As the one who suggested that Wednesday Matters be a “last lecture” series, Mark Kunkel offered his Deathbed Desiderata. He began by showing film segments of the last lectures of B. F. Skinner, Bruce McConkie, and Heinz Kohut, and pointing out a common thread among them - that the individuals all passed away within ten days of their speeches, which seem to be “spoken in response to a certain undeniable responsibility, and a certain suspension of temporality and consequence. So today I would like to stand before you as naked and risking and bet-placing as time and integrity and circumstances and chutzpah and cojones might allow, and sketch what would be a last lecture of mine.”
Noting that he is “not anxious, just really
alert,” Mark then offered some backdrops for his speech:
- “I am doing something very uncharacteristic
of me,” opting to read a prepared script “for various reasons, including
perhaps undeniably some self-monitoring of what might otherwise be spoken,
but mostly a need of clarity and the press for urgency in the air”;
- “The last lecture is a perilous and terrifying
hypothetical. I am almost but not quite paralyzed by it. But
still, it moves”;
- “Last lectures are for the wise, and I
don’t feel I’m wise quite yet. So my deathbed desiderata aren’t of
the absolute and engraven truth variety, and probably not even of the wise
variety. And they’re certainly not, if I get them right, smug or
self-congratulatory. They’re more like letters pissed in the sand,
my best retrospective guesses about ‘stuff that works,’ reminiscent of
other ‘Gosh, I don’t know, but . . . ’ things to cling to when it’s dark
and light and when easy is getting harder every day. I’ll start in
the dark and emerge into what passes for me as light.”
- “The words of the prophets are written
on the subway walls. My desiderata, grounded etymologically in that
which is seen as ultimate and essential, are echoes and perhaps amplifiers
of things written on these walls. This is not the, but my desiderata.”
First, there is within and through us an array of structures and processes called termed Unconscious - “the deeply unfathomable mountains and cliffs which are precisely the archaic, automatic, innately predisposed but dynamically acquired, largely inaccessible, and overdetermined engines of me.”
Second, as Goethe said, “I cannot possess that which I don’t understand. It is both liberating and terrifying for me to acknowledge that in pretty much all the ways that matter, I am ridden rather than rider.”
Next, “There is no recourse or rescue or redemption from the human condition, from that into which we are thrown. This is home. This is as good as it gets.” To quote Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, “The best doctors in the world can’t cure what’s ailin’, not Freud, not Pasteur, not Eddie Van Halen.” No one is cleansed, no one is completely enlightened. They don’t know the way out, much less the way.”
Fourth, “It’s about forgiveness. What, whom, how to forgive, I dunno. Life, gods, others, nature, entropy, ignorance, smarts, all are to be forgiven, and that is all but impossible. Yet endeavor to forgive we must.”
Fifth, to quote C. S. Lewis, “Suffering is God’s megaphone to the deaf world.” For Mark, another step along the path is an awakening to struggle. “I have come to possess, partially and grudgingly, a small measure of freedom and dignity through understanding the ways in which life has frustrated my desires. What I believe and claim as known about myself is the outgrowth of awakening to certain drowning megaphoned sufferings. The rest is happy talk.” He proceeded to display a piece of artwork his grandfather created on his deathbed on a tin of cinnamon rolls.
Next, life is finite and relatively short. “Time is a wellspring of conundrum. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.” Time is problem to be embraced, “living on the cusp of the now and the then. The occasions I acknowledge gratefully are those when I have lived almost fully because I have refused participation in a general seductive collusion around the denial of death.”
Seventh, life is worth living. “Any day above ground is a good day,” says Bob Dylan. “The living of life is alive in me,” says Mark. “Even on my deathbed, I claim the right to live, and in so doing have accomplished already something.”
Eighth, “The easiest thing of all is to live poorly.” Mark does not like to live by “lists” of deadly sins. But his own list would include zeal without knowledge (“passion is only half the battle”); orthodoxy without exploration (“smugly fancying we are warm, but cold nonetheless”); role without identity (“who I am is more important than what I am”); efficiency without integrity (“I have tried not to be wagged by the small tail, but not to mistake myself for the big dog, either”); observation without participation (“I have sung my songs”); novelty without precedent (“Some giants’ shoulders are worth standing on. Before we postmodernists kill them all off, perhaps we can learn their lessons”); and practice without theory (“Maps have helped me find my way back into and through various difficult and perilous territories”).
Next, “It’s about being patient. The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”
Number Ten, “It’s about an appreciation for subtlety, for the small truth over the big lie, for blackboard scrawlings over textbook pronouncements, for the apparently trivial over the sexily dramatic, for what is whispered rather than what is thundered.”
Next, “It’s about a particularly elusive bending of heart and head and hand.” As Rumi put it, “There are hundreds of ways to kiss the ground.”
Finally, “It’s about the healing contagion of relationship. There is something healing and perhaps even redemptive about certain companionship.”
To conclude, Mark offered his epitaph, drawing from two of his own songs: “Only love will last. You can wash up on the shore or tie yourself to that mast,” and “Maybe I’ll be great one day, who knows? Maybe I’ll be nothing but a man who loves his children and it shows.”