Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness Read Online Free PDF Page B

smallest part; let man impair not the dignity of decomposition! Tenderly pressing with both hands the liver like a stone pillow sewn into his belly, he entrusted the acting executor of the will with the additional, patient task, so as to ensure that nothing interfered with the Copernican rotation in which the cancer lodged in his liver, at the peak of its enterprise, would terminate all life functions and begin at once to decompose, ofprotecting his injured liver from premature cremation and antiseptic destruction by doctors who retained the experimental spirit of their intern days.
    As he thought about that part of himself that would remain in this world after death, he developed an appreciation for the custom of platform burial, in which birds or the wind were allowed to take their course. He also considered what he had seen along the Ganges at the Hindus’ sacred Benares, placid corpses decomposing from inside and bloated up like sunfish floating half-submerged down the swift, muddy river, and reflected once again, admiringly, that the wise Hindus were correct, that theirs was a solution befitting the meditative tribe among all the countless tribes of humanity that had meditated longest and most accurately in history, in the climate best suited to meditation.
    [[When you traveled to India did you really see corpses floating in the river at Benares? asks the “acting executor of the will.” Well now, when I sensed the difficulty in my liver was incurable, I declared my freedom from all bonds connecting me to the real world that was holding me dangling from its fingertips, so there’s no telling whether I’ve actually experienced what I say, correspondence with reality in itself has never meant anything anyway, “he” says. The truth is, I’m heading straight back toward my
Happy Days
in the past, and if bringing some detail in that past sharply to the surface requires it, I’m prepared to alter the present reality however I please. For example, when I’m trying to penetrate deeply into memories of fights I had as a child, I make myself believe that the thirty-five-year-old lying here in bed with a sick liver, and not only his liver but nearly every vital organ smashed and broken, is aprofessional bantamweight boxer long retired. When I set my internal time machine all the way back to myself fighting the older kids in the valley twenty-five years ago, with the boxing tricks I learned from the cadets who came to my village to tap pine tree roots for oil, my longing to become a soldier and also a boxer revives in me along with the nearly epileptic activity of the brain cells in my feverish young head, and it seems impossible that I could ever have chosen any profession other than boxing right down to this day. If I push myself too hard, a squirt in a torn, dirty, brown undershirt too large for him and short pants easily twice his size that he folded over at the sides and tied with a rope, fighting, with spit and blood whistling between his teeth, against the big kids who came to steal a look at
a certain party’s
excrement, his face swollen into a full moon, might just leap from the core of my body and wallop me as I languish here in this sloppy bed, “he” says.]]
    Inasmuch as the only limitation he would accept with regard to the present was that he was on his deathbed with a diseased liver, there was nothing to prevent him from postulating any life for himself he chose. And it would have been difficult to think up a set of circumstances better suited to catapulting a consciousness in quest of liberation in the direction of all freedom than lying in a deathbed with a liver like a rock he could scarcely encompass with both arms.
    Which was not to say he felt at the same liberty to choose from any number of possibilities those
Happy Days
which were the focus of his past: he was determined that this must not happen. Were he to recall those
Happy Days
as if they were a variety of past sufficiently vague to permit any