Sticking Around

Can someone please give Colum McCann a big hug for me? I heard he lives in New York City with his wife and kids. He’s originally from Ireland, but he’s found a home in NYC. And I’ve found my home in his novel Let the Great World Spin. I’m not a big fan of big hugs, but I can make an exception here. I just want to hug all his characters: the rich and the poor, the lonely and the jaded, the dying and the dead, and all the other “cast-offs of New York—the whores, the hustlers, the hopeless—all of those who were hanging on to [Corrigan, an Irish monk] like he was some bright hallelujah in the shitbox of what the world really was.”

On December 14, 2010, four days after reading the novel, I made the same request in an e-mail to my friend J.T., who works in New York: “In case you run into Colum McCann, please give him a big hug for me. Please tell him I’ve read his novel. And that I love every one of his characters. I lived their lives when I was strapped to a catheter, when I felt my life had stopped—or should stop—spinning. Having known their stories, I felt my heart full, I saw my life worth saving. I saw the world in a different, a more hopeful, light. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Which is why I’ve been avoiding writing here about McCann and Let the Great World Spin: I wanted to spare that Great World all my Grand Mush. I knew I’d be making a fool of myself again. I’d be spewing these icky “emo” bits of writer-worship that would ruin my and others’ reading experience. Which, of course, is merely self-aggrandizing paranoia. Who cares if (or how or why) I grovel for McCann’s attention or rave about his novel? Yeah, the world will keep spinning without me, thank you very much.

Oh, about that catheter (speaking of icky) …  Let’s just say that has something to do with the same medical condition (urinary retention) that made me start this blog on June 29, 2012. I was bored, depressed, stranded in the house. I had just survived another emergency-room episode involving an all-star cast of family members, doctors, nurses, attendants, administrative personnel, security guards, and fellow patients—fellow cast-offs—in need of immediate care or consolation or magical thinking. Back home, I was stuck with a catheter for a week. I found it hard to sleep or focus, so I began to tumblr.

This catheter thing is not a terminal illness. It pops up once or twice a year. It’s not contagious, but it can be humiliating and painful. I’ve found some comfort, though, in the fact that four authors I greatly admire have mentioned “the condition” in their books. They’ve been frank about how catheters have occasionally dragged them down or pissed them off or extended the life of someone they love. Read the final chapter of Donald Hall’s Unpacking the Boxes, Chapter 16 of Mary Karr’s Lit, Chapter 11 of Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards the End, and the tenth essay in William Styron’s Havanas in Camelot. Such illustrious company, don’t you think?

On December 7, 2010, I started reading Let the Great World Spin. I was enjoying it so much, but, as I told J.T., “the next day brought another one of life’s distractions. That morning I had to be rushed to the E.R. When I got home in the afternoon, I felt weighed down by the catheter, the urine bag, and all the nasty phantoms that were re-infiltrating my brain. That night I slid back into self-pity. This is it. This is as good as it’s gonna get. This is as far as I’m gonna go. I’m stuck with this body, this life, this world. For the first time in months, I couldn’t sleep. I felt like sinking. I was sinking.”

I did all I could not to hit rock bottom. I e-mailed friends, consulted specialists, did further research, weighed my options, took some proactive measures. I rested. I worked a bit at home. And, with medical props dangling from my belt but hidden in my pants, I went out to strut my stuff and shop at a mall. (What a daredevil artist!) As Gloria, one of McCann’s resilient characters, says, life is “about a refusal to be shamed.” Three days later, I finished reading the novel. I watched all videos of McCann I could find on YouTube, read articles about and by him. He seemed such a genuinely nice guy. In my e-mail to J.T., I talked about his book like it was some bright hallelujah in my own shitbox. (J.T. and I have been friends for almost thirty years, so she can put up with all my shameless drivel. To her and my other big-hearted friends: Thank you, thank you, thank you.)

Trapped in that box at the end of 2010, I could only tell my friend these stories. About books that untether me from pain, about characters who learn to embrace it, to live with it as I have lived with my body’s limits. Then I wrote: “Meanwhile, up next on my reading list is a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace, another man whose writings and life (and tragic death) will keep me in awe of this weird, wonderful world. I wish I could hug him, too—or save him. But I think he’ll be the one to save me. More than any other time in my life, it was this year that made me realize that books are my dope; they’re my medication.”

There are times I still feel like I am sinking. There are accessible palliatives, healthy distractions, so-called relief from the weight of the world, but no amount of positive spin can completely numb me off the sting. Which in a way is good. To be numb would be to fall into depression. As Philippe Petit, the unnamed high-wire artist in McCann’s novel, might say: “We fall—or we keep walking the tightrope.” We may be stranded in our bodies; we sometimes lose our balance. But reading, writing, or just knowing we’re not the only ones teetering on the brink can help us hang in there.

A few years later, in Stanfords on Longacre, … I was attracted by the spine of a book decorated with orange and sepia coloured tree branches and the title Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees. I saw the name Roger Deakin, remembered Waterlog and bought this book too. I was with my wife and daughter who both wanted to visit Jigsaw, a clothes shop up the road. As they tried out various garments I sat in a corner surrounded by clothes-racks, with women sorting and sampling and squeezing around me and I opened Deakin’s book and I was transported. I read his account of rebuilding his oak-framed farmhouse in Suffolk where swallows nested in the chimney and on summer nights bats flew through the open bedroom windows. The book’s brief introduction is a treasury of thoughts and aphorisms about wood.

As it burns, wood releases the energies of the earth, water and sunshine that grew it. Each species expresses its character in its distinctive habits of combustion. Willow burns as it grows, very fast, spitting like a firecracker. Oak glows reliably, hard and long. A wood fire in the hearth is a little household sun.

I was captivated enough to think I might meet him, so as soon as I got home I googled him to find out more and discover what else he’d written. But what I found were obituaries. He had died of a brain tumour shortly after completing the manuscript of Wildwood. I felt I had found a new friend then lost him in the space of an afternoon. I read the rest of the book with a sense of sadness but also gratitude and with the knowledge I was able to go back and read it over and over. In fact as I write this I realise it’s about time I read it again. He is perhaps best remembered for Waterlog but his celebration of the spirit of trees in Wildwood makes this my favourite. It has become my desert island book.

— from “For Roger Deakin” by Chris Hamer (Frames of Reference)

You’ve mentioned reading Ursula Le Guin and Susan Cooper as a child. What drew you to fantasy, and do you still read it?

Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience. When you’re 10, there is still an outside chance that you might find Narnia behind the wardrobe, that the fur coats could turn into fir trees. The state of childhood resonates with life inside a fantasy novel. If you have no control over how you spend large chunks of your day, or are at the mercy of flawed giant beings, then the desire to bend the laws of the world by magic is strong and deep. I don’t mean that kids can’t distinguish fantasy from reality — the playground bully will clarify the matter gratis — but fantasy offers a logic to which kids are receptive, and escapism for which kids are hungry. As an adult, I read less fantasy (aside from bedtime-story duties), but perhaps nomenclature plays a role here, too: both fantasy and S.F. have made inroads into literary fiction and influences even those novels whose imprint logo is reassuringly conservative. Murakami’s “Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” isn’t regarded as a fantasy novel, but the plot is propelled by occult magic. Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterly “Never Let Me Go” is old-money dystopian S.F., as is Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Philip K. Dick would recognize both Michael Chabon’s “Yiddish Policemen’s Union” and Philip Roth’s “Plot Against America” as alternate-history S.F. in the grandest, proudest tradition. We imbibe more S.F. and fantasy than we notice. On my last visit to New York, by the by, I had a dinner with a group of literary writers, and the whole main course was spent in earnest and learned discussion of “A Game of Thrones.”

Do you have a favorite character or hero from children’s literature?

Edmund from the Narnia books is an interesting one. In “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” he commits an act of exquisite treachery by refusing to corroborate Lucy’s experiences in Narnia, before selling his siblings for a box of crack-laced Turkish delight. Way to go, Ed. Yet by “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,” Edmund has evolved the strength of character to tell Eustace calmly, “You were only an ass, but I was a traitor.” Stumbling heroes linger longer.

— from “David Mitchell: By the Book” (The New York Times, October 18, 2012)

Dear Mr. Mitchell,

I have no right to call myself a fan, for I have not read any of your novels. We have two of them in the house—Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green, my sister’s copies. I keep telling myself we must have The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet as well. But there are a thousand details, some peskier or more mundane than others, that swamp my days as a middle-aged (possibly over-fatigued) reader. And there are a thousand other authors I will never get to read. So I end up merely posting excerpts from books I love—or books I think I’d love if I only had time to start (or finish) reading them. Ah, yes. Time—our convenient excuse. The lack of time—our inconvenient truth. A lifetime isn’t enough for the desperate, hungry, lonely, tired yet tireless reader. And so this will have to do for now: the joy of finding your words about children’s literature (“By the Book,” The New York Times, October 18, 2012) perfectly matching the current (and, like everything else, fleeting) concerns of my Tumblr days. Thank you. I look forward to watching Cloud Atlas the movie. But more important, I hope to read you soon.

— dabacahin

(via johannawright.com)