...more recent posts
March 11, 2003
I recently completed a year of medical treatment in a second attempt to refurbish my liver. I find myself not so interested in whether the treatment took, whether I achieved the coyly designated “sustained viral response” (the medical profession’s fear of the word cure is interesting) and more interested in the tidal surge of life returning to my body. My first encounter with the chemotherapy-like treatment of interferon, which you inject and supplement with red corpuscle murdering pills called ribavirin, was defined by my fixation on whether or not I could achieve a “cure” of the underlying condition. It seems unlikely that I have succeeded as the result of either of my year-long efforts (bloodwork reveals conflicting evidence that will clarify prognosis as the medication clears from my system; harried specialists console one with the highly untechnical sounding concept that one’s liver has been given a “rest”) but this seems surprisingly secondary. What I am focused on is saliva. Skin secreting sebum. Hair regrowth. A conviction that one has the newly acquired capacity to sense cells manufacturing energy in a time-lapse dance of excruciating pleasure. Muscles craving exertion. Appetite. Memory rescinding its intimacy with the contours of nausea. Even the occasional capacity to shape and articulate a thought, to read a paragraph. All of these phenomena were absent during the liver make-over. I am now luxuriating in a sort of Tourette’s syndrome of returned energy. I am not sure what to do with it all; my spouse looks nervous. Has a year’s absence of all physical energy been stored in some annex, some makeshift organ the body jerry-rigs in physical extremis? Is that storehouse of kinetic jubilation now being liberated into circuitry barely capable of containing the burden but, nevertheless circuitry shrieking with glee at the electricity burning up its pathways? It would seem so. I fear I may bark, yelp, dance, leap, commit acts of gross indecency I am so filled with the shock and pleasure of existing. The first indication of this great generosity of power returned appeared as moisture in the form of saliva. Let me say that saliva is a greatly underestimated substance. One of the side-effects of the treatment (documented in a neat little package with type so small and so demoralising in its content that I advise anyone tempted to read this mini-tome to bury the thing in the garbage immediately) is “dry mouth.” Now this term might strike one as an innocuous enough affliction and indeed it is not so difficult to endure. But the return of saliva, the flooding of the mouth with such sweet reassurance makes me feel compelled to kiss, eat, taste, drool, talk, and lick, to run my tongue around my mouth in an incessant appreciation of the body’s exquisite calibration.
Of course as the pleasure of these bodily functions fades into the knitting of daily life the problem of wanting more from that life returns. You feel better and a wet mouth is forgotten. When feeling ill the simplest of pleasures can fulfill one’s needs, the most mundane of tasks completed can feel like a grand accomplishment; fragility doesn’t only foster frequent irritability, along with it creeps in a tenderness and patience that I find is frequently absent from my hearty mode. Admittedly this softer, more compliant self may be the body’s endlessly calculating capacity to foster a future for itself: I’m so sweet, take care of me, but my compassion for humanity relished during the past year is fast being replaced with a ruthlesness and a rabid impatience to be done with all that is not essential. Neighboring the building that stores that year’s absent energy is the granary of a year that seems largely lost. So if I mow you down, yelping like a banshee and refuse to scrub the toilet bowl or wash the dishes, it’s because I’m currently attempting to live to the power of two and it may not be as alluring as Chatterton on his deathbed. Getting on with life is reassuringly vulgar.
March 10, 2003
Jean makes me want to smoke cigarettes. She makes me want to light the next one with the one I’m finishing. I haven’t really smoked consistently in seventeen years and it was never my biggest vice. But Jean could change all that. I see her twice a year at a mutual friends house. The house in question is a non-smoking residence (as is my own—depending on what you’re smoking) so we lurk in the kitchen with the window open and blow our second hand smoke out the crack. We sit on stools and talk to each other about our lives. About how winter kills us. How cooking saves us. About how our friends annual Robbie Burns night, where we always see each other, positioned in the calendar at the arse end of winter, drags us through this treacherous seasonal passage and girds our drooping loins for the onset of spring. Jean reminds me of why I took up smoking in the first place. At boarding school girls can be divided into two camps: the smokers and the non-smokers. Those that spend huge tracts of time in bathrooms with cans of ozone depleting deodorant gripped in their hands, behind the bicycle shed, sheltering under the cricket pavilion, negotiating the muddy paths of the nearby woods, all in order to have a smoke. I don’t know what the other camp does as I was never part of them. I suppose they went to the tuck shop, toasted white bread, chatted up boys, maybe even studied. But I was smoking. It takes a surprisingly long time to get the hang of smoking as any smoker will tell you. Hours of green gill inducing nausea on buses returning from away hockey matches, bathroom dizziness, head bobbing over the bowl, horizontal spins. All this was an initiation ceremony worth enduring for the pleasure of the company of women. A certain kind of woman. When I look at the smokers in my class, some of whom I am still close to, they are the ones still getting into trouble, still turning their lifes around in their hands looking for new surfaces, new shapes.
I know other smokers, but Jean is the one who instantly transports me back to this society that adopted a very specific ritual to denote it from all other lodges.
Lately I have been listening to Jean. When I hear her voice I want to run out and buy a pack of high tar smokes and gasp through them in quick succession. I want to brush my teeth, like I used to in school, and then light up in order to taste the tobacco better. Jean works as an interpreter at the United Nations. She has a voice that reassures one that all will be well with the world, and this in spite of the subject matter she is interpreting. She fulfills the requirements of her job with such grace, imagination and passion, converting the discourse of desiccated nations into an urgent poetry. If you listen to the Security Council hearings (my only concession to the impending war as I have couched my ostrich-like sloth in the convenient stance that I hate war-mongers, but I also hate the anti-war mongers: down with mongerers!) she is there telling you how important it is to talk. To sound the voice. Her Scots inflected speech can make you hear the time we are in. And it can convince you that whatever happens we must go on talking into the night, against the odds, channeling streams of sound into gummed up ears in the hope not of boring a passage to the brain, but simply because defeat is to lose one’s voice. To concede that we are rendered inarticulate is a fine admission, but silence is still a fair approximation of death.
All that smoking has only made her voice more beautiful.
January 7, 2002
The window that was being bricked up yesterday in the apartment building that I see from my desk has been finished. However, rather than bricking up the whole area they have halved the window space and now a new frame and pane sits on one side of the original structure. It is now a New York bathroom sized window rather than a full one. When I squinted out across the snowy, sun filled parking lot to check on it this morning it took me a while to locate the new window. I was looking for an area of brick, window sized and slightly lighter in colour than the brick of the building. My eye was confused and had to scan all of the floors. I was both relieved and disappointed when I realised that some compromise involving the former window’s fate had been arrived at.
“The worlds whole sap is sunke:
The generall balme th'hydroptique earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the beds-feet life is shrunke,
Dead and enterr'd, yet all these seeme to laugh,
Compared with mee, who am their Epitaph.”
A Nocturnall Upon St. Lucie's Day, Being the Shortest Day
John Donne
Here in the bowel of winter
(I always loved those lines from Donne, if not the time of year)
I am speed reading my life, asleep, in dreams,
Feature length with terror and amusement in equal parts—
I sit with my mother in perfect company
Admiring her profile
And the full, dark Lytton Strachey-like beard
That she has decided to cultivate;
I note how well it suits her.
Driving in planes
That balk at becoming air borne—
And life drifts back in briefly during part of a day
With a book,
Or an animal,
Or Vladimir and Estragon, still waiting, this time on TV.
But opposite my desk they are
Bricking up a window;
A terrible omen in the urban lexicon,
And I wonder if some part of me has been
Diligently and thoroughly closed,
A bulb disappearing permanently,
Sealed in brick and hardening mortar
The smell of damp cement
That is not nature,
That is not entirely synthetic—
A token of senses
Once bulging through
Each window
Every crevice.
December 17th, 2002
Dublin is a small town. You might think that you would have exhausted all of its streets during part of a lifetime lived there. Recently, during a ten day visit there, I discovered new vistas, new corners, new junctions. Going up Merrion Street past Doheny and Nesbitts pub I take a left down a lane and another left and am back on Merrion Square where I have just walked through the beautiful park in the square. I am killing time before meeting a friend in the Merrion Hotel. This approach to the square gives you a head on view of the fine Georgian architecture of the National Gallery, Government buildings and the grassy splendour that surrounds them. All newly clean, reminding us of Ireland’s economy that continues, if a little more slowly of late, to grow like a cabbage. This town is, in many respects, so different from the one I left seventeen years ago, return is both endlessly familiar and reminiscent of visiting a European city that you have never been to before. There are portions of it that are etched into my head, as familiar as one’s own moles. Bewley’s Cafe with its stained glass Harry Clarke windows: I meet a friend for breakfast (weak milky coffee, rashers, cherry buns and Irish butter). There is a roaring fire in the fire place and the whole place is suffused with a golden light. How many afternoons in the past did I spend here? But now the city also supports wine bars, cheese shops, and business people dealing tête a tête or on cell phones. I am from here but no longer exclusively of here. I meet a man and am reminded of my own race’s entertaining and eloquent charm, the sturdy flesh and pale skin, am reminded how I was often oblivious to the appeal of my own when I lived here. My mind performs a temporal boggle: This man and I are married, we have children, I work at something other than I do in New York, we go to the West at weekends. You peel back the fragile skin of destiny to expose the bundled nerve endings of another life, a life deserted, and your whole being loses its equilibrium like a ship in a gale force with its ballast ripped out. People, especially outside of Dublin, now mistake me for an American. I stare at the new Euro coins like a geriatric trying to make change. I know the city streets but get hopelessly lost when trying to negotiate the ever expanding suburbs with their glossy new EU funded roads. Sometimes it seems that everything has conspired to make me an outsider, even in my homeland. But the grand tradition of universal homesickness is a privilege I enjoy.