Finite Optimism

Toward the end of his book “No Time Like the Future,” Michael J. Fox introduces the poem Antigonish, by William Hughes Mearns.

Said to be inspired by a ghost haunting a house in Antogonish, Nova Scotia, the poem goes like this:

Yesterday, upon the stair,

I met a man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

I wish, I wish he’d go away . . . 

When I came home last night at three

The man was waiting there for me

But when I looked around the hall

I couldn’t see him there at all!

Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!

Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door . . . (slam!) 

Last night I saw upon the stair

A little man who wasn’t there

He wasn’t there again today

Oh, how I wish he’d go away.

Fox uses the poem as a metaphor to explain the hallucinations produced by one of the drugs meant to counter other side effects of a different drug, taken to moderate his Parkinson’s disease.

From the previous chapter, though, an equally apt comparison, one likely Fox makes on purpose: Describing fear he felt while on a safari in Africa, he writes the following, after first seeing a leopard sunning in a tree, and then the paranoia brought on later by thinking another is nearby:

“The leopard from the previous day hadn’t scared me. It was the leopard in the tree at twilight – the one that I didn’t see, the one that probably wasn’t even there – that scared me stupid.”

Coming from a family where paranoia doesn’t just run, it gallops, that line, and the poem that followed it, spoke to me. As, oddly, does Fox’s optimism, even an optimism he admits is finite. Because with that paranoia comes an increasing pessimism, a pessimism that belies a life of faith or, as Tolkein put it, “hope without guarantees.”

So, like Fox, I have some mental work to do. And I’d best get to it quickly. After reading this memoir, that’s probably a sentiment Fox would agree with.

This book started slow for me. I got it for Christmas and started reading it then, but then finished it in a gulp this week. It’s one I’m going to have t re-read, and one worthy of that effort.

Seems an odd poem to put into a foxtrot . . .