I injured my back in mid-April—and my recovery, or lack of recovery, has been, at times, painful and demoralizing. So I’ve spent much of the past two months on my living room couch. I’ve been reading a lot: reports of Trump’s latest outrages, mostly, but also terrific recent books by Rebecca Schiff, Jamaal May, and Helen Ellis. I’ve been following the Orlando heartbreak, the Brexit aftershocks. And I’ve been writing short poems—the kind I can type with one hand, while my other hand holds up my laptop.
A back injury might seem like the perfect affliction for someone who enjoys, even when healthy, lying on a couch, reading and writing. But no: I miss playing tennis; I miss dancing with my kids. And I’m a little bit afraid that I’m just broken—that the resiliency of my lumbar region, trusted at twenty-nine, at thirty-nine, has deserted me at forty-nine. As Louis C. K.’s doctor said about the comic’s fortysomething ankle: “It’s just shitty now.”
Still, I hold out hope that time heals, if not everything, at least stupid annoyances like bulging discs. And I have time right now: school’s out. But claiming to “have time” makes me want to leap off the couch (if I could) and knock on the wood mantelpiece. People think they have time—and then they die in a heartbeat. It happened just now, to countless optimists, in the twenty seconds it took me to type (with one hand) this sentence.
This isn’t the kind of post I usually contribute to this blog. I’m more likely to celebrate a poet’s birthday, review a book, riff on my clown class. But one of the interesting things about physical pain is the way in which it reorients you mentally. Reorient: “change the focus or direction of.” Reorient (oneself): “find one’s position again in relation to one’s surroundings.”
When I was in grad school in the mid-’90s, I wrote, after having thrown out my back, a paper on Oscar Wilde and Andy Warhol. I got a “B” on the paper—a failing grade, essentially, in grad-school terms—and the professor wrote something like “I can only assume your back problems have played a role in producing this too-brief argument.” But I just reread the paper—“Blue China and Brillo Pads, Personality and Pose”—and I don’t find the argument too brief at all. In fact, had I had more time, I probably would’ve tried to make it briefer.
Here’s a passage from Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? that I’ve been meaning to share for months:
At one point Ryan tried to talk to us. “No one wants to be friends with you two, and when they see you, they avoid you. Sheila, you never come to clown class anymore.”
“Who gives a fuck about clown class,” I said, giving a kick to the sidewalk with my foot.
We were following our instincts, same as we had always done.