At the end of W.W. II I was five and by the time of the Korean War I was ten. In that decade I was shaped and configured by my environment for the rest of my days. In the Forties I was most unaware of my self, impassive and passive, a receptacle for what I observed on my own and what was put into me by family and circumstances. Life as dumpster. As I look back, as Freud once said, metaphorically I was an archaeological dig, old and and newer artifacts placed randomly here and there crazily deposited by time and event. And so I will “excavate” the removal of my tonsils but first background story.
I “lived,” although that is not the right word; I existed unawakened and unaware, a fetus in the world, newly emerged. I was a tabula rasa. All the years in that decade are smeary, a kind of historical and chronological smog clinging to them, unclear in many instances. I lived at 222 Oceanview Avenue, Brighton Second Street in Brooklyn, years before it became known after the Russian influx as “Little Odessa.” Odessan Jews congregated near the ocean. It was in many ways for me a pastoral environment, the seasons constant, the games constant, and regularity ruled the streets. I loved the neighborhood for it gave me not only sustenance but constancy and constancy is most important while growing up. I knew all the alleyways, urban lanes, shortcuts and streets in a two or three block radius, the best stop to play stoopball, where to play marbles, the location of the library, the candy store for a Charlotte Russe, the hardware store to buy Crayolas and oilcloth to cover my schoolbooks and the grocer to ask for a cheesebox to plant seeds in.
Up the block and close to Brighton Beach Avenue which had an el overhead which cast the avenue into shadows for most of the day, or so it seemed to me, was Dr. Henry Mason’s medical practice. One of my earliest memories was seeing large jars, mason jars, pun intended, in which fetuses soaked in formaldehyde floated like the starchild in Kubrick’s 2001. I was not mortified, I was not traumatized, I just took that in. Nowadays that is outre, unheard of. But back then in the sterile office of Mason, with its chrome and metal tables, its antispetic look which I suppose doctors thought de rigeur, I was unaware of how like they bore a close similarity to the medical labs of the Nazi death camps. Obscenely clinical! And so I took all this in. And after all these decades I have metabolized it pretty well and realize it was part and part of our culture — in retrospect, chilling.
Around 6 or 7 I needed to have my tonsils out or that was what doctors did for extra change in those days, for it is not done any longer except for something my son, Jordan, experienced which was “kissing nostrils,” so close to one another he could not breathe. In the Forties it was a very common procedure, if memory serves me right. And here again I will try to capture the unspoken trauma that I experienced.
Several memories coalesce here. I recall having a woman nurse, I suppose, ask me to drop my underwear and she wanted and proceeded to wrap my genitals in a diaper and a diaper pin. I felt shame, yet I went along. As a child I often went along, not because I trusted the outside world but because I did not know what else to do. Resistance was futile. I was the world’s object, to do with as it wished. So this fragment deals with shame, embarrassment, a woman undressing me other than my mother. If it was latently eroticising to me, good for me. Manifestly, it was mortifying. Objects have nothing to say in the matter.
I recall two other youngsters dressed similarly on a bench with me, in assembly line fashion, and, indeed it was an assembly line. One boy who had sat with us was wheeled out on a gurney after the tonsil procedure. I cannot say what I felt as an object but as I look back with empathy for my self it must have been unsettling, to say the least. After a while I was next and brought into a room with a table. I recall a rubber device placed over my face and I was put under with the drug of that time, ether. We were all dealt with as objects by the doctors, by the nurses and by our parents. I suppose melodramatically for much of the Forties I was a thing.
As I remember I entered into a dream, in which hundreds of stars circled in a pattern, as if in a wheel. It went on for some time, the moving of the stars in the same round geometic figure. When I awoke I was in a room with other cribs and by my side was a white enameled kidney-shaped pan, I imagine, for spitting up. I was in a slatted jail and no one was there when I woke up, not that I recall. Quite different when my son went in for his tonsillectomy. After that I remember being home for a few days eating large scoops of ice cream which was the prescribed “medication” for the throat.
If we flash-forward to the last few years, I can say that I have undergone several procedures, a colonoscopy and a spinal procedure for spinal sinosis ( a cortisone shot). Earlier colonoscopies over the years usually amounted to having a valium cocktail, if you will, in which I woke up woozy and had to be escorted home. Recently I’ve been administered Propofol, the same drug involved in Michael Jackson’s death. Given the injection by the Sandman, I just went out. After I went out, I woke up. I was not nauseous, I was not woozy, and that is one of the reasons it is being used. During the time I was under, I dreamed nothing. I felt nothing. I was “dead” to this world. And when I woke and after undergoing a few more experiences with this sedative, I began to reflect about death. I just had to, for it was so analogous.
Here I am under sedation,and here I am instantaneously not under sedation, as a line drawn between life and death. And I began to reflect that if death is such a complete absence of self, of hereness, completely absent of sensation, of a dreamworld, I could use this as a mental anodyne for the fear of death. After all, apparently, it is the leaving which is the hardest part of it all. And as I experienced which is not the right word for what I had “felt,” or “sensed” with Propofol, I reentered the world of genomic evolution, dispersed as atoms and molecules to the universes all about us, the massive, titantic cataracts of time and space, of matter. And then I considered once more. Was this state of being, which is not really a state of being, able to be described? I needed words to express this thought and feeling of what it was like before birth — the absence of absence. Time out, then time in, and finally, much later on in life, time out again, this strange continuum of existence.
Like a woodpecker on a tear on a telephone pole, these ideas have me perseverating. Perhaps I need console myself; perhaps I am seeking some rationalization to deal with the days ahead, this autumnal season of my life. I’d rather have this belief system of how death, once experienced, is over and then existential emptiness forever without the existent aware or awake of the experience. I become less than a gene. I am atom. I’d rather live with this skinny of how to deal with the end than that of the ludicrousness of heaven and hell. Give me the indifferent, cold and chilling science of death and dying, of atom and molecule, than the febrile constructions of fables spun and story told by priests and rabbis, imans and all the rest.
