The Siesta (1884)

Within a day or two of getting home from vacation, my body stopped cooperating with me.

There was no fever, no head cold, none of the familiar signs that make illness easy to name. Instead, there was diarrhea—persistent, exhausting, and severe enough that after more than a week I began to understand how thoroughly something so ordinary can dismantle a person. I was not merely uncomfortable. I was depleted. Physically, certainly, but mentally as well. The days narrowed around the basic mechanics of the body: drinking enough water, trying to eat, wondering what would stay in me, calculating how far I could safely venture from a bathroom.

Eventually, I asked my brother to take me to urgent care. Tests were ordered, and I am still waiting for the final result that may confirm cyclospora, which at the moment seems a likely explanation. Until then, the diagnosis remains uncertain. The experience itself does not.

For more than a week, my body became the most important thing in the room.

That is an odd experience because, when the body is functioning well, we are remarkably good at forgetting about it. I do not usually think about digestion while teaching a class or hydration while sitting in a meeting. I do not consciously evaluate whether my body can be trusted before leaving the house. The healthy body recedes into the background of consciousness. It carries us quietly while our attention moves elsewhere.

Illness reverses that relationship.

The body moves to the foreground and refuses to leave.

Every decision becomes embodied. Can I go there? How long will I be gone? Where is the nearest bathroom? Should I eat this? Have I had enough to drink? Am I actually getting better, or is this simply a good hour? The world becomes smaller because the body has become larger.

That is what brought me to Ramon Martí i Alsina’s The Siesta (La migdiada) from 1884.

There is almost nothing graceful about the man sleeping in the chair. He has not arranged himself into some elegant pose of repose. His head has fallen sideways. One arm hangs heavily toward the floor. His legs cross without refinement. His body seems to have surrendered itself completely to the upholstered chair beneath him.

Martí i Alsina was working within the nineteenth-century realist tradition, and there is something almost defiant about the ordinariness of the scene. This is not heroic sleep. It is not the idealized rest of a mythological figure or the carefully composed languor of an aristocratic portrait. The man has simply become tired enough to stop performing himself for the world.

The chair is holding him now.

That is what I recognize in the painting.

Illness has a way of stripping away the fiction of control. We like to imagine ourselves as minds directing bodies, rational agents moving purposefully through the world. Western philosophy has spent centuries wrestling with that division between mind and body, but gastrointestinal illness offers a rather inelegant contribution to the debate: sometimes the body simply wins.

There is no reasoning with it.

No amount of discipline can negotiate with an intestine that has decided otherwise.

And there is something humbling about discovering how quickly the structures of ordinary life depend upon the quiet cooperation of the body. Work, travel, conversation, concentration, sleep—all the things I usually treat as matters of intention suddenly became conditional. I could want to do something and still be unable to do it.

The experience made me feel helpless in a way I had not anticipated.

Yet recovery has been equally interesting because it has not arrived dramatically.

There was no morning when I woke and thought, I am well.

Instead, normality returned almost unnoticed.

Two nights ago, I slept through the night.

Then I did it again.

Water began staying in my system.

My appetite began behaving more normally.

Today, I went to work.

That last sentence looks almost absurdly small after more than a week of illness. Going to work is among the most ordinary things I do. I have done it thousands of times. Yet today it felt consequential because I could sit through a meeting without quietly calculating how quickly I could escape the room if necessary.

For the first time in days, I was somewhere without constantly monitoring my body.

And perhaps that is what feeling better actually means.

Not that the body suddenly feels extraordinary, but that it becomes ordinary again.

Psychologically, there is an important difference between pleasure and relief. Pleasure gives us something. Relief takes something away. Pleasure announces itself; relief often arrives through absence. The pain is gone. The anxiety has quieted. The threat has receded. Something that occupied consciousness simply stops demanding attention.

We notice relief by noticing what we are no longer noticing.

That is the feeling I find in The Siesta.

The sleeping man does not look triumphant. Nothing has been conquered. There is no victory pose and no celebration. He has simply reached a state in which he can surrender his weight.

That word—weight—seems important.

For the past week, everything felt heavy. My body was heavy. Decisions were heavy. Leaving the house was heavy. Even the possibility of having to explain why I could not do something carried weight.

Now, finally, some of that weight has lifted.

Looking at Martí i Alsina’s sleeping man, I am struck by the trust implicit in his posture. To sleep that deeply in a chair requires a temporary abandonment of vigilance. His muscles loosen. His hand drops. His head falls. He allows the chair to support what he no longer needs to hold upright himself.

Perhaps that is the deepest relief I feel tonight.

Not simply that I am no longer sick, or at least no longer as sick, but that I am beginning to trust my body again.

I can drink a glass of water without wondering what will happen next.

I can leave the house.

I can go to work.

I can sleep.

None of these things is remarkable until they become impossible.

There is a tendency after illness to speak grandly about gratitude, as though recovery must produce some permanent enlightenment about the preciousness of life. I am not sure I feel anything quite so dramatic. Mostly, I feel relieved.

And perhaps relief deserves more respect than we give it.

It is the quiet pleasure of returning to the unnoticed.

Tonight, The Siesta does not look to me like a painting of laziness or even merely of sleep. It looks like a painting of surrender after exhaustion—the moment when vigilance is no longer necessary and the body can finally become heavy without being burdensome.

The man sleeps.

The chair holds him.

And after more than a week of feeling helpless inside my own body, I finally understand something about the luxury of simply letting go.

J. Cooper Armstrong

Dear journal,

It was a hard day for the Armstrong family. This afternoon, my parents’ dog, Cooper, crossed the rainbow bridge surrounded by the people who loved him.

Tonight, I am sitting here with my four cats, thinking about the strange amount of weight an animal can carry in a human life. They are not very large, most of them. They occupy a corner of the couch, a place at the foot of the bed, a particular patch of sunlight on the floor. Their bowls sit against a wall. Their toys collect beneath furniture. Their hair finds its way onto nearly everything we own. Yet somehow they come to occupy an enormous amount of space.

Perhaps we notice just how much only when that space becomes empty.

I have long thought that one of the best ways to understand personhood is through personality. We tend to reserve the word person for human beings, and biologically and legally there are obvious reasons for doing so. But in the more ordinary sense—the sense that matters around a dinner table or in a living room—personhood seems bound up with the experience of encountering someone who is distinctly themselves.

And, boy, have I known some animals who were distinctly themselves.

Anyone who has lived closely with an animal knows this almost instinctively. They have preferences and habits. They have fears, grudges, enthusiasms, and peculiar little rituals. They develop relationships differently with different people. They learn our routines and, in time, become part of those routines themselves. We learn the meaning of a particular bark, meow, stare, paw, tail movement, or trip toward the door. Entire conversations take place without anything resembling human language.

Eventually, you do not simply have a dog or a cat. You have Cooper. You have Cricket, Hopper, Louie, or Betty. The species becomes almost incidental. What matters is the individual.

That individuality creates relationship, and relationship creates a kind of personness.

For nearly twelve years, Cooper was part of the daily life of my parents and my brother. Twelve years is a substantial piece of a human life. It is enough time for jobs to change, people to age, houses to change, holidays to accumulate, and ordinary days to become years without anyone quite noticing how quickly it is happening. Through all of that, Cooper was there.

At some point, the phrase “my parents’ dog” stopped being an adequate description.

In many ways, he became my brother.

There is something slightly absurd about saying that, and yet I mean it. Families have always been more complicated than the categories we use to describe them. A family is ultimately a collection of relationships, and animals enter those relationships in ways that can be remarkably deep. They wait for us to come home. They sit with us when we are sick. They learn who sneaks them food and who enforces the rules. They appear in photographs of birthdays and Christmas mornings without anyone deliberately arranging for them to be there. They grow older while we grow older.

Then, one day, they are gone.

That is when their physical smallness becomes almost impossible to reconcile with the size of their absence.

There will be places in my parents’ house where Cooper should be. There will be sounds that cause someone, for a fraction of a second, to expect him. There will be routines that no longer have a reason to happen. A door will open without someone waiting on the other side. A familiar place on the floor will remain empty. Perhaps most painfully, life will continue behaving as though nothing remarkable has happened.

But something remarkable has happened.

A relationship has ended.

Or, perhaps more accurately, it has changed into memory.

Sitting here tonight with four cats moving through my own house, I find myself unusually conscious of them. The little sounds they make. The places they choose to sleep. The particular ways each one asks for attention. Most days these things are simply part of the background architecture of my life. Tonight they seem heavier.

That may be one of the gifts animals give us, even in death. They remind us that love does not require language, shared biology, or even membership in the same species. It requires recognition. Over time, we look at another living creature and begin to recognize someone there. They recognize something in us, too. And somehow, across that enormous divide, a relationship forms.

We make room for one another.

Cooper made his place in the Armstrong family for nearly twelve years. Today, surrounded by that family, he left it.

The space he leaves behind will feel enormous for a while.

I suppose that is simply another measure of how much of it he once filled.

Always, 

Dave

Baby Boy

Amazing Grace

Dear journal, 

At four o’clock, almost every working day, my phone would ring.

It was Grandma.

The timing was remarkably consistent. I would be finishing whatever needed finishing, gathering my things, and preparing to leave work when she would call. Most days she was sitting outside on her porch. I could hear the ordinary sounds of her world through the phone, but more than anything I remember the wind chimes. They would sound somewhere behind her voice, stirred occasionally by the breeze while she told me about her day, asked about mine, or simply talked because four o’clock was the time she called.

The calls were rarely about anything especially important—the price of potatoes, her daily report on The Price Is Right, what she had seen on the news, a list of things she wanted from the store, and, usually, to tell me she had baked something. It was her way of saying she wanted me to stop by on my way home.

The calls were part of the architecture of everyday life, one of those habits that becomes so ordinary that you hardly recognize it as precious while you are living inside it. Work ended. Grandma called. I drove home. Tomorrow we would do it again.

Until one day we did not.

Today I am sitting on my own porch, and the wind is moving through the chimes around me. They do not ring together so much as answer one another. A low note sounds from one side of the porch, followed by something lighter from another. Then everything becomes quiet for a few seconds before the breeze begins again.

Some of these chimes once hung on Grandma’s porch.

I had bought them for her over the years and replaced them when weather and time finally did what weather and time always do. Her favorite was a set from Woodstock Chimes tuned to “Amazing Grace.” There was something fitting about that particular melody hanging outside her house, even more so because “Amazing Grace” was one of the songs we sang at Grandpa’s funeral. What began as a gift eventually accumulated a history I could never have anticipated when I bought it.

Now the chimes hang here.

When Grandma died, they found their way from her porch to mine. I suppose that is how inheritance often works. We tend to imagine inheritance as the important things people leave behind: property, photographs, jewelry, furniture, documents. But sometimes what survives is much smaller. A coffee cup. A recipe. A phrase someone always used. The knowledge of exactly how a room smelled. Or the sound of wind moving through pieces of metal hanging from a porch roof through a phone.

Friday we will bury Grandma’s ashes beside Grandpa.

There is a finality in writing that sentence that I have not quite felt during the past year. Death itself rarely provides the neat ending that funerals seem designed to promise. People die, arrangements are made, possessions are sorted, papers are signed, and eventually everyone returns to work. The calendar continues advancing with an almost insulting indifference.

Friday will not change that. It will not finish grief or close some invisible door behind me. I know better than that.

But I do think it will provide a kind of closure.

Grandma will be beside Grandpa again, at least in the physical geography we create for the dead. There will be a place where both of their names belong together. For me, that matters. After a year in which her absence has gradually changed from an event into a fact, placing her ashes beside him feels like completing one final obligation of love.

And then life will continue.

That seems especially apparent this week because another school year is approaching. There are rooms to prepare, plans to make, routines to establish, and students who will soon arrive carrying lives and problems entirely their own. The rhythms of work that have structured so much of my adult life are beginning again.

There is something strange about preparing for beginnings while preparing for a burial.

Perhaps, though, that is not strange at all.

Life rarely gives us clean divisions between endings and beginnings. We bury people and go back to work. We grieve while buying groceries. We remember the dead while answering emails. New students arrive while old voices remain somewhere in our heads. We carry what has ended directly into whatever comes next.

I think that is what the wind chimes have become for me.

They are not a monument. I do not sit here pretending that Grandma is somehow speaking through them. The sound is only metal, wood, string, and moving air. But memory does not require anything supernatural to be powerful. The breeze moves through the same chimes that once sounded behind Grandma’s voice at four o’clock in the afternoon, and for a moment two different porches occupy the same space.

I can hear her porch from mine.

Soon the school year will begin. Four o’clock will come again, just as it has thousands of times before. I will finish my work, gather my things, and head home.

My phone will not ring.

That absence will remain.

But perhaps that is one of the quieter lessons of getting older: continuing does not mean leaving people behind. Sometimes continuing means discovering how much of them came with us.

The wind moves again as I sit here, and somewhere above me the chimes begin their lazy conversation.

One note.

Then another.

Then another.

And life, indifferent and beautiful, continues.

Always, 

Dave

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