My friend Lisa just posted a link to an essay she wrote back in March of 2012 about whether great (or even good) art (writing) somewhat necessarily comes from pain. She had (recently, I presume, because who could do it while actually having) had a migraine. My first thought was, since I didn’t leave a comment and don’t remember reading it: Where was I in March of 2012? Curious enough to check, I looked back at my digital calendar. Ah. In the last weeks of Craig’s dying. Which explains so much.
And begs another question: what kind of pain? Here I’ll digress to gratuitiously tell you that my right thigh and hip joint hurt right this second as I type, not viciously but enough that I can’t forget that they do. It has only been a week since Dr. Handsome Witha Saw replaced my corrupt and grizzled right hip joint with a lovely mechanized version in titanium and pearlescent violet ceramic, and, although it could be so so so much worse (as it was with Hip #1 last year), I ache.
Say that word and really draw out the “a” – I aaaache. This dull, deep, barely-rolling-tires-on-a-gravel-road bass line to everything else is my ache. My leg aches, more when it’s still than when it’s moving, which tricks you into moving it more which increases the next being-still ache. It’s not that bad, I tell myself and you, which makes me wonder why I find it necessary to qualify. Because self-reliant, tough chicas can handle pain, ride right over it without griping? Probably. That’s a persona I’ve projected all my life. I’m bitching now because this time I’m saying it’s allowed and no one is editing this piece, probably not even me. Just write the words and don’t reread it if you want honesty and not badge-shining, so that’s what you’re getting this time.
In March of 2012 I was aching on two sturdy legs and writing some of the best stuff I had ever put out. The same is true of my essays from the End of Marge era and from Saying Goodbye to Dad. I sense a theme here. I wonder: Maybe it isn’t that I write better when I’m emotionally cratering but when I write about death. Ah, but I can write the crap out of a piece about being in love, especially when my heart is exposed, reckless, pining, defenseless. I’ve written many about Mack and how it used to be when I would fling myself in front of the steel-studded tires of his indifference. I used to relish a challenge. Now I wonder how someone can fake it this long – or how foolish it is to not see unkindness for exactly what it is: not caring, an empty well, a missing chromosome, and that it isn’t the reason that matters, only the fact.
A singer-songwriter said once that she was, for the first time in a long while, happily in love but that the songs she was trying to write were awful compared to the ones written when she had been lonely and treated badly by some rat-bastard. Antje Duvekot, I think it was, and that’s my description, not hers, but you get the drift. Angst, it’s more than the salt in your soup; it’s the 24% Dutch-process cocoa powder in your flourless chocolate cake, the difference between meh and magical. And if you don’t think so, make two cakes, one with the 24% and one with Hershey's, taste them and get back to me. It’s the difference between a tentative, questing, hungry, warm-lipped kiss and one so perfunctory you can taste the resignation behind it.
I came home from the hospital with wristbands intact, three of them this time. I wonder if modern medicine has need for more info than can be crammed into one bar code, or if they just add them one by one as you get older. Two have been scissored off, one remains because I rather like its message.
Wandering off the path a bit, I found these paragraphs in an unfinished piece from a couple years ago:
A friend the other night described how he used to swim because it was great exercise but found it "just so fucking boring," said the only way he could keep going was to daydream about sex; he would weave these elaborate fantasies that carried him along, buoyed and distracted. I said, "Swimming laps is so awfully slow, though. How long could you keep the movie going?" He laughed. "A long time, a lot longer than in real life." I like an honest man.
We're all getting older, and we're married and too content to be tempted by cheating. Well, except the idea of it; that lingers, sizzling like bacon on a griddle, background noise in the busy diner of our lives. They say men fantasize about women other than their wives or current amours; I didn't ask Brian who he imagined fucking for ten laps, and Mack would never have even answered the baseline question about imaginary sex; Catholic school has sealed his sinful lips. I smile. He knows he would like Brian to ask me if and about whom I daydream, but also is more sure, even than I, that he wouldn't like my answers. We maintain the pretense that we are always monogamous, in thought as well as deed.
The anesthesiologist last week gave me an amnesiac before the next drugs made me unconscious, something I find especially wonderful. It isn’t given because you might be writhing in agony on the operating table when the scalpel opens your skin and fat layer like a ripe peach and it would be better if, indeed, you didn’t remember that (a scenario that horrifies my friend Ellie and, she swears, is the reason she can’t commit to any cosmetic procedure that requires a general); I think it’s a bit of insurance for those times that the anesthetic effect might be lightening, intentionally or otherwise. I had a total hysterectomy back in the late nineteen eighties, and my smart-aleck friend and OB/GYN told me I talked all the way through it but refused to tell me what I had said. He hinted, though, with a raised eyebrow. He had sure heard enough during my regular office visits in stirrups back in those days to know there was the potential for some embarrassing stories. I wonder if, during these hip procedures, I babbled anything incriminating. Better not to know.
Let’s get back to pain. On one hand, low-grade, nagging, constant, ranging from an annoyance to beginning-to-gnaw-on-one’s-last-nerve and, on the other, intense, sharp, breathtaking, blood-pressure-raising, consuming. My hip ache – or my heartache – compared to a blinding migraine or a throbbing, flayed wound, well, we all know which we would choose if choice were possible. The hard pain – 8 , 9 or 10 out of 10 – doesn’t enable or produce art or anything good, only agony and a plea for release, please please. The former, for some of us, is necessary for words to flow or notes to string or hearts to open, to bleed bright red, to feel instead of describe, to swim in a vast warm sea instead of a chlorine pool, to imagine the taste of lips yours will never touch, words that will never be whispered into your willing ear, a thudding heart against yours that belongs to someone for whom you are as essential as breath because, apparently, some people won’t stop until they find that, won’t settle for almost-there or sometimes-there or pretense, won’t give up because it’s too much work or it leaves one vulnerable-to-death. And it doesn’t matter one tiny bit whether all this happens in the real world in your real life with skin-and-bones people or just in the endless reaches of your shockingly fertile imagination. I don't even know if perhaps this reality was once mine and Mack's and has been flattened by decades of grinding life or if it was only ever mine, woven into whole cloth from threads of hopefulness and need. But I guess at this point it doesn't really matter: pain is pain, love is love, the only and insignificant difference is how you get there.
I guess I have always been – and remain – at great risk for falling.
