Chapter 8, Bad Novel

Breakfasts were hell: I would sit in front of the scrambled eggs every day, and if the smell of them had made me gag when not pregnant, they really affected me now. Yet the “Blessed Mother” was insistent: I would eat them, or I would be on bathroom duty before school.

I’ve never scrubbed so many toilets in my life….

The days wore on: the monotony of the orphanage was part of the regime.

“I hate this place,” I whispered to the girl sitting next to me in class.

“Me, too,” she said, “but it’s better than home…”

“What?” I asked. “How’s that?”

“Well, at least you get enough to eat. We were just scraping by back home. I got really tired of macaroni and cheese….”

We never got macaroni and cheese—my father believed in meat at every dinner. Anything less was, well, low class.

It was just a part of our lives: the latest cars, the biggest televisions, and the credit cards that seemingly paid themselves. When we went to Connecticut, I saw the reason why. The limousine would be waiting for us at the airport, and James, who seemed to have known father forever, would be struggling to put our luggage in the trunk. We’d try to help, but he insisted; when it became clear that it was a matter of pride for him, we finally gave up.

If there are any bad parts of Greenwich, Connecticut, well, I never saw them. We would fly in to New York, usually, and then be shuttled up to my grandmother’s house. But I was curious—what was New York City like? And why did we never stay there; why did we flee the city the moment we landed at the airport.

“Who the hell would want to go there? The place is a dump.  Filled with trash, niggers, burnt out buildings, crime. The place is just a wreck,” so said my father. My mother nodded.

“Broadway, Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum,” I said.

“Don’t you have a record player in your room?” said my father.

“It’s not the same,” I said. “And even if the city is a wreck, I still want to see it.”

“Well, she has a point, Jim,” said my mother. “Those are things that she should experience. I’d love to see a Broadway show myself….”

“Whatever,” my father said. “If you want to go, go. Just don’t expect me to go with you.”

And so it was settled—we would leave a week after school finished, spend five days in the city, and then go up to Connecticut with my father. My mother, completely characteristically, called the Ritz.

“It’s just off Central Park,” said my mother, “so we can take a carriage ride through the park.”

A carriage ride? I wanted to see the city, I wanted to walk the streets; my mother wanted me safely inside a carriage, being pulled through a dump.

That’s what it was then—there was trash all over the place, the benches had been vandalized, or had drunks sleeping on them. The grass had been trampled to death, and the building were there seemingly for graffiti, nothing else. It was like taking a ride through a war-zone.

“Bitch, take you fuckin’ cunt daughter outta the park,” called one black man.

My mother raised her gloved hand to her mouth.

“Driver,” she said loudly, “did you hear that man! The rudeness! I never! He must be reported at once!”

“Dint hear nothin’, lady,” the driver said.

“But that’s impossible,” said my mother. “He shouted at us! He insulted us! Where are the police?”

Wherever the police were, they weren’t in the park. Abruptly, my mother ordered the carriage driver to return to the Ritz. Then, she demanded a partial refund; we had paid for an hour, but only used 15 minutes or so.

“Can’t refund no money, Lady. You pay me for your time, I give you my time.”

They went around and around about it. As my mother insisted harder, the scene grew nastier. We were just across the street from the Ritz, but still in the park. That’s when I realized: we were the only white people in the park. And the passerby made it pretty clear whose side they were on.

“Ugly white bitch,” one person hissed.

“Outta take all her money,” another added. “She got plenty mo…”

“Come on, Mom, let’s get out of here,” I told her.

“I most certainly will not,” said my mother, “not until this man refunds our money.”

A small crowd grew around us, and the comments were not favorable.

“Bitch thinks she own everything….”

“Outta stay out in the suburbs and leave us alone….”

At last, the doorman from the Ritz left his post, approached my mother, addressed her as “Ma’am” and asked if she wasn’t a guest at the hotel.

“Why, I most certainly am,” said my mother, “we have a suite on the 12th floor, overlooking the park.”

“Oh, she got a suite in the Ritz! Bitch truly got money!”

“Madam, allow me to escort you back to the hotel. And of course, if you’d like to enjoy a drink at the bar, or a cup of tea, on the house, the hotel would be honored.

My mother knew that she was down for a defeat; she also knew that a drink at the bar—there was no question of tea—was a good way to save face.

And so the doorman shepherded us to the hotel, my mother protesting all the way.

“I had no idea the city had so changed,” she told the doorman, “it’s been years since I’ve been in the city.”

It was true. Madison, Wisconsin, was lily white. Yes, there were a few black families on the city’s south side, but who went there? More importantly, they knew enough to stay there. And since they were dumped into the east side school district, people on the west side (the toney part of town) were well insulated.

I was sixteen, I was idealistic, and it was clear. My mother and I were completely out of our depths.

Nearing a Breakup with Julian

“Love’s Trilogy?” said Lady. “What is this, Marc, a Christian book!”

“It is a little surprising,” I told her, “since oil and water are far more compatible than I and Christianity. Anyway, this is all about Julian of Norwich—circa 1470—and her revelations, or showings, as she called them. So I figured I would walk as far as I could down the road with Julian, and then, when I could do no more, I’d sit by the side of the road and wish her Godspeed. Which may be today, since we’ve got to two major hurdles—the Trinity and the Passion of Christ—and she soared right over them. Clever woman, though dead these many centuries. And here I am, slacking back and wondering if I can tiptoe around them.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Well, they’re both sort of central to Christianity—at least most people think so—but I’ve never quite bought in. Given that Julian and I got along until the fourth revelation, and there are 86 or so, it means that we’ve barely gotten out of the driveway. Or put it this way: we parted ways on page 13, and the book has 333 pages.”

“What—333! That’s your favorite number! Marc, that’s a sign!”

“Not really, 333 is the page that the last revelation starts, so it goes on for a bit longer….”

“Still a sign!”

“Listen, can we just drop it? I tried, I really tried, but I just can’t.”

“So what’s the problem with the Trinity?”

“The problem is that I used to know why it was important, historically speaking, and I know that everybody got into a big to-do about it, and there were conferences and diets and schisms and charges of heresy and excommunications—the entire religious smorgasbord. But here’s the deal: I’ve never seen the point in it, even when I could understand it, which I mostly couldn’t. I mean, I think it was Karen Armstrong who said, ‘we never really got the Trinity in the West,’ and who also said that a person would have to meditate most of a lifetime to understand the Trinity. Oh, and I was perfectly fine with the old song, “Three in one and one in three, oh, the noble Trinity!”

“Not sure that ever made it down to Puerto Rico,” said Lady.

“Trust me, it was never on Dick Clark’s hit parade. So I muddled around with the Trinity for years, until I discovered that somebody in the 13^th century had come up with a great design for it all, so much so that they were evening wearing it on the shields. In fact, it’s called the Shield of the Trinity, or Scutum Fidei, in Latin.”

“Yeah? What’s it look like?”

“Check it out—and the guy who designed had a serious career waiting for him on Madison  Avenue, many centuries later….”

    

“Not sure I get that….”

“OK—try this….”

   

 “Slightly better. Explanation?”

“Well God is at the center, and goes into the three components of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And vice versa, since the arrows go both way. Which mean that the three elements of the Trinity are also God. But the Holy Ghost is not the Son, or the Father. ‘Est’ being ‘is’ and ‘non est’….”

“Do let me guess that one,” said Lady, more dryly than the Sahara Desert. “Anyway, since we’ve cracked the Trinity, why jettison poor Julian?”

“In the fourth revelation, she waxes ecstatic about the Trinity, and why is it that the Trinity just leaves me cold? Granted, I haven’t put my lifetime into it—but why would a simple creature, by her own definition, care about it? Much less go nutso over it?”

“What does she say?”

“’And in the same showing (revelation) suddenly the Trinity almost filled my heart with joy…’”

“Almost?”

“Bingo—I picked up on that, too. Curiously, the commentator didn’t mention it. But then Julian goes on a riff, at one point describing the Trinity as our ‘everlasting lover.’ Did I tell you ecstatic? Anyway, why should she care? Why should anyone care? And why were all those medieval crusaders putting it on their shield?”

“I’m not sure I’ve met too many people so occupied with the Trinity.”

“I’m not occupied, and that’s the problem. And don’t even get me started about the Passion—which is the whole thing about the crucifixion, loosely—because I don’t get that, either. Though I will say that I can think of no other religion that is as narrative-driven as Christianity. I mean, look at Buddhism: what happens there? Guy sits under tree. Guy receives wisdom. Guy teaches wisdom. End of that story!”

“Right—might be hard to tease out an hour and forty minutes of film on that.”

“It’s been done, but not without some stretching.”

“So what’s your problem with the Passion?”

“Well, Julian gets totally into it. You can almost feel and smell the blood. And of course, I’m such a smart-ass about it all. Tell me that Christ died for my sins, and my first reaction is, ‘how very presumptuous of him.’ Which doesn’t go over big, theologically speaking. Anyway, until Susan suggested that the whole point of the passion was not suffering but vulnerability, the whole thing left me cold. So now I’m lukewarm, which doesn’t feel quite so good, next to Julian’s blast furnace.”

“So you didn’t get anything out of the revelation?”

“Yeah, I did, but it sort of slipped by the commentator, so it’s probably nothing. Anyway, what do you make of this: ‘For it seemed to me that it could well be that I would—by the permission of God, and with his Protection—be tempted by fiends before I died.’ All that, by the way, being tossed off in a parenthesis, whereas I would stick that right up that at the top of the revelation. In fact, I’d bang a concerto out of that drum, and stick the Passion and the Trinity in a footnote.”

“What’s so interesting about that?”

“Seems like a more fertile field than the other two. Interesting that Julian sees the temptation by fiends as something occurring with God’s permission, and with his protection.”

“Free will?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I think it’s more than that. I think that temptation by fiends is necessary, and always has been, throughout the Christian narrative. There’s that snake, you know….”

“I’ve met many a snake,” said Lady.

“No, the one with the apple…”

“That, too, though every snake, you can be sure, has his apple. Haven’t you? Met the snakes, I mean.”

“Seems like I have; I think we all have.”

“And what apples have you bit into? With or without God’s permission and protection?”

I consider this.

“I spent years crippled with self-doubt about my talent. Think that counts?”

“Remember the light and the bushel?”

“I think I refused a lot of love that I should have accepted. How about that?”

“Remember the fatted calf?”

“Not sure that works….”

“It absolutely works. We go off, we stray, we make mistakes, and then, somehow, we get home again. And yes, the brother gets his nose out of joint, but there is also the father, who hasn’t stopped loving, even when his child was straying. The story would have worked better, by the way, if the author had eliminated the other brother, and made the possible rejection internal to the Prodigal Son….”

“Quite possibly….”

“There’s something I’m missing, here,” I told her. “I know there’s a snake I’ve overlooked in the grass, though I’ve grown drunk on his fruit. But what is it? What am I missing?”

“Maybe,” said Lady, “if you get to the end of the road with Julian, you’ll find out.”

Could she be right?

Plodding on with Julian

Who knows why?

I only know that as I was falling, very early on that November morning, I had the twin dreads that what was happening was real, and the equally certain feeling that it was unreal.

To be standing implies control, possibly more than we know or can appreciate. I must know where the floor is, where my legs are; nerves impulses are flying back and forth, muscles are contracting, blood is flowing through my arteries, my lungs are breathing, my heart pumping.

It is, in short, almost miraculous that I can stand at all, and that I have been doing so for more than half a century. And then, six months ago, one system failed, and I fell.

Notice the words: “control,” “failed,” and “fell.”

Julian, in her third revelation, wrote of her illness, but, oddly, she was much more clear about what had happened to her than I was about my own predicament. A paradox—since imagine what I know, and what she did not. If the Internet were not spending the day lounging in bed and eating madeleines, I could refresh the vague memory from childhood of (?) William Harvey, who discovered the circulatory system. Whether it was he or someone else, it was surely later than when Julian wrote, in the last half of the 14^th century. Very likely, in fact, she was thinking of her physical illness—if she even framed it as a physical illness—as something brought about by an imbalance of the four humors.

So she was missing some information, according to our lights. When she got ill, in the second half of her 30^th year, she called the curate, not the doctor. I, in contrast, knew even as I was falling that my blood pressure had plummeted, certainly due to jumping out of bed to stretch out a Charlie horse. Oh, and possibly due to an alcohol / drug interaction.

Julian’s illness, in her view, was sent by God, and was a gift of God: through it, she was better able to experience the suffering of Christ. My fall, in my view, was the result of physiological factors, some of which were out of my control. Julian is healed when the curate asks her to focus on the crucifix: the room becomes dark, and only the crucifix appeared in “ordinary light.” I was healed when doctors, some of them unseen, looked into me, with various sounds and lights and electrical pulses, none of them particularly ordinary, or even available to the layman.

In short, the two illnesses had nothing in common. She turned to her curate; I, in contrast, sent everyone offering spiritual succor scurrying away. But both of us experienced what everyone suffering an illness feels: our control has been taken away. Or, perhaps, is in another’ hand. Or should that be “Another’s?”

God does not speak to me—for which on most days I’m grateful. I therefore do not speak to Him. We do, however, nod courteously on passing. In this, I operate under a sort of British mindset: because we have not been introduced, we can’t possibly speak.

But wasn’t I speaking, in a certain sense? What if we were to imagine pain as a language? What if pain were the language of God? In those days when I had two Hannibal Lector’s munching on the lumbar portion of my spine, what was I thinking? Or, perhaps, what was I saying. Or He? (Male pronoun by convention only….) 

Nothing?

OK, what was I feeling?

Everything and nothing. Rather, one thing, and that was a pain that I can no longer remember.

Like Julian, I would like to have the pain again. I’d like to explore it, map it, analyze all the physiological and emotional changes it wrought on me. But that, of course, would be impossible: only a person not in pain could do that. So pain is a kind of dream world. Instead of “I was in my childhood home but wasn’t,” we have “I have been stabbed by burning Excaliburs while God plunged the archangel into Hell.”

But if I were to return to that dream world of pain for only five minutes: enough to experience it again, and then sneak away to write / remember it, would that really work? Wasn’t it the duration of the pain, how it intruded on my sleep, how it made me tense before any movement—all that produced an accumulated effect. For weeks, I lived in “I will never not be in pain.” I had once lived in a Cezanne; I was now in a Dürer. 

Pain immobilized me better than iron chains ever could. But was it really immobility? Wasn’t it, in fact, stillness? I no longer had to carry the weight of an ordinary day: in fact, I literally could not carry the weight of an ordinary day. And so I was in the back bedroom, and almost as cloistered as Julian had been in her cell, seven centuries before.

I wrote previously that Julian was clearer about her disease than I was. She had not known, after all, any of the facts about her illness. She was free, therefore, to experience her illness as a spiritual affliction or blessing. I was less blessed, and in a sense less free: my knowledge of physiology and pathology allowed me to put up a smokescreen against the divine.

If I shield myself from the divine, at least I am not immune to poetry. Which meant that the metaphor of a broken back made me wonder—had my life become so burdensome? Could I carry my life no longer? Had my life broken my back, and if so, why?

Or was I weak? A neurosurgeon I saw pondered why a 59-year old male should have fractures of such severity—do I have osteoporosis? Is a bone scan necessary, or even worth it?

I am a broken man reading the words of a woman healed three quarters of a millennium ago. Will anyone be around to read either of our words 750 years from now? How will they see us—Julian and I?

My guess is that I will be some transitional figure: Julian, with her spiritual certainty, will be at one pole. But I am somewhere in the middle—poised between physics and metaphysics.

Will the women and men of the future have pieced it, or merged it, together?

Revelations, 750 Years Apart

THESE Revelations were shewed to a simple creature unlettered, the year of our Lord 1373, the Thirteenth day of May.

So starts the second revelation of Julian, which by coincidence (?) this simple creature mostly-unlettered read in the year of our Lord 2016, the Thirteenth day of May.

Which means that I had an idle half hour until the café opened, and how much Patience can one play, before the pangs of guilt set in? And so I took up the book Susan sent me, and reread the first revelation. OK—I wasn’t much impressed, since Julian seemed to be painting a theological shopping list with a very broad brush. But I consoled myself: hadn’t Susan had the same impression, on first reading Julian? Maybe, like Pooh, the bears get smarter, with a little time and training.

So the second revelation, some 750 years old, went a little easier on me. And because I was in bed, still technically recovering from a broken back, the second of the three wishes of Julian struck a particular chord:

The Second came to my mind with contrition; [I] freely desiring that sickness [to be] so hard as to death, that I might in that sickness receive all my rites of Holy Church, myself thinking that I should die, and that all creatures might suppose the same that saw me: for I would have no manner of comfort of earthly life.

Is it morbid to wish a sickness? Perhaps, but I wonder if we haven’t medicalized out some of the beauty of sickness. After all, sickness does something that meditation does as well: it reduces or even erases the noise of our life. The emails, the errands, the telephone calls—all that can wait. In fact, it must wait; whether through pain, immobility or simple indisposition, the daily drudgery is put aside.

It was, in those months of bed rest, a curious pleasure to do nothing. And what, truly, had I done that was so important? I had written a book, I had written a blog, I had played the cello. None of that seemed particularly worth the effort. And now I was lying in bed, and the pain was so severe that the only thing I could do was count my breaths, and try to keep my mind free of any thoughts whatsoever. I had done this years earlier, when I was practicing (as much as I could) Buddhism; never, however, had I done it so much, or so strenuously.

There was, in this sickness, more health than there had been in the days that I had woken up, taken the bus to Caguas, worked 10 hours in corporate America, returned, eaten, and collapsed into bed—only to do it all the next day. The clock had ruled my day, and there was no time. Now, the clock had been thrown out, and I was living more deeply into time than I ever had. Morning sounds: the garbage truck two streets away, throwing the bags of beer bottles into its innards. The mourning dove, cooing for ten minutes, and then stopping. Had his or her mourning stopped? Had he a round of mourners to attend to, and was he now off under somebody else’s window? 

Then there were the church bells, which I had never heard before.

In the same way that throwing away the clock had allowed me to know time, breaking my back brought the world to me. I had lived for twenty years away from the church bells, before I heard them for the first time on my sickbed. The only mourning doves I had heard previously were in my youth, when I was visiting my uncle’s farm on the border of Illinois and Wisconsin. And since I could no longer walk much—even now, there is a urinal hanging on my bedframe—I was walking a road in southwestern Wisconsin.

It went through a woods, it crossed a shallow ravine, and it led to a shack that I am sure has caved in. After all, my mother, late in her 80's, had discovered that one of the logs that supported a corner of the house had rotted. Her solution? Return home, get the tire jack, lift up the shack, and replace with another log. But Mother had died six years ago—and would anyone else do such Herculean feats? Or even something so simple as using a cut-out part of a coffee can to plug a hole that the mouse had bored into the wood….

No matter, since the crone who lives there, and whom I rarely visited when well, has no use for the shack. Which is to say that she lives there as I visit; nonetheless, she surprises me with her responses. She is, after all, quite unconcerned about my illness. I’ll go on, she says, if I recover from my illness. And if I am paralyzed? I’ll go on as well.

This is the response you want to hear when facing paralysis. Because the response I got from the rest of the world was, “it’s not going to happen; don’t invite that in.”

This was a response from the living and from the healthy, who know that the odds are their favor. The bus will not jump onto the sidewalk, the morning shower will reveal no lumps in the breast. But the world of sickness is larger: not only will the bus jump onto the sidewalk, it will be pushed by the tidal wave that will destroy the city.

To live in health is to live in the margins. Every day is sunny, every face is cheerful. To live in sickness is to live at the center. And what did I discover, at my center?

That I was alone.

Friends knew, of course, that I had broken my back. Though many did not: I posted nothing on Facebook, even as others were presenting their photos of the burger they were about to devour. I could have sent an email to the people in my life who weren’t in Puerto Rico, but why?
But why? Only I could have written that “but why,” since only a person who dwells so much in solitude could conceive of it. “But why” has nothing to do with the fact that there is nothing a person outside of Puerto Rico could do for a person with a broken back in Puerto Rico. It has more to do with the fact that breaking my back was my exploration of the life I had chosen. And that life has been fundamentally solitary.

So I met my solitude. I observed the cookie wrappers as they accumulated ankle deep around my bed. I forced myself into the kitchen, to take the three Advil and the one extra-strength Tylenol every six hours. (I had decided to forego anything stronger: I was already a drunk, did I need to be hooked on painkillers as well?) I made myself get up for breakfast and for dinner, and said little about the pain to Raf.

My mother had snorted, always, at the idea that suffering “refines” the soul. In general, I agree, if “refine” means the Victorian idea of politeness and gentility. If, however, “refine” was used in a metallurgical sense, I might have to pause. For in that time of sickness / health, I was being refined indeed.

“What falls away is always. And is near.”

Yes, Roethke, you had it right. “Always” is the world of health, the world where time goes forward until always. And how it fell, and how easily I grasped it again, when the back began to mend, and when I could at last sweep the bedroom, wash the sheets, and get to the store for the nightly wine. “Always” I picked up again, and could feel glad for doing so.

As I was glad that it had fallen away!