Memento Mori

by Douglas Milburn

Five days in a hospital with a heart attack gave me pause and cause to think about here, with its many puzzlements.

Wilde quipped that the visible world is far more mysterious than the invisible, a perception that is both clever and true.

This: I ain’t no ordinary, career-driven writer. I know the human type that does that, and I am not it. In the university I was roommates with a budding novelist who went on to considerable success, including a Pulitzer. He is in fact 1) a gifted writer, and 2) absolutely driven to succeed in the world’s terms. In spite of the Pulitzer, I know that if he doesn’t get a Nobel he will consider his life as a novelist a failure.

That has never been my path, a fact which, given my own gifts, has caused those around me more than a few problems: What is he? What’s he doing going this way and that? Dilettante? Poet manqué? Journalist? Travel writer gone astray? Errant Germanist? Perverse polymath?

How about "alarm clock"? Or: persistent, irritating macaw?

In his second Utopian novel, Island, Huxley has his people occupying a troubled paradise, one of whose intriguing features is macaws who are trained to say one word. They are everywhere. Thus you may be walking down a remote jungle path and suddenly from the forest canopy comes this squawking voice: "Attention! Attention!"

Whatever label you want to place on "one who calls to attention" that is the label for me and my words, pictures, and music.

That I have done it, have persisted in doing it, for so long with little expectation of worldly rewards bespeaks either foolhardiness or faith, systemic myopia or unreasonable certitude.

Magellan’s Log, which I consider "finished" though I’m still adding occasional stuff, is a four-year, 3,600-page run of such attention-awakening reminders.

Certainly others have done similar things, many others in many times and places.

Magellan’s Log is unique for several reasons. The timely appearance of the Internet enabled me to do my version in public, in real time, and have it immediately, fully, constantly available to readers around the world. Previous alarm clocks tended to disappear into libraries or onto distant bookshelves. This one is right there, right now. (The daily, highly detailed statistics about my readership are truly extraordinary, both for the global reach of my audience and for the willingness of that audience to heed—pay attention to!—even the wildest of my metaphysical prestidigitations.)

Behind it all, you understand, are on-going experiences which I have never written about and do not expect to write about, experiences that began early and continue today. The truly foolish are those who attempt to communicate these experiences directly: one adjective, and you’re lost.

I am reluctant even to use the phrase that has achieved some currency: "the perennial philosophy." But it will have to do, and allows me to say that this, and all that’s come before, is just me doing stand-up, live-at-5 news reports, with the reality that prompted the reports hardly visible at all in the distant background.

All in all, surely enough to give a person grounded in the world of consensual reality the most awful kind of vertigo. I understand that, which is one reason why I, and those like me, sooner or later learn to speak very very sotto voce.

Gentle perseverance furthers best, as every trees knows.

END

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