“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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