The Things We Go Without

This week i started a collection of short stories by Ivan Klíma, snagged from my generous friend M who always sends me back from Prague with literature to savor. As is typical for so many East European writers, the childhood tales involve trying to make sense of one or another wartime scenario; in this case, a Sudentenland ghetto being thinned out by death camp deportations. The child’s world is a mixture of midnight fantasies and real life food issues: special treats for a family occasion, an extra cupful of soup from a would-be sweetheart in the overcrowded camp barracks, being sure to save enough for his brother to eat. We’ve all seen photos of the skeleton-like survivors from those camps, we know that an extra bite, a hidden piece of bread, was hardly a trivial matter. In a war, which presumably ends at some point, it’s maybe easier to take in extreme levels of deprivation as normal under the circumstances, and to accept rations and other irregularities as exactly that: irregular, for the time being but sure to get sorted out when the fighting ends.

i was thinking about this when i came out of the metro and dropped a coin into the cup of the Astoria station beggar, a very sad older man whose aura of loneliness overwhelms me every time i see him. Maybe you’re thinking that if i’m so concerned about this man, i should take him home for a shower and meal? Fair enough, but here’s the thing: on that particular night, i was going back to a flat with no heat and no electricity, a nearly empty fridge and a sparsity of candles (on top of my running an anglo-saxon establishment here). Obviously the power’s back on now, but i’m still wearing many layers of clothes and rationing the honey. This is not wartime Europe, i work a fair amount but constantly struggle with not being paid on any kind of dependable schedule. It’s become so normal to be plagued by make-it-thru-the-day logistics that what i now notice as “being without” are things which most anyone who’d read this probably takes for granted. i’d be lying if i didn’t admit to feeling a little bit of envy, but mostly i’m just glad to know this isn’t the norm outside my brick walls – as i acquire the tools needed to be a professional something, i can expect my quality of life to improve. Or so the official story insists; at least i’m supposed to have the power to change it. i was recounting my power outage tale to a friend and it turned out that a pipe had burst outside his flat and he’d spent that same night without water. We laughed about the coincidence and whether we’d just be better off living in the woods.

Normally i don’t write much in this space about myself, i’m not very interesting although like most children of the 60's, i guess i’ve had my moments. Last week, the brother of a lifelong friend jumped off a bridge into the Hudson River – i knew him, of course, but have gone for years without hearing anything about him – this news has put me into a quiet, deeply contemplative space… thinking about K, his family, my own periodic obsession with suicide, the limits to our coping mechanisms for dealing with whatever our lives lack - individually or collectively – what we find ourselves having to live without. Really, the human spirit or whatever you choose to call it is an amazing phenomenon when it comes to negotiating voids, distancing ourselves from desires. i can’t remember the last time someone in Budapest asked me how i was and really wanted to know, or maybe they did but couldn’t negotiate my english, and still i go through my life here with a fairly amicable, well-adjusted demeanor. What’s the point of having expectations? It’s a utilitarian world. In a bit of comic coincidence, yesterday i received a facebook ‘message’ from someone in Palestine i really adore but who never communicates except through those silly fb invites, in this case, inviting me to take a test to determine the top 10 things i don’t have enough of. Indeed ironic. What i don’t have enough of is meaningful communication with her! For people like myself, close friends literally all over the map, we just get used to never seeing each other, mostly not seeing this as a measurable problem. There’s not much of a viable alternative for the non-independently wealthy, so we all just cope with this situation and trust that when we do meet again, we’ll be neither disappointed nor disappointing. i’m reminded of something my lover No Nukes once wrote: if we don’t cultivate fantasies while we’re apart, what’s the point in making a trip to be together? No Nukes died nearly 10 years ago to the day and i still miss him… with all the prescribed emotional limits.

My friend’s brother, K, was a very bright, sensitive person and i know for those who were part of his life, the loss is incalculable. i skim over the increasing number of news articles on how financial catastrophe and housing foreclosures are driving more and more people over the edge, knowing that some of those individuals are probably alone in the world but guessing most are not. Our world has driven us to be increasingly short on compassion, even towards those we love. Hungary has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, which makes kind of twisted sense (is there any other way to describe it?) given post-communist era materialism and the rampant individualism it fosters. Whether determined by one’s neighbors’ or one’s own, internal, rating system, everyone’s got limits to what s/he can go without and not lose face or hope. i know many people here who've suffered a suicide in the family, which counter-intuitively seems to have only increased their fears around being real with each other. This is a sad truth, hard to spin into a positive message beyond having respect for a person’s right to escape whatever feelings of misery and hopelessness haunt them. We try to be there for each other, but there are voids which sometimes refuse to be filled, leaving us standing open-mouthed, gaping at the extent to which we can’t understand what’s happened or why. At the same time, one looks inside, trying to tease out the borders of our own coping mechanisms and maybe press down a little on the cracks, just to make sure they’re holding. If you can’t relate to this, be thankful. Thankful but not arrogant, ok? Nobody is fully immune to heartache and depression, even the comfortably numb.

An unexpected outcome of K's tragic death is that it's led to my reconnecting with some people i've been out of touch with for decades. When i say (as i 'm prone to do) that i've lived several different lives over the past 50 years, i mean it seriously. Yet following the threads which string these disparate existences together, falling back on memories which allow me to do that, has always felt like my last resort for not totally losing it when times are tough. i call this the continuum theory for survival, and to anyone reading this who happens to be part of my own personal continuum, know that i'd much rather be typing in gloves and eating cabbage sandwiches than going without my memories of you, past, present and still to come.