Sunday, July 26, 2015

#207

https://books.google.com/books?id=pE8MBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA136&dq=I+have+a+gang+of+old+sins+unconfessed+207&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMIv523mYz5xgIVg5uICh3fTwWC#v=onepage&q=I%20have%20a%20gang%20of%20old%20sins%20unconfessed%20207&f=false

“Music comes painful as a happy look / to a system nearing an end”—pretty clear what’s going on here. The body failing, the consciousness and the imagination following. It has always seemed to me that simple enjoyment ought to be enough to prolong life—a cool breeze, coffee, birds singing, that one unexpected suite of flavors from a sip of good wine, an interesting or beautiful face, the tug of a fish on the line, the bright blue sparkle of some graceful insect, on and on. But pain can absolutely overshadow all that, I know, and emptiness is maybe one of the worst kinds of pain. Reports I’ve read on B. at the very end seem to confirm that there wasn’t much left, and it’s easy to compare the earlier YouTube readings with the later ones, which is pretty shocking. At the writing of this poem, he wasn’t done yet—he was still writing—but the engine was sputtering and the propeller had almost stopped turning and he was on the glide path to a crash landing. In this poem he plays with the conventions of casual greeting. “How are you?” is never meant as an invitation to list your problems. But, when we respond with the accepted convention, “Fine,” or “I’m hanging in there,” or “about half,” or, “can’t complain,” I suppose we do sometimes run through the parenthetical litany, though relegated to unspoken parentheses: “I’m fine (but this slipped disc in my back hurts and my wife left me for her lesbian yoga instructor and I had to put my dog down and my son’s parole was denied and this tooth is killing me and I’m losing my hair and the batteries in my hearing aid are weak and there’s all this diarrhea and my boss is a clockwatching twit and the Reds lost again and I had a thousand-dollar lottery ticket but I lost it when I fell in the river so now I can’t get this ingrown toenail fixed and the intervention over my addiction to crystal meth didn’t take and my fuel pump is out again, and did I mention how much my back hurts?). How are you?” 

Friendship invites a way through the convention of reticence. Buddies in some bar over a beer, women in a cute restaurant with glasses of chilled white wine or cups of steaming herbal tea. Or in a bar over a beer. They talk about what hurts, and it helps. I have a friend who recently pulled the story of my pancreatitis treatments out of me, because she feels it’s important to get people talking about their bodies; it’s the way to really get to know them. All right, you asked for it, I’ll tell you the story, though pancreatitis simply hurts like all get out and it has very little to do, actually, with me. Well…except that I had pancreatitis attacks over 50 times in my life, each one like a sword through the solar plexus, and I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. It became part of who I am and a defining aspect of my experience whether I wanted it or not—I behaved, ate and drank, in ways I figured would steer me clear of it, I feared it, and I writhed under it when it came and begged the hospital ER staff to please do something. Drug me or knock me out or kill me, but make it stop. If you come in your life to the point where it won’t stop, it never stops, then the elements that factor into your decision-making process open up new, formerly unimaginable solutions that will make it stop. “How are you?”? “Well, let me tell you. I’m to the point where pain outweighs satisfaction and pleasure. I’ll be checking out here soon. How are you?”
 
Our bodies are intrinsic elements of our souls, determinants of whoever it is we unfold to be.

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