"Spreading My Ashes in the Twisting River"
by Edward Curtin
“You may be right, I may be crazy,
but it just might be a lunatic you’re looking for...”
- Billy Joel, "You May Be Right"
"They say a stitch in time saves nine. They say it is always good to be prepared. They say Preparation-H is good for hemorrhoids. They say that Benjamin Franklin said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” They say the Girl Scout motto is “Be Prepared.” They say so many things like that that make me feel ashamed for my lack of preparation.
I think I heard one of “they” say that despite some people who think that death is a failure, there are far more who now say you are passing the big test as you “pass” on. I hope so, for the night before last I dreamed I was back in high school, heading to school on the subway. I had a big math test but had fallen asleep while studying the night before.
I was not prepared. I was trying desperately to catch up on my numbers when two pretty girls entered at the next stop and sat opposite me. My test preparation ended there, as my mind slipped from one plus one equals two, to which of the two would be mine. Then a further thought, as if from God, maybe one plus one does equal two, and they could both be mine. I failed the math test.
God knows, I don’t want to fail in life, so when I woke up this morning, all “they” have said flashed like lightning through my mind. I realized that all these profound past sayings were pushing me into a future for which I wasn’t prepared but must prepare now, get my ass in gear, as they say.
Since they say Franklin invented the lightning rod, I figured he must have known where lightning was before it flashed, a question that had long disturbed me to no end and whose answer left a blank in my mind until I realized it wasn’t. If you think that isn’t so, maybe you would clarify it for me, or should I look in Ben’s Poor Richard’s Almanac for an answer in one of his mathematical exercises that he included. I know how smart he was and he predicted that in the future we would be able to freeze the dead – cryonics – and resurrect them later on. I wonder where Ben Franklin is tonight. AI should know.
I realize that all desires are born in a lack, and when satisfied, they give birth to new lacks. It is a truth hard to swallow. But I still desire to be prepared despite such warnings. Weirdly, I think back to something I read in the past as I consider how to prepare for the future. Not exactly my future since – you guessed it, I’ll be dead – but I hope it’s yours. We know how to count, but for all the predictive power of numbers and calculations, we don’t know when we will die. So many people wear conventional masks to hide this and other disturbing questions. They act as if all is copacetic when it isn’t.
In his book about his passionate life, "Report to Greco," Nikos Kazantzakis, the Greek writer well-known for Zorba the Greek, recounts a time when he was looking at fierce African masks in a museum. They were made of wood, hide, and human skulls. He tells us:
"In an effort to unravel the mystery of masks, I said to myself, the mask is our true face, we are these monsters with their bloody mouths, hanging lips, and horrifying eyes. A repulsive mask howls behind the beautiful features of the woman we love, chaos behind the visible world, Buddha behind Christ’s gentle face. Sometimes in the terrible moments of love, hate, or death the deceptive charm vanishes and we view truth’s frightening countenance…I pretend to believe in mankind’s faces, and in this way I am able to live with my fellow human beings."
Then this great pretender, this great disbelieving believer, this modern Odysseus, this genius writes that a girl came and stood next to him. He was not prepared for what happened next, but you can imagine. It’s an old story, masks or not. It often happens that when you look ahead too much, no matter how smart you think you are, you fail to see who is standing beside you, and when you focus on planning the future, filling in all those little squares on the calendar, the present goes out of focus, and you are ensnared in the uncanny.
Kazantzakis ends his book with a dream of his beloved Cretan grandfather who came from the land of the dead to find him. Nikos is old now, dark hair has whitened. ”In the atmosphere of love,” he writes, “who can distinguish a flash from eternity…My entire lifetime I was a bow in merciless, insatiable hands. How often those invisible hands drew and overdrew the bow until I heard it creak at the breaking point! ‘Let it break,’ I cried each time.” He ends by telling his grandfather that he has come to recline as dust by his side, “that the two of us may await the Final Judgment together.”
It was that word “dust” that brought me back to the thought of my ashes and my preparations. I don’t want to fail. Mathematics was never my strength, so even if I could understand the relativity stuff, the meaning of e=mc2 and so on, I wouldn’t believe it. And I could study it all my life but I still wouldn’t care. I could have kept my head in the math book on the subway without looking up to see the girls smiling at me. Maybe I saw their masks. But I liked what I saw. As Kazantzakis’s great character Zorba the Greek tells his friend, boss, the uptight writer, to be free you need to cut the string that ties us to the calculating mathematical mindset:
"You need a touch of folly to do that; folly, d’you see? You have to risk everything. But you’ve got such a strong head, it’ll always get the better of you. A man’s head is like a grocer; it keeps accounts. I’ve paid so much and earned so much and that means a profit of this much or a loss of that much! The head’s a careful little shopkeeper; it never risks all it has, always keeps something in reserve. It never breaks the string. Ah no! It hangs on tight to it, the bastard! If the string slips out of it grasp, the head, poor devil, is lost, finished! But if a man doesn’t break the string, tell me, what flavor is left in life? The flavor of chamomile, weak chamomile tea! Nothing like rum – that makes you see life inside out!"
So nine minus five equals four, or so they say. It means nothing to me. They say we live forward and remember backwards. They say time is a river that ends at the sea. They say there is a 34% chance of rain tomorrow at 1 P.M. I’m sick of they; the hell with them! How are you with they?
Yet I’m still taking no chances. My ashes have been accumulating is a small custard cup for a year now, burnt down from the incense that is in the bathroom to make shit smell like roses. We like to make believe. So I’m getting ahead of my life and going down to town to the twisting Housatonic River to scatter my ashes in advance. I too like to make believe. Ahead of what, you might wonder: one year, five, ten, fifteen, fifty? Math can’t tell us. I just hope the stench from the waste processing plant on the other side of the river doesn’t spoil the ceremony. I prefer roses.Say what you want, call me an ashhole. Say this is all folly.
You may be right, I may be crazy, but it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for. But you can’t say I’m not preparing..."
Billy Joel, "You May Be Right"
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