The House of Who Podcast (S4 Ep2): Entropy, a love letter
Transcript
Hi and welcome to the House of Who podcast, formerly known as Artist CEO podcast. I am your host, Shan Free here at house of who we talk about. Basically, who are you? Who am I, who are we? And why does it matter? This is the place where we still talk about business and art and the integration of the two, how creativity concerns business and in fact, how business can be works of art, we can get all philosophical soon, don't you worry? But even the question I think therefore, I am, is that true? Is it because we think get ready, we're expanding what it means to be?
Entropy, a love letter:
With the hot swollen fruit of summer hovering in perfection, the air thick, life static, a languid timelessness around – I can’t help but see the first green pear drop;
The final hold-outs of the pink rose petals turning brown; The old Lotus tree in my front yard, already dropping leaves; The clematis and nasturtiums, crispy.
On a text thread, I mention the word “Fall" to some friends. There is an urgent and swift reaction:
“fall?! I thought it was still summer“
“yeah don’t leave us summer“
“definitely summer!”
Doesn’t fall begin in September? I ask earnestly. I have come down with Covid, and by the time I’m done isolating & masking, it will be August 28. In my mind, we’re cusping Fall.
I try to be present with the abundance and vibrancy of the summer season. But I can’t not see everything existing at the same time: summer inherently contains winter, as life inherently indicates death. And while the first half of my life felt like a time of building—
Building a body! A brain! A personality! Friendships, relationships! A career! Passion! Hobbies! Home! A business! A personal brand!!!!!!!!!!!
… The second half of my life, roughly estimated, so far has been much less about building and more about… maintaining—
Maintaining my health, Weight, Home, Business, Sanity, The garden, the goddamn clean dishes!
Maybe it’s just me, but entropy is a much more familiar houseguest than I remember.
She’s always been around, our pal, but life before just had all this momentum, you see, so I couldn’t see her. Through the years, the forces of disillusion just little gnats barely able to keep up with me in my very busy, very fast, very important LIFE.
But more than building and maintaining my life, recently I have taken to enjoying, well, enjoying my life. Why such difficulty “just” enjoying life before?
Contentment wasn’t enough: “So much to do: I mean, there’s so much wrong with everything: the world! our lives! that asshole over there! myself. Must be fixed, changed, improved.”
Either way, it’s effort. Grasping at better, or Resisting the perpetual and relentless licking of entropy, that big wet tongue dissolving our ice cream lives lick (slurp!) by lick (slurp!)
I didn’t mean for that to sound sexual, but maybe it’s worth having a love affair with decay.
* * *
I went to the dentist and was appalled when I was told the cap, put on my front tooth when I was a child after bashing into the concrete wall of a swimming pool, might need to be replaced. But it’s been there forever, I said. Well, it’s been there for 35 years, my dentist replied. It’s just porcelain. They usually only last 15 years.
(touches front tooth mournfully) “I resist this truth of which you speak” I thought, my breath tightening.
But when we deny life, we deny ourselves.
* * *
My friend’s cat is dying and she watches him die. There’s not much so can do. My cat died, many years ago. I was a young adult and my mom called me home to be with her. I rushed home and held her in my hands and sobbed and said all the things I wanted to say to her and gave her cat reiki and lit a candle and held a vigil and promised her I’d stay by her side. It was dramatic and heart-wrenching and full of pathos. Her breaths were labored and I committed to each one.
10 hours later she was still breathing, inching toward death, but nonetheless breathing. I realized in that moment that death is miles long. Maybe years long. Maybe a lifetime in length.
Her dying was so incrementally slow it was as if she was expelling herself molecule by molecule and it was tens of thousands of exhales before she finally exhaled herself into nothingness. Maybe we’re doing that from the moment we are born. I was told a woman is born with all the eggs she’ll ever have, determined right there at birth her capacity to give life, and I wonder if the same breaths.
And while we can leave this plane in one impressive flash, very often it is a slow gradual decomposition over many many years.
* * *
I’ve watched a few beings die: I held my grandmother, then my grandfather, then my own father in my arms as they each exhaled their last moments. An honor to bear witness. Each time, I sat as still and loving as I could until they passed their last breath. It was hard to tell which one was the last one. The breaths so elongated lifetimes pass between them, the difference between breathing and not breathing almost imperceptible, like ice melting on a cold day.
in…….. Pause….. Out….. pause… silence… long silence….. Timelessness. The end. BEAT but then nope! Here comes another one, just as slow and elongated as the one before, except maybe a micron longer, breath turning into a sine wave with peaks and troughs stretching out so long almost a straight line. But not. There is still motion. And as long as there is motion there is life.
What is life and death but a long protracted dance with entropy? And what a beautiful thing to be designated the person to watch you die. No other guaranteed witness but you, you get to. What an assignment: isn’t that the most beautiful assignment: to be your own doula into death? And we can start now. To sit so still, so loving, as we take our last breaths:
On average a person living to 80 will take about 700 million breaths. What do we do with them? 100 million of them left now, or is it 1 million, 100,000 of them, 10,000 of them left, now 1000. One hundred to go. Just 10, until just one of them left. Which one?
Do we resist some of them, embrace them?
What about the breath at the moment I’m typing away at that fucking email I had to write – you know the one– when suddenly the pear outside my window drops? Or the one where the dentist shoves her drill into my mouth? Or breath number 5627 as I watch Patches come into my life as a kitten, I’m 12 years old, or the one as she passes away two decades later? When I watch the caregiver cut my grandmother’s clothes and bathe her body with a sponge? When my grandfather’s hand softens into mine? When I knew there were no more coming for my dad? The hundred or so we’ve spent here together just now?
Letting each one fall from our lips, just so.