Stephen Jenkinson - How To Understand The Meaning Of Death

Full transcript: Stephen Jenkinson on London Real

4:40 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Stephen Jenkinson, the storyteller, teacher and author. You hold a master’s degree in theology from Harvard University and a Master’s in Social Work from the University of Toronto.

4:57 During your two decades of work in palliative care, you counseled over 1,500 people on their deathbeds. Your work led you to identify a death-phobic society, which provided the framework for your award-winning book, Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul. Your most recent book, Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble, explains why we must birth a new generation of elders willing to be true stewards of the planet and its species. Stephen, welcome to London Real.

5:23 Thank you. Great to have you here. For starters, what do you think of this city? Do you have a relationship with it? Like a water spider has with water.

5:33 You know, not much descent, not much penetration, but to kind of scramble on the surface, that’s all I’ve ever been able to manage, because I come to places like this sort of on tour, so you could say you’ve been to London, but it’s not true. I’ve been to highways, venues, hotels, airports. But this is a, you know, it took me a long time to get here this morning and I saw the place a little bit, so it was a pleasure. What do you think of it? I’m glad I wasn’t driving.

5:59 I wouldn’t ever drive. Do you like big cities? Well, I think the antipathy or the mistrust is mutual. Oh, the mistrust, that’s better. Antipathy is too strong.

6:12 Yeah, I have a healthy hesitation about the madness of too many people in one place. Yeah. It’s not just a style thing, you know, it’s some critical mass that’s gone on way too long and it’s an indefensible conglomerate, you know, and the consequences to the immediate environments are so discernible and there’s no sign of any general willingness really across the West to rein it in and to begin to really take seriously the consequences of growth for its own sake.

6:50 So that’s what I see cities to be, is some sort of profligate tumor, right? I know that’s really strong language and I know people enjoy living there and good for them. And we live off the grid way off in Ontario. Yeah, with your own wells and solar panels and that’s the other existence for you. Yeah, that’s home as much as I can inhabit it, doing this kind of thing.

7:19 I’m lucky to have it, but and I should say that I don’t mean to make it sound as if I have a morally superior way of life because I’m able to do it that way, because it has its own madnesses. Our agriculture is, in many ways, a disastrous enterprise as well, you know. You have to really negotiate your relationship to the land, but the good news is for me that it’s kind of unmediated. I don’t have to do it through buildings and, you know, structures and how to get around, and I’m able to do it very directly, you know, in real time in an actual place, not a symbolic place.

8:04 So there’s an enormous privilege, you know, which I have to, I think, earn routinely. And then we have eight or ten young people that are working the farm essentially now and the principal apprenticeship that I obliged them to was only peripherally about the seeds, about the ground, the particular ground that we have. And so it was largely about this, about your lived relationship and renegotiating this notion of, quote, who’s in charge, who was calling the shots, and understand understanding agriculture to be a public service that no one’s asking you to do.

8:43 Hmm. Stephen, I really wanted to have you here to talk about something that, funny enough, in eight years and five hundred guests we’ve never actually had a candid talk about: death. I know it’s something that you talk about and, you know, I was asking myself, I wonder who’s going to enjoy this show, and then I realized, well, they all have a vested interest in this topic, you know, and they all know people that have gone, they’ve gone through this or are going through it, or will.

9:10 And yet from everything I read about you, we’re doing it all wrong, or we need to at least be conscious of how we’re doing it, or at least we need to have this conversation. So I’d love to talk to you about that today. Um, for some reason I’m kind of compelled to tell you about some of my experiences with death, if we could start there. Your show, okay. You know, I had four grandparents who are now passed, again people from kind of the Midwest, and as a young kid I saw them be parts of my life, and we can talk more about that in your later book.

9:42 They were real elders, kind of, you know, parts of the family and hubs of the family, and we were always taught that they were, you know, kind of important, and we would kind of go to see them as pilgrimages for Christmases, and it wasn’t just because they were older, it was like this kind of deep level of knowledge and respect, something unfortunately I don’t think my kids will have with their grandparents. But, you know, when they passed I was a bit younger and never really had much closure or experience. That’s what’s happening, I think.

10:09 I went to one of their funerals a little bit later in my life. One of my good friends died of cancer at about 42 years old, and I was godfather to his daughter, and I got to see him kind of waste away, and it was a real hard thing for me to watch. At the same time, I think it taught me a lot of lessons. One of them, I think, was leaving my job in banking and even starting this show. I think it just really hit me in the stomach that I was mortal and that there was something more going on here in my life.

10:37 My other experience with death was my own overdose from heroin in New York City in 2001. That’s probably the least experience I had with death because I don’t really remember. I just remember having to kind of face myself, that, wow, okay, you almost ended this, and at the time I didn’t care, but I think it caused me to make some decisions later in life. And then my final one I had last year. I was down in the jungles of Costa Rica and I had a pretty heavy ayahuasca ceremony, and there I felt like I really died about 20 different times, and it was definitely not pleasant, and I remember feeling how unpleasant it was and how I was really trying to fight as a human, and at the same time I saw this entity that was Gaia and everything was just going to be dissolved anyways.

11:22 There was no need to be emotional about this life changing from one, you know, molecule being into this piece. And so it’s kind of general, but these are just some of the thoughts I had around death and some of the things that went through my mind about a year ago. So I don’t know if that helps to start this discussion, but I was curious, how do you usually start talking about this concept with people? Hmm. Well, it’s not really a crowd-pleaser, you know, and it’s not a small-talk thing.

11:58 It doesn’t submit to being clever or coy, especially ironic, you know, all the high-water marks of casual conversation in urban centers in particular. So I probably don’t. I’m kind of paid to do it, you know, and otherwise it’s proper that I should probably stay at home, and then if somebody inquires after it, then I’m happy to be available. But as an advocate, no, I don’t see myself that way at all. I don’t push anything in that respect, you know.

12:32 I was introduced a couple of years ago as the visionary, which was intemperate and kind, but I’m not sure was accurate, but I was not happy with it, so when I got up to respond I thanked them and I said, and a word came to me which seems more accurate to the enterprises that I’ve been burdened with: divisionary. I said, I think that’s maybe closer to what I do. So you know, dying is not a user-friendly proposition in a culture that doesn’t believe in endings.

13:07 That believe, like, even though the ayahuasca characterization you made, like there’s no ending, and people love the word transition, it’s kind of, it eases things, and apparently endings are illusions. Illusion is an illusion, endings are real. You know, and that’s what marriage is, it’s the end of everything, everyone else you could have been with. It’s an end, and that’s how it begins, and human conception is the end of ovulation. It’s an end, and I don’t know why, well, that’s not entirely true, but I just say as a figure of speech, it remains mysterious to me, the hostility towards endings.

13:54 It’s presented as a life-positive orientation, that it’s, um, it’s life-affirming, but there’s nothing about life that refusing to end affirms, because when you observe, but if speaking as a farming person now, so we have earth, you know, what we’re deeply responsible to and for, and what is earth? What’s dirt? And the answer is everything that didn’t make it this far. That’s what it is. It’s not a symbol, it’s death in your hand, and once you see it, you know how it comes to be.

14:29 You have to have death to end up with that stuff, and if you don’t have that stuff you will not have anything growing. So what is life rooted in? It’s not rooted in life. That’s just, there’s no observation that sustains that prejudice. Life is rooted in death and requires death.

14:47 So life is not life-giving, life is life-taking. That’s its gig, you see, whereas death grants life another shot. It’s enormously generous. But the refusal to die turns into a kind of exercise in opting out of this arrangement, and don’t get me wrong, it’s not easy to come around to crafting some willingness to die. It’s a counterintuitive, utterly hope-free proposition, and but that’s the pitch, that if you’re unwilling to die, then your manner of dying takes as you go.

15:36 And what dying is really supposed to be is you sort of releasing your death grip on everything that granted you your certainties, you know, your stability, your sense of yourself and all of that, and you’re basically cashing out, and hopefully with a sense of gratitude about the whole operation, you know, that of course everything didn’t work out, most of it didn’t work out, no, by most standard understandings of work out, but it was remarkably just, in some strange way, that you made it this far. A lot of people didn’t. I mean, nobody who’s dying ever does the math on a lot of people don’t get to die at 70 or 80, you know, they die at 7.

16:20 That’s where I was a superintendent of the death of a lot of children, and there’s much easier ways to make a living, I’ll tell you, than that. And the notion that kids, they’re the worst aspect of them dying, especially to their parents, is not the fact that they’re dying. This is gonna sound awful, what I’m going to say to you, but I observed it over and over again, that most parents were devastated by the fact that by virtue of their child dying, the child would not get to live a full life.

16:51 That was the principal grievance they brought to the court of last resort, you know, and it was my sort of sorrowful responsibility to challenge that very deeply. What do you mean, a seven-year-old hasn’t had a full life? Because they haven’t reached the age of majority that you imagine constitutes a full life? Ask anybody the age of majority, have you had a full life? So the notion of full life, the way we cling to it, is informed by this prejudicial spell that we’re in called potential, right?

17:26 That’s what you’re supposed to live up to, that’s what you’re supposed to reach and strive towards, and everybody at least senior to you, when you’re a teenager in particular, it’s very clear that you’re not living up to your potential. You’re the only one who’s confused about it, but they’re all very certain about it, and you say, well, where is this potential I’m supposed to live up to? What’s in the future? Well, when am I supposed to get there? And the answer, of course, is you never get to the future.

17:53 If you get there, it’s called the present, and future never happens. So the notion that you’re supposed to live up to this carrot on the end of a stick called all you could be is tyranny, you know. It’s not encouragement, it’s the end of encouragement, it’s the kind of gutting of encouragement, you know. And that causes anxiety around our death ultimately? Yeah, I mean, I think the large story that I was witness to is that North Americans, which is the only place I can speak about with any familiarity, that North Americans are addicted to a terminal degree to their competence and their certainties and their swagger and their autonomy and mastery.

18:43 These things are recipes for dying a miserable, grinding death, guaranteed, virtually. And but the addiction is very strong, and the reward system is, you know, starts when you’re about this tall, you know, to get the right answer as quickly as possible in school, for example, not to tolerate the learning, which is like the halfway house towards knowing. Learning, in fact, is an adult proposition, and knowing is for, it’s like an entry-level thing. Certainty and all of that.

19:17 Think of the word ambivalence. You were trained away from it as a kid, as was I, and it was identified as you being profoundly at sea, right, and not to be trusted if you engaged in ambivalence, certainly not to be taken seriously or relied upon. But the actual word means what? Ambi, it means several contending somethings, and valence is a word we get from chemistry and physics, and it means the way by which a certain thing can be recognized as itself. It’s kind of tracks, if you will, its footprints.

19:50 And you put the word back together, it doesn’t mean confusion at all. The ability to be ambivalent means to nurse a number of contending possibilities more or less at the same time without the utterly arbitrary, often radically, unnecessarily premature lapse into certainty by eliminating all of the possibilities, all of the contentions but one. You know, didn’t Einstein once say, I measure a man’s intelligence by how many conflicting ideas he could hold and still function?

20:27 If he did, he was onto something. Right, at the same time. Yeah. And so is this a recent phenomenon, like 100 years ago or 200 years ago, you know, especially in North America where you grew up, would that have been less of an issue, or was that always part of the Western vibe? Well, you know, the Western mind hasn’t always been so, depending on your time frame, and that there’s not one Western mind, you know.

20:54 We could, you know, for brevity’s sake, you could use the phrase Dom in a culture, that’s the phrase I tend to use, the dominant culture West, which is a very present proposition, and it’s not just in Western countries. I mean, the Americans in particular have exported it all over the world, and the Chinese are better at being Western than most Westerners now are. So, but with that in mind, you know, this utter refusal to submit has a long and dire history amongst humans, but it’s not pervasive across all cultures in all times.

21:32 But it seems to me that any culture that was spawned more or less spontaneously with no real precursor by a kind of hellish flight away from medieval miseries and so on, this is North American in a nutshell, Australia too, at the very least the Caribbean to a great extent, as we know it today, and other places. And oh, one of the consequences, people cross the ocean allegedly for a better life, what they’re doing is they’re running. This is not the best building blocks to build a good building with, people on the run.

22:10 But they were, and that’s how I end up where I am, that my people’s people were running, and as they came across they were obliged more or less to leave behind everything that they were fleeing. Yes. But what about the rest? What’s the rest? Well, the cultural continuity that, among other things, told you what was to become of you in your dying time and thereafter, in a word, your ancestry.

22:40 And North America is an ancestor-free zone, and it’s a ghosted place, because we’ve had generations of people like me in North America now dying without any cultural continuity or stories that give them a profound understanding of what’s asked of them when they’re dying. So what’s the definition of a ghost? One would be someone who doesn’t know they’re dead, for whom the habits of life have not been extinguished by any fundamental ending, and they’ve been nursed along by the New Age notion of transition instead, as if nothing has to end, and I think that’s a recipe for being stuck in the bardo, as they say in Buddhism, you know.

23:26 This is someone holding on to the last year of life. Yeah, or certain people of certain places, whatever it might be, but the notion is that the habits of life should properly be the first casualty of you entering into the ending of your days. But if that’s all you have, why would you forgo them for the sake of a mystery, which is still a human-scale thing? The ending of your days is not psychopomp, it’s not cosmic. The ending of your days is a human-scaled mystery that’s entrusted to you, and in that sense it’s a skillfulness that is seeking you out, not something that’s being done to you, but a way by which humanity can appear again among us.

24:19 And the way by which we die will either be like the last manifestation of your understanding what it means to be human, or it’ll be the undoing of every understanding you ever had about what it means to be human. And my job security, alas, was predicated on the fact that virtually everyone died in the second way: kicking, screaming, wailing, sedated, slack-jawed and drooling. That was the norm. That was 1,500 people. You?

24:52 Well, I don’t know the numbers, you know, it’s a generous number. Let’s just say I saw probably more death than most people in active combat see in wartime. And you know, if you go to the PTSD model of Veterans Affairs, it would be easy to imagine that everything you’re hearing from me comes from being traumatized by exposure to too much death. Well, you can decide if I’m traumatized or not, but what I’m telling you is what I saw, not what I’m afraid of, not what I’m afraid might happen if we don’t get it right, but I actually saw it, and I’m in that very lucky position simply of reporting on what I saw and of being troubled aloud because of it.

25:40 That’s my gig. That’s why I said divisionary. Mm-hmm. These people didn’t know how to die, but how would they know how to die? And is that something that goes back to culture, ancestry, deep down into purpose?

25:54 I mean, there’s a quote from you, was saying that death is the crucible of making human beings. Every culture where the damn knows that it’s not success, growth, happiness, it’s death. Talk about divisionary, can you explain that, or did you just do an explanation? Though it is pretty good, it stands pretty good on its own. I mean, it does, but the crucible making human beings, so our relationship with our death is what makes us human?

26:19 That’s a secondary characterization. Okay. Our relationship with this, that’s a very human-centered rendering of the extraordinary. You’re trying to get a get-out of it, see, of course. I mean, all the language that you would probably go to is a way of getting away from it, right?

26:36 Okay. Our relationship with death is not the same as death. How I feel about dying is not what dying is. You said, I’m saying, I do. It’s a very strange one-step-removed thing that we’ve come up with.

26:52 That we, let’s take the word indigenous, okay, very heavily used word in certain circles today, inherently noble, right, eco-warrior and the whole thing, I don’t need to replay it all. Yeah. But if you investigate the word, it has, it means nothing of this kind. It means in, locates, it’s talking about where, it literally means inside, it’s place-specific, and the “gen” root from which we get genetic and to generate and Genesis and so forth means to be born or conceived or crafted.

27:23 In that word signals an identity that’s place-based, not human-centered, place-based. Say the human is not in the center of the operation, and dying is exactly the same function in your life if you grow some understanding of it. If you’re willing to learn dying, you learn that it’s a god. That’s how I’ve come to understand it. Death is a deity, right?

27:51 And as such there’s a kind of etiquette, if that doesn’t sound too austere, there’s a kind of devotional etiquette that is needed to approach this mysterium tremendum called your ending. First of all, it’s not personal. This is apostasy today, the notion that I’m going to suggest to you that the more personalized things are, the less profound they are, as a rule. So death is not personal, so there’s no such thing as your death. There is the death that’s entrusted to you, in the same way that your body was entrusted to you, right?

28:33 Not really yours. More apostasy. So this deity is not your personal lap dog on a leash doing your bidding, backing away when you insist, coming close when you feel like it, you know, that’s a domesticated little chihuahua. But death is a serious business, and your death is not that interested in your idea about it. It doesn’t acquire after them, certainly is not solicitous where your feelings are concerned.

29:04 And in a kind of controlled junky cultural milieu, uh, like the one I’m from, those things are all insults. Very good example is a story. I’m walking up three flights of stairs to see a 28-year-old woman who’s dying of breast cancer with mets to her lungs. She has maybe, from what I could tell, maybe two months to live. I knock on the door.

29:28 I know already something about it. I wonder if she knows it. She’s never coming down those stairs, I know that, and it’s a very mysterious encounter to see someone you’ve never met before and to know something about them that you’re, it’s not clear that they know you know, and there’s no sense of superiority or mastery or anything that comes with it, it’s forlorn, that you meet someone and you wonder how deeply they’re inhabiting the days that are left to them.

30:00 So I’m letting in, long story short, there’s her, there’s her mom was flown in from Winnipeg to help out in travel time. I asked her what’s happening. She said, well, I’m seriously ill, as if that’s a synonym for dying, which it isn’t, but that’s what she said. But really, she said, I don’t let it be a big part of my life. And she looked at her mother, and I do not exaggerate this, her mother looked at their daughter, went and then she looked at me, she said, that’s my girl.

30:29 You see the reward system, it’s to not die while you’re dying. Fighting cancer, these types of things, not even, I’m not even fighting, like that’s a sucker’s game in this view. And then if it can’t get weirder, it can always get weirder. So what did she say after that, you asked? She looked at me, she said, and my yoga instructor says I’m on the right track.

30:53 Oh well, you’ve got mom colluding on the one side and Mr. Yoga on the other side. So what chance does death have in this house when it’s demonized as an interruption into your constitutional right to have a normal life? And what would you rather have had her say? What do you think would’ve been more healthy for her sake? First I should say, not rather to satisfy me in any way, her sake and for her family afterwards.

31:20 Another important point you make, and how about this culture too while we’re at it. Yeah, so everybody but me could benefit from my suggestion about how to go. Otherwise it could have been this, I don’t let it be a big part of my life. No, it is your life. Your dying is your life, and it’s most of your life, and your refusal to, no, that is not life-affirming, it’s life-betraying.

31:51 You see, because now you’ve come to life as, like, a beneficiary of an insurance policy, and it only works when it cashes out, you see, and as soon as it asks something from you, now it’s a ripoff. But it was just exactly the same deal as the one you benefited from. And I know she’s dying young, I’m not being harsh about it, a little, a little. But why, to make a plea that, as a grown-up of 29 years, 29 years of age, she had a fundamental responsibility to open the door when death said, you are a son, song, yeah, well, I haven’t lost track of you and we’re gonna sit together now until one of us won’t.

32:39 That’s how we’ll be, and we’ll have to figure out how to do it, and the onus of the learning is yours because I already know this one. Yeah, so why is death not allowed to be a big part of your life, and why is yoga sane, and why is a mother colluding entirely, why is that called love? Why is that called maternal responsibility, to cheerlead your daughter away from her, let’s call it her existential and moral responsibility to inhabit the last act of the play, to not abandon the house and run out screaming out into the street when the ending of the play comes into view?

33:23 And what is the benefit if she inhabits this last act? Does she make peace with herself? Does she pass on to her family an exit that is beneficial to the culture, maybe? Here, but the context is an important thing. The context is not, we’re basically neutral around dying, so then how will her enhanced example affect things?

33:47 No, the context is that we’re death crazy, right, death-phobic in the extreme. That’s the context where what you’re asking me has to appear. So anybody who’s watching mistakes what she’s saying for someone who’s heroic. What do they do when it’s their turn but turn to the heroic examples, and everybody knows a story of somebody who prevailed against dying until the last couple of days. It’s absolutely misrepresenting what happened.

34:25 The person was dying the entire time. Well, you want her to wallow in it? Why is wallowing the only vision of what it means to engage your death actively? Why is that? It’s either that or it’s called fight or flight, it’s a basic human response.

34:42 Of course it is, but in the same culture, what the culture gives you is a repertoire for what, for dying, not for not dying. Well, you are a crazy culture that makes dying another one of your lifestyle options, right? You could turn it into a personal style thing, and, you know, he fought till the end, he was strong. What does strong mean? You wouldn’t have known he was dying.

35:11 That’s not strong, that’s schizophrenic, right? That’s functional schizophrenia, and if enough people collude with it, what’s it called? The hero’s journey. So what’s the consequence of dying badly? Most of the consequences are cultural and widespread, and the now dead person who died badly doesn’t have to live any of the consequences they set into motion by the refusal to die.

35:42 And what are some of those consequences? Me sitting here, you asking me about this is one of the consequences. Okay, no doubt, if this was rolling out nicely you’d have no interest in the subject at all, you know. Like me, you’re probably cued to this by a kind of combination of contentiousness, a sort of fretful penumbra around the thing. Um, well, some of the consequences are the mania for self-determination, the mistaking of personal freedom for living a consequence-free existence, the utter misapprehension of what the responsibilities of citizenship are, excuse me, in a, in a quote, still nominally free place in time, just for starters.

36:33 Yeah, I mean, the great consequence of refusing to die well or deeply or wisely is the corruption of the capacity that others can grow by virtue of attending to your dying. It corrupts their capacity to orchestrate themselves in a village-minded fashion, and they become, there’s sort of bit players in your personal drama instead, and that the kind of whisper campaign that emanates from your ultimately futile heroic journey is that when it’s those people’s turn to die, they might have Plan B, that would be a good idea. And what’s Plan B in my country?

37:16 It’s euthanasia, which is now legalized virtually across the country. And you’re not a fan of euthanasia because it thumbs the nose at the deity again, for terms, it’s sacrilegious. Now, how I feel about euthanasia is irrelevant, whether I approve it or not is irrelevant, but I can wonder about it, I can have some discernment about it that’s free of any feelings, relatively speaking free, and here’s what I come up with really quickly: euthanasia is a death-phobic culture’s solution to dying.

37:52 Euthanasia is being decriminalized by cultures that remain death-phobic, subsequent to the decriminalization. That’s the great mystery. If a death-phobic culture legitimizes euthanasia, it’s because the euthanasia is consistent with the death phobia. It doesn’t challenge it, it doesn’t react to it, it doesn’t threaten it, it’s maintained by the euthanasia. Right, and what does that look like on the ground?

38:22 You don’t have to die, you don’t have to put up with it, you don’t have to learn how to do it, you don’t have to be its servant, or you don’t have any obligation to come to an understanding that’s deeply unwelcome. You have none of these things, and when you decide, and you have the agreement of a couple of physicians who sign off on the fact that you’re not nuts, that you’re not nuts. Yeah, you’re not just depressed. And but you’re dying in a death-phobic place, if you’re not depressed it’s questionable whether you’re even engaged in the thing.

39:00 No, I mean, the degree of extraordinary levels of free-floating anxiety bordering on kind of chronic disabling despair was the order of the day where I worked. If there was a similarly widespread cultural malaise and it was identified as such, people would be on the streets about it, demanding action at every level of governmental and beyond. Why isn’t there any such thing? There’s no mobilization. Why?

39:39 Against this dilemma, because partly it’s the emperor’s new clothes thing, it’s not visible anymore, because because the death phobia has compromised all the attempts to subvert it. It’s very powerful business. I’m making it sound like a conspiracy, it’s not a conspiracy because it’s not orchestrated in a particular zone that’s free of the conspiracy. There’s no manipulation in that sense going on, you know. What’s happening today is that there’s a kind of parallel universe, self-appointed, credential-free practice zone called alternative death care, just grown in direct reaction to the medically based, hospital-based, doctor- dominated thing.

40:31 I’m not saying it’s not an understandable thing, I’m saying they’re hankering after mainstream status, and they are, and here’s the thing: everything that goes mainstream, what’s it called? Normal. That’s what happens to it, and the amazing power of normalcy in a democracy is its capacity to absorb everything that challenges it and turn it into part of itself and absolutely declaw and defang what could undo it. And that’s what euthanasia will quickly be, to the point where, if you have grandchildren, let’s say, the likelihood of them growing their entire lives in a place where it’s absolutely legal to refuse to die and to be killed instead will be the norm.

41:17 What will their understanding be of dying then, when it’s informed by dying is another opportunity for you to exercise your right to a suffering-free or suffering- controlled existence? My answer is you’ll have another generation of people extraordinarily self-absorbed with a grudge and a grievance against the natural order of things as soon as it includes them not as its principal beneficiary anymore but as its debtor. That’s what’s coming. It’s pretty dark.

41:52 Yes, sir. You have a great expression which says what has to die is your refusal to die, and so you want people to be with the death, to be there with it for all of its uncomfortable now and its deity, and not scheduled it in a new euthanasia? No, no, because the center of the observation you’re making is still the person’s feelings about the thing. Okay, okay. If you’re marrying somebody, okay, it’s understandable that you’d be preoccupied with how you feel about the person, but somewhere over there is the person who’s not a sum total of how you feel about them.

42:29 They were there before you had any feelings about them at all, and with any luck there’ll be a big portion of them that’s not high- ly responsive to your feelings about them. That’s trustworthy. That’s dying. Dying is not the sum total of how you feel about it or the adjustment you make to accommodate it. I don’t know how to say it more intensely than deity, and a deity, when it comes present among us, is in deep disrepair, er, you could say it undoes anything that’s not informed by it.

43:15 Let’s use an example of people’s belief system. I get asked all the time in interviews, so did you have, I mean, people who had strong beliefs died on your watch? Yes, it is. And they must, by virtue of having these beliefs, must have died better than the generic non-aligned people. I said, why would you say that?

43:35 Well, because their beliefs must have enabled them to a little bit. Well, you’re counting on something. You’re counting on their religious orientation to life or their spiritual orientation to life was crafted in the presence of this deity called death. That’s what you’re counting on there. So you know what I’m going to tell you?

43:53 Virtually everybody’s belief system that I worked with was designed and undertaken to protect and defend them against the presence of the deity, not to learn its ways and live alongside it in the time that was left, but to have a firewall to prevent it until collapse was an if, hopefully, if the collapse lasts longer than 24 hours, you have a good outcome. Any exceptions to that? Was there anyone that’s sure? Sure, but they didn’t need me. Easy, right?

44:28 So what was my job? To make myself obsolete, of course. To democratize death wisdom, that was my job, to work myself out of a job, that was my responsibility. Yeah, but unfortunately I sort of came of practice age in a time of increasing specialization. Well, this is no surprise actually, because increased specialization is a ghetto, and if you can get hold of end-of-life care and the alleged practice wisdom to guide its many technologies and so on, you’ve got job security for the people working inside the ghetto, and the direct consequence of that is the capacity of the general public to come to their death as a practitioner of dying instead of as a victim of it is virtually non-existent, because the pros own the wisdom and you submit to them, not to the dying.

45:26 So the reason I’m sitting here essentially talking to you is to act on the self-appointed task of democratizing the wisdom, but democratizing the wisdom is not all light and flowers, as you’ve ignores. Pretty dark, is it? Yeah, because death wisdom begins with an acknowledgment of our fundamental poverty in this regard, and if you leave that out, you turn it into another, you know, hope and dreams campaign, you’re back in that thing that you think you’re an alternative to.

46:01 I was never in the customer satisfaction business. Funnel properties, what do you mean by that? Everything I’ve been talking to you about, right, you know, the thing is, nobody meant to die badly. This important thing to say: nobody woke up in the morning, said, right then, that looks like a good idea, writhing in agony at 3:00 a.m. with an unconquerable existential dread, let’s try that. Nobody ever did that.

46:31 Of they didn’t, but they did, they did find themselves there routinely, and the only way out of it was sedation. Yeah, so were there exceptions? Yeah, yeah, there were exceptions who I would meet and we would kind of bless each other and go on our way, you know, and occasionally they, I mean, they’re very welcome, right? But there was nothing to do except to acknowledge it and to thank them for the unlikely, however they got there. How did they get there?

47:08 He’ll ask, can I prepare now for my death time? You better. You better. One of the reasons you’re here is because one of our guests on the show, his name is Ido Portal, he’s a movement specialist from Israel, I think his mother is a fan of yours, and I had a long conversation walking through London with him, and at the very end I said, you have anything else you want to say? And he said, he said, today is a good day to die.

47:29 That’s what he said. And he said, he said, I try to meditate on my death every day, and I know that today is a good day to die. Now, I’m sure it’s not that simple, and I know you’re not into the tips and techniques of how to get a better relationship, but that actually, I even say that wrong, of death, but is that a glimpse of how it starts? Okay. Mm-hmm.

47:53 A more troubling answer than the question was troubling. Here comes, there’s a few books out there, they’re real how-to books. There’s a real famous one, I’m not gonna mention any of it or its writer, but he’s not an English guy, and a lot of English people down that book. Okay, it’s basically a death Bible. He’s still alive, helps you narrow down.

48:13 If you look at his examples that he crafts in this book, and he’s advocating for a certain vision of death, and the thing that they all have in common, his success stories inside the book, as I remember, without exception characterized that good dying as barely noticeable. Yeah, barely noticeable. You don’t buy that for a second, dude. What? That’s what you’re holding people to?

48:41 Well, I mean, it’s a Buddhist practitioner, so I don’t know what kind of predisposition they bring to dying. It’s not entirely true, but I’ll say that. But obviously it’s another kind of victory story, you know, but in this case it’s not as troubling as people who are not good practitioners of this understanding. But wait, where is it written that the best dying is the one you don’t notice? Why is that the gold standard?

49:12 Why should dying not break your heart? Because it does mine. Yeah. When I’m sitting in this chair, one of the things I get asked all the time: you saw a lot of death? Yes, I did.

49:27 So somewhere in there you must have seen your own death? Yes, indeed, it’s an occupational hazard or a benefit, you decide. So then, here’s the next question: so you must be good with it then, because you’ve seen it? And I say then, get behind me, Satan. That’s what I say, not sometime, not explicitly, but the notion is this: why do you think that an indirect encounter with the guarantee of one’s own demise confers upon one a kind of mysterious sense of well-being that’s absolutely unavailable to you when things are working out nicely?

50:08 What kind of, what kind of math is this, you see? So I have no obligation to be okay about my dying. Do you know here’s what it did to me? My life, my ability to be alive, became habit-forming. That’s what happened.

50:27 I looked around and I became almost involuntarily grateful. I knew myself to be lucky because I’d lived long enough that the news of my death prompted a longing to be alive. Now the mystery is, but I was alive, so why would I long after it? Am I longing after more life? Well, of course, to a certain degree, yeah, but I’m longing to be alive at the same time that I’m in the presence of the life that I’m longing for.

51:04 Then you realize, ah, it’s not a future tense to long after being alive, it’s a present tense thing. That’s life-affirming. Getting more of it doesn’t make it true. Getting a longer life in which to long after it doesn’t do anything to the quality. Might make it a little better at it with more practice, I don’t know.

51:27 But when I glimpsed the end of what I claimed to love, being alive, that was the beginning of my capacity to love it. Now that’s as counterintuitive as you can get, you know, that when I saw the end I was granted the capacity to fully inhabit and locate myself in being alive, and from that moment on I was deeply enamored of the thing. So no, I’m not okay, but I’m not gonna roll over. I’ll die wishing I wasn’t, of this I’m fairly certain, until it becomes unbearable, and then like most people, probably, you know, it’s only one thing we’re worse than, not dying, as then dying.

52:18 And that’s not dying when it’s pretty much its time. Yeah, that much I’ve seen, sure. But I have no obligation to be blithe or butter or turn into another gauzy spectacle. You know, it breaks my heart to think about it now, to say these things to you now, having brought children into the world and grandchildren, lingering, and, you know, these extraordinary opportunities to wonder about these things, of people I don’t know, these were all enormous gifts, you know, and they’re predicated on the fact that we’re not going to last.

52:50 We get to do this now, and younger people are watching what we’re doing with the remnant of the allotment that’s entrusted to us. They really are, they don’t know that they are, but they are, and they’re taking their news from how we are, and if we come to these endings belligerent and hostile and sort of grievance-driven, what’s the message they draw down from this that informs their middle age? The answer is it’s a sucker’s game, right, and it’s only being youthful and capable that’s worthwhile, and the rest of it is a dismal demise, which is totally false.

53:29 There’s a part in one of your movies where you say to a woman, how you’re going to die is going to determine the state of your family when you leave, not what you will die from, but how you’re going to die. It’s a pretty powerful moment, and I think she understands what you say at that point. We’ve been talking a bit about that, but this is what you’re trying to say, is that everyone in the family unit and the culture and the community is going to watch how you die and live their life accordingly, or refuse to watch and live their life accordingly.

53:57 Okay, you know, right, but they take cues, because how you die determines the culture, depends our values, depends, determines what we do, and we’re doing it the wrong way now and it’s probably getting worse, when being hyper-phobic about death. Yeah, fair characterization. You’re gonna fight death though when it comes? No, I don’t think so. Okay, look, if I can keep my wits about me, no.

54:25 Thank you. I can’t, I use almost very similar to a plant medicine ceremony for me. Does it well, maybe it is. You can go into the ayahuasca ceremonies saying I’m just gonna hold tight here and everything’s gonna be okay, that’s not gonna be that big of a deal. Yeah, but it’s supposed to be.

54:40 Why would you do it? Yeah, it’s supposed to be painful, it’s supposed to be scary, it’s supposed to flatten you out. Yeah, so yeah, why would you do that? And if you really want to get something out of it, it’s to try to be with it and get all these, just be there. Yeah, you know, but you’re not gonna get anything out of dying.

54:59 Yeah, same, guess not that language again, see, yeah, it’s there for me. Well, there’s this, you know, it’s there for me, but human, my servant. We’ve been making up illusions about our death since the beginning, right? I don’t know, you know, I’m not persuaded that this is a universal constant, that everybody effs up in the same fashion. I’m just not wise about it.

55:18 There’s a great book called The Denial of Death, which I’ve never finished, but I didn’t, so I don’t know all the premises, but part of it is that, you know, we put these statues of war heroes up and celebrate their deaths, and in fact we shouldn’t, because it’s it’s just a symbol that there’s something that we can look forward to. I don’t know, it just seems like one of the many things that we, oh man, those things are just like cruel whisper campaigns, that if they build it, if they put a statue of you or your name into public square, you’re not really dead, right, and your death had a purpose. I’ll tell you what, I’m just gonna curl your hair, and maybe this story goes like this: virtually every person I worked with who was dying came into the dying with the worst fear vision, and they were very articulate about it if you were to ask them, and in a word it was writhing in agony at 3:00 a.m. with no recourse, no doctor to call, and even if there was a prescription it wasn’t really getting it done.

56:14 In other words, all their worst fears rotated around physical suffering, and the doctors were so skilled where I worked that that virtually never happened. I mean, one or two percent. Amazing. So then if your worst fear never comes to pass during the course of your death, what does this sound like? A recipe for a prescription, for a guarantee of dying well, because all your worst fears, they never materialize and they never manifest.

56:47 How then to explain the extraordinary level of antidepressants and sedation inflicted upon people in the last weeks of their life if their worst fear never comes to pass? So this is an existential mystery, right? My answer is they were wrong about what they’re afraid of. That’s the mystery of it. How can you be wrong about your worst fear?

57:11 Answer is, fear’s not knowledge, it’s easy to be wrong about it. That you have a worst fear, you’re not mistaken there, but what is it? Well, it turns out almost across the board, the dying people that I knew, their worst fear was disappearing without a trace, slipping under the waves of time passing, with the people who claim that they love them crafting an ability sooner or later to reassume their normal life, which is a mark of adjustment and psychic sanity among us, to reacquaint yourself with and reacquire your premorbid normal life.

57:58 Let me translate that for you: to be able to live as if the dead person never was, basically. Yeah, and that’s what they feared, and they had good reason to fear it. Why? Because it’s only towards the end of their life that they sort of copped a vision they were never looking for. Now they’re dying and they’re wondering involuntarily what they did when someone close to them prior to this moment was dying, and they realized how easy it was in our way of life to move on, and they did so, and they realized this is a kind of sentence that’s awaiting them, that they’re dying in a time that is very keen on carrying on, not that keen on living alongside everything that’s been, and they’re about to join that mystery train heading out of town, and they’re about to be in eclipse, and they’re scared.

59:07 Doesn’t begin to describe it. They’re cottonmouth and rigid in the presence of that, and that’s why the sedation, the antidepressants. Hmm. Because there’s no language for it where I worked, and still where I live now, basically, there’s no language for it, completely undiagnosed. They call it kind of existential anxiety.

59:31 Come on, man, it’s not strong enough. You know, so is that a battle with our own ego at the end, like as this thing is literally dissolving away as we die, and it’s just a battle of our own self-importance when in fact it’s just a natural course of life? The way you started off with this discussion, you’ve got to be careful with the natural characterization. Okay. You know, natural is code for your mother would like it, right?

59:57 Okay. It’s code for you don’t want me to give any environmentally friendly toilet-roomisms around my dad. Oh, it would be better just to get solid. Okay, so I don’t know, you know, natural. I mean, women go into childbirth with this natural tyranny expectation, and so any involvement of anyone else becomes unnatural.

1:00:19 It’s a terrible position to put yourself in. People come to their death the same way. Okay, this is gonna kind of white-knuckle it out, or they’re just gonna omit out. But this is it, same thing again. Are you listening to it though?

1:00:34 Because it doesn’t mean you any harm, but it means you, see, it means you. It’s not going away, it’s the most faithful companion you’ll ever have, and you’re not accustomed to that kind of companionship. Every other one by comparison is wayward, this one’s faithful, your death. Here’s the mystery: you and I are, I guess, approximately the same age, give or take. I’m guessing in your 50s, 60s?

1:01:06 60s, yeah. My late 40s, but thank you for noticing. Okay, well, you will be if things work out. A little housekeeping. And but we know people a lot younger than us are listening, perhaps.

1:01:19 This, what does this mean to them? Do they really imagine, and I’ll bet they do, that my death is closer to me than their death is to them because because I’m older? What a strange misapprehension. I’m no closer to my death than they are, because my death is not in the future, my death is a present tense reality. It’s here now as a knowable companion to my days, isn’t it?

1:01:51 Of course it is. Do I know the actual time and place? What would that change except increase my misery as it approached? There’s no upside to knowing it. But you can know that you will die.

1:02:03 You can know that, and that’s gifted to you, you see, so you can chart your course accordingly, because it’s not if, although people will actually say, you know, if I die, here’s how I’d like them to go, and you say, what was that? Oh, they say if. I meant when. I promise you, if you had meant when, you probably would have said it. I promise you, you meant if.

1:02:31 You know, how do you feel about these people that want to live to 200, and the Silicon Valley people that want to upload their consciousness and preserve themselves? Is this just more demonstration of our death phobia? How’s it working out to get everything you want? You don’t look very assured when you pour your dot-com billions into the serum, you know, and then you go on a talk show and you say something like this: and look, if you take the serum you won’t have to die.

1:03:01 Listen to the characterization, the prejudice that it carries: you won’t have to die. I can say the same thing where the prejudice becomes apparent: if you take the serum you won’t be able to die. Does that change anything? I think so. You won’t be able to die, and we’re gonna have to come up with another word for what you are, because human won’t cover it anymore.

1:03:27 The inability to die is one of the things that calls our humanity into deep disrepair. I would say, do you think people need to think about that, about the fact that maybe, what if they couldn’t die, and to think about how they live their life? Is that something worth meditating on, or just blurring? Yes, you’re softening the inquiry as you go on. Do you think it’s worthwhile, instead of should they?

1:03:52 Well, like, I’m not a thing, despite all appearances, I’m really not a finger-wagging guy. You’ll do what you’ll do, right? It’s not for me to dictate. Oh, I don’t have some way, a la jour ideas? Well, I’m full of them.

1:04:05 Okay, here they are, you know, but most of them can’t translate easily into a strategy. Well, that’s very deliberate. You can’t franchise out what I’m talking about, turning into a movement. Why? Because it keeps falling apart as a kind of, if you do this you’ll win, and if you do this secretly you’ll defeat death.

1:04:28 No, you won’t. So there’s no hope in what I’m talking about, but it’s not hopeless. Hopeless rotates around hope, just like hopeful rotates around hope, but I don’t rotate around it. I have no obligation to be hopeful or hopeless, because I’ve experimented with both of them and they’re not that interesting, but the capacity to proceed free of either one of them compels me, and that’s what you hear from these is the the refusal to be bound to the hope project.

1:05:06 You know, hope is extraordinarily tyrannous, and this is how it works. It works the same way of mortgages, as you are in banking, so this will mean something to you. The word mortgage comes from two words: the first word means death, the second word, parceled out over time. What is the mortgage but death on the installment plan? That’s exactly what it is, and the word tells you that’s what it is.

1:05:30 And the moral code of a mortgage goes like this: you have to keep up your payments. Why? Well, you’ll end up paying more because you have this fixed amount called the principal, that’s what you did, you borrowed, you took somebody else’s money, you’re living beyond your means, shouldn’t have done it, that’s the moral order. But there’s punishment that’s stitched into the fabric that’s called the interest, and that’s why it’s a variable, see? It’s not a fixed amount, it’s a fixed rate, but the amount is determined by your compliance, isn’t it?

1:05:59 You know it is. So you could end up paying way more than you signed on for if you don’t comply, and what a mortgage does is turn you away from the present. You do without now in order to have later, and that’s exactly what hope does. And the easy demonstration of this: neither one of us are sitting here right now hoping that we’re sitting here right now. It’s a ludicrous statement.

1:06:27 Hope is not required for us to occupy these places, is it? You know, you don’t feel hopeless? No. But you know, you feel hopeful either? No, it’s not needed.

1:06:38 No. Why? Because the present is generous, that’s why, and you don’t need to turn away from it. But hope obliges you to abandon the present for the sake of a possible future, and if you’re dying, what are you supposed to be hoping for? That you’re not dying?

1:06:58 What will that turn you into? It’s not good, right? So you experiment with hopelessness, okay, if you must. Try again, try it again, see how it goes, see if it’s a more authentic experience than being hopeful. It isn’t.

1:07:17 But to turn out, require hope at all, and to engage the God that’s sitting in the corner of your room, both of you can agree that you don’t need to be hopeful anymore. You’re absolved of the obligation to strive. Now you learn the etiquette of the deep radical hospitality of including in your life its end. It turns you into an innkeeper, you see, not a security guard. You’re an innkeeper, and your guest is mysterious, and the consequence of the presence of your guest will be the end of your inn.

1:08:03 But you realize what a way to end your innkeeping career is, that your last guest brought the whole thing to a mandatory conclusion. It’s a good analogy. It’s a little more than an analogy, it’s kind of how it goes. Tell me about grief and what is the state of grief and how does that play into all of this stuff? I guess that’s by definition after the event.

1:08:31 Not always, not never. Okay. No, well, one of the ways to talk about something is by time, but what it isn’t, and that’s how it can become manifest in a different way than we’re accustomed to. So you finger the edges of its absence, and that begins to articulate a woundedness, and you recognize the wound, and from that you recognize what caused it, and then you’re in a different understanding. So grief’s not a feeling, that’s the big thing.

1:09:02 Grief is usually mistaken for something on the same sort of general plane as despair and depression and hopelessness and, yeah, and nobody’s looking forward to it, nobody’s trying to get good at it, nobody goes to grief school, right? They go to school for how not to grieve. So if grief were a feeling, then its principal attribute would be that it would be transitory, which all feelings are, feelings are, whether you know, they’re not architecture, they’re weather, comes and goes as it should.

1:09:43 Even the deepest feelings you have are transient, because you don’t have them all the time. Yeah, but grief though, grief stays when you become a practitioner of grief. It stays. Now you don’t get invited to many parties, I can tell you from personal experience, if you become a practitioner of grief, but your understanding of love is renovated for all time, and here’s what it is to me. You could say, what’s the relationship between grief and love?

1:10:19 Well, if you’re in love you don’t have any grief, what if, as you love, included another human at any time in the proceedings, if it has, you know, that’s a lie. If you’re in love, grief will be part of the deal, and you’ll mistake that for being the end of love if you’re a rookie in these matters. You could come to the third marriage still thinking that, and you’ll be into your fourth marriage before you know it, if you’re seeing that these two things have to be kept separate, that the only way love can burn away is that grief is burned off, right?

1:10:57 So we get together in order not to be lonely, and that our loneliness is more acute than at any time when we were by ourselves. Yeah, so it could be that these are twins and not adversaries at all, that they’re not designed to annihilate the other one or to replace it or to make it obsolete, they are there to see to it that the other one appears, which is what twins do by virtue of the resemblance, and only one of them’s in the room, but you kind of know what the other one looks like just from that. That’s how I understand it.

1:11:30 To put it in a phrase, it’s gonna sound a little formulaic and clever, maybe, you could say that grief is a way of loving that which has slipped from view. Grief is a way of loving. I don’t think many people would be challenged by that. You wouldn’t grieve something that you didn’t have some love attachment to. I’m sure not just people, I mean times of your life, favorite cities that you were obliged to leave, you know.

1:11:59 There’s a lot of ways of understanding this, but I’m gonna do this with it in hopes that the relationship between them becomes more full and more apparent. So if, if grief is a way of loving that which has slipped from view, then it must stand that love is a way of grieving that which has not yet done so. Love is the willingness to love, finally understanding that your love of this will not extend its days by one. So you’re going to have to find another reason to love this person at this time, or this city, or this moment in your life, without adding to it to legitimize loving it.

1:12:52 In other words, love becomes a recognition of its temporariness, and you love the temporariness too, and that’s grown-up stuff, and there’s just no training in the popular kind of romance culture, you know, where everything is just sort of glandular satisfaction, you know, and as soon as it’s not that anymore and there’s too much work involved and all that. Yeah, no, no, grief is a way of loving, but love’s a way of grieving too. So know that when you love, that it’s going to be temporary and that there will be a grief component to it.

1:13:32 Is, well, not going to be temporary, right, is a temporary, yeah, it already is, right? Yeah. And you saw a grief walker. There’s a moment there when I’m talking about my kids and this was a staggering realization, and it sounds how could you have been shocked and surprised? Well, I’m not above any of these things.

1:13:54 So I really looked at the kids one day and it suddenly hit me what I had done to them, that by virtue of collaborating in their creation I had dragged them over the threshold, you know, into the living, breathing world, such that they would die. Now there’s other things too, I know, but that’s what I did, and I didn’t mean to, I didn’t even think about it. If I did, who knows what the thought process and the decision making might have been, but I didn’t, and now it’s too late to save them from that most extraordinary of heartbreaks.

1:14:36 It’s too late, I can’t do anything about it. I love my kids grievously, and that’s why, you know. So so what do you hope for as an arrangement for them? At some point you’re gonna have to glimpse their death if you really love them, and your first instinct might be to want to be there for them, which immediately says that they’re gonna die before you. Is that what you want?

1:15:08 And then you were back away from that, it’s not okay. So what do you want then? How do you want it to go? Okay, they die after me, right? So they bury you.

1:15:19 So you want that heartache for them? Yes, I want that heartache for them. Okay, good, because why? Because it’s practice for them, that’s why. Because you can’t be there, so your way of dying becomes their companion when it’s their turn, instead of your physical presence, and that’s an act of love entirely endorsed and underwritten by a grief about the things you can’t change, and not being able to change them turns not into grievance but grief instead, because you realize that’s the architecture, man.

1:15:54 That’s not the difference, that’s not the booby prize, that’s the architecture, and if that’s what it is, there’s something meant to be nice about it all, and our orientation is obedience to it, not poking a hole in it to see if we can fix it. No, I’ve got two young boys, two and three years old, and a 15-year-old girl as well, and I think about their death too often, but thinking about my death, no, how can I die in a way that serves them? Like, what is that?

1:16:26 Do I die with dignity? Do I die with presence? Do I die, how do I do that? We’re owners, not a scheme, right? And you’re answering the question by how you’re wondering about it, by the phrasings, because in your habits of speech you see your habits of thought and perception, they’re right there.

1:16:52 You’ve heard me draw your attention to a few of them, right? So you could imagine, for example, that your death is your last act of fathering them. You father them, and your dying is your father, it’s the last, it’s not the summary act, okay, because you did a lot of other acts too, and some of them are goofy and some of them are crazy and some of them are pretty good, and but this one, this one you kind of get to mean if you’re willing. You get to not control it, but you can have something to say.

1:17:28 So for me that means I die with peace and dignity and assurance to them that it’s okay. I don’t know, that’s what feels like, I understand. I understand why it would be. You have no obligation to be okay. How about this, to go along with maybe dignity could include heartbreak instead of being a solution to heartbreak instead.

1:17:52 And maybe you could understand it this way, that in a culture that does not believe in endings, how do they solve heartbreak? Answer is less heart, so less brokenness. But you hear what that’s a recipe for. Yeah, okay, so I’m recalibrating what dignity could be. It could include this, looking at them right in the eye and saying, I don’t want you to see the day that I’m not alive in this world with you.

1:18:30 Yeah, I’m not going willingly. I don’t want to imagine a time that you have to fend for yourself without knowing that I’m around, and I don’t know what after death looks like, so I can’t reassure you about it, but such as my love for you, that my desire to attend to your life is not extinguished by the oncoming nescience of my ending. And you know, people don’t understand, this is going to ask you to stop talking because everybody will be dissolved. You sit, and if I’m there I will say, you’ve gone with that, because anybody can say that, you’re leading [expletive], but nobody can say this, that only can come from you.

1:19:23 I don’t want to die, I don’t agree with it, I’m going, that’s not refusing to die. No, okay, Dad, not at all, because we don’t want to do that, but we can say we don’t want you, I don’t want him. Okay, I don’t want to leave you, but there is gonna be a day where I’m not there for them, so how can I say, I don’t want there to be, I’m scared for them, because it’s honest, it’s more than honest, it’s testifying. It’s saying you have no obligation to disown your desire for me to be here.

1:19:56 We have to redefine what okay means, okay means in a situation like this. You don’t have to give up okay, you can lay it down instead of holding on for dear life and pretending that’s life-affirming. You lay it down, you submit, you pay the price with greater and greater grace. That’s what it’s for, and that’s the gift you have to give to them. It’s not being Teflon, not folding like a cheap suit at the first sign of real trouble and calling that dignity.

1:20:37 Dignified is not silent, you know, that’s a kind of strange kind of John Wayne kind of thing. I remember my buddy who died of cancer, he looked at me, had maybe two months left, and he never looked at me and he said, Brian, I’m not angry, I’m disappointed. Yeah, that’s what he said. Yeah, that’s kind of the user-friendly end of grief. I’m disappointed.

1:21:01 Yeah, I just felt like he meant it that way, I don’t know, he was like, am I angry? I’m just disappointed. Sure. I know it was like a real, I don’t know, it felt real, I felt something. Human, sure.

1:21:11 Oh, anger’s real too. Yeah, it’s human too. Yeah, but it’s a kind of one-trick pony, being angry that you’re dying. Okay, good, now that we’ve established that, do you imagine this is gonna turn into anything? Because it won’t.

1:21:24 The amazing thing about being angry is it’s the great enabler, right? That’s how it works, it fills you with, you can act on this s*** now. Yeah, because of your rage about it. But try acting in some similar fashion when you’re grief-stricken and heartbroken, see? It, you’re not a fan, you’re gonna think that’s impotence, and you’re gonna do everything you can to get back into the realm of potency and action and refusal and all that.

1:21:52 But grief is not the opposite of anger. It simply restores anger’s proper place in the scheme of things as a minor character. It has its place, but it’s a minor character. It’s only when it swells as a kind of moral obligation to refuse to die that it becomes, quote, the problem. It belongs, that’s all.

1:22:20 What do you say to parents that are looking at their kids while they’re dying, or parents that worry about their children dying, and parents that have to come to terms with their young children dying? What do I say to them? Yeah. Now it’s not their death, it’s their child. Stuff, and like you said, they’re there looking at all of this life’s potential, which is probably the wrong way to look at that, but it’s just that it’s not true.

1:22:45 I don’t know, it’s wrong, it’s just not true, you know. I don’t have a recipe that if you follow it, none of the things I’ve talked about for the last hour, what happened, they’ve already happened. This is where we are, right? So anything I have to say, it doesn’t make that go away. Anything I have to say gives you the capacity to befriend the poverties that you were born to in this matter.

1:23:11 So, a story, much better than a concept. Seven-year-old dying of leukemia down the hall, I’m in the family room with the family, they’re going crazy. I say, what do you think hurts you more than anything else? So once those dying, you sure that’s what it is? Of course.

1:23:33 Now or they’re already looking at you like, how about this, I say, all this life that they won’t get to live, isn’t that the thing? Lion’s share, people agreed that was the thing. It’s a ripoff, it’s wrong, it’s unnatural, all that. I should be being buried by them, not burying them next year. Okay, I get, understand the should, it’s not accurate, but I understand it.

1:24:01 It’s okay. So let’s do this. Let’s go down and ask her if she’s had a full life, because you’re sure she hasn’t, and this is what’s killing you slowly, and this is what’s going to end your marriage. Statistically, I don’t know if you know that, but somewhere in the high 60s percent of all marriages where a young child dies in the marriage, they separate within two, two or three years, irrevocably. Wow.

1:24:24 Yeah, so I dropped that in there, and so shall we? And they all look at you like it’s unthinkable you’d actually rub her face in it. Well, you’re just talking like she doesn’t know. Rub her face? Come on, come on, she’s in that, she’s in the ward, what do you think?

1:24:42 But anyway, I don’t say all that cause we don’t argue. I said too much, I understand. I’ll tell you what, I get paid the big bucks here, why don’t I go find out? I’ll go ask, I’ll come back, I’ll tell you what she said. Yeah, but everybody wants me to, that’s the truth.

1:24:59 Okay, I go down there, come in, move the chair, I’m not sitting across from her like this, kind of beside her. I say, well, I was with your family in the family room. Mm-hmm. I said, out pretty crazy. Just, yeah, I said, you know why?

1:25:14 She said, yeah, I know why. Because what’s really killing them is that, is if I know I’m dying, so every time they’re around I don’t know. I said, okay, well, you got that figured pretty good, that’s true. Well, here’s the thing, that’s today’s weird piece, ready? Yeah.

1:25:40 What? Well, they’re pretty sure you’re not going to have a full life. A seven-year-old just looks at you and it can’t make sense of that phrase at all, you actually have to explain it, and good luck with that. Well, here’s the thing, that’s what’s killing them, so I have to find out if you’ve had a full life and go back and tell them, but I need examples, I just can’t be yes or no. I said, hopeful life, you know, stuff that made it the whole thing pretty good.

1:26:10 So she’s thinking, of course, adults are weird, that’s her first and only enduring thought about all this, but she comes up with something, and I remember this one distinctly, she said, I rode a horse one time. I’m writing it down with a piece of paper because that’s it. She got it. Now, I rode a horse one time. Okay, I buy that.

1:26:30 I said, not just one, that’s good though, because that’s pretty much a full life right there, riding a horse. What’s the second one? She thought about it for a minute, she said, I fell off. Well, you can’t get fuller than riding a horse and falling off. And I wrote it down for a fella.

1:26:48 I said, just humor us, one more. She’s thinking about it. I said, don’t tell me you got back on, because anybody would hear that one coming, has to be something else. She said, well, there’s a time, you know, this next-door neighbor, so I always thought he was kind of cute, she’s seven and she’s using the word always, anyway, I thought he was kind of cute, you know, but he didn’t even know I existed, of course, and so one day we’re in the backyard, whatever, it’s not that long ago, and a fly landed on his shoulder, you know, I didn’t want the fly to be on his shoulder, right, so I went to brush it off, and just at the moment that he turned and my fingers touched his cheek, I said, that’s plenty.

1:27:35 Wrote that one down, and I know they’re not even gonna get to the third one, that’s just gonna salt it. I get it, you get it too. I’ll see what I can do. Go down, they’re waiting for you. What did you say?

1:27:53 Well, she said she rode a horse once. Half the place is dissolved. Oh, she doesn’t understand, she thinks it’s about horse riding. She kind of understands, because she doesn’t have the capacity to not have a full life. That’s an affliction of us.

1:28:11 Her understanding of life is, that’s what it is. You know, it’s not like there’s gradations of full, that’s what it is. When you’re seven it’s just, you know, high definition all the time. I’d even get to the third one. I, they couldn’t have stood the third one, I don’t think so.

1:28:33 You have to learn empty life. What kind of a lesson is that? That’s where your grievance about being ripped off because you’re dying comes from, from having been taught about empty life and full life. That’s a curse, it’s not a teaching. Right, right.

1:28:56 How do you then move into talking about elders? Is it related to the death, or is this kind of something that’s significantly different, or is it related also to some of this glandular culture that you talk about? Well, I think many of the realizations I had about elderhood came from my time in the death trade. They weren’t articulated in terms of elderhood, I had to do that part, but I, you know, had a real simple level, it came to this, where I live, ever-aging population, you know, more aged people per square foot than there’s ever been, and if you just follow the math sequence, this should actually be a good news story.

1:29:41 So, well, we have more age than we’ve ever had, we have more experience therefore with age than we’ve ever had, more on the ground encounters with agedness and what it means and how it could be in all of that, and more experience inherently means more capacity, and more capacity must translate as, we’re the most age-literate culture the world has ever seen, because we’re the oldest. Ask anybody who’s over 65 how that’s working out. Do they know themselves to be a child of an age-friendly, age-literate, you know, they don’t.

1:30:19 You know, they’re liminal, they’re the bubble and they know it too, and they’re nobody because we don’t respect our elders anymore. There’s a few, because but that’s one of them certainly. So then there’s something in that sequence that doesn’t hold. Demographically the observations are accurate, there’s something about the conclusion that withers before you get to the finish line. I think this is what it is: experience does not equal wisdom, nor does it prompt it, not as a guaranteed.

1:30:51 Experience can be traumatic, not wisdom-generating, easily. So first of all, anybody who’s old, chances are very good, anybody who’s my age or older has lived their entire lives without the ongoing elder function in their lives. Oh, they might have had a grandparent they really loved, and hopefully they did, but grandparents are not elders, they’re old, older than you, but the word elder and the word grandparent are not synonyms, and largely it’s because grandparent is a consequence of what your kids did by procreating.

1:31:34 That’s how you become a grandparent. What you do with it, yeah, of course there’s a repertoire and all the rest, but it’s not an achievement of yours to become a grandparent. Yeah, but being an elder is nothing but that. Nobody can confer elderhood upon you arbitrarily as a consequence of a life decision that they’ve made. You see, they don’t even touch, and the bigger observation by far is this: grandparents, I have to generalize to speak about these things at all, and of course there’s exceptions, but you could say that grandparenthood is a risk management proposition at its riskiest.

1:32:15 What does that look like? Well, you’ve got the grandchildren for the weekend, and you know full well the expectation of their parents is that you’ll return those kids to them psychically intact and fundamentally not challenged as to their parenting practices with those children. That’s the deal. Nobody gives you their kids for the weekend so you can undo some aspect of their parenting. Okay, you know what I’m going to say about elderhood, it’s fundamental responsibility is cultural, not interfere with them, it’s cultural, and the principal responsibility of an elder is to see to it that the culture is enhanced, endorsed and underwritten by sanity, and wherever they see the betrayal of cultural sanity, it’s their responsibility to at least blow the whistle, if not do something actively about it.

1:33:14 That’s what you’re doing, if you say so. I’d be happy if that were true, I don’t know, you know, but I know that grandparenting can’t risk those kind of functions, because you wouldn’t be a grandparent on Monday morning, you’d be fired. Easy. Yeah, so we have godparent, said rather chilling phrase if you lit it in. I mean, that’s a big deal, you know, what it’s used for today.

1:33:41 It’s the default booby prize if your parents get smeared across the highway, then you become, sorry, if your parents get smeared across the highway somebody stands in for your parents, surrogate parents, right? The word God should mean something, shouldn’t it? It’s a signal to you that it’s not a surrogate, that it’s not even parenting, it’s some other order of, I don’t know, soul care, you know, and parenting is basically janitorial, right? It’s care and feeding.

1:34:16 I know what it’s turned into. I know parents have become the de facto high priests of their children’s early lives, to everyone’s detriment, because nobody’s capable of doing that, especially with their blood kin. You’ve got too much wrapped up in it, you say, but if you’re an elder, you have no blood kinship with the people who you’re fundamentally responsible to and for, and so you bear the culture in mind and you risk it all with some frequency. It sounds like more of an indigenous model.

1:34:48 Well, there’s some places in the world that are mysteriously hanging on to these things and able to practice them. Can we still do it in the West? Not now, not without a willingness to learn not only the poverties as I’ve tried to articulate them here, but something about how it came to be this way, and that will not be pretty and it will not be affirming, because we are the heirs to a cultural poverty, we’ve only just begun to imagine the consequence and the extent of, and it’s so overwhelming.

1:35:26 We’re surrounded by technology in this room, right, that most people in the world wouldn’t even know what end of the thing to point at, anything are. And for all of our material sophistication, our kind of poetic and spiritual chops are an extraordinarily tawdry frailty. It’s because they’re kind of connected, material sophistication will generally seduce you away from the troubles, because they’re all solutions. Everything’s a solution to what, to what the technologies made problem-wise.

1:36:05 So more technology becomes the solution. Whose solution is that? It’s technology solutions. It’s the same thing with euthanasia, it’s the same idea, you know. So I’m not saying, you know, live my life and, you know, try to milk a goat, and good luck to you guys, I don’t mean that, because more trouble for goats.

1:36:24 You know, totally inept people thinking they’re getting back to the land. No, if you don’t learn the poverties you don’t know anything, and if you don’t know anything you’re not a grown-up, you’re just a bag of aspiration and fret, you know, and striving to be free. But what’s human freedom, really? Is it human freedom to be free from anything or everything, or is human the capacity to act differently in the face of an utterly unchanged circumstance? I tend to think it’s a second.

1:37:09 Human freedom is an exercise in being willing to proceed otherwise when nothing in the circumstance rewards you for doing so. Elderhood in a nutshell. Hmm. Right, that there’s no payday anytime soon. Look, all this work I’m doing over all these years, taking me away from home and all the rest, I will not see any consequence to any of it.

1:37:35 You know, the old adage about the vineyard: you plant the vines, you’ll never drink the wine, no matter how long you live. And it’s proper, right? It’s the right thing to do, right? It’s what elders do, it’s one of the things that elders’ duties, they proceed as if there’s unborn generations, right? They proceed in their presence, right?

1:37:57 And anybody younger than you seeing you do that becomes an heir to this mystery that you’ve enacted. You’re willing to do without. No, that’s not it, you haven’t done without, but you won’t taste the wine. But wait, how do I know how to plant grapes? Because I have tasted wine, it’s just not from my own hand.

1:38:20 Are you saying it earlier in your life because some would plant? Yep, but we’ve become too disconnected from each other to see that long game as elders. Well, if you grew up in an environment that said don’t trust anybody over 30, you’re asking for it, and that was the 60s, so it’s no shock that people who said that, his kids are now themselves two and a half times that age, and they’re the ones who are demanding euthanasia, they’re the ones who are demanding to be treated for depression with LSD, they’re the ones who wanted, I mean, that’s not a coincidence.

1:39:04 Is there any way back from this? That’s not back, there’s nothing to return to, right? You know, native friend of mine who lives at the opposite end of the lake from where I live, we’re talking about this kind of stuff one day, because people come to him all the time wanting him to be the noble savage, right, and he’s hip to it, he’s aware of it, you know, right, but he’ll just say to me, look, if you want to do it, you go right ahead, but you’re never getting me in a teepee again.

1:39:28 That’s just what he says. I live in, no TV, and then he said, one day he phoned me up and he said, I just got my test result for her, and I got diabetes. I guess I’m a real Indian now. So he said it pure grief, you know what, without the rancor. I guess I’m a real Indian now.

1:39:54 So I don’t fetishize anybody else’s gig, spiritually, cultural, either ceremonially. I genuinely don’t. I have a high regard for them in principle, if they’re just trying, you know, but I don’t imagine that it’s there on the shelf waiting for any dominant culture white folks to dabble in as they see fit as it benefits them. And I’ll tell you why, because I’ve never heard anybody who does that dabbling wanting to participate deeply in where that ceremony came from and how to maintain and sustain it, if they’d ever be allowed in, which they generally wouldn’t be anyway.

1:40:32 But why are we always positioning ourselves as beneficiaries and not benefactors? Because we’ve been on the take our whole lives, because that’s our life way, is to be on the take. Yeah, so if you don’t want to start there, you’ll be a solution junkie again. So that’s why you hear me not issuing the five decrees, the six stages, the seven sages, the twelve steps. I’m not saying anybody else shouldn’t do it, I’m just saying the market’s cornered on solutions.

1:41:09 I live with the questions, so my glandular event is wonder. It’s not certainty and salvation, it’s wonder. Sorry, you mentioned the LSD, the end-of-life stuff like Johns Hopkins is doing with people, you know, dealing with death. What do you think of that? Yeah, what I think of it?

1:41:29 I mean, in a weird way, does it allow you to take this unmanageable ego that’s holding on and just take a break from it, to where maybe you could see a bit of a bigger picture and connect with the deity? I’m not sure connecting with the deity is the thing. Okay, you know, the deity’s the thing, not your relationship with it. Okay, it’s really tough, man. I know, it’ll take me a while to figure this out.

1:41:57 That’s [expletive], right? It’s that’s the architecture, it’s how it is for you. So you can keep hearing me say no, there’s something there that’s not an extension of your take on it. That’s what you learn. You learn that, like the way you’re trying to learn about your kids, that they’re not really a science experiment for your psyche.

1:42:19 I mean, but I mean, too often kids become that in their parents’ lives, and their attempt to fix what they couldn’t fix. You see what I mean? Yeah. And people try to domesticate dying, and do I think that the LSD proposition could just be another, easily turn into another attempt to domesticate dying and make it behave? Absolutely.

1:42:45 Do I think it would in any way be free because it’s LSD? No, I don’t. I don’t. Do I think it could be otherwise? I don’t know, you know, wouldn’t it be something?

1:42:54 Sure. But I mean, what were we doing for 80 thousand years before Dude made LSD for a dime? It’s not really necessary. We got a lot of troubles, LSD come from the troubles. So what about pain medication at those last days, and then you said it only ends up being the case in a few percentage of the cases, the writhing in agony thing?

1:43:28 Yeah, no, pain medication is a part of the deal, you know. You could say it’s a slippery slope from pain medication to LSD, like what’s the difference ultimately? Well, this there’s a Puritanism in that assumption, that it’s either cold turkey, right, or you break down and you do what you can. Well, as if that’s a continuum. Do I think that pain medication is a pretty good idea?

1:43:56 Mm-hmm. Have we been trying to find pain medication for longer than 75 years? Oh yeah, sure. Here’s a good example. I see a picture there’s a broken-down old shaman in the Guatemalan Highlands, friend, he’s looking pretty rough, and the guy who took his pictures, an archaeologist, excuse me, anthropologist, and a little caption says, this man, a medicine man for his people, asked me for aspirin, and I got out the aspirin but I asked him, why don’t you use your traditional medicine, in your own chops, you know, to cure your headache?

1:44:30 And he said to me, as he popped them in his mouth, because these help the gods do their work. Christ, that’s too good, that’s just too good. So in other words, he’s got not a problem with it, he understands this stuff’s in the world, right, and the gods will do with it as they do, right? This doesn’t trump them, screw you, it doesn’t make them, it doesn’t subvert their presence, and were we to live a sort of gods-infused existence, then perhaps LSD would be in that category, but as far as I can tell we do not live in that place, and as a result of the absence of the gods, we deify the LSD, we deify the pain medication.

1:45:20 Yeah, I mean, there are different things, the LSD and the pain. That sure was a psychedelic, I mean was an opiate. I’m glad they’re there, they’re right, the pain meds and so on, because that stuff can be very, very taxing and drive you to the cliff edge of sanity, you know, without it. No doubt. Okay, environment, global warming, do you think that this is all related to our relationship with death?

1:45:47 Related to, yeah, but that doesn’t say very much, you know, it just indicates there’s some kind of connectedness, but is it a cause and effect connectedness? Is it, are they mutual consequences of an unexamined, unimaginative, to think is perfectly the case. I think we mistake a lot of craters for bombs, if you understand what I mean by that, the crater meaning it’s already happened, right, but we think that’s the happening, that’s actually a sign. So the, I mean, one of the big ones is, I’m leaving from here to Wales tomorrow to teach five days in my school, and we’re teaching, I’m teaching Gilgamesh, which is the oldest story the Western world has, and it’s, one of the hinge points in this story is the attack that’s made upon the guardian spirit of the forest.

1:46:40 It happens very early on and it’s never explained in the story, it’s just that’s what you do, you attack the guardian spirit of the forest. What what historical memory is this a kind of crater of? And the answer is deforestation, and how did that happen? And the answer is the advent of the Iron Age, because you can’t deforest an entire valley with bronze axes, but you can do it with iron, you can do it with steel, and there’s remembering that story, the undoing of the natural world and the final wedge that divides us from it, which the Iron Age was in every place it has occurred across the human spectrum, not just white folks in northern Europe, across.

1:47:33 Yeah, why? Well, because man, it’s a long thing, but short version is, when you come to the natural world as raw material for your ideas, it’s already happened. That’s not the beginning, you know. That you could never have got there if some other separation had not already occurred that allows you to view the natural world as something potential and not actual, not a living, breathing, deified being, but something that’s waiting for you to smarten up and figure out how to smelt it so you can make a Tesla.

1:48:11 And that seed might come with that relationship with death, or a lot of other disconnects that might have happened. Endings, endings, endings, frailties, right, limits, okay, that’s where your humanity finds its saddle. It’s, it’s, um, repertoire, success does not do that to your sense of humanity, all it does is encourage you to continue. But endings, endings challenge what you think victory is, what you think success is, what you think being alive is for, and those challenges are what you’d never seek out on your own.

1:48:51 So you could say all our endings have, excuse me, a similar kind of eldering function for us all. Our endings, and that’s why elders are all people, because their visitation upon us in middle age or in youth of what our ending looks like, not our end, our ending, the way by which we come to our end, that’s what an elder is, and they’re master practitioners of the failure to prevail. That’s their gig, that they practice failing, and the good ones are ever more graceful in how they fail.

1:49:36 Maybe that’s what dignity, properly understood, actually is, is how to fail, not not to fail. If you don’t fail, you fail young people. You betray them by making as if failure is blowing it, but failure is signing up for active duty. Do you see elders out in the world right now? Not many.

1:50:07 You see some? No, right, I probably do, but I see more older people walking out of my talks about this, and not one young person has ever walked out. And I wonder, what the old people walking out, exercising their freedom to deeply disagree and disapprove of what I’m talking about, what the consequence is for those young people who are watching them walk out of a session about elderhood. I know they’re not thinking about it, but I think about it. And I’ll tell you something that sounds, it’s gonna sound self-aggrandizing and I don’t mean it to, because I’m not sure this woman was right, but I’m signing a book and a book signing line one time, and so she’s kneeling there, as you know, just to be on the same height as me, and you know, I opened the book to the page and I’m waiting for her to say something like, who’s it for?

1:51:03 And I look at her because she’s been quiet, and I look at, and resist sobbing, but really silently, but the shoulders are heaving, the whole thing. So you wait as is proper, you don’t prompt her, you certainly don’t inquire after how it can be, okay, this is okay, this is alright. So finally she looks at me and this is what she says. She said, you know, I feel like you’ve made a promise to people of my age and I think you’re the only one that’s keeping it.

1:51:39 I don’t think she’s right about the second part, but she is right about the first part. I did. I continue to do, me talking to you about these things in the way I am is bearing them in mind. Do I think it’s too late for a lot of people my age? Why?

1:51:59 Because the habits are too strong, because the addiction to feeling okay and feeling sure of yourself, it’s too strong, man, it’s too strong. Nobody gives that s*** up willingly, from what I’ve seen. I’m not giving up on people my age, but I’m just not overly invested in their approval or their willingness to consider these things. Well, in who else? Well, the people who will see a lot more of life than I’m going to see.

1:52:26 You know, I think I owe them that. The fact that they don’t ask it from me doesn’t do anything to my understanding of my obligation to them. Do you always feel this way, or did you make a conscious effort? These are always questions, man. I, you know, I was young and stupid for a long time, so there’s no always that goes back that far, I suppose.

1:52:46 At some level, you know, there’s a part of you, when everything gets burned away by divorces and, you know, getting fired and all the other mayhems, there’s not much of you left standing, if you’re lucky, but whatever is left standing, that was probably you all along, and it seemed like nothing, like a husk, but that’s, that stuff’s kind of trustworthy, and that’s who’s talking to you now, you know, the one who, all that’s left of me is this. You know, I tried everything I could, probably, to find a way of being somebody else, and I have to settle for this because all of the other experiments collapsed in a heap, you know, and that’s what the failures helped in. Now I sound like I’m rather pleased that it’s worked out this way, but if you had asked me at the time, no, it’s carnage at the time.

1:53:39 So you’re not reliable then, you know, but if you live to tell the tale and you’re willing to see it for what it is, and that it’s not a victory march, it’s just a little walk, you know, that’s what’s granted to you. How about this, we have this word saunter, right, which in English today means a casual kind of no big deal thing, right? You know what it means? The first part of the word is where we get our root for sanity, sanctity, health and hygiene and cleanliness, it’s all in the first part of the word.

1:54:16 I say you in, and then the second word is the word for dirt. You know what saunter really means? It’s the way by which you conduct yourself across holy ground. It only looks casual from the outside, but from the inside it’s devotional and prayer-like. It’s not hesitating, it’s considering.

1:54:42 That’s what’s been left to me, I’m sauntering now, and the only ground I can find anymore is holy ground, that’s all I’ve got left, and I’ve run out of desecration, you know. It’s a very peculiar place to be, but I know my good fortune when I see it now, and that’s what it is. Tell me a bit about you. What’s something that you do every single day in order to be the guy, don’t you above myself since I sat down, I know. You know, biography is not that interesting, it’s full of details that are fighting with each other to turn into a story.

1:55:30 I don’t, I’m not that enamored by it. I mean, there’s a few signal features, you know, I tried to get into the priesthood of something, but I’d never been to church, I was missing it too early, and that was crazy, but it showed you something was up obviously at age 18 or so, and also me not going to church, something was up too. So how do you not go to church but still have this thing? And I nearly died of spinal meningitis when I was three or four, and I remember it very distinctly and that’s been with me ever since.

1:56:02 But I was conceived as the ash of the Second World War was descending over the world. That’s an enormous influence that I’ve never heard acknowledged by anybody of my generation. You were conceived in the aftermath of something that was never supposed to happen again, right, and the victorious nations were broken, and civilization of the Western variety as we once fantasized about it was the final casualty, man, and it’s never coming back. Those are my formative days, right, and none of them were personal, but they all come, of course, through the family line and so forth, and, you know, second-generation immigrants from England and so on, class consciousness all over the damn place, but nobody knows what class is, but everybody’s got it, you know.

1:56:51 My grandmother trying to marry up, so she marries my grandfather, worked in the town tannery, that’s not marrying up, but and so on, you know, these things, all they flirt with you and they pretend to be determinants, but what they are is, I don’t know, they’re mandatory details that you temporarily hang up the clothing of your decision-making on the pegs, you know, they’re the armature upon which you drape your cloth of great intent that you’ve woven your time of physical mastery. I thought there, I’m glad they’re there, but I don’t press them into too much duty, you know. What was the best day of your life and the worst?

1:57:42 The worst? Wow, there’s some contenders. I mean, I got divorced, man, I hated that, because I’m a lifer, you know, I’m very old-fashioned, and as you could tell, wasn’t my idea. I mean, that was as hard as it gets. And now Samuel Beckett wrote a book, but the book’s impenetrable so I can’t recommend it, but the title is remarkable.

1:58:10 The title is, I can’t go on, I’ll go on, and there’s great wisdom in it if you don’t interrupt the thing by saying, I can’t go on still, yet, or yet I’ll go on, or but I’ll go on, or and. But he didn’t say any of that, so the title is saying everything you need to know: there will be times you won’t be able to go on, and if you don’t think that’s happened yet, wait. So this is true, and if you don’t credit that, you’re a lunatic, right? And the other half of the sentence, or the title, is I’ll go on, but what he doesn’t say is I can go on to counteract the first one.

1:58:52 So what does it mean? It seems to me that if you live long enough you might craft the ability to go on not being able to, and these two things happening at the same time, and they don’t cancel each other out, they don’t balance, it’s this ragged kind of skillfulness that you’d never seek out for yourself, and the good days contribute to it and the heartbroken days contribute to it in their fashion, and if, as long as you’re not practicing kind of psychic apartheid and cherry-picking from amongst your experiences, you might be a reliable person someday, you know, but you’re not doing ethnic cleansing amongst your influences, you know. You say I’m an innkeeper, everybody gets in hard on the furniture, God knows, and I’m not going to make a cent of this deal, but they’d be homeless otherwise, and that means they would be set in somebody else’s house for some kind of sanctuary, so I can’t do that, so I have to find a way to welcome them.

1:59:56 That’s not evading what you asked, you know, and it’s not turning a silk purse into, excuse me, a devastation into a secret victory. There’s no secret victories when you go down, you know, but knowing how to be wrecked on schedule is its own skillfulness, and I think I’ve, you know, I had an old teacher, God bless him, I miss him, just by everyday way he used to say about himself, he’d look at me dead in the eye and he’d say, look, man, I don’t look like much, but I am hard to kill. I love that.

2:00:32 I’m getting there. What does that mean? Well, first of all, he was lying about the first part because he was devastatingly good-looking and the ladies really knew it and the men knew it too, you know, but he was hard to kill, meaning his frailty was not his weakness. He didn’t have weakness that way, but he had frailties. He was an older black man in a very contentious time in American history.

2:01:07 Oh yeah, he had frailties and he had angers that were not his own, and sure, and I was let in on all that stuff, and why a white kid from Canada was including that I can’t begin to tell you, but I was his band and he was a storyteller, we traveled all over the place. Best days of my life included all that time with him, though I never knew it then, I didn’t know what it was, but it was an undeclared apprenticeship of the medieval variety, and he was a master, but his mastery was in the direction of tragedy. That means he wasn’t in control of tragedy, he was a practitioner of tragedy, you know, and he was a child of his time, and somewhere in there he gave me the assignment of me being a child of mine, not his, his child, but that my own time’s woodcraft, the mandate by which I lived, that’s the example that he gave me, and it was a tyrannous example because if you’re not doing that, your life is a, you know, sack of grievance.

2:02:14 But he stole something from me, and it was any ability I would have had to proceed as if I’d never seen the real thing. He took that and never had it since. I have seen the real thing, you know, in the form of an old black guy, and think whatever was responsible for that, because I never wanted to be a young black guy, but that’s not what happened, but I got to see the incandescent example of a human being utterly claimed by the travails and the turmoils and the tenderness of his time, and that’s thievery, because now I don’t get to b**** and moan about my little allotment, and that’s my fortune.

2:03:10 So you see, my affliction at the time has become my ritual now. It’s powerful mentorship. What a deal. Yeah, would it to be stolen from and to have that be your most precious possession, you just have to bow because however that happened. So I didn’t let me into the priesthood, but I ended up with him in the same week, that’s literally what happened, I met him in the same week.

2:03:39 Well, you’re not in control of your story, man, but if you’re lucky your story’s telling you, you know, and this is me pretending I’m telling it, but I’m being told. What scares you? Falling asleep at the switch, not to switch, fallen asleep with the thread that’s tied to the tiller and because of fatigue letting it go? Yeah, I’d rather hand it to somebody, but I can well imagine, you know, this just be getting angry or despondent, you know, of being on the road like this and now and not being able to drink the wine, you know, of what I’ve dreamt, but the dream’s pretty good, and I’m not soothing myself by saying it, but I do.

2:04:52 I wouldn’t want to betray what was entrusted to me, that’s for sure. It’s not always clear what it means, you know, to hold it dear, I should say. I kinda have to figure it out as I’m going along. So all these questions you’ve been asking me, have I been asked them before? Yeah, but I’m sitting here across from you now at this age in London, England, stranger in a strange land, about to go off, et cetera, et cetera, and I figure you deserve, because of your kindness in asking me to come here, everything I can manage, not holding anything in reserve for tomorrow, and that’s his example.

2:05:38 So I’m just carrying his equipment, bank, you know, across the finish line, and if we ever see each other again, say yeah, I did, I did the best I think on a good day. What keeps you awake at night? Nothing. Nothing. No, when I come off a gig I’m pretty, I get a lot of mojo, so it’s not easy to go to sleep, and oftentimes I’ve been looking at the hotel window at 2:00 in the morning for sure, but that doesn’t keep me up, that’s, that’s part of the deal and I don’t mind it, but not, but I’m not, I’m not beset, you know, I’m not fine, but nothing keeps me awake.

2:06:28 Stephen, I always ask just a few questions at the end. I might ask you, I could give you some type of magic piece of technology, a phone where you could ring up the 20-year-old Stephen and tell that man a few words. No, about what would you say to him? I don’t need a phone, I do it all the time. Yeah, yeah, but it’s not like I’ve taken instruction from that punk.

2:06:49 You know, I remember enough to allow him the junior position in the proceedings, in the family business, you know, he didn’t have voting rights, you know, but he’s got a position, he’s got a stipend, you know, and he’s not banished, and he could use a wardrobe upgrade from time to time, but that’s not what he spends his money on, and I’m glad he was there, you know, and I don’t disown, I mean, I’m speaking of in the third person now. Just answer the question that way. I mean, I’m not nostalgic though, I don’t really think about the past at all or what I’ve done, it’s the things I’ve written or the books or any movies, er, I don’t.

2:07:30 I don’t look at them, I don’t read them, it’s a calm quips, Facebook and all that, and I like that’s ridiculous, I can’t think of the name, but I don’t, so I wait, I wouldn’t take the phone, you know, but I let him know, I guess, that there’s some continuity, you know, which is not slavish, it’s just, you know, I remember how impossible everything seemed then, how deeply unlikely a sane life that didn’t kill me That’s where the heart attacks come from, from not being out to do something every day that you secretly know kills the world, and as women occupied positions of greater, you know, responsibilities and so on in the workplace, they’re gonna find out the cancer didn’t come from having testicles, the cancer came from that, high incidences of cancer and so on, it came from that, and there they won’t have a different experience of it, it came from them not being able, because the whole architecture of the economy is that the reward system is for plunder, the dominator culture, yeah, for unconscious, mindless growth.

2:09:22 You can’t get underneath that, and anybody who assumes senior positions, that arrangement ain’t gonna change the thing, no matter what you think. It’s got to end, you know. I’m gonna say anarchy, not if you know what the word means. The word arch means the foundation stones underneath the thing that holds everything up, so it’s literally a piece of architecture, if it’s part, you don’t see them, it’s the stones under the surface, that’s what elders are. So anarchy is the absence of them, it’s not willy-nilly destructiveness, it’s the compromise of their function.

2:10:02 We’re in that time, there’s no doubt. So there’s a lot of work to do, right, and a lot of it’s not gonna get done, and a lot of stuff’s gonna have to end. And, you know, W. H. Auden made a ghastly observation, very accurate: we would rather be defeated than be persuaded.

2:10:23 That’s what I see coming, and look, I can talk to you all this time in the teeth of that storm without selling despair. How? Because I’m not despairing about something that’s coming anyway. Okay, so then what’s my gig? My gig is to be a child of what’s coming anyway, not to be the alternative to it.

2:10:51 So if you want to know what’s happening, oh no, that’s not a good formulation. So, like, I got my finger on the pulse, but I’m lucky enough to be around a lot, you could say, and so my privilege is also my responsibility. Right, I see a lot of what’s going on, a lot of countries, and people are off the record with me a lot, you know, and that’s what you’re hearing me tabulate in, and how I’m speaking about these things, and my responsibility is to testify faithfully to what I’ve seen, and I’m clear about it, and I work like mad to see clearly, you know, and the cost is significant, but that’s why I can sleep, though I don’t say that with any satisfaction.

2:11:47 It’s very sorrowful, what I see, and I got kids who are going to see way more destruction than I’ll see, but if it’s soul and you’re an older person, was your job, when kids lose track of what soul looks like, they have to be able to see it in how you carry yourself, because you become, not how it all could be, you become the way it is, and they can plot their course, but you become kind of the pole star by virtue of your faithful witness to how it is without any recourse to assuring them that it’s all working out. Last question: to that twenty-year-old that’s watching, listening out there, it kind of absorbed all of this stuff, advice to them? You must get asked advice at your events.

2:12:40 Yeah, and I don’t. You knew I was going to say I don’t dispense any advice, I don’t have any, I don’t have any, ain’t got no should, and I’m very proud of the fact. You can’t franchise out what I’m talking to you about, you can’t turn it into a movement, you know, because it crumbles under its own weight when you try to turn this into the next fix, you know. So I’m not a very good teacher that way, because I’m not pointing like this, do this, see that. I suppose my gesture’s more like this, the best of my ability, this is how it seems.

2:13:17 I’m not trying to sell you anything. Can you have a full life without this? I’ll bet. What, I recommend it? Not really, that’s enough.

2:13:29 I don’t wish them luck, I don’t wish them anything, but I’m still here, and until that’s not true anymore, I’m not blinking that I can look them right in the eye and say, and as it happens I’m getting paid, well, that’s a trifecta. Like I’m in the clubhouse and I got the garland already, so you don’t hear me complain, but I always remember what Leonard Cohen, bless his bones, what his old teacher said to him when they both were getting old. He said to him, Leonard, the older you get, the lonelier your life becomes, greater love you need, not greater love you need, to make sure you’re not lonely.

2:14:20 He said, lonely your life becomes regardless, so what’s the love for? Well, greater love you might need to be in the teeth of the lonelier life becomes, neither love yourself. Do you think is what he was trying to say? I don’t know, man, I wasn’t there, but Cohen’s output is informed by, you know, what he’s, I mean, he’s got a line for everything. Oh my love, be not afraid, we are so lightly here.

2:14:59 It is in love that we are made, in love we disappear. Your servant here, he has been told to say it clear, and say it cold: it’s over, it ain’t going any further, and now the wheel of heaven stops, you feel the devil’s riding crop. Get ready for the future, it is murder. Things are gonna slide, slide in all directions, won’t be nothing, nothing you can measure anymore, and the blizzard, the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold, and it’s overturned the order of the soul.

2:15:38 And when they said repent, repent, I wonder what they meant. That’ll do. Last one. Well, we’re sitting, we’re drinking and we’re dancing, and the band is really happening, and the place is dead, is heaven on a Saturday night, and my very close companions got me fallin’, got me laughing, she’s a hundred but she’s wearing something tight, and I lift my glass to the awful truth that you can’t reveal to the ears of youth, except to say it isn’t worth a dime, and the whole damn place goes crazy twice, and it’s once for the devil and it’s once for Christ, and the boss don’t like these dizzy heights, so we’re busted in the blinding lights of closing time.

2:16:31 That’s almost where I am. So I like ending with somebody else’s take on things. I appreciate those poems a lot. Statement, yeah, you do. And I appreciate your time here today.

2:16:43 I got very excited when you told me in the very beginning that this isn’t popular stuff, because I like talking about stuff that’s not popular. I like things that aren’t lessons and aren’t sound bites, so I appreciate what you do, appreciate the message. Thank you. I appreciate the fact that it’s hard to understand it the first few times and you’ve got to go deep and kind of be with it, and, you know, I’m probably gonna be thinking about this stuff for quite a while.

2:17:07 Me too, but I’m glad to be actively thinking about my death and not moving it off to something, you know, glorifying it or whatever. I’m sure I’m still doing it, but I’m just thinking about it more now, and I appreciate you posing these questions. Very valuable stuff. Thank you. Thanks so much, sir.

2:17:26 Until next time.