friday

Inanna's Boat

Friday nights are hell. There is something about anniversary days, regardless of how close or far-removed they are from the actual event, that set something off in my psyche. Yesterday was only the second Friday that had passed since Y's collapse. Last Friday was the memorial service, and this Friday, well, this Friday I needed to find something to do with myself.

Wednesday night, I was driving with a friend due west. The sun was setting, and the vermilion sky cast the barns and the trees in a sort of blood-amber light. In the midst of all that redness was the palest sliver of new moon. Inanna's moon, and I was reminded of the legend that says that the sliver of new moon is Inanna's boat, carrying the souls of the worthy from the underworld to heaven.

I could not take comfort from that legend. The only thing I could think was, "When you're dead, you don't get to see these things anymore." And the idea that Y could not see what I was seeing pierced me. Death is not about the dead. It's about the living. It's about how we make meaning out of the sudden disappearance of what was once a presence.

I keep seeing his ghosts everywhere. They're private moments, and I'm collecting them all, trying to piece them together so that perhaps, if I gather enough of them up, I can glue them together and make him present again.

Ridiculous. I'm a rational, intelligent human being. And yet.

Submitted by Lorraine on 25 November 2006 - 12:57pm.
anniversary | Death | friday | Grief | legend

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Words to live by

Who could have imagined that in the United States, with its independent judiciary, thousands of men could be rounded up in the night -- many only because of their Muslim religion or foreign nationality -- without recourse to a trial, without even an acknowledgment that they had been arrested? Who could have dared to suggest that there would ever be "desaparecidos" in America? And there it was as well, torture being discussed as a legitimate option to protect a community in peril, and then being used in Guantanamo and Afghanistan, and even obscenely photographed in Iraq -- yes, there they were again, the depressing echoes of my Chile.

But worse perhaps than all of this was the erosion of the moral compass of America, the seeming indifference of the seeming majority to the suffering of others, the casual acceptance of "collateral damage" as an unquestioned consequence of the war on "terrorism," the demonization of an ubiquitous foe who had to be destroyed without second thoughts -- and often without first ones as well; without, in fact, any thoughtfulness at all. That was far more terrifying than the criminal attacks on New York and Washington: To realize that the Chile of strongman Augusto Pinochet was not that far away, not that difficult to imitate, that it was already hovering in the future and ready to materialize if we were not vigilant.

— Ariel Dorfman, Memories of Chile in the Midst of an American Presidential Campaign
TomDispatch - Tomgram: Ariel Dorfman on the struggle for Americaâ€™s soul