Ideas that were like farts atop the White Mountains

Turns out Dr. Bootsie has decided that an operation might help me. In a little less than a month his hands will actually be inside my chest cavity cutting and stitching my inner flesh and organs. To keep my mind off of this I borrowed my uncle’s car to spend a week at my aunt’s cabin in New Hampshire hiking in the White Mountains, reading Gary Snyder poetry, and working on some other writing projects.
It was a good week but now, back in Boston, I realize I have less than two days to meet my self-imposed deadline of two blog entries a month. Having done nothing in the last four weeks except scratch out a few notes I will start quite lamely with things that I wanted to write about but did not.
My favorite of these was a comparison of a recent issue of Philosophy Now devoted to Darwin and a news paper article in the Boston Herald about that Australian cattle dog that swam over nine kilometers through shark (“infested”, of course) waters to survive on an island through the use of (or by “reverting to”) its animal (yes, we are all animals) instincts. The problem was the more I researched the more I realized that my understanding of evolution would be too limited to delve into the comparison with the level of complexity I felt it needed.
In contrast to the primal and joyful topic I had also finished reading Milan Kundera’s Immortality this month and had jotted down a number of incomplete thoughts on this intricate and tricky novel. I had started reading them over but all I could think was, ugh. Kundera is brilliant and insightful, of that there is no doubt, but I find him too old, too tired and too European (as in from the land of the sorrowfully furtive alpha predator and scavenger, that forgotten symbol of a healthy natural ecosystem; the ghost bear, whom outside rustic corners of Romania exists only as a mascot for their football and hockey clubs).
In this novel in particular it was his oldness that frustrated me the most. And by oldness I am referring to his perception of his age. To read it was to often see the world (though not always as Kundera is not without a bright and attentive wit) through tired somber eyes. Almost every time I put the book down I slumped a little in the shoulders the same way my uncle who lent me the car does after his cleft foot and artificial hip struggle up the stairs or after his pupils creak, adjusting to read a pharmaceutical label.
To get a clearer idea of what I wanted to get at here a quick comparison might help. One of my favorite authors who will soon turn 73 will also soon release a “children’s” book entitled B is for Beer. I am fairly certain that this newest novel, much like his others, will leave the reader contemplating their impulses only without all the guilt over their laughter, their joy, their desire to be remembered forever or their multiple bonners (wetness too perhaps?) induced by slightly under-aged girls of the sort that Tom Robbins is wont to lustfully describe. Aside from the brilliant and delightful fictional conversations between Goethe and Hemmingway, Kundera, very simply put (keep in mind he was still in his sixties when Immortality was published), is just too serious for me about his age and the world to touch on that vaguely Zen Buddhist wisdom that I find so appealing these days. Of course, Kundera did not have the relatively safe American youth of Robbins (or Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac for that matter). He spent much of his life dealing with the realities of a war torn country often under the control of a ruthless totalitarian government. The seriousness of this is not lost on me and probably not lost on anyone with even a vague concept of suffering. Nonetheless (or rather in light of this) I think that Kundera could use a little more of Robbins’ joyful leaning insights, an undertaking that I imagine would be figuratively represented best by a scene in which the aging authors take part in a mermaid orgy on a south pacific island somewhere off the coast of Australia followed by a feast of feral goat. Now that's a fictional situation and conversation I would very much like to write someday. But I am neither qualified nor capable at the moment to see into the minds of two great writers whose lives and work reach for an immortality and wisdom beyond my admittedly young self.
This leaves me with the third and final topic I considered writing on, one that I am actually capable of completing.
While packing up the car to return to the city I had left the front sliding door of the cabin wide open. As a result a young bird flew in. I was faced with the very real and somewhat delicate responsibility of freeing it.
But in the words of Jimi Hendrix who had reached his relative immortality by my current age, “the hour is getting late” and in honor (and yes, I do mean honor) of ignoring my impending surgery, I will continue lying to myself. I declare this blog entry finished and complete so that I can very lamely use the bird rescue story to meet my second self-imposed April blog deadline.