When Everything Ends and Nothing is Gone
Reflections on a drug statue and the real nature of time
We were there to get high, not to study history, which is probably why there was so much I never knew, seventeen years ago, about the eccentric and charming stone obelisk.
I definitely never knew it was called the Good Samaritan. I probably would have loved that. To us, it was just “The Ether Statue.”
The monument is a tall pillar rising from a square fountain basin. On each squared side of the base is a very serious lion. When the fountain was actually turned on (we never could put a finger on any pattern to it), water flowed from the mouths of the very serious lions. Atop the pillar is a dramatic man firmly covering the mouth of a sick man with a cloth containing ether. The statue commemorates the first such use of ether as medical anesthesia, which apparently happened down the road at Mass General. The serious and dramatic man is supposed to be a Moor. There’s apparently some association here between Moors and Samaritans that I’m pretty sure is seriously inaccurate historically, but whatever. I always thought he looked like Jupiter.
Mid-way up the statue, each side of the pillar contains an inscription. My favorite was the most serious and dramatic: “NEITHER SHALL THERE BE ANY MORE PAIN. -REV.” Indeed.
We lived just a few hundred yards and across an intersection from where the statue rests in Boston’s Public Garden — in the northwest corner nearest the intersection of Arlington and Beacon.
The building has long since been converted to some VERY expensive luxury condos, but in 2002 it was owned by Emerson College. It was our dormitory, and we were students there, and of course we were not allowed to smoke inside the dorm. Hell, even “being high” was against the rules. At night, we would instead convene across Storrow Drive on a dock in the Charles, but during the day we always stood sentry at the Ether Statue.
I’m sure we’d chosen this as our daytime spot due to the fact that it was a drug statue. Aside from the proximity factor, it certainly wasn’t practical. Indiscreet doesn’t even begin to tell the story. Not only was it a stone’s throw from the dorm but it was also maybe a couple dozen yards from the main causeway through which every single one of that dorm’s residents traveled back and forth multiple times per day heading to and from the main campus on the other side of the Common.
That’s not even to mention the general public — mistrusted outsiders that they were — with whom the Garden is positively crawling all day long.. The odorless vapes so many of us enjoy today were not even to exist for another decade and a half. We didn’t even smoke joints.What we were doing was still a criminal offense! And we just stood there in a circle ripping glass bowls in a real middle finger sort of way.
I always figured that in a city like Boston, only a small percentage of people would actually object to what we were doing. Of that already-small percentage exactly zero were likely to be bothered enough about it to interrupt their day in order to somehow GET US. Even if they had gotten us, we wouldn’t have faced any serious trouble. The turn of the millennium was a good time to be a privileged white college student in Boston. (I’m guessing it probably still is.) I suspect my hypothesis was correct, considering we were never even hassled by any cops.
What I really can’t explain, though, is how this kind of brazen behavior never got us busted by the college authorities, who actually would have given us at least a minor blast of hell over it. But we never were.
Not at the Ether Statue, anyway.
A monument remains there, a monument to the pharmacological easing of pain — and well it should. Too often today our focus on the scourge of addiction makes it easy for us to forget that using chemicals to kill pain is not merely a good thing, but an out-and-out miracle. But no monument exists to mark those of us who were there in that place and time, exploring the world and its truth beside a dry fountain in a huge magical garden. Not even the slightest trace of us remains.
The divestment by Emerson of its “West Campus” had begun during our tenure but was completed in earnest after I had moved on. 100 Beacon, as I mentioned, became luxury condos. I think all of the buildings did. No more Emersonians traipsing diagonally across the Common and Garden by the hundreds each day, and Emerson itself, which has largely swallowed a large chunk of the entire Theater District, is barely recognizable.
Around the same time, the city condemned our dock on the Charles, replacing it after six months or a year with a much nicer, larger, sturdier dock. This is great, but I bet there’s only a couple dozen people on Earth today with any recollection of the old one. That dock deserved better.
It was like someone came in after I left and cleaned up a crime scene, using urban-scale bleach to erase every last speck of evidence that any of us were ever there. Soon after came the diaspora; I can only think of one single friend from those days still in Boston. There’s no one around to even tell anyone about the age in which we ruled stoop and statue and dock.
It’s like we weren’t even there, and that bothers me, because we were. I swear we were even if it’s really difficult to prove and even though any proof I could come up with would be entirely unsatisfying, devoid of any detail or color or life.
It is a good thing to be made of stone, if you care about such things as longevity and posterity.
Nothing lasts and everything ends. These are two of the only precepts often proclaimed by the pioneering Merry Pranksters many of us in that ghostly pot circle admired, and maybe the others were able to accept that at the time. Not me, though. Obviously I’m still struggling with this a bit to this day, but back then I really thought the aeon would last forever. When it vanished — suddenly and nearly all at once — I hadn’t even yet moved on from any of it. I hadn’t even dug into my “next life” yet (and I’ve had about six or seven next lives since THAT one). I was still close to all of it, statue included, when it was vaporized, like what happens when a nuclear bomb is dropped. What’s most unsettling, beyond how quickly it all happened, is that it’s only MY world and MY memories that are gone. The city still stands all around the statue. There are still just as many people there going about their lives. Just not me and not my old friends, unceremoniously purged and forgotten without sufficient warning.
The change from one age to the next doesn’t always happen exactly like this. Sometimes it’s more gradual, more gentle, perhaps occasionally, when we are lucky, more voluntary. But it does always happen. Everything gets rubbed out and passed over and forgotten — yes, perhaps most painfully, even us. Even our nations and cultures. Even, eventually, our species, our planet, and our star.
For now, however, the statue still stands, proud as ever. It is a good thing to be made of stone, if you care about such things as longevity and posterity.
Everything I just said is true, certainly, but it’s only a portion of a complete perspective; the opposite is also largely true.
Nothing ever really GOES anywhere, so nothing can ever really be GONE. That includes the past.
I often see the proclamation that “all there is is NOW”, a statement I believe to be true, but perhaps in a more complicated way than it is popularly understood. For example, I saw a longer version just this week, something like “The past is totally gone and the future doesn’t exist yet, so all there is is NOW,” and I don’t think that’s true at all. In some ways, it’s certainly in line with how we perceive time, but I don’t believe that’s in any way an accurate description of how time actually works.
We only experience the NOW, yes, but where is it that the past went? On the most basic level, we all carry conscious memories — however skewed — of everything we experience, but personal memory is much deeper than that. The past, personally and historically, is a big chunk of what makes us who we are.
What I’m really getting at is even beyond all that — I’m suggesting that NOW is actually all of it, that all time exists simultaneously at once. That it’s more like a record album than a straight line. Our lives move across the record like the needle, the spot where the needle is at any given time being the NOW that we experience as “the present.” But while we’re living the song of the present, where does the rest of the record go? Nowhere! It’s all still there, it must be in order for the whole mechanism to even work. Even when we aren’t living in the past anymore, it’s still there, every last note of it. On the same score, even as we haven’t yet heard what the future sounds, it’s all sitting out there, waiting for the needle to arrive.
Even with our own limited mortal consciousness, we don’t experience time as a straight line. Explain, for instance, how it’s been seventeen years since I haunted this statue and nearby territory in corporeal form. I’ve lived like seven lives since then, traveled millions of miles, came to settle into an existence I once both imagined and thought impossible, learned more about this world by several orders of magnitude than I could comprehend in those days — and despite all of that, in my mind, I’m still that guy. I’m still young. I’m still THERE. Those people are still there with me. Even the ones I don’t talk to often, even the ones I don’t talk to at all.
Sometimes I’m aware of none of this, other times it’s all so close that if I woke up in the morning in a twin-size bed in the Back Bay, all THIS proving nothing but a dream, I wouldn’t be surprised. I’d immediately go find everyone to tell them about the wacked-out fuckin’ dream I just had, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m still there. I’m probably still lots of places, but most definitely there.
This is different from nostalgia, and I say this as someone who was positively pathologically nostalgic until my late twenties. But I did grow out of all that. First, it started getting too complicated. I had lived too much and that made it so that there were too many things to long for, until I wasn’t really SURE what I was longing for anymore, and then the longing just went away.
It’s certainly not that I want to go back there. I LIKE my life now — a lot. I like it better than ANY of my previous collection of lives. And the Ether Statue days were some pretty turbulent times. If I’m being sober in my reflection, I suspect the proportion of my time that I spent uncomfortable and/or unhappy and/or straight up angry was FAR higher than I would be remotely close to okay with now. There were some really rough episodes and periods, not least among them some of my largest Life Mistakes.
It would be a lie to say they weren’t also some of the best of times (not to get all Dickensian, but). Beyond good or bad, the truth is that though I was only there for about two years, that two-year period was probably the most significant one in my life — not merely because of the ways in which the experiences and adventures and relationships shaped “who I am” but because the events and decisions quite literally set the course of the rest of my life.
It was mostly a series of accidents that got me here, a series of accidents that looks to me now like an improbable, elaborate Rube Goldberg machine. That machine was set in motion back in those days, back when I haunted the Ether Statue.
I still haunt that statue because I’m still there. The ghosts of our era, the phantoms of that brief moment in which we had seized that territory and managed to hold it, they still linger on there. Even if no one knows or notices or gives a damn, the deep imprint we left behind — itself a manifestation of the fact that the past doesn’t go anywhere — will linger on even after the stone lions and their ruler the Jupiterian Moor are toppled and dug up or just eroded from the earth.
There’s actually a third angle from which the more complete perspective can be obtained — the angle of the CYCLE. Eternal return. The idea that everything, especially big things, comes back eventually, though often in a different manifestation and form. It’s not quite so easy as a simple circle; I like to think of it as an upward spiral, as though you return to the same VICINITY but at a different height.
It was only after I began writing this that I remembered I was scheduled to be in the neighborhood on the evening of April 13.
The occasion itself was not unrelated to my original tenure in this area, for several friends were making a veritable pilgrimage to the Orpheum Theater to see Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason perform with his band Saucerful of Secrets. Pink Floyd, you see, was a major factor in our time by the Ether Statue — at least for most of us.
I still love and hold tremendous respect for the brilliance and mastery of Floyd, but it’s nothing like in those days. I’m far more likely to put on the Dead or some Afrobeat or classical than I am to choose Pink Floyd. Perhaps some of that is related to the fact that listening to Floyd in any manner other than complete albums in a single session is profoundly frustrating, but some of it also has to do with the way resonance evolves with age.
I know, though, that hasn’t evolved as much as I sometimes believe. My only tattoo is still a quote from “Echoes.” It’s just nothing like it was back in those days, when that music and those words were burned into our souls, woven directly into the very fabric of our individual beings and our character as a group. It was very serious and significant.
When we arrived in the city a few hours before the show — nicest day of the year so far! — it was then that it occurred to me how fitting, dare I say responsible, this was, in at least a half-somber sort of way. I realized that, save perhaps for one or two dramatically overpriced appearances by his eminence Roger Waters, no member of Pink Floyd had been in my home city in the intervening years since my time there. Now that it was coming to pass, it was positively RIGHTFUL that at least ONE OF US be there, out of respect and reverence and even duty. I swelled a little at the thought, a little bit proud and a lot glad that this task of FULFILLMENT had fallen to me.
Fitting as well, I realized, that though I was the sole representative of that phantom era, I was traveling with a group of friends I would readily describe as the most tangible and connected and even blessed Tribe I’ve found in any of my lives since leaving the Statue.
Whether or not I was going to drag their asses the several blocks from Park Street Station to the statue was never in question. This was, after all, a pilgrimage, and we were gonna do it right and proper — regardless of whether they liked it. (And whatever they say about it, I know they did kinda like it.)
They did swear at me the whole way there, frequently doubting that I had any idea where I was going (little do they know that part of me still LIVES here). It seemed like millions had amassed in both the Common and Garden, soaking up the glory of the waning afternoon. I know how much has changed in the last two decades, with even the city itself having taken on a very different character, but I slipped back into it while striding over those paved paths and admiring the willows and oaks of old. It was all still there, all of it and all of us.
The statue, as usual, had no water in its base, but I grinned like an absolute fool at my reunion with the serious lions and Jupiter the Moorish Doctor, at once again coming face to face with the reminder, NEITHER SHALL THERE BE ANY MORE PAIN.
I got a kick out of one MAJOR change — I could no longer be arrested or even very seriously hassled for imbibing a little cannabis at my ancient altar. If only I could tell myself and all the others BACK THEN what this would be like! Not just the legalization of marijuana (news of which would floor my nineteen-year-old self), but how things turned out so far. I would have been satisfied to know it.
For that day, however, I’d have to be content to speak only with the very palpable ghosts of that bygone time, and appreciate the hunk of stone that remained the same despite it all. Whatever catastrophes may befall us in the years to come, we can count on the rock monolith to remain and keep remaining — to remain for all of my future returns and to remain even after I am no longer living at all.
The inscription is right, it points at the whole thing. Even pain shall dissipate, and only the stones and the ghostly imprints of all who lived in their shadow will remain.