My Wobbly Bicycle, 149

Reading Jeanette Winterson’s Art Objects shifted something in me. I’ve been sitting here a long time beside Jerry’s hospital bed. Generally, hospital-sitting makes me numb, or, rather, attentive basically only to what needs to be done at the moment. One thing after the other. People come in, people leave. Things have been like this a long time, or rather, time after time. Which is why you haven’t seen posts much lately. There’s a particular energy that has been missing, or, rather, used as fuel toward bare existence. This is all fine, but there comes a time—and this is what I’ve been thinking about—when just-living jumps a cog and tears through the ordinary into the shall-we-call-it? Creative. We have had one surgery after another here. This last year Jerry has had a major back surgery followed shortly by the need for a hip replacement. He had an abdominal hernia in the middle of all that. Then the hip replacement dramatically failed, which is where things are right now. Getting ready to try to fix that. Pain has been our constant companion for a long, long time, which makes for a great deal of bed-rock simplicity as well as a hunkering down. Hunkering down does not admit much that isn’t immediately useful.Then surprisingly I wanted to write to you again. “You” being my “letter to the world,” as E. Dickinson would say. The “you” being not exactly a real you, although I am sure you are, but more like the way the taproot I call newness chooses to reveal itself in the world.  Such newness is of the spirit and doesn’t bypass the mundane so much as illuminate it at last, make it visible beyond the dead language, the cliché, the plodding, that has kept it embalmed. So, my question was, is, why and how now, rather than earlier? Or later? We’re still stuck here in the cardiac ward. We’re waiting to make sure that the atrial fibrillation that was showing up yesterday just minutes before Jerry was ready to go into hip revision surgery is not “serious.” So far I think it’s okay. Many of us have funny heartbeats, especially when we’re anxious. Especially when we’ve been waiting in the hospital for four days for this surgery. Especially after a long spell of extravagant hip pain. Here we are, having coffee, Jerry reading the paper. Nurses in and out. But, sitting here, I read one of Jeanette Winterson’s brilliant essays about the nature of art, how art “works,” and works on us. In the room of my soul, you might say, the lights had been turned down—for ease of sleeping, for ease of coping—and Winsterson walked in and turned them back up. This, I’m thinking, is how it works. Something turns the lights up. It isn’t enough to see or read or hear art, however. There has to be a way in. A door already unlocked. Then someone needs to stand at the darkened doorway and turn on the light in the next room. It could be Picasso, or Mozart, or the Buddha, or Jesus. Then, besides that, there must be a close teacher, intimate to us, whose life has been infused, often through a great deal of study and work, with what will be transmitted. Once there is a light, there must be someone pointing. A transmission. I use the word art, but what I’m really thinking is spirit. Aliveness. Awake-ness. This is why we who do art, do it even when no one gets it, when it seems unintelligible or crazy. Or a waste of time. We’ve gotten hold of a thread of light that even we don’t get, yet. And may never, completely. All we know is that it’s alive. And that our teacher saw it, and so we went after it.