Death Just Got Out of This Truck (guest post)

“There are, I find, things I want philosophy to do that it cannot. Or that I cannot do with it.”

That’s Amy Olberding, professor of philosophy at the University of Oklahoma, on the limits of philosophy that life sometimes makes vivid.

The guest post by her, below, is an excerpt from her truly remarkable book, Kill All The Chickens, which was published last month, and which you should all buy today (Amazon, Bookshop).

The book is a beautiful example of an academic philosopher breaking free of the standard publishing conventions of the profession (at which she was perfectly adept) to produce writing that is full of wisdom and personality, and that, even as it confronts us with an exploration of life’s difficulties, is nonetheless a pleasure to read.

Death Just Got Out of This Truck
by Amy Olberding

Maybe we should just skip the middle step and throw it all straight in the toilet?  This is what I ask my mother as we together stand and consider the overburdened farm table.  We are bereaved and so a steady stream of neighbors has come by to deliver casseroles and pies, lunch meats and cookies, chicken and potato salad.  If death were an appetite, we’d have the means to satisfy and send him off by now.  But he is not an appetite, nor have we any of our own. 

Mine are a people of uneasy stomachs.  I remember one night spent in the ER alongside some uncles and cousins, waiting to hear what the doctors would make of my grandfather’s alarming stroke-like swoon.  That night we shared the TUMS bottle the way others might pass a flask.  Bringing food to us bereaved is like giving a dog a pencil.  There’s just not much that we can do with it, at least not much that anyone could count useful. 

Grief is an affliction physical and material.  It roils the gut and stops the sleep.  It can put a tremble in the limbs, a quiver in the voice, a restless agitation run all through.  It makes the knees want to let go, the body just to sink.  It is tired but cannot ever really rest, a breath you cannot really catch.  It can make the gaze go vacant, blank.  Grief is eyes that see too much, make sense of little.  How long have I now stared out the window into nothing, seeing nothing?  Grief sets the body all awry.  The body wants, but what?  Something it can now no longer have, a voice in the ear gone mute, a touch tactile, now but memory.  We stare at food; we do not eat it.

My book on death, the one I will not write, was originally going to have a chapter on the body.  It seemed to me that one of the troubles with philosophy on grief is that it misses out on bodies.  The philosopher’s talk is all of what loss means, what grief can make you think.  It speaks to what the mind and heart may feel, but not the stalling, empty mind or trembling heart.  It speaks to one who speaks and thinks, not the instinctive, aching animal, not the raw creature all sensation without sense.  This is not a novelty where philosophy is concerned—philosophers have long neglected the cruder materiality from which thought transpires.  But still, I wanted some way to make philosophy answer not to thought or feeling or meaning, but to the brute stuff upon which all the rest is set.  I wanted some way to make loss less like an experience of the mind and thought, to make loss on the page more like itself in life, an experience altogether nauseating.  Before the reasoning or meaning, first the gut. 

There are, I find, things I want philosophy to do that it cannot.  Or that I cannot do with it.  There is nothing wrong with thought, with seeking out some sense.  But what can be made sense is rarely all there is; it leaves in remainder much, too much.  Worse still, even good sense can be misleading.  You can get your thoughts in careful order, root out all mistake, prepare to read the vexations of experience with well-honed training pitched to make vexations yield.  But all that practiced thought and careful habits of the mind can leave you unready for what comes.  Don’t trust them more than they can bear.  The body is not a prison, but neither can thought escape its meaty and substantial bonds.  I cannot make philosophy bend to this, I think, not in a way that is not all false and false confidence.

Many years ago now, when the farm was still a working dairy and the place was hectic with cows and work, my grandfather hired a milker to come in and help.  The milker had a love of the drink and would sometimes cry off work for a hangover, but he was, I suppose, reliable enough that they kept him on.  One day, he’d taken the farm’s yellow truck into town to retrieve some feed.  At a four-way stop sign, he was briefly bested by a fancy man in a fancy car, the kind of man who didn’t want to wait on a beater truck that got there first and instead just blew the stop sign so he’d get ahead.  The milker would have none of this, so he drove that yellow truck right up to and behind the man’s bumper for blocks that soon turned into miles.  Finally, the fancy man pulled over in a parking lot, the milker close behind.  Both men got out of their vehicles.  The fancy man planted his feet wide and bellowed out a caution meant to be severe:  I have to warn you that I just got out of karate!  The milker didn’t even pause before he answered quietly, Well, I just got out of this yellow truck.  Before aught else could happen, the milker’s fist had found that fancy man and laid him flat. 

Karate class is fine and so, too, is philosophy.  But make no mistake, you can’t really get ahead of it.  Loss comes at you like a fist.

“Death Just Got Out of This Truck,” from Kill All The Chickens by Amy Olberding.