Really Deep Thoughts

“Diana-LAEV”

I pause, realize that she has long left that hospital room and is now deceased, and delete the entry. The millisecond of the cellular phone’s processor losing the number happens, the phone screen mopped up by a sopping digital rag. The completion sees pixels fading into the center of the screen, similar to when a text message has been sent. Only this time, a trace of Diana has vanished. That’s when I realize that this is just the beginning. My friend L.A. has a book of hand-written and typed poetry of Diana’s. She wrote some of the poems when she was in college, in the sixties. The most recent one was written in July of last year. The other night I leafed through the binder, identifying with some lines of poetry and finding others quaintly amusing. I didn’t know that Diana wrote poetry. For now, we have this artifact to prove that she did. To represent her thoughts and hopes. To paint a picture of who she was. Yet this binder will not last forever. Just as my cellular phone entry disappeared into the ether, so will the poetry binder meet its end. And another piece of Diana will vanish. Like that. Her friends will forget details of times spent together. Her students will forget things that she taught. Of course, these people will take a part of Diana with them throughout their whole lives, until they die. But they will die. And with them, so will those pieces of Diana.

In June I will leave the school where I teach. The traces of my existence will slowly fade until none of the students at the school will be aware that I was ever there. This is okay. What I’m more concerned about are the seeds that I can only hope I have planted in the minds of my students.

I know that the voice that speaks through each of us is an ancient voice. Whenever we speak with someone of an older generation, what they share with us has been shaped by their conversations with those of older generations and older generations and older generations back to the beginning of human time. No person has existed without communicating with a person of the generation before them. In this way, we each speak the knowledge of the first humans capable of speech . . . and of those that followed. And, in this way, we each have ancient wisdom to share with the children on the planet. What I have shared with my students has been one part a fleeting snapshot of the state of chemistry and physics and another part a window into a vast reservoir of thought and creativity. I hope that the seeds that have been planted were those that will serve us all best to be carried into the future.

It’s similar to the blood of our ancestors flowing through us and into our children. Life, itself, is a message we are given and that we pass along. Richard Dawkins refers to this in his book River Out of Eden (which, once upon a time, my high school biology teacher assigned (thank you, Mr. Gabler)). The sanctity of (all) life is most apparent when we consider the large numbers of beings that were not successful in reproducing. So many streams of our river have wandered off to dwindle and then evaporate away. Yet we are all here (and all living creatures are here) because our ancestors were on the successful branch(es) of the river of life which, as I’ve mentioned, we may pass on to our children, if we have children.

Regarding this, some may say that the biological urge to reproduce is what makes our species successful; that it’s a good thing. I’ve been of the opinion lately that the queering of the population, leading to fewer reproductive and to more adoptive choices, is the best thing for us now. It doesn’t seem biologically positive to populate until we are barely holding onto this planet, worried for our future and squeezed into oblivion. Right now is the perfect time to make non-reproductive unions and welcome children that we may not have spoken life into, but whom we can speak wisdom to.

I can still hear Diana’s words in my mind. I thank her for the coded wisdom she has passed to me in her life anecdotes and her fears about death and her self-damnation for the cancer that took her life. Her parents, grandmother and her teachers have spoken to me in her voice. I bow to them all and those that came before them for having sent the messages that I have received and begun to decode.