Literary Salons with One Who Is Dying

mulholland-twins

Naomi Watts and Laura Harring in Mulholland Drive

I have written about my close friend and colleague Alan Paskow, whose lungs (although he does not smoke) have been attacked by an aggressive cancer.  One response of the community has been to gather for literary salons every two or three weeks.  Anywhere from 15-20 people attend each one, despite busy schedules.  In attendance are faculty from the departments of English, Religious Studies, Philosophy, Economics, International Languages, Education, the Library, and Art and Art History   Alan is an intellectual in the best sense of the word, a philosophy professor who relentlessly seeks for truth in all that he undertakes.  The community could not have given him a better gift than these salons, and we in turn feel honored that Alan and Jackie (his wife) have opened themselves to us in this dark time.

Each session has a designated topic and sometimes a reading assignment.  As I have been away on sabbatical, I have come to the salons late, but since April we have met to discuss dreams, surrealism, what we would do if we only had a year left to live, the David Lynch film Mulholland Drive, and the first fifty pages of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Following is my attempt to make sense of these choices, which some have found puzzling.

Confronting us in each gathering are the hard facts of Alan’s illness.  Though one doctor predicted that he should be dead by now, he is in remarkably good shape.  He works out daily at the gym and feels fairly good.  But each check-up reveals that the tumors continue to multiply and grow.  Alan gives us a medical and psychological update at the beginning of each salon.

Mullholland Drive and Proust are difficult works.  Why not choose more concrete works dealing with people who are dying, such as (say) the Kurosawa film Ikiru (To Live) or the Tolstoy novella Death of Ivan Ilych?

I think Alan is drawn to the topics and works we have chosen because death is such a mystery.   We think that an abyss exists between life and death, but perhaps such boundaries are less solid, and more porous, than we imagine them to be.  Dreams and the imagination seem more likely to penetrate this veil than more straightforward approaches.


Proust, for instance, talks about those moments on the edge of sleep when other worlds enter in or spring into being.  The taste of a Madeleine cookie will make the far distant past more present to him than objects in the room.

Mulholland Drive also shakes up reality.  It’s not clear, in the film, what is fantasy and what is real.  There are two women in the film, one blonde, one dark.  The blonde seems to be an aspiring actress, the dark the survivor of a car accident suffering from amnesia.  Are they in fact two different people or is one a fantasy projection of the other?  And what is in the mysterious box that one gets in a mysterious nightclub?  No two interpretations of the film match up, but in the discussions about it, infinite possibilities seem to open up.

In the surrealism session, artist Sue Johnson brought a number of games that the French surrealists used to play, including one in which we were each given seven cards.  After we wrote a question on each, the cards were shuffled and redistributed, and we wrote answers on the backs (without looking at the questions).  While some of the questions and answers made little sense, others seemed to speak with oracular wisdom.  I asked whether the dead were extant, a question that meant a lot to me (since I lost my oldest son) and received back the answer, “in a while, crocodile.”  This hit me hard because it was an expression he and I had I used often with each other (as in “See you later, alligator; in a while, crocodile”).

Does any of this mean anything?  I am suspicious of both paranormal claims and know-it-all scientism and try to remain open.  My philosophy, articulated by Hamlet, is that “there is more on earth or in heaven than there is dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.”  Horatio is stalwart but also unimaginative and has no idea what to make of the ghost that is haunting Elsinore.  Hamlet, who is both more imaginative and more unstable, seeks to penetrate the mysteries of being and not being.  At the very least, the surrealism exercises shook us out of our customary paths. 

They were also the source of wonderful laughter.  Comradeship, intellectual exploration, good food and laughter mix in these occasions.  Even when we speak of death, death appears to have no dominion over us.  These may be fantasy moments, the lull before the storm, but they feel more like life as it should be lived.

 

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