The Two Kinds of Decay

Measuring

A nine-year period began and ended.

I measure time by the movement of this planet. As any sane person would.

I tend to forget that my measurement of time is designed to distract me from what’s really happening.

I tend to forget I’m walking on the surface of a soft mass on fire on the inside, a surface warmed and lit by an explosion taking place ninety-three million miles away. An explosion that started at some point and will end at some point.

I tend to forget that I rose out of this explosion and — despite my feeling I am unique from it — will someday fall back into it.

Why nine years?

Why do I need to read sixty minutes in the morning, and swim twenty laps in the afternoon, and write a thousand words at night, in order to feel that a twenty-four-hour period has been well used?

What are all these numbers for? What do they measure?

What do I think I’m clarifying by the act of measuring? What does measuring make clearer?

At the beginning there’s conception, gestation, the growth of the brain in the womb. There’s the crowning, the first breath, the naming.

At the end, unless you are vaporized in an explosion, the heart stops and the blood still moves in the veins, then the blood stops and the tissues still live, then the tissues die slowly, and at some point the last neuron in the brain dies. How long this takes depends on too many variables to measure.

My Jewish grandmother lived to be eighty-five. She thought she’d been born on December 10th, but when we found her birth certificate, it seemed she’d been born at home on the 8th or the 9th. There was snow in Boston, and the 10th was the first day anyone could get out to report the birth.

I have two letters she wrote to me at summer camp in the 1980s. One is dated Tuesday 6/29, and the other, July 4—Happy Independence Day.

What times aren’t open to debate? What times are clear?

Wars end at particular times. They end when the document has been signed. They end at the first moment the document can be described as signed.

But it isn’t so much that a war ends in a single moment as much as people decide to agree the war has ended in a single moment. And so the measurement becomes unassailable. Not accurate. Just unassailable.

Nothing happens in a moment. Nothing happens quickly. If you think something’s happened quickly, you’re looking at only a part of it.

Firing a rifle shot seems to happen quickly, but what about the movement of the trigger finger? What about the decision to fire the rifle? What about all your careful target practice? What about everything in your life that happened before you decide to fire that rifle?

How can you separate the incidental from what was necessary to your decision to pull the trigger?

Nothing happens in an instant. Nothing starts happening and nothing finishes happening. History doesn’t begin anywhere. And it doesn’t end.

Why is it important to me to know the beginning and end of this particular decay I think I’m writing about — which is just part of my own whole decay?

And couldn’t the decay be called by many other names — for instance, my life?