Lift your bones

On the 14,159th day of my life, I signed my divorce papers. Meanwhile (in unrelated news) some of the oldest oaks in Ireland burned down in Killarney National Park, Co. Kerry. Losing the oaks is much more difficult for me to accept than losing the marriage. I am assured by competent authorities that I shall be much better off in divorced estate—an odd way of putting it, I know, but I do feel as if I’ve come home to the country.

Why is why I don’t like to see it burning. India, too, is burning. What I’ve taught my daughters to call The Disease has ravaged and rampaged through the country, raping the lungs of the dying, haunting and salting the memories of the living and the afflicted. Truly, to remember is pain. Sometimes, I think to myself that we invent monsters to protect ourselves from the glaring light of mourning, burning and wailing forever among the bones of the dead. I could not detect monsters as I signed the papers in a strip mall FedEx, the kind no one goes to now that they have Amazon.

Unfortunately, Jeff has not yet re-invented divorce in consumer friendly terms. Nor has he a corner on monsters. I ordered a six-foot crocodile from a Florida monster-maker a few months ago, because Amazon has everything on earth except large alligators. The irony did not escape me.

The bones of memory, drive your plow over them, suggests Olga. To crush them into a fine dust, as might be suitable for baking shabbat bread. To keep shabbat is to remember the dead, and that is the way in which I am a Jew. Not by blood. Grind up the trees to raspings. Spread the ashes of the trees of Kerry upon the bloody fields of 1916, forever young. To believe in something is to remember, but some things that have never happened to me I remember better than the 14,159 days of my life (a prime number, by the way, and the first to be constructed from the expanded digits of π - 3).

Drive, drive, drive then. Drive to FedEx. Drive down the green green roads to Kerry. I have done both in my 14,159 days. Drive, drive, drive your plow over the bones of the dead. This I do daily, and there is no difference. As Scarface likes to say in my ear always, forget about it. Eat your bread. Enjoy the neat letter opener in your upper left desk drawer with a haft turned from 4,000 year-old Irish bog oak. (How many women, how many children, sank into that bog? The horses, the horses, pulling the bit, sinking slowly.)

Plow under your marriage, then. Compost it. Modiano it, memory style. Allude no more to the complex series of mental lenses required to see and to envision the steam rising from Chernobyl, staining the mind, poisoning the body and the blood, imposing a mellow season of blurry forgetting upon the clouds that ascend forever above the bone kilns of the little Polish town. (Olga is also Polish.)

Drive your plow over the bones of the dead. The 20th century, I am saying, was so constructed as to be a Rube Goldberg machine for forgetfulness. My childhood, I am saying, involved the forgetting of Rwanda (which was in the papers) and the deliberate concealment of Trisakti, of the Papuan genocide (which was not).

I am also writing that I have long felt the very alchemical process of memory necessary to continue living leads to a blurring of the essential act of tragedy. To live, in other words, is to disrespect certain of our dead who should be alive along with us, because to live is essentially to forget. Fortunately, the dead are merciful, and (who knows) perhaps they remember the forgetting they themselves did when they were alive. Truly, how is one to process the pain? It does not stand still as beneath a glass cloche. No. Tragedy piles upon tragedy the way leaves from 1,400 year old gingko tree at the temple of Gu Guanyin in Shaanxi Province, China—the way leaves there and in Seattle in my own front yard fall fall fall through stilly air to the ground, gold upon gold, in both cases (only one is a tourist destination, currently). Unless they are burned, these leaves, these memories. Between the two trees I am speaking of, between these two points lies 5,944 miles of mostly ocean, slowly warming. And (to progress still further in our imaginary journey) Xi’an, the city in Shaanxi near which the temple still stands, travel 5,410 miles (mostly over land except for the last few minutes of your flight) and you will be able to stand in the Irish fields and to see and to mourn whatever is left of the corpses of the oaks.

So the air breathes our memories, and the smoke. The air of the parking lot smelled vaguely of gas and a cold antiseptic nothing that goes with strip malls in America since 2017. You will see, you will mourn, you will have difficulty finding a traditional plow in Seattle, or in China, or even in Ireland to plow over these bones. The blade will probably stick in the pavement, anyway, I think, as I get into the car with my ex-wife.

Now to speak of memories, depending on the plane and the number of passengers you choose for your imaginary journey along this airy Silk Road from China to Europe, you will convert the dead memories of dinosaurs and ancient plants into a couple of invisible tons of the gas we call carbon dioxide along the way.

At least, that’s the way we usually put it. You (personally) emitted so many tons of carbon dioxide this year, this decade, this (if you are lucky) century. You, personally (implied). As if the crafters of the memory engines that lift you like magic over the clouds bear no responsibility. Nor the diggers out of dinosaur bodies and memory, one of which was a British company named BP, which in 2000 (351 years after Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland, all within memory of the trees that burned yesterday) produced a wildly successful ad campaign designed to convince the public that they, individually, were responsible for global warming. Not the oil companies. This campaign won awards at the time.

I wonder how Killarney will manage without plows. I plow under a marriage that will be forgotten by human memory by the year 2100 at the latest. Around this time, Ireland may no longer have a climate suitable for oaks. What grist shall be the flour of memory in those hot days? It’s likely, I think, that the 250 foot dipterocarps of my youth will be dead then, too. Chainsawed or otherwise.

Drive your plow over the bones of the dead.

Lift up your heads, O Jerusalem.

Lift your bones over the brows of the dead.