These Last Strands of Man: My Own Age of Injury
"Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee
Not untwist - slack they may be - these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can."
"Carrion Comfort" by Gerard Manley 'the man' Hopkins
Running today in the midday heat at Almaden Quicksilver Park in South San Jose (15.46 miles, ~2550 elevation gain, 3172 calories burned), I smelled carrion mixed with the heat and dust and frantic rush of life and death buzzing around me: there must have been some dead animal dying or already dead nearby, the carrion rotting silently in the field to the side of the trail while big, black-winged hawks circled overhead; a multitude of bugs buzzed me, dive-bombed my face, arms, legs, sizing me up as potential carrion; yet other insects sat semi-squashed on the path, writhing and wriggling their last few unheroic contortions before they too would become food for someone else. Or just decay into the earth.
Always with life, so much death - and always with death, so much life.
Two sides of the same coin, inseparable.
I had such thoughts of myself, my own body, as carrion, this large and hulking frame, this collection of capillaries and cells, someone's son, many girls' long ago boyfriend, a brother, a friend, all this is me, my body. What will happen when this body - me - becomes carrion?
Last Sunday I dislocated my shoulder doing the quite unheroic and mundane task of making my bed - flipping the comforter as I usually do to distribute the down filling when POW, the left arm was out of its socket and dangling. This has happened to me twice before and somehow I had unbeknownst knowledge of how to put the dangling arm back in, albeit under the great stress of intense pain. But this time, for some reason, my luck ran out and I could not put it back (cf. Humpty Dumpty), and I got nervous - thoughts of this as a permanent condition panicked my mind. I got nervous. Would my arm go back? Should I call 911? But if I had done that the whole neighborhood would from that point forward have known me as The Man They Took Away in an Ambulance. Kids would creep behind me and whisper "there he is, the Ambulance Man." Personally, I would like to be at least 60 before shit like that happens.
Luckily my kind neighbor was home, Bernie (short for Bernadette), the older woman who lives behind me, and she gracefully took me to the hospital, all the while I was ungracefully holding my arm up like some loose strand of man in the front passenger seat of her small truck. In the ER, they doctor tried twice to place the arm back in but the pain was too great, and I discovered that I had no problem screaming like a 10 year old girl in a public place - in front of cute nurses, hospital stafff, and bearded, white coated doctor with a beard and beady eyes. Twist it hard enough and the body just screams.
It appeared that their strategy was to call in an orthopedic doctor and knock me out with drugs so they could put my arm back in its socket. Last thing I remembered I was holding my arm up, closing my eyes and looking for peace while the pleasant nurse injected morphine and sedatives into the big vein in my forearm. Then, four hours later I was lying in the hallway of the ER about on my gurney, these little electrode dealie bobs all over my chest and stomach - little electrodes used to monitor a patient's heart when they have to knock him out. I have no recollection of them repositioning the arm back to where it belonged. Lost time, it feels like.
They noticed me there, coming to, and took my blood pressure and told me I could go when I felt ready. It was around midnight then, and I struggled to get up and carefully managed to get my shirt on and started walking down the hall. I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going. I was too sedated to make sense of tasks like walking and getting a ride home, so I went back to my bed on wheels and became a serious napster. About two hours later, I was able to get up again and find a phone to get a cab and make it home. When I got to my bed room I eyed my comforter with mistrust and suspicion. I wanted to blame that inanimate object, blame something. As I looked at the comforter I was sure that somewhere inside the neatly sewn pockets of down feathers there lived some nasty little demon spirit whoses job it was to ruin my pefectly fine (albeit hung over) Sunday afternoon.
Lying in that ER I realized how alone I am in the world, and that, given the circumstances, there could be some day when my body will be in its last movements, nearing the point of no return. The day will indeed come where people will be sad and they will struggle to come to terms with my absence and will take care of disposing of my body permanently and properly - so much carrion, this thing that was me - they will perform these deeds with respect and dignity and solemn, probably tearful words, hopefully more ceremony than those little buzzing bugs on a trail, writhing his last moments of life in the dust and heat.
Like the bugs and dead animals in the fields of parks and mountains, we have a limited time before we go back to from where it was we came: the dirt, the trees and rocks, or maybe Heaven? (Why do we get heaven but not the bugs? Who the hell made us the paragon of animals?) As we move about the world, the clock it is 'a tickin'; Time's winged chariot is at our backs, drawing near. Everything we do is significant, everything has meaning, and each and every second counts. The question is, what do we do with them?
"Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee
Not untwist - slack they may be - these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry I can no more. I can."
"Carrion Comfort" by Gerard Manley 'the man' Hopkins
Running today in the midday heat at Almaden Quicksilver Park in South San Jose (15.46 miles, ~2550 elevation gain, 3172 calories burned), I smelled carrion mixed with the heat and dust and frantic rush of life and death buzzing around me: there must have been some dead animal dying or already dead nearby, the carrion rotting silently in the field to the side of the trail while big, black-winged hawks circled overhead; a multitude of bugs buzzed me, dive-bombed my face, arms, legs, sizing me up as potential carrion; yet other insects sat semi-squashed on the path, writhing and wriggling their last few unheroic contortions before they too would become food for someone else. Or just decay into the earth.
Always with life, so much death - and always with death, so much life.
Two sides of the same coin, inseparable.
I had such thoughts of myself, my own body, as carrion, this large and hulking frame, this collection of capillaries and cells, someone's son, many girls' long ago boyfriend, a brother, a friend, all this is me, my body. What will happen when this body - me - becomes carrion?
Last Sunday I dislocated my shoulder doing the quite unheroic and mundane task of making my bed - flipping the comforter as I usually do to distribute the down filling when POW, the left arm was out of its socket and dangling. This has happened to me twice before and somehow I had unbeknownst knowledge of how to put the dangling arm back in, albeit under the great stress of intense pain. But this time, for some reason, my luck ran out and I could not put it back (cf. Humpty Dumpty), and I got nervous - thoughts of this as a permanent condition panicked my mind. I got nervous. Would my arm go back? Should I call 911? But if I had done that the whole neighborhood would from that point forward have known me as The Man They Took Away in an Ambulance. Kids would creep behind me and whisper "there he is, the Ambulance Man." Personally, I would like to be at least 60 before shit like that happens.
Luckily my kind neighbor was home, Bernie (short for Bernadette), the older woman who lives behind me, and she gracefully took me to the hospital, all the while I was ungracefully holding my arm up like some loose strand of man in the front passenger seat of her small truck. In the ER, they doctor tried twice to place the arm back in but the pain was too great, and I discovered that I had no problem screaming like a 10 year old girl in a public place - in front of cute nurses, hospital stafff, and bearded, white coated doctor with a beard and beady eyes. Twist it hard enough and the body just screams.
It appeared that their strategy was to call in an orthopedic doctor and knock me out with drugs so they could put my arm back in its socket. Last thing I remembered I was holding my arm up, closing my eyes and looking for peace while the pleasant nurse injected morphine and sedatives into the big vein in my forearm. Then, four hours later I was lying in the hallway of the ER about on my gurney, these little electrode dealie bobs all over my chest and stomach - little electrodes used to monitor a patient's heart when they have to knock him out. I have no recollection of them repositioning the arm back to where it belonged. Lost time, it feels like.
They noticed me there, coming to, and took my blood pressure and told me I could go when I felt ready. It was around midnight then, and I struggled to get up and carefully managed to get my shirt on and started walking down the hall. I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going. I was too sedated to make sense of tasks like walking and getting a ride home, so I went back to my bed on wheels and became a serious napster. About two hours later, I was able to get up again and find a phone to get a cab and make it home. When I got to my bed room I eyed my comforter with mistrust and suspicion. I wanted to blame that inanimate object, blame something. As I looked at the comforter I was sure that somewhere inside the neatly sewn pockets of down feathers there lived some nasty little demon spirit whoses job it was to ruin my pefectly fine (albeit hung over) Sunday afternoon.
Lying in that ER I realized how alone I am in the world, and that, given the circumstances, there could be some day when my body will be in its last movements, nearing the point of no return. The day will indeed come where people will be sad and they will struggle to come to terms with my absence and will take care of disposing of my body permanently and properly - so much carrion, this thing that was me - they will perform these deeds with respect and dignity and solemn, probably tearful words, hopefully more ceremony than those little buzzing bugs on a trail, writhing his last moments of life in the dust and heat.
Like the bugs and dead animals in the fields of parks and mountains, we have a limited time before we go back to from where it was we came: the dirt, the trees and rocks, or maybe Heaven? (Why do we get heaven but not the bugs? Who the hell made us the paragon of animals?) As we move about the world, the clock it is 'a tickin'; Time's winged chariot is at our backs, drawing near. Everything we do is significant, everything has meaning, and each and every second counts. The question is, what do we do with them?
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home