I have so many existential questions. Because I’m spending so much time sitting or slow walking, so much time removed from my old life. Old life? It’s the same life, isn’t it? That’s one of the complicated questions—what is the kernel, if there is one, that has followed me through this life from childhood? What is this mysterious morphing? I look at my arms, the skin hanging in rivulets. It’s hard to imagine I’m the same person.
The difference between me and a flower is that the flower has no consciousness of its wrinkling and fading. I guess. It re-enters the earth carrying no baggage from its blooming-time.
I’ve had a lot of time to think. You can see that. This is a long healing, a long hurting. And the accompanying cold I caught in the hospital, the cough. I’m a mess. It’s an act of heroism to write even this small message to you, considering how contracted inward I am. The mind turns to the hurting place and remains there, trying to soothe it.
I’m not allowed to bend over yet. Watch me try to put my pants on. Watch me pick up a Kleenex off the floor with the grabber device. Watch me pull on my socks with the sock device. There are many small logistical problems, many clever ways to move to avoid the risky ones.
Existential questions. Who am I? Am I the Ph.D., the poet laureate, the person who’s written “all those books”? We give people labels. We admire who we think they are. But we’ve made them up, haven’t we? They/we are polymorphous.
I’m glad I had this back surgery in winter. I’ll remember this time as a plunge into the dark, a stripping away of what had been my regular life. What have I been doing? Reading, mostly. To perk myself up, there’s The Dear Committee Trilogy, by Julie Schumacher. And The Women, and Drop City by T. C. Boyle. Jeffrey, the Poet’s Cat by Oliver Soden. Those are the unusual ones.
The Women is the story of Frank Lloyd Wright’s women. What a brilliant, driven bastard he was! And then I’m thinking genius in general, how genius isn’t forgiven, doesn’t ask to be forgiven, but goes its own way, shining and stumbling over mere mortals. Admired, worshiped, hated. I’m thinking no one would choose to be a genius. Every time I delve into the life of genius, I see suffering. Everyone suffers, but a simpler mind, one that’s more blunted, seems able to pack the suffering into suitcases of cliché. The bigger the mind, the more space for parsing the nuances of pain. Also, the bigger the mind, the more intense the joy, one would think. Maybe so.
Much has been made of Christopher Smart’s cat Jeoffrey. Jeoffrey, whose life is celebrated in every twitch of his tail by poor Chris Smart, friend of Boswell, of Samuel Johnson, locked up in the asylum because he will not stop obsessively praying over everything. Who turns his obsession into the most amazing poem of praise. https://poets.org/poem/jubilate-agno-fragment-b-i-will-consider-my-cat-jeoffry
Who really knows anything about the mind of Jeoffry? The writer Oliver Soden stands a few feet off, imagining, following along. (Consider also Virginia Woolf’s Flush, her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel). When a space feels vacant, we fill it with our own stories. How many stories have Jerry and I invented about our Ollie?
How many stories have I invented about myself? I think of the essays I’ve written, how I’ve shaped experience to suit myself, to entertain you if I can, to garner your sympathy, your praise. By the time I have one wrapped up, I no longer know what part of it is true. And maybe none of it is. Or all of it.
Oh look! There’s a big red cardinal on the bush outside our window. They show up so startlingly against the brown. The suddenness is better than all the stories because it’s unpremeditated, a gift. Its presence makes children of us.
When a child skins her knee, she runs crying to her parent. It’s a catastrophe, a break in the perfection of the knee. The child wants sympathy, but the child is also fascinated by this new thing. Likewise, I’ve read everything I can find about back fusion surgery, its rate of healing, levels of pain, its success rate. I meet people who’ve had back surgery who have all sorts of tales to tell. My research results are much more optimistic. Generally, after six months or so, the problem is healed for a lifetime. I’m going to count on that.