The Cleveland Clinic

Several days were passed, late in November 2001, in the Cleveland Clinic. The duckdrop secret word of admittance, to the most esteemed cardiological Research Hospital in the world, was hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy, and the only means of exit from that Sao Paolo favela of inter-connected buildings, was a myectomy, a procedure that had before then been performed only two hundred times. That act was described by the chief surgeon (a graduate of the University of Rochester) as carving away muscle from the walls of the heart (as with a grapefruit spoon?) to permit cardiologic function to resume and life to be allowed, against forecasted expectations, to continue.

After the operation and the early stages of recovery, there is astonishment out of measure, and gratitude out of measure, and heightened appreciation, out of measure, for two particular miracles: one that survival has been assured, and two, Ohio’s sunlight on the dust motes behind the blinds has turned them into actual diamonds.

Then the subject goes home.

Just before that, a number of legally exculpatory tests are “run,” including the simple matter of a chest X-ray, which is carried out in the dim basement of the grand and palatial Cleveland Clinic, in Radiology, evidently too déclassé an activity for prominent space in a facility that routinely welcomes potentates from Oman and Robin Williams, or his like, to its four-star, adjoining hotel.

Opiate derivatives play their part; family members act queerly as if they were stoned; nurses and technicians appear and disappear like non-speaking actors in some commedia del arte farce, (O! farce it is!) and of course there is a confrontation with the food tray, which contains what must seem to be joyous gustatory delights, but turn out to be the tricksters’ outward manifestation of what are really archived, period-area Civil War biscuits. These particular distortions are but croutons in the large vague vichyssoise that is the soul’s helen kellering through such strange lands as faith, and flammable rivers, and the ceaseless and reckless vacillation between utter hopelessness and paroxysms of a grand guignol Humoresque. That is to say, pensee, or its leftovers.

My conventional, miserable personal habits of distressed familiarity seemed to have returned, as I was wheeled (I believe it was in a looping bi-plane) to Radiology. There, I realized that I was and had never really not been a desiccated sponge, as I was immersed in water and watched myself from within and from the outside burst into a blue ducky. All credit to the Clinic supervisors and policy-makers who must have been confronted with this issue and had decided for the side of right and justice, to permit the technician called WENDY to make her appearance as she would, (in fabulous contradistinction to the many dozens of desiccated sponges with whom I had been passing my time) with her black lipstick, white powdered face, and dangling piercings depending from the patches of skin just below the eyes, where later in life lesser sufferers often develop dark bags. I cannot trust myself to rightly describe the magnificent ocean sunrise she threw upon me, with her scintillating happy nature, dance-prancing around the room, and light laughter.

She asked: “Where are you from?”

I answered: “Aurora, New York.”

This town, apparently, permitted her to ask: “Do you mind if I sing?”

Mind? I don’t think I mind?

During the preparations for the procedures, and during the procedures, she replicated the sound of (it was not mere singing) Marianne Faithfull’s “As Tears Go By,” a song I had first heard in 1964 while driving through the Everglades. That audition was an early occasion of one of Virginia Woolf’s “moments of being” in which time and consciousness merge harmonically. (A person is limited to seven of these in a lifetime.) Another was hearing in an Iowa City record store in 1970, Joshua Rifkin playing Scott Joplin. Another was napping and then sleeping through the Met’s Pelleas and Melisande in 1978 in Raleigh, which is probably the only way to really understand Maeterlinck and DeBussy. Another was watching Paris and its environs pass by from the top floor of an RER car. You will have noticed that all of these epiphanic perceptions depend for their effect and focusing energy on juxtaposition, which is the bête noire I have for years been trying to eradicate from the structuralist interpretive folly of my ungrand, ununified undercooked half-theory. (Books are not life, but then, what is?) Prior to satire, juxtaposition was all men knew of comedy, and even now, in the twenty-first century, much of our work is perfecting our patience with those persons who prefer not to be dragged past 1726 (about when Swift published Gulliver’s Travels) and who actually can convince themselves that Falstaff and his heirs were doing something that was truly funny. If you must know, I walk around Ithaca in a state of almost perpetual annoyance due to the fact that here, in a college town, so many people teach and so many people believe that what some of the early Roman writers were up to was satire, which is wrong, wrong, wrong. Someday, somebody’s going to make a movie of Mrs. Dalloway that actually depicts what Virginia Stephen was thinking, with that long neck of hers and her kind-versus-pitying eyes. Relativism accounts for so little, really, don’t you think? The difference between atheism and anti-theism is important here, or at the least extremely helpful. Perhaps we can’t ask for more than that. Though demanding some final resting place, for our ashes or for our last flickering opinion, may be the single most useful expedient for determining when our homeland has been recovered. I had done what I could, by moving from city to city, and I had tried to call the attention of my fellow citizens to the trench battles of the First World War. I have worked in various mills, and trudged across the plains. I ate in Vicksburg, grits on a hot dog sausage. The belief settled upon me, finally, that I was going to ship out with both Ishmael and Herman Melville, and that in our little pica type of a lifeboat we were going to reach our homeland port, and there abide with our people. Two people, in my case: one of them was real and symbolic and has been described accurately (I have avoided the word ‘goth’ in reference to Wendy, but that may suit you better). And the other is presently finding that after the late Victorians and chasing precisions, playing Brubeck on the Steinway is her Crow’s Nest in Gloucester.

Mlle Vogdes advises me that her career as a lexicographer may result in our moving to Beijing for three to five years, where three hundred square feet of putrid air might contrast in the sharpest manner with, here, an acre of lush grass, raspberry bushes, a brook, saplings and oaks, and a pink-blossomed apple tree. If we do not move there - if that doesn’t happen - if that doesn’t eventuate - you will find me here until the end, where I started, near the lake and among the gorges and ravines of Ithaca, where nothing is out of context, and everything is in its original position.