Hi Janice,
Sal and I drove to Sunwest on Monday for Hans' funeral. His family lists March 24 as the day of his death. That was the day Hans walked out of the hospital. The police guess that he walked to "a bridge near the hospital where there was a break in the ice" and jumped off. They figure the flood currents would have been strong enough to carry his body to the Lake, as much as 100 kilometres away, where it washed up. It was discovered on May 10.
Hans had given thought to his funeral. He chose some of the music and possibly indicated which of his poems should be read. He also chose his urn. Two brothers and two sisters spoke, and three of the four friends listed in the obituary. My impression is that Hans was lucky in his family and friends. Through the internment the weather remained lovely and we could imagine we were in the prairie heaven where, in his poem "Cerulean," Hans hoped to find peace at last. During the drive home we were caught in a downpour and had to pull over for about twenty minutes.
Love,
Jay
*****
It is 9:16 a.m. Thursday, June 4, 2009.
I wrote Janice Bremer a couple of paragraphs about the funeral that Sal and I went to on Monday. I am looking at those two paragraphs now.
I also looked at a synopsis of The Courage to Be on the Internet.
I liked Paul Tillich’s book when I read it. But I was not impressed with the synopsis. It pumps up the idea of courage too much. Courage becomes a veritable brass band singing the praises of Being (don’t forget the capital!) as a God who is greater than God, Ground of all Being, Who is Dread Defeating, and so on and so forth--ideas that exist only in sermon mode.
I prefer the formulation of Pema Chodron who writes that to mark a single breath requires courage, but in exchange returns a surplus of the quality. That is, you invest a unit of courage (mindfulness) and immediately get it back with interest. In one place Pema’s minimal meditation is three breaths long; in another place, a single breath qualifies. I love exercises that lower the bar like that. Anything more elaborate is just priestcraft, I think.
I imagine I understand Hans Skaler's situation. He desperately wanted to be in creative contact with the world, but did not know how to get there.
When his younger son committed suicide, the poet William Stafford commented, “Brett was not mean enough. He was not mean the way a cornered wildcat is mean.” Living in the shadow of his high energy father, Stafford's son never quite got his life going, and then apparently he was unsuccessful in love too.
There are times we’ve got to be mean the way a cornered wildcat is mean. Our lives are worth fighting for. Curiously, that’s the message that is screaming through anxiety, but also the message the anxiety wants to keep masked. “What a huge mistake breathing life into such a weak vessel as you was!” thunders God. “I do repent me of it. I surely do.”
I think we are born with such aggression as we need and, “save for an evil chance,” (Yeats) it keeps working to bless us and keep us all our lives as we make contact and grapple with the world. For some of us, that aggression gets marked as either evil or useless, and it turns inward. I think Hans was one of those, and I am another.
At church last Sunday I referred to Hans’ “gentle intelligence.” At the funeral on Monday, to my surprise, Hilda Starling, a close friend of Hans’, employed the identical phrase in her eulogy. The family emphasized Hans’s loving good will going back to childhood--as well as the extra complement of brains he seems to have been born with. All seven of the kids completed university, but they recognized Hans as something special.
Hans cheerfully helped his brothers find jobs and become the successes in life that he never became. He kept in contact with his parents almost to the end. He made it a point to tell them how he blamed them for nothing that had gone wrong in his life. He was sure that the anxiety and depression he suffered had nothing to do with his family or the way the world had treated him. It was something between him and God, apparently. Hans thought about God a lot.
There was a time in the 1990s Hans was hoping to make appropriate creative contact with the world by publishing his poetry. When it became clear that was not going to happen, he lost the ability to write as well, he said. It had been a consolation.
The presence of God was another consolation that seemed to be drying up for Hans in his last few years. He was brought up Reform but switched to United when he moved to our town about twenty years ago. His family referred to this as part of his “faithful quest.” They were silent about his shift away from United and over to the Unitarian Church a couple of years ago.
One of the last conversations I had with Hans was about God. I had just read The God Delusion. Hans said he was meaning to read that book but hadn’t got around to it yet. He had read Christopher Hitchen’s God is Not Great, however. The sub-title for that book is How Religion Poisons Everything. Hans believed many of the themes were similar, and there was a lot to be said for making oneself aware of the negative aspects of religiosity. Religion was hardly a political innocent. It had a lot to answer for.
“At the same time,” said Hans, “Speaking for myself, while I no longer imagine God as talking to me, if I stopped feeling that he was there listening, that he was monitoring my deeper processes, understanding me more deeply than I understand myself, yet still man to man, and accepting me...if I lost that faith...well, I don’t know what I would do. I wouldn't commit suicide or anything like that. That's not what I'm saying.”
“Okay,” I said.
“But I would be looking forward to a pretty bleak old age.”
In response, I told Hans how my daughter lost her faith when she was four or five years old. She had learned at her Mother’s Sunday School that God saw her wherever she was.
“Even when I’m in the bath?” Tara had asked.
“Even when you are in the bath.”
“There’s no way I’m going to believe in a God who looks at me while I’m taking a bath,” said Tara.
“And I haven’t from that day to this,” says Tara today, remembering fondly.
So how does all this fit in with my life right now? Well, I am still looking for a healthful contact with the world. The e-mail to Janice counts as healthful contact, and so does this addition do it, produced with my blog in mind. Tara got up in time to get to her first class at high school. I showered so that she could change my dressing before she went. That’s an inch or so on my back, where they chopped out some tissue for a biopsy of my skin and put in a couple of stitches. I cannot feel it or see it, even with the help of mirrors. It is nothing for Tara to remove the old bandage, clean the site and replenish the anti-biotic cream. There doesn’t seem to be any problem.
I have had 2 cups of coffee. I will possibly go for a walk. This evening, Sal, Tara and I will join Prof. Dan Toews and Agnes Reiner to go see Othello.
And now?
I should look at my blog. My self-hatred has always revealed itself most forcibly at the point of intersection between me-as-writer and world-as-judge. The world is an angry pack of mad dogs. I am charged with subduing them through my verbal agility. But I’m not equal to the task. Of course, my first critic was my huge bully of a brother Mobojobo, and he wasn’t about to have his behaviour modified by anything I said or did.
I put things charmingly, no? But this is serious business.
When I read over my writing a couple of days after having posted it, I become full of self-loathing and think this whole blog business is ridiculous. My good head, however, tells me the contrary is true. The blog is just what the doctored ordered. (I’m the doctor, and that’s what I ordered.)
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