From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Subject: Re: Happy Birthday, Marty!!
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 92 14:04:57 GMT


In article <1b8q8kINNafg@mizar.usc.edu>
adolphso@mizar.usc.edu (adolphson) writes:

>Mara, can you pass this message on to Marty for me?

>HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MARTY!!!

>And give him a big hug from me while you're at it.

All my life, I mean since I was quite small, I've been
marking off the passage of time.  It never seemed *to me*
such a notable facet of my personality, but at least to some
people it has stood out enough for them to notice and to
remark upon it.

One of my best friends, a gifted writer named Ron McCrea who
now works for Newsday in Long Island as an editor, wrote a
little booklet about me as a present for my 40th birthday.
It's a collection of 40 vignettes, each a sentence or two or
three, called "Jess: Forty Exposures" (we had photography as
a shared interest).  It's in many ways a Compleat Guide to
Me, and certainly not entirely complimentary.

Of my propensity to note the passage of time, he remarks to
the effect that rather than celebrating my anniversaries
(and not just those of my birth), it was/is as though I were
preparing for a court case.

It's less a judgment than a fact noted in passing, but it
made me aware for the first time that birthdays and other
dots on the axis of time (in 57 years it gets to be a lot of
dots, too) are at least two things for me.  One is, locators
in temporal space, which otherwise always seemed too vast an
ocean to be cast adrift upon.  Where I am, in many senses
including the temporal one, has always been something I
tracked.  I said something the other day about geographical
navigation, and I guess this is its time-bound equivalent.
I don't know, but I think a lot of people are far less
concerned than I am about such things.

Up to a certain point -- and this is the relevance, I
suppose, to Marty's birthday -- I saw these markings as
indicators of time spent, of survivorship, of a miraculous
having passed through, lived through, everything that came
before.  It would be hard to overstate the sense of awe I
have about this *mass* of time, in which the *entire* world
has *really* changed a lot, and me with it.  My *god*, I
think, I have lived, and have been living, I continue to
live, what a life it has been, it's a miracle to me what it
has included and continues to include.  Interestingly, and
pertinent to my point here, it has never been a matter of
what life did not include.

But the other great facet of those dots on an axis, for me,
is that exactly at 50, the idea of time spent gave way to
the idea of time left.  When I was 20 or 30 or even 40 (for
me this was before HIV, and this is also part of my point),
I had no real sense of my mortality.  But along comes HIV,
of which I was first aware in 1982, just ten years ago
[there it is, by the way, making a dot], when I was 47
[another dot].

Again apart from HIV, when you're thirty, you don't normally
see your life as half over, for practically everybody lives
to be 60.  At 40, maybe, you start to realize that 80 is,
well, pretty old.  At 50, you realize that 100 is not *at
all* likely, and you know for certain that your personal
hourglass has more sand in the bottom half than in the top
one.

Perhaps it all sounds very self-absorbed, and I suppose
that's true.  But only up to a point.  Ticking off the
markers can, and for me does, signal the existence -- and,
sadly, the ceasing to exist -- of the humans out there in
the world, whether in any way related to me or not.
Naturally, those who *do* relate to me are dots (I mean no
disrespect, it's an item with no scale) that I notice.

I notice last night, encountering a friend and jabbering for
a while, that one more dot has blipped off the screen from
HIV.  Rest in peace Jim Cobb.  Been dead for several months.
I didn't know.  It makes me cry.  There are others, surely.
I don't *want* to know, but I wish I did know.  I want this
one (oh, he was such a sweet person), number 51 [dot] to be
the last, the very last [please, no more FUCKING dots!].

Time left, my friends, is a distinctly different experience
from time passed through.  As sure as anything on this
earth, and quite transcending HIV, surviving leads
*directly*, and inexorably (and after 50, understandably
though unaccountably) to *not* surviving.

To a young person, perhaps to many of you, this could sound
morbid or dark.  I don't think it is.  It's just a fact,
one more fact [dot] in the great flux of things.  Don't
think I don't celebrate the miracle of opening my eyes every
morning and seeing -- there's a miracle all by itself --
the bedroom ceiling.  A half a century and more, that *is*
something, though I don't know exactly what.

Many other things are to be celebrated, I think.  To begin
with, I think if you fail to celebrate each an every day,
each and every hour of your own life, you are making a *big*
mistake.  *You* are a miracle, a wonder like no other on this
earth, nor indeed on any other planet.  It's well known that
time speeds up in the process of running out.  From 5 to 6
is just forever.  From 10 to 20 is long.  From 40 to 50 is
pretty quick.  From life to eternity is about two minutes,
as I discovered (at this late date!) on the morning of June
7th, the one and only time I *saw* it happen with my own
eyes.

This vast acceleration of the universe, the ultimate
subjectivity of it, seems to me, as the dots get so close
together as to blur into a fuzzy line before my failing
eyesight, these are great miracles, marvels of existence,
huge cosmic things, wonderous enigmas, the art of being at
all and of being at one with the All.

As the dots come faster and faster, I've revised, am
continually revising my expectations, my aspirations,
concerning the Time Left.  At 50, in part I suppose because
I'm a young-*looking* person for whatever age I am, I
thought I'd make it to maybe 80.  Brothers and sisters, I
don't think *that* any more; that would be crazy as hell.  I
daily get more sanguine about that kind of stuff, and this
past summer has surely been an eye-opener in that regard.

People seem to hang onto life, most of them.  I guess I
learned it from my mom, but I'm not like that, not like that
at all.  I'm ready now, this instant, this very second,
though it would mean that some friend would have to send
this out (and some friend would, I'm pretty sure).  Here
too, nothing morbid, certainly nothing depressed or
discouraged, is implied.  It's just A Fact [dot].
It could be seconds, it could be years, the difference
between which, when you're nearly 60, is really not much.

There's a giant virtue in all this, I think.  For one thing,
you crumble.  I'm crumbling while I sit here, nursing my
aching [literally] back.  Who wants to go on crumbling
forever?  I mean, at some point that's just not tenable, is
it?  The main thing, I think, is the *degree* to which you
get focused on the present.  A lot of great things came
before, especially in my life, but I'm less and less
attached to them, apart from an occasional sense of wonder.
And the bald truth is, *after* is undefined.  So there you
have it: there's just Now.

And that's worth making a little party for when you turn 50.
So have a good one, y'all y'all.

-- 
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
Internet: anderson@macc.wisc.edu <-best, UUCP:{}!uwvax!macc.wisc.edu!anderson
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