not writing is dishonest

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Ma and I saw the movie, "Capote" the other day. It was at the fancy multiplex, where I seldom go. The Movies 8 dollar theatre is my speed; they're not new releases, but new enough, for a dollar. And it's across the street from the Goodwill warehouse, for cheap shopping.

I was sitting on the porch this morning, sipping coffee and having a smoke. It's not light out yet: just the vaguest hint that this planet orbits a sun and that it might roll that way soon.

I was thinking about death. I was thinking how people don't REALLY write about death. I was thinking how people make death into a personality, a being, and how dishonest that is. I was thinking how people don't write about the universal experience of death: the breathing, the twitches, the reduction of a loved personality to a series of biological reactions to shut down.

I was thinking people don't acknowledge, discuss, write about this universality in much detail very often. I wondered why. Maybe we're just too in denial of death, so we'll have the gumption to live? After all, if you are constantly conscious of the fact that everything you do makes little difference in the end, why strive?

Or, maybe, especially in this modern, middle class, American life, we just aren't exposed to much death? Maybe we know a handful of relatives and friends who've died. Maybe we didn't experience their deaths firsthand. They probably died in a sterile hospital. Maybe only certain professions -- slaughterhouses, hospitals -- see much death anymore. The rest of us are no longer witnesses, as we'd have been a century ago, or in another, less affluent country.

Ma and I saw James Whale's "Frankenstein" and "Bride of Frankenstein" recently. We also watched "Gods and Monsters." And PBS had a biography of Mary Shelly for Halloween. Now, THERE's a person who witnessed death first hand. Her very birth killed her mother. 3 of her four children died...or was it 4 of 5? Her lover died; her sister died....friends died. No WONDER she wanted to reanimate the dead! I need to reread that book...

When I moved to Louisville from Los Angeles, I was frequently struck by the cemetaries, usually family plots or old church yards, sprinkled throughout the neighborhoods. One could easily live next door to tombstones. I remember thinking it was healthy. In Los Angeles, the dead are segregated to the outskirts of communities: out by the oil wells, self storage units and industrial parks. We never see their markers, think of their lives, think of our mortality. There's that one, old cemetary we pass as we drive on the 405 freeway. We tell each other stories of who's buried there: Jack Benny, Valentino, Al Jolson. We don't know, for sure, if any of those people are actually buried there, of course. We never pull in and have a look around. It's all just celebrity gossip.

So, between the hospitals, EMS, funeral parlors and segregated cemetaries, we really aren't exposed to death much, or dying. We make up stories about heaven and peace, without understanding how PROFOUNDLY people of past generations NEEDED to believe the dying, the suffering, might have some Great Reward, some Final Justice, at the end of the ordeal.

I was thinking, this morning, how death isn't so much a personality as an experience. And then, I realized DEATH isn't an experience; by the time you get there, you're DEAD. DYING is the experience. And we don't write about it, not really. I've seen so many creatures die. And the physical process is so similar, despite the circumstances. One watches a being one loved, with whom one has distinctly individual memories, reduced to a series of rather violent and frightening reactions, as the body struggles to maintain life. It's pretty horrifying, really.

I remembered "In Cold Blood," which we rented, along with "To Kill A Mockingbird," after viewing Capote. I remembered the hanging scene. The jerks, the twitches. In "Capote," at least, they were honest enough to say the hanged person's heart can keep beating of nineteen minutes, more or less. One wonders the experience of the hanged. Interesting, isn't it, that we place a hood over the condemned prisoner's face, so we don't have to WITNESS the facial reactions? They were hooded in "The Green Mile," too.

We don't WANT to experience it. We don't want to witness it.

Capote never wrote another book after "In Cold Blood." He squandered his remaining years on alcoholism and shoring up his porous ego. He couldn't write because, in my opinion, he could no longer be honest. He had nothing more to say that could be considered authentic.

I was angry with him this morning for giving in, being coopted by his witness of the executions of Perry and Hickock. I was angry with him for using that as an excuse not to write.

And then, I reminded myself, "Rogi, YOU're not writing, either." Oh, yeah. I've many excuses, but no reasons, why I stopped writing in these blogs. I'll discuss some, I'm sure.

But I just wanted someone to know that, in the predawn chill of my front porch today, I caught myself in the act, came in and started writing. Gotta let the cat in.