the trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts
you know what is a really super and understanding piece of literature on the way pain focuses the mind is Leonid Andreyev's On the Day of the Crucifixion. That is the one where a guy with just an incredibly bad toothache hears the three condemned men, each their own distinctive “type of guy” as we no doubt would say today,—hears them go by dragging their crosses on the fateful day, being scourged by the Romans and all, attracting a howling crowd of spectators &
"How they are shouting!" he said enviously, picturing to himself their wide-open mouths with strong, healthy teeth, and how he himself would have shouted if he had been well."
this is a good story with good insights into human nature.
and when they take him, our guy of the tooth problem, up the road to be diverted by the spectacle, but he misses that part of the resurrection commonly known as the “good part” due to his eagerness to finish telling his sympathetic friend the story of his very bad toothache, I think: this guy gets it. some readers take a different lesson, but I think they misunderstand.
—to ruin what is a very fine closure to a good couple of paragraphs above, I will be the exegete to my own gnomē: if you read this story as some kind of drippy exposition of the Auden poem on the Brueghel, or the William Carlos Williams poem on the Brueghel—or even of the Brueghel itself, god forbid we should apprehend a work of visual art with our naked eyeballs and interpret it with our naked brains without any textual intercessing intermediary—it all seems sententious, homiletic and dull. The point (stories don’t have “points,” I am just pretending, but pretend along with me if you will) of the Andreyev is not that we miss out on the numinous due to mundane distractions, or fail in our duty to bear witness to the holy due to excessive attachment to the flesh, or that the theological reason for the crucifixion was too many people getting too selfish & egoistic about their own precious toothaches, or that we are all too preoccupied with our own lives to know when something more important is going on, isn’t perspective a funny thing. that is all very silly, none of those are the point of anything. the point of the story is pain hurts. and I submit to you that this is a fine and subtle point, and the more pain has hurt you in your own daily life, the more readily you will apprehend its profundity.
listen! I LIVE
listen, everybody is sick of my dramaticks because nobody but me was ever in any serious doubt that I would live, the only reason they at the hospital kept making me sign papers acknowledging risk of DEATH, DEATH, DEATH was to play at games of cup-and-balls with my head, I know this perfectly well. but I keep amplifying them (the Dramaticks) as loudly as I am able because I am offended to have had everyone take my survival in stride.
If you follow me in other arenas of life you do not need the full context rundown yet again because I have not been able to shut up about my Problems for many years. however, a newsletter is formal serious business and for the sake of clarity and posterity I should say as directly as I can that on July 1 they unbolted my head and cut my throat to uncompress my spinal cord & selected nerves, replacing some, but not all, of my old faulty discs with prosthetic replicas made of polyethylene & titanium. “this’ll stop her complaining for sure,” they said, not knowing me well at all. they are a top-of-the-line model, not everyone’s number one choice but certainly a respectable one, there is hardly any risk of mechanical device failure, usually, and when there is it is at least spectacular and ends up in the medical literature, and that’s something. anyway they got right in there! right up on my spinal cord! blood on my hair, blood at my feet! bruises on my palms! agony abounds!
before long I should be back to my normal irregular schedule of saying things, but as I recover I ask you to either bear with me or at least feel guilty about your inability to bear with me. that, at least, is what I have been preoccupied with all my waking hours since my last address to you all.
surgery was not a decision taken lightly; as it says on all my records, I exhausted all the standard conservative measures long ago. I tried buying a small preserved boxwood topiary, which represents the frozen stoppage of Time & the arrest of attendant physical decay and decrepitude; I tried six different gothic bibliographies, indexed in six times six different ways, to get to know intimately the horror of physical & spiritual existence; I tried misting my hair with thermal-distilled Bulgarian rosa damascena, for a little pick-me up. then, I was out of ideas.
anyway I’m not on a lot of drugs but you better believe I would like to be. I am on just enough drugs to excuse any unpleasant or incomprehensible thing I say for at least two more weeks, and that is a semi-tolerable amount.
say, do you know how in Strictly Ballroom there’s the New Steps! New Steps! scene, and there’s a whirly flash cut from one person to the next, all exclaiming New Steps! and a spinning newspaper with the headline New Steps! and then Bang a cut to Barry Whosis of the dance federation who brings it all down to earth again with a “THERE ARE NO NEW STEPS”? well, it’s just like that for me but with Neck instead of Steps and no Barry to stop me. I have a new neck, and it hurts even more than the old one but in different places, which is a hopeful sign I GUESS. someday I will be cleared to tilt my head backwards again, more powerful even than the famous Pig of Vincent d’Onofrio.