sought Transfiguration.

I mean, that androgyny bit was just shtick, wasn’t it? It was shtick to conceal. He wanted us to know him, but he wanted us to know that it was all just a show, and the shtick enabled him to sell more records and more tickets.

I don’t believe that for one second, and that’s what he dreaded in dying. His work becomes static without him. He rots away, and his catalogue lies in state. We’re going to know him now.

We know he was a type, and he was a noble type, though tragic. As for me, I was off-again when he said some particularly nasty things about my God, but, then again, my fellow-Christians did some things to sully the name of my God, so why wouldn’t he say some particularly nasty things about my God? Was he looking for God, but when he saw him, he saw those things which sully? Who will wipe up all David’s filth? “Look up here! I’m in heaven!”

Heaven is no place to be when you are fond of hiding yourself behind a fortress of your own filth. “Oh, no, everybody knows me now.” With knowledge is judgment. With judgment, there is no love, only merit. And merit scratched only reveals the fortress of filth. We all know him now, but we all already knew him. We were hoping he’d find a way for us. Instead, he backed into a casket which embraced him with its doors.

The song is called “Lazarus.” Lazarus was raised from the dead. Lazarus was carried up by the angels to nestle in the bosom of Abraham. “Look up here” is a taunt. From where are we looking? For whom is the dirge? Does everybody know him now?

Templates Overlaying Expectations, and Futility

/ John David Duke Jr / Leave a comment

I was trained, I think, to have a lot of kids, a cache, as it were, for the world to consume, or, perhaps, to protect from the world, but who can do that when one is shielding his own face from the ceaseless blows? Maybe I wasn’t trained, but it was modeled for me. I liked the idea of having many children, but I wasn’t particularly enthralled with the idea of it. Nevertheless, when I met a girl who expressed a desire to have many children, a quiver full of arrows, as it were, with which to conquer the world, standing strong in the ceaseless battle, well, who can resist? So I married her.

We snapped into a template quite quickly, into career obligations (we thought they were obligations). The institutions of this present evil age foster themselves as protectors and guides, and they eject a newly married couple of individuals into the fray with promises of further protection and guidance, but when you look back at the fortresses of the institutions of your trust, you see that they are being assailed without cessation, and if you have the will to look closely, you see that the worst of the flames are being set from those whose charge is the maintenance and operation of the institutions. And so you are demoralized. They said “career,” and I with the wife of my youth said, “okay,” then chafed, then fell away, and we found ourselves abandoned. This is a template. It happens predictably to a subset of human beings (oh, how I hate that designation; what are we? Are we human beings? Aren’t we a communion, man and wife?) every single day. And the outcry goes up into outer space, swallowed by the beepings of exploring satellites and the wind of the sun. Will Jupiter turn his eye upon us in mercy? The bloated god will only flatulate and turn away.

We fell when we fell away. “Just desserts!” cried out the men. “You have become to us as rebels.”

“But we are your own flesh and blood!”

We had two children at the time, and circumstances convinced us that two was enough. Those two would help us limp along to the end, whence they, perhaps, according to hope, could bound away. This is also common.

But we were expected to have more children. By whom? Ghosts, I should think. Spirits and unseen powers, bidding us to resume that good work, as it is also enjoyable. Career had failed us (and we certainly failed it) and progress was in ruins, so why not flex ourselves, as man and wife, and shatter the template?

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An Asshole to the End

/ John David Duke Jr / Leave a comment

A few days after Peter died, I got a text from his pastor telling me Peter wanted me to read John 11 at his funeral. “That asshole!” was my reflexive response. The request was true to his character.

John 11, he knows, I cannot read at a funeral whose corpse I do not know, not without being overcome with the emotional force, so for him to make a dying request that I read over his was a coup de grâce upon our friendship, which death ended. That was it. It was over. The text made it plain: Peter is dead.

A thousand people moseyed over to the big Lutheran church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Of the thousand, I knew Angie, his wife. It’s possible some others from the early days of our friendship in the mid-90s were there, but I would only have recognized their faces and known nothing more about them. A thousand people, and never did I feel so alone, not even when my father died, for in that case I had my three sisters and my mother.

That one was also a rather large intrusion of claimants to the corpse. They had to have two separate funerals for my dad: one in southern Louisiana, where he died; another in northern Alabama, where he was raised. I skipped the first one because of the many claimants I would not have known. Besides, I had what they call a “complicated” relationship with my father, a deep and abiding love which was made white hot by long-standing patricidal notions borne of deep-seated philosophical disagreements, which were, at his death, which was sudden, then peppered with anger and guilt, as one would be when one hates how one was raised. I was a pastor’s kid. My dad was a Lutheran pastor. His many surviving brothers and sisters and their families and extended families, along with his childhood friends, were jammed into the Lutheran church in Hanceville, Alabama, where his mother was baptized by a Lutheran pastor from Milwaukee sometime in the 1940s, along with five of her children, including my father, who was five years old at the time. She was an American Indian. It was the Lutheran pastor from Milwaukee who broke down that racial barrier.

His corpse was in the narthex (the common area before you go into the sanctuary (the main room of the church where all the pews are)), a week old already, having sat in refrigeration during a particularly warm August, having been transported within the mysteries of the mortuary crafts from Louisiana to Alabama. We greeted family and friends, and they were seated. As it was, I had not seen the corpse, and I requested to see him with my sisters and mother. The mortician turned the appropriate latches, raised the lid, and there was my father, laid out in sacramental splendor, to be buried in his priestly garments, including a golden chasuble. When I reacted, every head in the sanctuary snapped back to stare. My mother comforted me. Peter was a pastor’s kid, too.

There is an expectation–at least, there was an expectation for a pastor’s kid, especially the pastor’s son, placing him on one of the two paths he can go by. He can either adopt a Pharisee’s mien, the faultless son of the Most High Pastor, who himself is the representative of the Son of God, and can make no error, neither his sons and daughters–a Pharisee’s mien, I say: a hard, cold, exacting, cruelty expected of a sniveling wretch who cloaks himself in an expertise of religiosity. Or he can unleash his anger in a destructive lifestyle, usually in a hedonism akin to that exhibited by the wonderful Sam Kinison. In either case, his identity is not his identity, but that of someone else. To craft an identity is exceedingly difficult, and much discouraged, both by Father and by his disciples.

It can be done, though, if he can navigate that Scylla and Charybdis. Indeed, forgiveness has been known to prevail upon those pastors’ kids who wreck their ships, and they can set sail again. I think Peter and I managed to escape, a pair of Odysseuses in our own right, but not without paying a heavy emotional toll. The tax is high, my friends, for those of us who wish to live free of those peculiar expectations. And, thus impoverished, Peter and I leaned on each other. We developed a shorthand with each other, much as twins do, and we leaned on each other.

Another lonely claimant was there, whose name escapes me. He was flown in from Ghana, where Peter served as a missionary over the course of over 20 years, both formally, and then later on as an emotional supporter of the burgeoning Lutheran Church in Ghana and throughout that stretch of Africa. That is to say, this second lonely claimant was another who had Peter as a close friend and confidant for over two decades, beginning together as young men with babies, enduring the travails of this ephemeral career in the visible futility of the Christian Faith, ending with teen-aged young-adult progeny. Ah! Death! You sting us! Where is your sting?

The funeral was horrible. It was just horrible. Peter wrote it. He wrote the structure of the service, picked the readings to be read, picked the hymns to be sung. Structure? There was no structure. It was a vile Sacramentarian Baptist service with Lutheran trappings. There was no Kyrie, no proclamation of the gifts of the sacrament of baptism, no declaration of the resurrection of the body because there was no Apostles’ Creed, only that godawful John 11, gaping before me like the grave itself. And he had me read it. He did it on purpose. He did the whole despicable thing on purpose because he knew I was the only son-of-a-bitch in that building who would weep while the confrontation of that text was being laid out before us. Do you understand me? He laid out a structure-free funeral service, departing from every form and norm known to our tradition in order that he might have my weakness for reading that particular text in public actually highlight that thing around which his hope revolved.

It’s not the part where Jesus weeps that gets me, nor the many indications of the upwelling of utter despair expressed by a despondent people. Those are, indeed, difficult to read, but where my throat constricts, where my chest heaves, where my mouth clamps into a quivering vise, is the question. “Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” At this comes the existential pause, where you stare into the abyss, and it stares back, tearing at your guts, shouting, “WHAT A LOAD OF STUFF AND NONSENSE! RUBBISH! THERE’S NOTHING HERE! DO YOU HEAR ME? NOTHING!”

Do you believe this? Peter’s corpse is within arm’s length. What an asshole. Truly, he was a brother. Peter Kelm, 1972-2017, RIP.

 

Uncoiling

/ John David Duke Jr / Leave a comment

“Sleep in Safety” by 45 Grave was one of my favorite all-time songs between my fifteenth and thirty-fifth birthdays. I was born in 1973. Somewhere along the line between my thirty-fifth and fortieth birthdays, I forced people to endure waves of nostalgia, as happens to those of us who watch our children rise up around our feet, coiling mortality around our throats. “Remember when?” How dreadful the nostalgic! And then the all-time favorites were boxed and put away, not thrown out, but stored, to be laughed at as comic elements participating in a greater tale, a grander story than mere fond memory.

It’s an impulse to hang on to adolescence when manhood is necessary, to substitute the carelessness of adolescence for the freedom of manhood, a liberty which requires discipline, the rote, regimen, and pure, unadulterated liability. That is to say: a man is willing to fail at manhood in order to achieve that quality which allows one to be called a man. If he’s lucky, they might append it to him when he lies in state. Therefore, why grow up?

Overlapping that prolonged adolescence, between the fifteenth and thirty-fifth birthdays, is the uncoiling, prying open mortality to see what dreams might come alive. It is uncoiling before my eyes, and with the uncoiling, the realization that Poor Yorick, though he be unearthed, sleeps in perfect safety. Should he come back, he will not come back as a zombie, formed in perfect silliness and lots of foam rubber. No, he shall sleep in safety to awaken as though he were only resting to hear the next grand story, refreshed.

It is a deliberate act, uncoiling, to examine what is and what is not, what is imagined and what is unimagined. How does one distinguish? The sun shines, the shadows move, and then the sun is gone again for who knows how long. Who can distinguish? One holds the coil open, I suppose, even as it recoils around your throat, and, with a knife, one probes carefully and exactly, inasmuch as one can remember how it looked when the moving sun shone upon it. We’re fumbling around and using the wrong tools, aren’t we? Certainty comes and goes, and then they say some words, and you yourself are gone.

Military graveyards are set in perfect rows and columns, and they endure for a time, embodied as long as they do as belonging to the institutions of power. The helter-skelter arrangement of all the rest of us–mercy! After a much shorter time we are excluded.

Dreams do come to pass, and they come. They are embodied, and we live and eat and breathe among them.