Not that we\u2019re talking only former lives. There\u2019s also the next life, even what my wife terms \u201cthe next-next\u201d life. How long it may take, you see, for me to regain, say, my musician\u2019s chops so we can perform together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Do you wonder if I believe in previous lives or ones to come. Do I imagine a moment my wife and I encounter each other, hug, as in an old movie, say, \u201cDarling, it\u2019s been ages.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And does she? Well, frankly, <\/em>as the politicians in Washington can\u2019t not say when they\u2019re about to misrepresent or deceive, frankly<\/em> I try to keep an open mind. And not just for domestic tranquility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two thoughts:<\/p>\n\n\n\n 1. My wife is very good at teasing, masterful at keeping a straight face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2. How dis<\/em>prove, for instance, reincarnation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though \u201cWhy us?\u201d has yet to cost either of us any sleep, I have my own take on the issue. No doubt it\u2019s professional bias, but I\u2019ve suggested to my wife that what\u2019s important is what we\u2019ve made of our fifteen-plus years together. That is, story we\u2019ve been telling ourselves. Are<\/em> telling ourselves. Story we\u2019ve become, though I remind her that even in just this one life it\u2019s not final.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Story we\u2019re still becoming? Making my point, I\u2019m careful not to mention, say, Chinua Achebe\u2019s Things Fall Apart.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n So: heading out the front door. \u201cSee you soon,\u201d I call.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And, I\u2019ve said to my wife more than once, when we\u2019ve encountered yet another health problem of mine, having to discuss eventualities: \u201cAfter I\u2019m gone…\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n And, something she\u2019s said, but only a few times. \u201cAfter you\u2019re gone…\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Honolulu. Break of day. Again this small beach. Ghost crabs, low tide, nearly spent waves. Ocean: living and breathing membrane shore to horizon. My church and office. Writer, alchemizing water into words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So many years here. Time keeps passing. A few years ago, more heart trouble. My surf buddy, a doctor, asked, \u201cDo you want to live until you\u2019re eighty-five?\u201d Arguing, \u201cIf you don\u2019t get a second opinion, you might die anytime.\u201d But to live if things get worse? When<\/em> things get worse?<\/p>\n\n\n\n More than forty years ago, morning twilight at my church and office, I\u2019d nod hello to a woman \u201cgetting on in years.\u201d Or \u201cshowing her age,\u201d as people also put it in my Boston childhood. Or, they\u2019d say, \u201cShe lived to a ripe old age.\u201d Ripe, but as with fruit, suggesting a trend toward overripe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Or, back in the day, someone \u201cdropped dead.\u201d \u201cKeeled over.\u201d Keeled<\/em>! I was in my twenties on an oceangoing sailing vessel before I saw the noun inside the verb. Visualized a hull, capsized ship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But about that frail elder before sunrise: \u201cwrinkled as sea-sand and old as the sea,\u201d as poet Edith Sitwell wrote. Very short, stooped, recently widowed. Given her struggles with the slippery stairs, down from the seawall and back up after each brief swim, her several daily visits to this small beach seemed strongly motivated. Admirable; compulsive. As, two times a day\u2009\/\u2009 day after day\u2009\/\u2009every single day I\u2019d head out to surf\u2014admirably; compulsively?\u2014I wondered how often this woman had to enter the ocean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How often? Just often enough to stay afloat, I concluded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Afloat. Now, more than forty years later, for me today it\u2019s not riding waves. Knees aching, no popping up off the board as I take the drop. Instead, a very slow swim out the channel to the reefs. Then past surfers lifting and falling during the lulls, carving waves when the next set arrives. Into open ocean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First swim of the day, second with the goatfish at sunset. Black bathing suit. Black neoprene cap for shaved head, black two-millimeter-thick, long-sleeved wetsuit jacket: wind chill, blood gettin\u2019 thinner. Goggles. No fins. No \u201cAustralian crawl\u201d as we called it on frigid New England lakes when I was a skinny, shivering, blue-lipped child. No crawl, just a calm and steady breaststroke. Pull, glide, kick; breath in, breath out. Breath autopilot set to, setting itself to ON.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hypnotic. Beyond intent. Might this be what positive spirits term \u201caquatic mindfulness meditation\u201d? Concentration\u2009\/\u2009 serenity\u2009\/ \u2009bliss?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Nope. No dry-land therapies, please. Is the deep blue not indifferent, unsentimental, without memory? In the ocean, one has to consent to surrender.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On land, one usually moves on the stable horizontal, not aware of even worms just underneath. Terra firma. On this mirrored surface, however, it\u2019s inescapable there\u2019s much going on right below\u2014the mostly unseen, often imminent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Water can also break up anything structured, anything not in the moment. Regressing you back to what Mircea Eliade called \u201cthe undifferentiated mode of pre-existence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes, when I\u2019ve returned to shore, shedding cap and goggles in the shallows, wetsuit jacket intimating commitment to strenuous immersion, someone asks how far I went. I could say, \u201cA half hour or so outbound,\u201d though I\u2019ve never timed it. Wearing a watch in the water? No. Machine time versus dream time. It\u2019s not that time doesn\u2019t pass either way, but humans have lived most of the species\u2019 existence without timepieces. Without time measured in pieces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nonetheless, it\u2019s out toward the interface of sea and sky far enough to, but only so far as to\u2014reflexively\u2009\/\u2009 inadvertently\u2009\/\u2009 prudently\u2014remember<\/em> (?) to turn around. Though who\u2019s doing the remembering, or, what part of who, is unclear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At last, approaching the beach, taking a rest. On my back. Afloat. Looking up: moon; frigate bird; two fairy terns; planet. Occasional rainbow sign. Double rainbow. \u201cBetween the earth and sky, thought I heard my Savior cry,\u201d goes the spiritual.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But how or why convey any of this to someone who asked only, \u201cHow far did you go?\u201d As novelist Bernard Malamud responded to an interviewer\u2019s interrogative, \u201cWhat is the question asking?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow far did you go?\u201d I\u2019m tempted to reply, sometimes do reply, \u201cMoloka\u2018i.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This archipelago. Eight islands; atolls, islets, seamounts. Fifteen hundred miles SE to NW across the Tropic of Cancer, from 154\u00b040\u2019 to 178\u00b025\u2019 W longitude and 18\u00b054\u2019 to 28\u00b015\u2019 N latitude.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If the askers don\u2019t know much about where they are, they nod assent, like mariners receiving their bearings. But if a fisherman, surfer, sailor, or waterman does the asking, and I say Moloka\u2018i? We laugh. From this coast to the island of Moloka\u2018i is more than thirty miles. \u201cGoing to Moloka\u2018i was tough,\u201d I like to add, \u201cbut coming back was a nightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Channels: growing up, I imbibed something about bounded bodies of water. Nantucket Sound, and, Over There, the English Channel, Strait of Gibraltar. But not, back then, the Moloka\u2018i Channel. Or, its Hawaiian name, the Kaiwi Channel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A brutal swim, Moloka\u2018i to O\u2018ahu, though not impossible. For great water athletes with escort vessels carrying food, lubricants, and safety gear, it\u2019s twelve, fifteen, or seventeen hours at the shortest crossing\u2019s twenty-six miles. With, predictably, ferocious winds and currents, high surf, stinging jellyfish, tiger sharks, and, as sweetener, volcanic ash\u2014vog\u2014to impair breathing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As for swimming from O\u2018ahu to Moloka\u2018i? Seems only two remarkable swimmers have ever carried it off. Not, even, yours truly. Just a running joke. Like telling basketball\u2013junkie friends who know better that, regrettably, I can no longer dunk. As if I ever could.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thus my own private Moloka\u2018i until not long ago, after open heart-surgery back at age seventy. I pause to acknowledge my surprise yet again writing this number. Seventy; 70. But I\u2019d survived the operation, heart-lung bypass machine allowing my heart and lungs to be still for\u2026a few hours. Truly extracorporeal! Gifted surgeon splitting my sternum. Professing himself not miniaturist but minimalist: small-as-possible incision facilitating recovery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then, several years later, total knee replacement. Brilliant techniques and technology. Rehab strenuous, some healing, but then setbacks. Chronic pain, that euphemism. I was in bed, bedridden, rider of my bed. \u201cHaggard rider,\u201d I\u2019d tell myself, remembering Sir Henry Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon\u2019s Mines, a childhood favorite. Some play on words! I was majoring in self-pity, minoring in misery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you live long enough, you learn there are lines you once read that stayed right with you. Set in a prison in Stalin\u2019s gulag, Solzhenitsyn\u2019s In the First Circle<\/em> was first published in English in 1968. In the novel, mathematician Nerzhin remembers a proverb: \u201cYou don\u2019t drown in the sea, you drown in a puddle.\u201d Post-surgery, that was me all over. Drowning in a puddle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Back in my forties, thinking of Queequeg\u2019s canoe-coffin in Moby Dick,<\/em> and reading about a retired seventy-two-year-old who died surfing, I thought it wouldn\u2019t be a bad way to go. Out on the waves one day during a surfer\u2019s funeral as ashes were strewn and leis placed, I imagined being cycled and recycled in the tropics. To return as warm rain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But now, bedridden, rider of my bed? Poet Marianne Moore came to mind. \u201cThe sea is a collector,\u201d she wrote. And, \u201cthe sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n I thought also of Tennyson\u2019s Ulysses, ship at the dock, setting out \u201cto Sail beyond the sunset, and the baths\u2009\/\u2009Of all the western stars, until I die.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And I recalled Ahab\u2019s melodramatic exchange with his first mate in Moby Dick:<\/em> \u201cSome men die at the ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood;\u2014and I feel now like a billow that\u2019s all one crested comb, Starbuck. I am old\u2014shake hands with me, man.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bedridden. When my wife, checking on me, would read my grim mood, she\u2019d inquire, \u201cWhat are you grinding on?\u201d Not that I was up for being interrogated. Too much to say, too much that couldn\u2019t be said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One day, however, channeling Ahab, I came up with, \u201cI\u2019m going out with the tide.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat\u2019s that supposed to mean?\u201d my wife asked, reasonably enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I took some time. \u201cMoloka\u2018i,\u201d I responded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though my wife has spent much of the last decade in Hawai\u2018i with me, her time is not in the moana,<\/em> ocean, but hiking in the Ko\u2018olau Range. Or at her halau<\/em>\u2014Tahitian dance school with its kumu,<\/em> teacher. This dancing: on dry land but waves! cascades! torrents! of relentless drumming. Layered frenzied pitch chattering, impelling the dancers\u2019 shaking\u2009\/ \u2009rotating\u2009\/\u2009 gyrating hips and pelvises. She\u2019s determined to improve her fa\u2019arapu, ami,<\/em> and ruru. <\/em>And oh, the regret of not having started as a child! My musician-wife also studying the percussion, sometimes herself one of the halau<\/em>\u2019s drummers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSo what about Moloka\u2018i?\u201d a Tahitian dance zealot asks a querulous husband. For her, Moloka\u2018i is an island we\u2019ve yet to visit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another pause. Choosing my words. \u201cI\u2019m going to swim to Moloka\u2018i.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAnd?\u201d my wife said, trying to move the exchange along.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Though I wasn\u2019t myself, lately\u2014not hardly\u2014she\u2019d assumed I knew what I\u2019m doing in the ocean. It was my thing. Always had been, she gathered. Also, given how curt and ill-tempered I\u2019d been, if I said I was going to swim to Moloka\u2018i, then, very well, I was going to swim to Moloka\u2018i.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was tired of withholding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019m going to swim to Moloka\u2018i,\u201d I told my wife, \u201cbut no way I\u2019m going to make it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thomas Farber has been a Fulbright Scholar, awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and three times National Endowment fellowships for fiction and creative nonfiction, recipient of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize, and Rockefeller Foundation scholar at Bellagio. His recent books include Penultimates, Here and Gone, The End of My Wits, Brief Nudity, <\/em>and The Beholder.<\/em> Former visiting writer at Swarthmore College and the University of Hawai\u2018i, he teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. www.thomasfarber.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Foreseeable Futures Though she doesn\u2019t say so, doesn\u2019t have to say so, my musician-wife savors life. Wakes up ready to make coffee, thinking, \u201cWhat\u2019s for breakfast?\u201d Later, \u201cWhat\u2019s for lunch?\u201d and then, \u201cWhat\u2019s for dinner?\u201d Among the many things that please her, there\u2019s playing piano for hours at a time (Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Debussy, a … <\/p>\n
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