Author: by jay cummings

        Our paths lead us through and over chasms of light and dark.  There really isn’t another way.  Some are deep and wide and perilous.  Some are lightly filled with honey-meringue and joy.  Some look right, but aren’t.  Some look brutal, but are really blessings.  All of them are invisible until we traverse them.  And thank goodness.
        A common thing a young adult will hear from slightly older young adults:  “You just can’t know what it’s like to have a baby until you have one.”  And it’s true.  No matter how much you don’t want it to be true, it is.  Sure, some of us are more prepared than others.  If, for example, you grew up as an older child with a baby in the house, you have a leg up.  I most certainly did not.  On the night of the birth of my first child – two nights after labor began – I found myself alone in a drab Philadelphia hospital room.  In my memory it is like any other hospital room from the Netflix show Stranger Things.  
        Mother had just undergone surgery to bring our beautiful child into the world and was passed out on drugs.  The nurse said many things very quickly that I didn’t catch or at least caught and released, and then left with a click.  Then there was just me.  And a baby.  And the baby started crying.  And I looked down at this beautiful child with horror.  My first day as a parent – the person who is supposed to do whatever it takes to bring comfort to their brand-new, completely dependent being.  
        I panicked.  I called the nurse.  “Yes?” she said.  “Um, the um, the um . . .” I said.  “YES?” she said with growing annoyance.  I’m sure she was busy.  “I, um, he’s um, he’s crying.” I stammered.  I was holding him – cradling really – and rocking back and forth.  The only thing I could think was that I didn’t have useful nipples, and so what could I do?  The nurse said with annoyance, and I’ll never forget this, “Yes, he’s a baby.  They cry.”  “But, I, um. . . how do I . . . ?” I was going into shock.  “Babies cry when they need something,” she said.  “Can mom nurse him?”  “No. No.  She’s . . . um . . . she’s . . . um . . .”  “She’s sleeping?” It’s like I needed her to speak for both of us.  “Um . . . yeah . . . what, um . . . what do I do?”
        This question:  What do I do?  What can you do?  When you don’t know and you’re thrust into the ring, what can you do?  I have a friend who signed up for fight night one time because you got paid $50 for even just stepping into the ring.  That’s a chasm I’ll never cross, but I recognized the fear in his voice recounting the tale.  That fear was in my voice over the phone to the night nurse.  “Change his diaper?” she suggested.  “Um, yeah . . . um, I . . . um . . .” Another deep sigh.  “I’ll send someone up.”
        That chasm seemed dark, but fast forward a few years and a couple kids later.  Without stepping across to another invisible chasm, I will say that it was decided to do cloth diapers.  And I am now a cloth diaper wizard.  I can capably change a cloth diaper in an airplane bathroom.  Ain’t no thing.  Chasm crossed.  I can turn around and look at it, see the crenelations and spires, trace the outline of every blind crevasse, every dark night filled with worry.  This chasm is straight up invisible to the me who hadn’t crossed it.  There’s no getting around it.
        I wondered recently what a list of invisible chasms would look like – a list of things that were unknowable until experiencing them.  It would have wonderful and exciting things on it like kissing, taking a plane on your own, visiting a place where a very different language is spoken, learning to drive, training for some physical feat that is very hard, seeing the rings of Saturn through a telescope.  

        Seeing the rings of Saturn is a great example of an invisible chasm that seems like it shouldn’t be one.  We’ve all seen pictures of the rings of Saturn a million times.  Why would it be different through a telescope?  Because it is.  It just is.
        But this is life.  And life consists of jagged and ugly crossings:  losing someone close, getting divorced, losing a beloved job, car wrecks, persistent anxiety.  You’re in the emergency room and it’s all going to shit, and there’s nothing you can do.  So much of these kinds of chasms are about enduring loss.  
        We can’t know what loss is until we are faced with it.  As a young person, I didn’t even know I was accumulating things that could be lost later:  Love, friendships, exuberance, ideals, passion, trust.  My grandfather died when I was barely into my twenties.  It took decades to unwind that loss.  When my marriage unraveled a few years ago, it felt like a ghost hand reached into my guts and tore out the best parts of me.  Watching my middlest – when he was all of two years old – disappear into an operating room surrounded by people dressed as aliens ready to attempt to make his little heart function correctly was terrifying.  What really matters is what we do with the chasms.  How do we catalog a life?  Should we even try?  
        Our options are limited.  Denial was a popular response of my younger days.  This isn’t happening.  Everything is OK – take the Calvin and Hobbes route – live and don’t learn.  Usually this is unconscious – a defense mechanism.  I have never met a person who was intentionally in denial about something hard.  We can self-medicate.  Another popular choice of my youth.  Again, we don’t usually understand what we’re self-medicating for until the self-medicating becomes its own difficult invisible chasm to cross.  

        What’s magical about being a person is that we can choose to look down into the gaping vastness.   At a certain point, if we’ve crossed enough of these chasms and, importantly, haven taken the time to look at the crossing, we can start to relate a little.  Take a minute to look back over your shoulder at the space you’ve crossed, or even to just look down because the chasm you’re in will span a lifetime.  Once, a friend confided in me about her experience with chronic anxiety, about sitting in a stairwell outside work trying to breathe and cry and just pull it together enough to put one step in front of another.  I’ve never had that experience.  But I know what it is to be ugly-crying your guts out and then have to go be a person.  Some don’t, but everyone has the opportunity to if you’ve ever chosen look down at the crags and crenelations.  And there’s a shining, beautiful path that will take you by surprise until you’ve experienced it – what it feels like to endure a loss, not on your own, but alongside another who loves without judgment or criticism.
        There’s another invisible chasm which is like the zeroeth chasm on the list.  Looking hard into those dark inner topographies is critical to experiencing joy.  Stepping into the suck makes the bright chasms sparkle and shine.  My memory of my first kiss is ever so much more sweet because I choose to look hard into the loss around last kisses I’ve known.  The joy of attending my eldest’s Christmas choir concert is brought into relief because I choose to feel the loss of my grandfather’s piano playing at the annual Christmas sing.  It can’t be any other way.  You don’t get to have honey-meringue without brutal emptiness.  Knowing this is, in itself, an invisible chasm.
        Some chasms are the result of choices we make and don’t know the ends of.  They are like strings held on one end, blowing unpredictably in the wind on the other.  We have some agency after all, though I would guess less than we think we do.  Others are simply a part of being a human – the mile markers of biological existence: walking, puberty (gah), aging, the final chasm we all will get to cross: dying.  I hated puberty.  (Who loves puberty?)  Getting old sucks ass.  But I wouldn’t get rid of any of those experiences for anything.  Old Dr. M.E.K. had it right when, after my grandfather passed, he said as he was helping our family navigate those final days, “He’s experienced the last part of his life.”  I love that.  Dying as a final part of living.  To quote a Shins song: “the years are short but the days go slowly by.”  May there be ever so many more invisible chasms to cross between now and then.      

        Silver, dancing light penetrates the dark, thick night air.  We’ve all had dinner.  We’ve all had our second shower, according to both custom and necessity.  I sit on a plush rug.  Not far away, sounds of night – a miasma of insects buzzing, food cart hawkers, motorcycle traffic, the beep of bajaj – filter into the living room from a section of the house that isn’t roofed.  I don’t specifically remember, but there might have been Teh Botol.  There probably was Teh Botol.  In my memory it’s a weeknight, maybe a Tuesday.  I’m happy that there is something my host-brother, Uyi (far left, above), and I can share.  
        Why, it’s Kung-Fu, of course.  One night a week, one of the couple television channels that Jakartans had access to in 1995 would play a Kung-Fu movie.  I suspect the movies were produced in Hong Kong, but I’m not sure.  What I can say, is that these movies were filmed in Mandarin, dubbed into English, then carried Indonesian subtitles.  Aside from the obviously utilitarian feature of helping to teach me the language, I found these films fascinating and beautiful.
        My favorites were the ones set in a deeply mythologized Chinese past.  If you’ve seen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you’ve seen the Hard Rock Cafe version.  These films we watched were the Somers Bay Cafe version.  They were low budget productions: chintzy sets, gaudy and over-the-top costuming, uninspiring plots, terrible dialog (which, in fairness, could have been a problem of translation).  But the thing which made them incredible was the fight-scene choreography.  
        Pretty much any life situation could land in an all-out Kung-Fu fight.  Taking a walk by moonlight with the pretty village magistrate’s daughter?  Better get out your Kung-Fu.  Fight scenes were long and involved.  There were many considerations to take into account.  How many villains are there?  Is the main villain attacking or has he sent less-experienced lackeys?  What style of Kung-Fu does the hero have?  The villain?  Which style is stronger?  Strength alone doesn’t guarantee victory.  Which style is more ancient, more honorable, reflective of highest virtue?
        My absolute favorite was a movie where at one point the hero is trapped in an ancient cave.  He knows a respectable style of Kung-Fu, but has been bested by the villain, whose style is seemingly unbeatable.  The cave appears to be his last resting place, but no!  Inside the cave are ancient and wise stone tablets that allow a person who is true of heart and spirit and who already knows a style of Kung-Fu to learn an unfailingly powerful style in only a few minutes of study.  The hero, of course, learns the style, escapes the cave, bests the villain using these new/old techniques and saves the day.  
        I don’t know why this memory is so compelling for me.  I tell the story of it any chance I get, and this plot line appears in the Crimson Hen tales coming down the pipeline.  But all I have of it is a memory – a twenty-five year old memory.  I have spent hours Googling what I know of the plot, but I haven’t got enough to make a successful search.  It’s essentially a discrete thing which is unGoogleable.  
        Over tea with an excellent friend the other day we got to talking about this kind of tangible object.  He told a story of a long lost pop music CD he brought back from Italy as a teenager.  He can describe in vivid detail the album art, but nothing useful enough for a Google search.  I’m sorry for the fact that our memories remain stuck in the ether, but I am also so glad these memories exist.  They bring a kind of pastel, washed-out color to the world that can’t exist online.

        In the movie, “While We’re Young,” Ben Stiller’s character pulls out his phone after the group can’t identify an unimportant fact and says, “oh, hey, I’ll look that up.”  Adam Driver’s character – who is playing the part of the hip young up-and-comer – stops him, saying, “no, that’s too easy, let’s just choose to not know.”  It’s a kind of hearkening to a simpler, apparently cooler time when no one really knew anything.  But, there’s a difference between choosing not to Google something and coming across something that can’t be.  
        It struck me later that this is yet another way our lives are different now.  Of course, unless you’re Taylor Swift or Elon Musk, we all live most of our lives in an ineffable, non-searchable mode.  That’s not what I’m talking about.  The Kung-Fu movie in my memory is a thing which should be searchable, but for whatever reason, isn’t.  In the not-so-distant past, every new definable consumable was a found object, either the product of amazing serendipity or the careful curation of sources – like dictionaries.  My mother would jump up from the dinner table, finger in the air with an audible “ah-ha”, and race to the dictionary when a word came up for which there was difference of opinion as to its correct definition.   My brother would come home from college and we’d compare notes:  what, if any, music had you found through whatever random late-night college radio program you might have listened to, or zine you’d stumbled across at Rockin’ Rudy’s back when it was just a record shop?
        It wasn’t necessarily the internet that ended this way of being.  MTV did a fair enough job of beaming whatever was new and hip straight into our suburban homes.  Just one episode of 120 minutes with Matt Pinfield and you’d heard enough contemporary music trivia to fill a very large hole.  But where MTV was a preprogrammed fountain of culture, the internet is really the ultimate democratized searchable bringer of all things.
        And, of course, I wouldn’t change that.  I really like being able to use Google Earth to find street-level pictures of the house where I spent a formative year of exchange in Jakarta as a teenager.  But it’s nice to think that like Harry Tuttle, the renegade heating engineer in the surreal dream movie Brazil, there are objects of our memories that defy search algorithms.  It’s a small thing – a little humanizing, snow globe of memory that is part of the fabric of me that I cherish.  
              
        
              

        “…in the darkness binds them,” echo the ominous words of Tolkien regarding the One Ring.  I have just finished reading this chapter to my middlest son.  In doing so, I am but one in a long expanse of parents engaging in a timeless exercise – reading the Lord of the Rings to their children.  This line, though, has always struck a chord.  The One Ring, and the terrible places it pulls its bearers, is a kind of metaphor for the dark inner expanses a person can unwittingly visit.
        These places are locations created by our innermost emotional landscapes.  The same chord that the little line of poetry accompanying the One Ring’s lore strikes is also plucked by Francis Bacon’s, Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X.  It’s a painting that describes a moment of darkness none of us get to avoid.  We need Tolkein, Bacon, and so many others, we need them to help us navigate things we don’t understand, emotional topographies we traverse, but cannot map.  Luckily, it isn’t only the dark corners of our emotional chasms that defy attempts at description.  It is our brightest as well.  
        From the back of the passenger van, twelve hungover collegiate geology students sing along with Stevie Wonder’s, Superstition.  There is unabashed seat dancing.  In a dark theater at two in the morning a full house of invitees to the premiere of Star Trek: Generations treats a movie screen to a standing ovation.  Overflow crowds in Philadelphia’s Independence Mall who don’t have tickets to the main event stand enraptured as the unseen, but amplified voice of the man who would become America’s first black president unfurls a vision of hope and change like a newly designed flag hoisted on a heretofore unimagined and improbably beautiful vessel.
        What do these things do that regular language cannot?    
        There is a kind of unknowing which is pervasive to the human experience.  It is deep and wild and brutally unfair.  It leaves those of us who sense this unknowing like weavers without looms or bee-keepers without hives.  It is all around, everywhere I go.  This unknowing is linguistic in nature, emotional by character.  I came into this life not knowing how to navigate the vast nomenclature of emotional strata that a human life – my human life – can contain.
        And you probably did too.  We – most of us – cannot say with words what we’re feeling.  Those words we do have are insufficient.  There aren’t words that can encapsulate what losses we suffer, what triumphs of joy are possible.  For this unknowing, there are consequences.  We all pay for it in different ways.  Our lives so often have the characteristic of a good surgery – an activity where anesthetic is necessary.  I sure swallow my share.  Vast swaths of us sway in the thrall of robot controlled pop country radio, life’s-minutes-consuming online tower defense exercises, the latest Marvel adventure, mega-church, Fox “News,” Insta-scrolling.  
        However, as dark as this time feels, I believe that for as many of us who appear locked in the thrall of emotional anesthetic, there are as many who would not be.  I also meet these people every day, I even sometimes turn aside those blue pills of everyday noise myself.  The most interesting, the most surgingly important actions we will take are what happens when the pop-radio station is turned off.  What are we left with?  Where can we go?  When a person decides to trace the topo lines of their own emotional landscape, what happens?  
        In all her work, a common thread that Brene Brown advocates for is dismantling the protections we wear in the world to keep us safe from emotional landscapes that would threaten to drown us.  More specifically, to let down the armor that protected us in our earlier life, but which now no longer serves.  Giving up this armor – the anesthetic that keeps emotional radars keyed down – is uncomfortable in the way that fever is uncomfortable.  Few of us want that.  An inspiring, if fictional, character who desperately wants that is Commander Data.  Data, as an android, is a character who has no emotional landscape, but where most of us look for paths around the overwhelm, Data is a being who desperately searches for one.
        I imagine the two of them meeting – not in a bar –  Brene Brown claims sobriety as her superpower and Data isn’t a human being who can get drunk, but maybe they meet in an antiquated tea-room.  Something about old oak, honey-scented candles, and steaming cups of Earl Gray feels like an appropriate setting.  After some cursory pleasantries, I imagine Brene Brown marveling at the attempts Data makes to create an emotional landscape where one does not exist.  He paints.  He creates poetry, music, engages with literature, and on and on.  His searching is beautiful.  Meanwhile, I imagine Data being at a loss to decipher Brene Brown’s life’s work – her attempts to bring awareness for the vast masses to attenuated emotional landscapes that we all so adamantly tranquilize.  Why wouldn’t a human, filled to the brim with emotional potential, choose to access that?  Why would a person choose to shut that off?  Where’s the overlap in the Venn diagram there?
        Curiosity.
        Curiosity is a life preserver that can buoy our heads above the overwhelm.  Curiosity is the back-brace that can support a lack of language that might describe unfamiliar emotional topography.  Curiosity can replace defensiveness and shut down self-doubt.  Curiosity can compel a person to seek creative ways to explain joys and darknesses.  Curiosity is the gateway drug to awe and wonder.  Curiosity – real, vibrant, searching curiosity –  can swell a heart.  Why does the Grinch turn the sleigh around at the top of mount Crumpit?  His heart can’t grow three sizes that day unless upon hearing the Whos singing down in Whoville, he first asks the question, “How can it be so?”
        What does it mean to be a person who has suffered unexplainable loss?  Mary Oliver answers:
                …
                To live in this world

                you must be able
                to do three things:
                To love what is mortal;
                To hold it

                against your bones knowing
                your own life depends on it;
                and, when the time comes to let it go
                to let it go

        What does it mean to feel drowning in joy?  On the facing page of the same collection of poems, Mary Oliver answers again:

                …
                But joy does that,
                I’m told, in the beginning.
                Later, maybe,
                I’ll come here only
                sometimes and with a
                middling hunger.  But now
                I climb like a snake,
                I clamber like a bear to
                the nuzzling place, to the light
                salvaged by the thighs
                of bees and racked up
                in the body of the tree.
                …

Why do I love reading Tolkien to my child?  To teach him, for the better I think, how to welcome wonder.  So that when he’s on his hands and knees, ugly-crying for a loss in his life, he’ll have an inkling of how to summon a kind of language that might help him navigate the expansive topography of that loss.  And make no mistake, I will read Mary Oliver to him as well, so that when overwhelming bliss finds him, he might remember the light salvaged by the thighs of bees and he’ll know how to sink in and revel in the exquisite warmth of the joy he’s found.
        




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        I asked my father the other day if he was hungry for lunch.  He paused for a moment, considering what I had asked him very carefully, then pointed to an empty part of the room and said with sincere suspicion in his voice, “who are those two people?”  My response as I got up to make some sandwiches was equally sincere: “I don’t know dad, who do you think they are?”  “Well . . .” he replied, giving the question real consideration.  “I just thought you might know.”
        This is how we communicate now.  It’s a perfectly typical interaction on an otherwise unremarkable day.  There is an unrelenting distance between the way he perceives the world and the way I do.  One of the things that caring for someone with advanced dementia teaches you is that really, there is no one true version of reality.  The difference between the kind of reality I share with my father and that which I share with all the other people in my life is only outcomes, and even then, that’s a tenuous link.  I can communicate with my brother or my mother or children or friends in ways that create real meaning in the world and lead to positive outcomes.  I can say to my mother that I’ll take dad to the PT appointment at 11:15, and it actually happens.  This doesn’t mean our realities are equivalent or even similar.  
        If you say to my father, “want to come outside to take the dog to go potty?”  He’s likely to ask which piece of property it is that needs surveying.  The consequences of intersecting with his dementia in this way are many.  If you were a friend of my dad’s in the before-time when he was a successful, and exquisitely sharp legal instrument able to leap complex real estate deals in a single bound, and then met him now, your reaction would be shock.  I work with him every day, so there is no shock.  There is only a long, slow, coming to terms.  And daydreams: horrible, horrible imaginings.
        Working with this beautiful man every day, I am forced to imagine myself in his condition.  I imagine the little bundles of plaque slowly aggregating around my neurons, white, slime-like little snots that tighten and strangle the connections that give my life order and meaning.  They move through neural tissue with malevolent purpose. They attack tiny defenseless capillaries without respite. For my father, the onslaught has been brutal. What remains is mostly perseverating echos of his legal career.
        Perseverance is the circle, the loop, the unending circuit.  It’s a groove that has no exit, that he can never leave.  Perseverance is maddening.  It also has a character that I have struggled all my life to adopt.  Perseverance creates a kind of compulsion, a kind of dedication to an idea, or an action that will not quit.  I’ve made pottery, hand-blown glass, paintings, sculptures, ill-conceived art installations.  I’ve written short stories and even a book or two.  I’ve remodeled, remolded, restored, repainted and repaired in countless iterations.  I’ve never worked with such dedicated zeal as that which my perseverating, dementia-addled father brings to his completely hallucinogenic legal projects.  His persistence is staggering in scale, and utterly horrifying.
        Current best practices in caring for a dementia patient advises caregivers to not fight the surreality of behaviors. To go along with mental wanderings. Keep them safe. Don’t agitate. Don’t fight the nature of their reality. I’m all in for this. It’s clearly what he needs. It means living in a dream world. Who are the people involved in setting up the entertainment business? Just who is going to do the survey work on Bird island? Have we dealt with what the FBI want? What about the IRS? There are answers in the documents missing, missing, missing from the filing cabinet.
        I pray that like my grandmother and now my father, if my fate is to wrestle amyloid proteins, my dementia would not leave me angry or dangerous. I hope, I pray, that if this becomes my fate, that because one of the things I’ve tried to dedicate my life to is making things, my family will be able to set up an easel in the corner and set out some acrylics and just leave me to make strange, otherworldly, perseverating paintings. This is the best possible imagining I can make: to see myself standing there, in front of an easel, hashing out my perseverance on canvas the way my father stands in front of the filing cabinet, sorting through documents, just sure there is a missing power of attorney or an incorrectly signed last will and testament.
        The advantage, of course, is that paintings, unlike legal problems, don’t have to make sense. Paintings that make no sense are routinely celebrated and beloved. Think Kandinsky – whose project was to paint what music would look like. Think Newman – whose project was to recreate actual forms of thought in color fields. Think Dali – whose project was to explore dreamlike surreal landscapes of the mind.
        Canvases will line the walls of my care facility. Nurses will all evaluate them seriously, giving sincere feedback. My children will replenish stocks of blank canvases and paints. When I start to forget to wash my brushes, a stockpile of cheap new ones will be requisitioned. Endless playlists of sad, male folk-singers will be queued and set to play for me. Lord Huron, Sufjan Stevens, Nick Drake. Toward the end, someone will have to help me operate a toilet. I will genially wear sweat pants and genuine-heartedly compare my feeble efforts to the gigantic amazingness of Matisse’s end-of-life cutout compositions. Grief and pain will be lessened because my grooves make something useful. I don’t have perceptible rendering skills as a painter, so my works will be expressive, Dubuffet hack-jobs. Objects and people roughly outlined.
        My mind won’t be able to help me unbuckle a belt, but flashes of imagery will persist and pierce the deepest depths of the illness. Cold winter nights when there’s a ring around the moon. The improbability of a group of birds all turning together en masse. A single majestic dark crimson Japanese maple against the blue sky. Sunlight filtering dappled through forest canopy. A lover’s thigh curving into the cold winter bed sheet shadows. Distortions of shallow sun lines under water. And color. So much color. Colors swirled into colors. Made real. Unceasing phantasms of the darkest, at last loneliest, terrible journey made real.

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