61 hospital myself, with polio, an appendix and gallbladder out, a huge cut on my left lower leg. I‘d go to opera classes twice a week up on the North Side, Zerlina Muhlman Metzger from Vienna; there were violin and music-writing classes with composer-violinist P. Marinus Paulson. I mean stockyards, ditch-digging, doctors, hospitals, banks and bankers, businesses and secretaries, nuns in grammar school, the Christian Brothers of Ireland in high school, the Jesuits in college and graduate school, my master‘s thesis advisor, Father Surtz S.J. (Society of Jesus), who deftly helped me get through my thesis on the aesthetics of Sir Joshua Reynolds, then the University of Illinois, Dr. Edward Davidson, my Ph.D. dissertation on Poe‘s Eureka. Everything on track, no terrorists, no drive-by shooters 7. shooting little girls in the brain, no kidnappers kidnapping people for ransoms, the whole idea of a chosen people erased from all the scriptures/ theologies . . . I‘ll be honest with you, I spend half a day every day meditating on the impossibility of our universe existing at all, feeling and believing that we live in the midst of total impossibility. It‘s there, but it can‘t be there. Nothing can exist forever. The earth/universe had to exist so the prophets invented an eternal, endless God. But we go back, back, back, back, centuries, millennia, millions, trillions of years . . . nothing can be forever, it has to begin. But how could God begin from nothing? Or, how could the universe begin from nothing? Nothing to Everything. How can you go from Nothing to Everything? So God and / or the universe are both impossibilities. And all the design in the universe, ovaries and eggs, sperm, seeds from the trees, birds‘ feathers, suns, planets, seasons, toenails . . . everything impossible. And afterlife? Heavens, hells? More inventions.
Open up graves. No afterlives, just bones and (for a while) 8. disintegrating flesh. I remember the cadaver I had for human anatomy class in my first year of medical school. An old, old lady, already mostly skull and bones before she‘d died. Little ―bags‖ in her lungs from coughing. Bones, bones, bones, no ghosts, all this nonsense about people coming back. I wish my grandmother would/ could come back, my mother and father, my old poet-astrophysicist pal Richard Morris, my grammar school girlfriend, Jeanne Anne Kappell. No spirits, no heavens or hells or anything but graves . . . or getting burned up into dust and tossed to the winds. So here we are surrounded by murder and hate and misery on earth, we have our fifty, eighty, ninety, even a hundred-plus years, and then we‘re gone totally. What sense does murder make, hate your sister/ brother, someone of another race, language, clan, region, religion? Zero sense! Spring, Summer and Fall my wife and I drive out into the country every afternoon, watch the deer and does in the fields, the ducks and geese on the ponds and rivers, watch the corn and soybeans and mint and pears growing, go to small towns and villages, 9. walk along rivers, have a little homemade ice cream, sit on a bench in a park next to a river, and then, when the days shorten and shrink, it‘s plays and concerts, news, films, Catherine Deneuve (let‘s not forget Les Demoiselles d’Avignon or the fact that a few years back I had a book on French film published — Opening the Door to French Film — that it took me a decade immersed in French films to write) . . . and all day long I‘ve got WKAR on while I‘m at my computer, Mozart, Mahler, Stravinsky, you name it. Lunch everyday with wife #2 and offspring #6, Chris, my twenty-seven-year-old film-tech maniac.