Papers

It is complex, taking care of oneself.  And at the heart of the matter lies the nature of one's self.  The latter can only change, or become more apparent, or seem different after watching the life slowly drain from someone beloved.  And so it is that 14 months later, I have finally settled on a strategy for newsprint recycling.

In editing an anthology of poetry, Robert Bly included one interesting bit of prose.  Charles Darwin's account of the effects of science in his own life.  As he got deeper into his observations, analysis and life-origins thinking, Darwin reports a curious event.  The moment when he could no longer read Shakespeare.  In fact, poetic writing in general.  I can't recall more about Bly's snippet.  But this is the gist.  Once the mind was directed to reason and analyze, the other sensibilities began to wane.

Which feels much like my thing with newspapers.  Since Marlou's death, my resistance to them has mounted.  Even The Nation, one of my favorite political outlets, has become hard to read.  I don't precisely know what is happening.  Something.

Still, I have a solution.  Coffee.  Take the newspapers out to coffee.  Buy each of them, the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times, a latte.  While you're at it, buy one for yourself.  The caffeine will do nicely with the frenzied atmosphere of the reportage.  You'll actually read some of it.  And, not insignificant, leave the papers on the table when you are finished.  Let the café recycle them, if it wishes.  In any case, it is no longer your problem.  Showing that despite your liberal sensibilities, you are quite capable of utter and complete social irresponsibility.

I need to be fully caffeinated to deal with work that is recurrent, perhaps obsessive.  I tell myself the following: if I keep torturing myself with the same scene, replaying a memory, surely this is for a reason.  Something needs working out.  It is the dying Marlou, of course.  

She is in bed, our bed, propped up, weakening, looking my way.  I have rolled into the bedroom to talk to her, probably between bouts of ghastliness.  But in this remembered scene, I am sitting at her bedside, as close as one can get.  People placed chairs in the narrow passage between wall and bed so they could visit, talk, stare.  I kept asking to have the chairs moved.  Sometimes I just gave up.  Giving up being rather easy at the time.  In this scene, might as well call it a dream for all its likely verisimilitude...I recall Marlou's helpless look, her sinking, weakness.  She is propped, perhaps pinned, against the pillows, wearing a high necked nightgown.  She looks beautiful in this memory.  The memory itself is not.  I also feel helpless, hopeless.  Not to mention exhausted.  These moments where hard work for me.  Necessary, not enjoyable.  Everything in me heavy and depleted, spent like uranium.

I must have actually been on the bed, lying next to Marlou when we talked about the blindness.  Did we actually talk?  Did Marlou tell me she had lost the vision in one eye?  Either she said it, or someone said it, in a matter-of-fact sort of way.  And today that is what horrifies me.  There was so much else 'wrong', if one can use the term of understatement, by way of body failure...that an optic nerve shutting down here or there hardly mattered.  What I recall in the most recent replaying of this scene is my own fear and retreat.  I was there, active as I could be, which means I wasn't there completely.

And almost a year and a half later, I still have trouble with newspapers, polemics.  Actually, I have trouble with the amount.  Defense critic Andrew Bacevich has been in San Francisco recently.  He says it all.  I don't need to hear more about this.  Put him in charge.  Or show me a way to put someone like him in charge, and I'll support it.  Beyond that, I lack bandwidth, as we say in California.  I lack patience.  The latter having been in very small supply since Marlou's death.

But there is a much more positive way of looking at all this.  It's time to read.  And read something else.  Poetry for example.  I'm getting back into reading poems.  Literature in general.  Not to mention music, good drama, spirit-expanding art.  Grief puts us on track, steers us like a train.  There's no resisting.  And down the track, there has to be something different.  Maybe even something healing.