the parsley.blog.landscape.life

Manus verò has ipsas, totumque hoc corpus meum esse, quâ ratione posset negari? nisi me forte comparem nescio quibus insanis, quorum cerebella tam contumax vapor ex atrâ bile labefactat, ut constanter asseverent vel se esse reges, cùm sunt pauperrimi, vel purpurâ indutos, cùm sunt nudi, vel caput habere fictile, vel se totos esse cucurbitas…?

But how could I deny that I possess these hands and this body, and withal escape being classed with persons in a state of insanity, whose brains are so disordered and clouded by dark bilious vapors as to cause them pertinaciously to assert that they are monarchs when they are in the greatest poverty; or clothed in gold and purple when destitute of any covering; or that their head is made of clay, their body of glass, or that they are gourds?

Descartes, “Meditation 1″

I have a spanner in my works, a hitch in my git-along, a bunch of wires crossed somewhere. but it is not visible to the assisted or unassisted eye. people scrutinize me, and at length they say, “Well, you look great.” I have left behind a whole labful of blood at my HMO, vial by vial, and every last sample looks good. clean, healthy, vigorous. my T cells are great. thyroid’s fine. they cultured my blood and nothing grew. my head is not made of clay and my body is not made of glass. I’m just about the healthiest sick person I know.

but, as Descartes so famously wrote in Latin, our senses can trick us. they can give us the wrong information. I am almost always cold now; I have wished for a heated rock, like the kind they give to lizards, to lie upon. since the fall I have wished for a heat wave, not unheard of in Los Angeles even in January or March, but there has instead been an excess of cold and wind and rain. I’m walking down the street toward the bank, and the wind is coming off the ocean, three miles away, and I haven’t brought my jacket. it’s the end of May, and I am aware that the Pacific is very cold and very deep. is this inaccurate information? or is it just a little too much information, more than I was meant to know?

my temperature is normal, every time I take it, but I am always cold. there is, after all, a thirty degree temperature difference between my body and the air; this is the kind of thing of which one usually isn’t aware. I think I would prefer not to know it the way I know it.

I started physical therapy a little while ago. this kind of physical therapy is a little more complicated than the kind you get when you’ve got a bad knee or a frozen shoulder. it makes my head hurt trying to comprehend it. I go in and ask, why does my neck hurt? why does my back hurt? and I don’t always get the same answer. I have felt that my neck hurts from the effort of holding my head up all day; and this is the truth. but it also seems that my nerves are misfiring, that I am not getting the right information. the physical therapist does some kind of complicated mapping thing that moves from the palms of my hands to the backs of my hands, where he writes numbers.  then he maps out the numbers on the back of my neck, on each side, to correspond with the numbers on my hands.  can I tell where the touch is?  this is hard work.  my brain can grab all kinds of arcane information and it can do it fast – but I can’t tell where the touch is.  finally I say:  I know you’re touching me, but I can’t tell where!

my left hand is colder than my right hand. I rub the back of my neck: you know, I say, I’ve noticed my neck gets kind of numb. he nods, as though this is what he expected to hear.  I am supposed to keep the numbers on my hands and practice on my own neck.  it’s like learning again to drive a car, he says. I look in the mirror at my own hand. I remember an exhibit of preserved, dissected bodies that I went to, how it was full of people pointing and saying to their friends: that’s where my knee went bad!  look, that’s where Bill had his operation!  I want to look inside myself, to see where the disconnect is, to see where the wires went crossed.  but I can’t do that;  I can only close my eyes and try to interpret the information I’m getting.

maybe it is true that it actually hurts to live, but maybe we are not supposed to be aware of that, most of the time.

like Billy Pilgrim, I have come unstuck in time. except I don’t get to pay any visits to the future, only to the past. I am driving a little bit too slow on the way to the grocery store and someone is tailgating me; that person is me, back there. I’m tailgating myself, because I am always in a hurry, and I don’t see what excuse that person in front has for going so slow. I am at the grocery store and I’m moving a little too slowly in the aisles. someone is impatiently trying to get by me, because they are in a hurry. I am that person, trying to get past the person who is unaccountably slow. why is she so slow? she doesn’t look old or halt or lame. she must just be in a world of her own. she needs to pay better attention. but I am the person who is moving too slow, and I have never paid so much attention in my life.

I have wished for a cane, or a sign around my neck, or some way of telling people that there is actually something wrong with me, so that other person in the aisle, who is me, might spare a second of understanding.

in landscape architecture school, for one class we all went around campus with a wheelchair, taking turns trying to get up and down ramps and through doors. we had a guest instructor, a wry architect who used a wheelchair, accompanying us as we wandered up and down the steep campus on a summer evening. Architects, he said, like to put their buildings up on plinths. “As if to bring them closer to God,” he said with a flourish. some of the ramps were OK, some of them were just stupid. when nobody thought about the ramp from the beginning, there is no end to the awkwardness that can result when you try to stick one on.

one year, I remember, my ex-husband was recovering from an injury; we went to the wild animal park in San Diego and rented a wheelchair and I pushed him around.  there’s a lot of steep hills at that place and he is not small.  this is information about a steep hill that you normally don’t get. standing at the bottom of a steep hill and looking up to the top of it, your interpretation of what you see suddenly changes.

someone once told me, Disability is a state we all will move through in our lives.  some of us stay there only a short time, others find themselves citizens of that state for much longer. I’ve been on crutches, I’ve hurt myself many times, I’ve gotten a little bit of education in the past.  but it’s so easily forgotten when you don’t think you’ll need to know it again.

the art historian in the family told me there was someone – an art historian or critic – who used to go to museums and rent a wheelchair, though he was perfectly able-bodied, just so he could sit and look at the art as long as he damn well pleased. I can walk; I don’t need a wheelchair; but I have considered it, being so short of art these days.

I went to a gallery, just a small one, and brought a friend for company, and to assuage my fear of suddenly becoming so exhausted I can’t drive myself home.  (that almost happened to me once a few months ago, and I can’t remember ever having been so afraid.)  it was an exhibit about water.  in some parts of the world, women spend almost all their lives either going to get the water or bringing it back home.  there was a five gallon jug on the floor that you could lift, to see what that would be like.  I couldn’t lift it. this might be a little more information than I was meant to know.

I could stay right here on my computer and look at all the art and photography I want; I don’t need to exert the effort to go to a gallery. but I want to stand up, to walk, to go up the stairs, to walk from picture to picture and look at each one: close to, far away, tilting my head sideways. I would like to just look at the art, but I have to pay so much attention to how I’m doing, if my neck can take it, if I need to stop yet.

before, if I was going about my business and felt this kind of fatigue and muscle pain, I would worry, because it might mean I was coming down with the flu, and I would have to start making plans about how I would try to “fight it off.” the thought of losing two weeks, or a week, or  a day, to illness would make my mind race with plans about how I could avoid it. now, I have to interpret the information differently: the immediate threat is less, provided I don’t get stranded somewhere with no way to get home, but the much deeper problem is the one the back of my mind is always working on, almost every minute. I can’t carry the water, I can’t be in the trenches, I can’t do the heavy lifting. so what, now, is my usefulness?

I stand farther back from a picture and lean my back against the wall.  I do this a lot.  I was introduced to someone and had to lean against the wall to talk to her. I wonder, do people notice that I am doing this?  do they notice that my hands and legs tend to shake?  if they notice, how do they interpret the information?  how shall I explain myself?

I’m going to my gym, which seems so familiar, like something a healthy person does to get more healthy, like something I used to do before, when I always thought I wasn’t healthy enough. the physical therapist wants me to get in the pool, for ten minutes. or I might get on a machine, for ten minutes, at a tenth of the speed I used to maintain for an hour. and that will be the one thing I will do today.  I go up the stairs, the same ones that I used to go up two at a time, and I’m really slow, grabbing the handrails. but I am taking the stairs, and not the elevator. I am not in a hurry. someone is brushing past me, impatiently. if I had to explain to that very fit and energetic person, who is me, what exactly is wrong with me, and label myself with the disease with the stupid name, what would that person think of me? would they think me deluded?

my head is not made of clay and my body is not made of glass. but I know that other person on the stairs has a barely-articulated suspicion that maybe there is something wrong in my head, that makes me mistaken about my hands and my body. the reason I know this is that the other person on the stairs is me, and not so long ago.

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Truly, though our element is time,

We are not suited to the long perspectives

Open at each instant of our lives.

They link us to our losses; worse,

They show us what we have as it once was,

Blindingly undiminished, just as though

By acting differently we could have kept it so.

– Philip Larkin, “Reference Back”

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