My readers may appreciably take comfort in the fact that I have very little formal training in music, as cousin Pamela and I swap tunes as a form of moral support, to discover on my own that I know You Raise Me Up through exposure on commercial radio, and it is this Josh Groban, pitted unequivocally against Brian Greene, and by extension, Feynman:
"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe...can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil."--Richard Feynman, born 100 years ago today. pic.twitter.com/jBGq68ysWp— Brian Greene (@bgreene) May 12, 2018
whose atheism Greene is highlighting, who wins the argument. No one can listen to Groban's trembling baritone and not be reminded of our transcendental merger with aspiration, regardless of your faith, or lack thereof. The singer might be a telescopic savant, little knowing that one of my tweets to him, for miserable Pamela's sake, was tongue in cheek, and the public face of popular physics may understand genius enough to distill it to rogues such as I, but listen to Josh, then listen to Greene, and a pathway may be found where neither personality is necessarily in dialectical opposition to the other. Musical compositions are as carefully coordinated as the Hubble telescope, in certain respects, so God may be absent and present just the same, whether in a spiritual or material worldview, as I stray further and further afield into this woman's land mines, with conscious alarm telling me to withdraw while I can, and don't, carrying this woman's pain atop of mine. I owe her mother-in-law as my father's sister, certain loyalties, while neither woman does much to give disability pride a good name, with their respective conditions forming a cesspool of self-pity, with brassy Philadelphia sparks as we wither. I, who am suicidally depressed but for my resilience against it, begin to fear my cousin's wife may kill herself, as she insulates her failing body in recrimination. I, who had a horrific medical life, see Pam's as worse, aside from the fact that sticking my nose in it, as Richard the elder would remind me, supporting Pam is just outside an immediate family concern, while for once, the paraprofessional holding himself off me, just, may find me nodding off in the machine, trying to find the space to work between his scent, and Pam's grip on me as a liferaft, to still work as a writer, taking too much of a toll. He took my hand yesterday, seized it, as no man has ever done, to indicate effect, possession? And I wonder what the hell we're doing, me, maybe 24 months off from returning to medical institutional fodder, and this former factory food processor. Oh, I've had relatively tepid sex with able-bodied men like him, wanted to see if he would be any different, and instead, we're torturing each other in this bizarre ritual where he sees me as woman enough, but it is a sad commentary that a woman of my age has to have grown so old to experience desire conjoined to such care, forging ourselves against each other. No mobile man ever seized my hand like that. It kicked me in the skull like a gulf ball, and in part led to this all nighter, while Pam and I bleached the skeleton in the closet, vibrating with such tenacious despair.
